Nigeria Community Capacity Strengthening Resources and Tools

From 2019 to 2024, Breakthrough ACTION-Nigeria trained 659 Ward Development Committees to plan, fund, and implement Community Health Action Resource Plans. The project supported the committees in implementing their plans in two stages. The first stage focused on delivering immediate benefits to the community, such as free emergency transport to health services for pregnant women and children under five and for other emergencies, delivery kits for pregnant women, funds to renovate health facilities and procure commodities, and community health information boards to track data. The second stage focused on strengthening committee capacity by addressing gender disparities in health care through tailored training and by forming Gender Economic and Empowerment Committees, equipping Ward Development Committees with social and behavior change resources to promote health-seeking and preventive behaviors, strengthening committees’ financial management skills, training them in decision-making and stakeholder collaboration, and encouraging community involvement in decision making.

Training Package and Community Engagement Tools

This training package was created for individuals and groups working on community-led health interventions. It contains manuals for both facilitators and participants, along with accompanying tools that provide practical guidance for community engagement, identifying issues, and developing community health action resource plans.

Mobilizing Communities for Health and Social Change
Fostering Leadership in Community Development
Community Dialogue Tools for Leaders
Ward Development Committee Gender Champions

Impact Stories

Last modified: August 1, 2026

Language: English

Source: Johns Hopkins Center for Communication Programs

Year of Publication: 2023

Malaria Service Delivery Assessment Tool: Four Steps to Identify Challenges and Opportunities

Despite progress, challenges remain in delivering high-quality malaria services. Stakeholders articulated a need for a rapid and flexible tool to help holistically examine the complex web of factors that influence the delivery of quality malaria services.

Breakthrough ACTION collaboratively developed the Malaria Service Delivery Assessment Tool: Four Steps to Identify Challenges and Opportunities to provide national malaria programs with a structured, holistic, and participatory process for investigating and responding to service delivery concerns. Such tools can empower providers and other health system actors to truly understand the challenges impacting services within a given facility by applying a behavioral lens.

An accompanying technical brief describes the pilot test in the Democratic Republic of the Congo as a use case for applying the Malaria Service Delivery Tool. The brief is helpful for those interested in learning more about the tool’s implementation and what insights can be generated from it.

Ferramenta de avaliação da prestação de serviços contra a malária [PDF]

Last modified: July 31, 2026

Language: English

Source: Johns Hopkins Center for Communication Programs

Year of Publication: 2024

Malaria in Pregnancy: Trends from the Malaria Behavior Survey

Synthesizing multi country evidence from the Malaria Behavior Survey, this technical brief examines behavioral patterns, ideational factors, and service utilization related to malaria prevention and treatment among pregnant women. The analysis explores key indicators such as intermittent preventive treatment in pregnancy (IPTp) uptake, insecticidal net use, and early antenatal care attendance across diverse sub-Saharan African contexts. It highlights how psychosocial factors, care-seeking barriers, and health system interactions directly influence behavioral adherence during pregnancy. Program planners, researchers, and technical advisors can leverage these findings to refine social and behavior change interventions and improve maternal health outcomes.

Last modified: July 31, 2026

Language: English

Year of Publication: 2024

Community Empathways Dialogue Results Brief

This brief focuses on the results of a light-touch monitoring effort in Côte d’Ivoire and Togo conducted with adult community Empathways participants to gauge whether the card deck contributed to reducing social barriers for youth to access family planning/reproductive health information and services.

Résumé sur les résultats issus des discussions communautaires autour d’Empathways

Ce résumé s’articule autour des résultats observés suite à un effort de suivi discret effectué par WABA en Côte d’Ivoire et au Togo auprès d’adultes, membres de la communauté, ayant participé à Empathways, le but étant d’évaluer la contribution du jeu de cartes à la réduction des barrières sociales qui empêchent les jeunes d’accéder aux informations et aux services de PF/SR.

