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The Interactive Loop: Community-Driven Solutions

We combine direct community engagement and participatory media and technology. Our projects are designed around the priorities, experiences, opinions, and solutions of the communities with whom we partner. Every program has multiple touch-points that integrate community solutions and feedback. We call this a generative feedback loop.

 

Direct Community Engagement

Participatory Media & Technology

Community–Centered

Formative Research

Formative Research

A critical first step before we launch our programs. We look at the attitudes, behaviors, and social norms of local communities through a variety of data collection methods. For EAI, this first step helps us build rapport and co-create solutions with our partner communities.

Stakeholder Engagement

Stakeholder Engagement

We gather essential representatives and individuals who will influence and be affected by our program design. We create a system to feed stakeholder inputs into the program design and engagement over the course of the program.

Capacity Building

Capacity Building

The process to equip individuals and communities with the understanding, skills, and access to information, knowledge, and training that enables them to be more active and informed citizens and take on leadership roles in their communities. This includes personal and professional development.

Co-Created Communication Programs

Co-Created Communication Programs

EAI partners with communities through Content Advisory Groups, Listening, Discussion, and Action Groups, and other methods to write and produce media that uniquely reflects the experience of the community. These groups enhance our ability to increase targeted attitude and behavior change, help decrease backlash on sensitive issues, and mobilize local action.

Interactive Feedback

Interactive Feedback

EAI designs programs with multiple inflection points for community feedback such as interactive voice response; polls and surveys conducted by community researchers; media packages produced by community reporters and other customized feedback loops. We believe communities have the solutions to their problems.

Social Action

Social Action

By co-creating solutions with communities our programs increase social capital, empowerment, and leadership leading to the emergence of new actors courageously championing important social issues and actions.

Learning & Adapting

Learning & Adapting

Adaptability is central to our program approach. We use survey data, evaluation tools, reflection meetings, in-depth interviews, community, and facilitator feedback, and randomized controlled trial data to continuously evaluate and improve our programs. By creating real-time learning and feedback loops, we can design iteratively and adapt as necessary to achieve our goals.

Formative Research

  • Literature Review/Problem and Context Analysis
  • Focus Groups
  • Qualitative Participant and Influencer Interviews
  • Alliance Assessments e.g.partnership and network landscaping

Stakeholder Engagement

  • Informative and Consultative Stakeholder Meetings
  • Townhall Meetings
  • Content Advisory Groups
  • Community Roundtables
  • Shuras and traditional forms of community gathering
  • Youth Clubs
  • Community Researchers

Capacity Building

  • Tech Camps and Hackathons
  • Lifeskills Training
  • Advocacy Training
  • Leadership and Empowerment Workshops
  • Participatory M&E Training
  • Gender and Inclusion Training
  • Social Media Influencer Training
  • Strategic Communications Planning/Campaign Development
  • Content Development Training
  • Scriptwriting and Journalism Training

Co-created Communication Programs

  • Serial Dramas
  • Chat and Morning Shows
  • Magazine Programs
  • Documentary and Narrative Films
  • Original Television Series
  • Street Theater
  • Music Videos
  • Digital Media Campaigns and Branding
  • Community Reporters

Interactive Feedback

  • Social Media
  • SMS platforms
  • Interactive Voice Response (IVR)
  • Radio and Television Call-Ins
  • Surveys
  • Contests and Games

Social Action

  • Learning Discussion and Action Groups (LDAGs)
  • Public Resource Use and Service Delivery Overisght
  • Norms Diffusion
  • Establishment of Civic Groups

Learning & Adapting

  • Baseline, Mideline, Endline Surveys
  • Monitoring & Evaluation Tools
  • Approach, Strategy and Methodology Reviews
  • Periodic Review and Reflection Meetings
  • Participatory Community Mapping and Appraisals
  • Random Control Trials (RCTs)

We bring our approach to life through these methodologies

Social and Behavior Change Communications (SBCC)

We know that sound communication strategies inspire action at the individual, community, and government levels. For us, inspiration is the great frontier of social and behavioral change.

We do more than simply inform our audiences, we help them develop them the skills and motivation to foster their own change. To do this we use different approaches, including listening, discussion, and action groups; life skills and youth empowerment training; community town hall meetings; and interactive street theater performances.

We approach SBCC holistically with the goal of inspiring change in individuals and communities by including families, peers, local leaders, and government. By working with the whole ecosystem that surrounds and influences a person’s life, we encourage positive changes that are driven by real needs and are sustainable over the long-term.

Asset and Vision-Based Programming

Our approach to empowerment is aligned with positive youth development and is infused across all our global programming. We maintain that all individuals, including at-risk and vulnerable youth or those with counter-normative or “radical” views, have assets that can be leveraged and oriented towards positive outcomes.

As a result, our dynamic approach to preventing and countering violent extremism recognizes, enhances, and channels the potential assets of all individuals – such as agency, commitment, leadership, and self-efficacy – and identifies positive pro-social pathways that help to reorient youth impulses, attitudes, and behaviors away from violence and toward civic empowerment.

We help communities connect their new skills to resources and opportunities that help society overcome social exclusion and marginalization. Without these opportunities for success and growth at the local and regional levels, youth are more likely to engage in self-destructive and risky behavior with gangs, criminal networks, or armed opposition groups.

In a world where youth and vulnerable communities are too often defined by their risk, our efforts strengthen youth assets, foster local agency, bolster an enabling environment, and empower tangible local contributions to social change.

Norms Change

We understand social norms as the rules that tell a society or community what behavior is expected or allowed. This includes our perceptions of how others in a community behave (what we think others will do) and how we think others expect us to behave (what we believe others expect us to do).

Norms are deeply entrenched in the fabric of a society and held in place by influential groups, such as peers, family members, and community leaders. As such they are often unchallenged and are notoriously difficult to change. We aim to challenge existing negative norms and behaviors while modeling positive ones. We do this primarily through radio, TV, community dialogue platforms, and mobile theater, but also by partnering with leaders and influencers in a community who are often the gate-keepers of the norms we are trying to address.

We encourage critical reflection and dialogue, creating a safe space where norms can be questioned and new behaviors practiced. In this way, we influence the collective beliefs that drive social norms while incubating and dispersing new, more positive norms through our active community-based groups.

Partner with Us

Work with EAI to expand the evidence for norms change and asset-based programming.

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