UN Behavioural Science Group

The success of an entrepreneur depends not only on her or his personality but also on the decisions and actions she/he undertakes. Thus, a realistic analysis of individual and collective behaviors can be extremely useful in the design, evaluation, and implementation of entrepreneurship-related projects. Behavioral insights and a data-driven approach help identify barriers and levers to business creation and development.

Almost nine in ten children in sub-Saharan Africa are learning poor, in that they are unable to read and understand a simple text by age 10. The potential for leveraging smartphones in development has so far remained largely untapped, but recent trends may reverse this:

• Almost half of the world’s adults own a smartphone, with ownership rates rapidly growing in developing countries

• Smartphones can deliver persuasive social and behavioral change communication , from social media campaigns to edutainment narratives, complementing hardware solutions.

• The provision of smartphones preloaded with apps allows targeting different household members at a relatively low cost.

Building on its existing efforts in the Arab States, UNDP is interested in how the idea of “noise reduction” can contribute to public sector effectiveness in support of sustainable development and sees three main ways of doing so.

Each year, two thirds of deaths globally are caused by noncommunicable diseases that result from genetic, physiological, environmental and behavioural factors. Behaviour affects health. For example, many risk factors causing noncommunicable diseases are behaviourally driven, such as smoking and sedentary lifestyle. The misuse of antibiotics in human health care is a main but avoidable driver of antimicrobial resistance. Hand hygiene is one of the most effective measures to stop infection spread but people often fail to keep adequate hand hygiene, even where water and soap are available. We should resist the temptation to conclude that people have insufficient knowledge or awareness of the importance of such matters: these are behavioural issues, and most if not all health challenges involve the behaviour of individuals.

The European Commission’s Joint Research Centre and the World Health Organization concluded a Collaborative Research Arrangement that aims to mainstream behavioural insights into public health programmes and policies worldwide. Behavioural insights can help improve understanding on how and why people behave in ways that affect their health, and help design policies and services that address behavioural factors for improved physical and mental well-being.

UNDP Accelerator Lab Georgia designed an experiment using a behaviourally informed RCT to understand why waste separation practices are non-existent, and to move forward to devise and test solutions to nudge the population to adopt more sustainable behaviour. This experiment focuses on nudging residents to step up recycling only. Ultimately the goal is to make recycling a social norm for a clean environment.

With more and more financial products and services, both formal and informal, available throughout Rwanda, clients are required to make informed choices and manage their money. New skills are especially important in times like these, when the use of digital financial services and mobile money is growing because of convenience, and also of large-scale events like the COVID-19 crisis.

The LENGA application, or ‘app’, is geared towards Rwandans who wish to build their skills in creating savings plans, making a budget, understanding different types of savings groups, comparing financial services, and deciding whether to borrow. The app currently has six modules that target the financial and digital skills necessary to achieve these skills.

In the Arab States, about 1 in 4 young people is unemployed. This unemployment rate has been higher than in the rest of the world for the past three decades, and it has worsened since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Entrepreneurship can be a way to improve young people’s prospects, and especially opportunities for young women who face a range of additional barriers to becoming entrepreneurs, including restrictive social norms, caring responsibilities, limited business-relevant networks and difficulties accessing finance and training. At its heart, entrepreneurship consists of a series of behaviours: creating a (new) product or service, opening a bank account, applying for a loan, registering one’s business formally, to name only a few.

With the onset of COVID-19 in early 2020, and with a new home-centered lockdown reality, it could be foreseen that the burden of home-care duty on women would increase and drive a deeper wedge in global development goals towards gender equity.

To combat the gendered impacts of COVID-19, UNDP and UN Women Lebanon ventured early 2020 into a pre-emptive awareness campaign to address the “social norms” of the nuclear home. As a lab, we found that a communication campaign on the topic would present a critical learning opportunity, particularly if we (a) observe and measure the way different demographics react and (b) use this data to conduct experiments that produce behavioral evidence on the topic.

In collaboration with UN Women, our learning experiment became focused on identifying the possible behavioral drivers that, if surfaced, could inform insight interventions around social norm changes in hopes of relieving women and strengthening gender equity at home.

Behavioural Science (BeSci) is a field of study focusing on people’s individual and collective decision-making. Drawing on insights from multiple disciplines, including economics, sociology, and cognitive science, BeSci experts examine the drivers of human behaviour and develop an evidence-based understanding of how to influence it.

Behavioural science is a subject of ongoing debate among peace practitioners. “It is difficult to overstate how much emotion rather than logic influences our societal politics and international wars,” says Andres Casas, a Behavioural Science expert who is advising DPPA’s Innovation Cell. “Traditional approaches to making peace often tend to overlook this fundamental point. They focus mostly on economic, legal and political matters and neglect the central role that group dynamics, social norms and individual behaviour play in conflict.”