Alliance Ramps Up Behavior Change Communication Activities in 2016
Over the last five years, the Alliance and its partners have made significant progress toward developing a thriving clean cookstove and fuel market, in particular in fostering an enabling environment and strengthening supply. Still, generating demand and sustained use at scale remains a challenge in many markets. The Alliance is expanding its efforts to meet this challenge with increased support for behavior change communication.
Behavior change communication (BCC), the use of communication (interpersonal, mass media, etc.) to positively influence changes in behavior, can play an important part in expanding and sustaining demand across the category of clean and efficient cookstoves and fuels by raising awareness about the benefits and availability of clean cooking solutions to drive purchase decisions and encourage consistent use. BCC complements and enhances the marketing efforts of individual enterprises and organizations active in the sector.
The Alliance’s engagement in BCC and marketing includes: commissioning formative research to deepen consumer insight (reports from this research are available in the Resources section of our website); grant making for intervention design, execution, and evaluation; enterprise marketing support; dissemination of best practices; and capacity-building of local institutions. Our objective is to ensure that appropriate, evidence-based communications achieve greater scale and effectiveness to complement supply-side interventions.
In 2016, Alliance supported pilot campaigns will be implemented in Bangladesh, Ghana, Guatemala and Uganda. These initiatives will provide an opportunity to test and better understand the efficacy of various BCC approaches, in particular channels and messaging for reaching households.
Requests for Proposals
The Alliance will also be releasing a request for proposals (RFP) in early February to fund up to $4.5million in large-scale BCC interventions. These interventions will aim to build demand and adoption across the category of clean and efficient stoves and fuels, but is not designed to directly promote individual brands.
Recognizing that individual brand marketing is also essential to driving demand, the Alliance will also be releasing country-specific RFPs (limited to Alliance focus countries of Bangladesh, Ghana, Guatemala, Kenya, Nigeria, and Uganda per donor restrictions) to fund enterprise marketing efforts. These RFPs will be released by country throughout 2016.