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ESTABLISH YOUR PROGRAM GOAL AND HINDERING CAUSES

Focusing on the behavioral outcomes with the most potential for impact is critical to ensure lasting impact on the development of your population, and to make the most of limited resources. To appropriately identify and prioritize certain behavioral outcomes over others, you must first clearly identify and articulate your development goal and the causes that stand in the way of meeting that goal.  Then and only then, can you delineate behaviors likely to have the greatest impact on addressing these causes.

TEAM TASK 1: Articulate your Goal

  1. On a piece of paper, write your program's broad goal, for example a development objective.
  2. Write the specific goal (or immediate result) you plan to achieve with your program, along with the timeframe for achieving it.

For example:

  • In the next five years, catalyze my country’s long-term development strategy, offering a productive, healthy life to all its citizens.
  • By 20##, catalyze transformation of a holistic health system to sustain equitable improvements in health for all citizens of my country.
  • Reduce infant mortality by one-third from 20## level in my country. 
  1. If you do not have a goal for your activity yet, consider the following questions about your topic to develop one:
    1. What are the most pressing challenges facing your country in the next 5-10 years?
    2. What change or progress do you hope to see in 5-10 years?
    3. What can or should your program do to contribute to that change?

YOUR GOAL IS AN ESSENTIAL STARTING POINT OF YOUR PROGRAM OR ACTIVITY!

 

TEAM TASK 2: Analyze Causes Inhibiting Achievement of your Goal

  1. Gather your existing quantitative and qualitative research on causes inhibiting your goal.

Need some help, check out our detailed website country data by health topic or by country on 25 high impact health behaviors.

Don’t find what you are looking for there?  Try the Demographic Health Survey. 

  1. Now that you have your goal, consider what is currently inhibiting achievement of that goal. On the piece of paper with your goal, write under your goal the heading “Causes Inhibiting Achievement of our Goal” and list as many different causes as you want, especially if working with a large group.

Note: Causes can be broad, such as “lack of transparency and accountability” or more specific, such as “weak health system information data use.”

  1. Once you have listed the causes currently inhibiting achievement of your activity goal, combine any that seem redundant or express the same ideas.

For example:

  • Lack of funding and limited donor support could be combined into one cause “insufficient financial support”.
  • Institutions don’t have accounting systems in place and institutional capacity for budgeting is limited could be combined into one cause “inadequate capacity to manage finances, e.g., budgeting and accounting”. 
  1. Link your causes to a data source. For example, if “lack of timely funding of the health system by the ministry of finance” is a current cause, note how you know this—is it anecdotal? From a donor's assessment? From outside assessment reports?
  2. As much as possible during or after the initial cause analysis, identify data sources to substantiate your analysis or lead you to verified causes.

ESTABLING CLEAR CAUSES INHIBITING YOUR GOAL WILL HELP YOU BETTER ARTICULATE YOUR PRIORITY BEHAVIORS – THE CHANGE DRIVING YOUR PROGRAM!

You can also establish causes for health behaviors using the Behavior Prioritization Tool, if any of your priority behaviors are one of the 25 high impact health behaviors and you are developing a program for a country included in the data.   These behaviors have data pre-loaded into the system and the tool will use this data for your country to help you identify specific quantitative causes.

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