Source: Johns Hopkins Center for Communication Programs

Date of Publication: July 31, 2026

Measuring Equity in SBC Programming for Family Planning and Sexual and Reproductive Health

Establishing a standardized monitoring and evaluation framework, this technical resource provides guidance on measuring equity within social and behavior change interventions for family planning and reproductive health. The brief outlines practical indicators and data collection approaches to track whether program reach, engagement, and behavioral outcomes are distributed fairly across diverse population segments. It offers step-by-step methods to disaggregate programmatic data by age, geographic location, socio-economic status, and gender. Program evaluators, researchers, and project managers can apply these measurement tools to identify underserved groups, address access disparities, and hold health initiatives accountable for equitable impact.

Recorded Webinars

Why Do We Need to Elevate the S in SBC to Improve FP/RH Outcomes?

This webinar made the case for explicitly considering and addressing equity and social determinants of health in social and behavior change programming for family planning and reproductive health.

How Can SBC Programming Address Equity and Social Determinants of Health?

This webinar focused on how social and behavior change programming is well suited to addressing equity and social determinants of health in family planning/reproductive health.

How can Incorporating Social Accountability Into SBC Improve Equity?

This webinar focused on social accountability as a critical process that can be further leveraged across social and behavior change programming to address equity and social determinants of health to shape and influence family planning and reproductive health outcomes.

RELATED RESOURCES

Expanding the “S” in SBC: Addressing Social Determinants of Health and Health Equity [ENGLISH / EN FRANÇAIS]

Intentionally Incorporating the Social Determinants of Health into SBC Programming for FP [ENGLISH / EN FRANÇAIS]

The Road to Equity in FP: Incorporating the Social Determinants of Health [ENGLISH]

Last modified: July 27, 2026

Language: English

Source: Johns Hopkins Center for Communication Programs

Year of Publication: 2023

Provincial Assessment of Barriers to the Adoption of MNCH Accelerator Behaviors in the DRC

To better understand and address the barriers to adopting timely maternal health services, Breakthrough ACTION conducted a contextual assessment in select provinces in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. This analysis involved close collaboration with health care providers to develop solutions to help resolve persistent challenges and behavioral barriers to seeking services.

The evaluation report highlights key findings and offers actionable recommendations that address cultural, religious, and socioeconomic barriers. These insights can guide others interested in designing targeted strategies to improve access to and uptake of essential health care services.


Evaluation provinciale des obstacles liés à l’adoption des comportements accélérateurs relatifs aux services de santé maternelle et infantile en Republique Democratique du Congo

Afin de mieux comprendre et d’éliminer les obstacles à l’adoption de services de santé maternelle opportuns, Breakthrough ACTION a mené une évaluation contextuelle dans certaines provinces de la RDC. Cette analyse a impliqué une étroite collaboration avec les prestataires de soins de santé afin de développer des solutions pour aider à résoudre les défis persistants et les barrières comportementales à la recherche de services de santé.

Le rapport d’évaluation met en évidence les principaux résultats et propose des recommandations concrètes pour lever les obstacles culturels, religieux et socio-économiques. Ces informations peuvent guider d’autres personnes désireuses de concevoir des stratégies ciblées pour améliorer l’accès et l’utilisation des services de santé essentiels.

Last modified: July 26, 2026

Language: French

Source: Johns Hopkins Center for Communication Programs

Year of Publication: 2023

Unlocking Behavioral Insights to Prevent Outbreaks through the Zoonotic Behaviors Survey

Providing a modular data collection framework, this technical brief presents the Zoonotic Behaviors Survey designed to capture critical behavioral insights around animal to human disease transmission. The survey instrument fills an essential research gap by offering adaptable tools that measure risk perception, prevention practices, and human-animal interaction patterns. Program teams and public health agencies can leverage these standardized surveys during baseline evaluations, outbreak preparedness initiatives, and routine surveillance. With real-world implementation insights from Liberia and Cote d’Ivoire, the resource demonstrates how behavioral evidence strengthens national One Health frameworks and global health security strategies.

