Giving Compass' Take:

• Shireen Jejeebhoy says that in order to have successful social change, we start with testing and preparing before implementing projects. 

• How can we utilize community mobilization for social change initiatives and how will that bring about sustainability? 

• Other models of social change can happen through collaborative partnerships with bigger entities such as government agencies. 

Many of us working in the social sector have designed a ‘perfect’ program, only to find, at the time of its evaluation, that changes observed were nowhere near what we expected. What happened? Many things. For one, social change is slow and expecting to, for example, reduce child marriage or violence against women and girls significantly in a two-year period is possibly unrealistic.

In many instances, we develop and implement programmes that aim to effect social change through existing platforms, without clearly understanding whether these platforms are functional and effective. We later learn that was really needed was a longer-than-expected preparatory phase, during which we strengthened platforms, raised awareness of and sensitized those in authority about their responsibilities and how to discharge these.

With an eye on scaling up a successful programme, one always tends to look for local capacity, that is, women (for the most part) from the community who will implement programme activities and sustain them once the programme is over.

While this sounds like a workable model on paper, there exist many challenges which may inhibit its effective execution.

As a result, while we get the ‘what’ right, we don’t get the ‘how’ right. To understand the ‘how’, we ideally need to pay more attention to on-the-ground realities than we typically do while designing and allocating resources for the programme.

We are impatient social sector change agents; it is equally important for our donors to understand and accept the need for a longer preparatory phase. Change is slow; starting a programme without adequate preparation and then realizing that it isn’t working is too great a risk to take.

Read the full article on how to implement social change by Shireen Jejeebhoy at India Development Review.