On 20 January 2016, a team of two senior ladies staff from Busara Centre of Behavioral Economics spent the whole afternoon sharing their expertise and knowledge with core staff of AfT.
The whole engagement between the two Organisations is focusing on the following three facets:
1. Tailoring Communications: here both organisations shall coordinate to conduct extensive qualitative work in regions relevant to AfT with a primary focus on the districts of Mityana and Mubende alongside other districts.
The purpose is to develop a deeper understanding of the behavioral biases and barriers affecting public decision-making.
A section of AfT Core staff who benefited from the first of a series of traininigs to be conducted by Busara Centre team.
Busara is scheduled to conduct a field survey in the districts of Mityana and Mubende on 28 – 29 January with the help of MMUDFA (Mityana-Mubende District Farmers Association) governance structure. Already recruitment and training of the field enumerators and research assistants is underway in preparation for this important exercise.
It’s worth pointing out that AfT implemented Phase I of the GAPP program that ended in March 2015 and the findings from this posterior survey shall help inform the Monitoring & Evaluation component whilst implementing Phase II due to commence shortly. This perception index shall also help AfT-Busara project technical team generate appropriate IEC content messages including developing policy issues papers during the project cycle.
Ariana Keyman, a Research Associate with Busara Centre articulating and sharing her rich experience with AfT staff.
AfT is also looking forward to apply similar strategies and approaches in the scheduled AfDB funded ACCF and ClimDev Fund projects and hopefully, an Oxfam funded Action Research project.
From a broader institutional perspective, the skills and capacity to benefit AfT Core staff shall be applied optimally in all future new/renewed programs and projects to better deliver the expectations under the Advocacy dimension.
- Communications Testing: there shall be two rounds of rigorous experimentation to test information to action. The AfT-Busara technical team shall rigorously test communications content to establish what communication content strategy is optimal for inspiring sustained awareness and involvement among beneficiaries.
- Collaborative Workshops: finally there shall be continuous collaborative workshops throughout the various project life-cycles to involve team members in messages testing.
Strong emphasis shall be placed on knowledge-sharing and capacity building to enable extended testing post AfT-Busara engagement.
This first of a series of workshops focused on three issues:
- In-depth understanding of behavioral economics;
- How can behavioral economics apply to civic engagement; and
- How it can apply specifically to AfTs work.
We are now warming up for the qualitative research.
Be sure to always visit this blogsite to get updates on what’s trending at AfT.