Last modified: July 23, 2026

Language: English

Source: Johns Hopkins Center for Communication Programs

Year of Publication: 2025

HIPs Implementation Tools Project

Launched in 2022, the HIPs Implementation Tools project aims to compile crucial resources for FP/RH practitioners, that provide guidance on effectively implementing and expanding the Family Planning High Impact Practices (HIPs). Responding to the growing need for resources that not only explain the effectiveness of the family planning HIPs, but that also offer practical guidance on implementing and scaling up these practices, the project collaborated in 2023 with FP/RH technical experts and implementers. Together, they published an initial set of resource collections focused on implementing and scaling up 7 selected Service Delivery and Social and Behavior Change HIPs. In October 2024, with additional expert support, the project released a new set of resource collections covering 8 additional family planning HIPs and HIP enhancements. Within each collection, viewers can find accessible knowledge products designed to help FP/RH professionals strengthen the implementation and scale-up of these HIPs in their programming. (Un petit nombre de ressources et d’études de cas sont disponibles en français pour chaque dossier.)

Source: Johns Hopkins Center for Communication Programs

Date of Publication: November 15, 2024

Capacity Assessment Tool

The Capacity Assessment Tool is used to evaluate the Social Behavior Change Communication and Knowledge Management skills and abilities of SBCC professionals. It is used for planning future capacity strengthening activities, and dicovering where, within an organization, an area of skill needs development.

Source: Johns Hopkins Center for Communication Programs

Date of Publication: March 25, 2019

Malaria Learning Briefs

These are 4 learning briefs that document key results, challenges and lessons learned in implementing a five-year community involvement intervention to prevent and control malaria through a combination of interventions. These interventions include, in addition to universal coverage bed net distributions, training of community health workers, health committee volunteers and teachers, as well as partnerships with local radio stations to disseminate messages on malaria prevention and control practices. This mix of interventions improved knowledge and practices for malaria prevention, treatment seeking and community management.

The project aimed to support the efforts of the Mozambican government to reduce malaria throughout the country through scale-up of prevention and control efforts with community involvement. The learning briefs cover a range of topics

The briefs are as follows:

Malaria Prevention and Control in Mozambique: scaling up for universal access with community involvement (2011-2017): This project overview provides a summary of the Malaria Prevention and Control Project in Mozambique, its objectives, strategies, and key achievements. This project sought to contribute to a reduction in the number of malaria cases in the country through a range of interventions including working with community groups, training primary school teachers, and distributing long-lasting insecticidal nets (LLINs).

Mobilising communities for malaria prevention and control in Mozambique: This learning brief shares Malaria Consortium’s experience in partnering with existing community structures and building the capacity of community-based volunteers to deliver key messages around malaria, to increase uptake of prevention and treatment services within communities in Mozambique. It describes the intervention, and highlights a number of important lessons and challenges, as well as the necessary next steps to maximize the impact and sustainability of this approach.

Integrating malaria education into primary school activities: This Learning Brief shares Malaria Consortium’s experience in integrating edutainment-based malaria sessions into primary school classroom activities, to provide children with a basic knowledge around malaria transmission, symptoms, prevention, and care-seeking, as part of the Malaria Prevention and Control project in Mozambique. It highlights a number of important lessons and challenges, and the necessary next steps to maximize the impact and sustainability of this approach.

Nets bring good health: a qualitative inquiry: This brief shares Malaria Consortium’s key findings from a qualitative inquiry into mosquito net use and care practices in two Northern provinces of Mozambique, Niassa and Nampula. It explores the experiences and drivers of mosquito net use, non-use or misuse, and local perceptions regarding recommended malaria prevention and control practices.

Source: Malaria Consortium

Date of Publication: March 25, 2019