Dilip Soman is the Canada Research Chair in Behavioural Science and Economics, and serves as a Director of the Behavioural Economics in Action Research Centre at Rotman (BEAR). His research is in the area of behavioural science and its applications to consumer wellbeing, marketing and policy. He is the author of "The Last Mile" and teaches an open online course "BE101X: Behavioural Economics in Action" on EdX. We spoke to Dilip about his views on the role of behavioural insights in the Global South, its challenges and whether the Global South and North can share lessons learned. This blog serves as Part 2 to our interview with Dilip.
In Part 1 to our interview with Dilip, we established that the field of Behavioural Insights (BI) was established in the Global North, which comes with serious repercussions. This sense of pioneership, combined with often a greater number of resources available, has led to a dominance in the quantity of BI work being carried out in the Global North compared to the South—characterised by mainly developing countries. As a result, a dynamic has emerged in which the diffusion of innovation tends to move predominantly from the Global North to the Global South.
Nonetheless, as Dilip shows, innovation can be witnessed from those that are pursuing BI in the Global South despite resource scarcity and external environment constraints such as poor transport infrastructure. Indeed, these constraints trigger the Global South to move more quickly, efficiently, and creatively: the more limited you are, the more innovative you have to be. This gives cause for Dilip to rightfully point out that if, with all its internal and external environment constraints, the Global South is still able to innovate, there is tremendous potential for application of its lessons in the Global North, where they can perhaps generate greater impact when fewer constraints are present. As a result, the diffusion of innovation needs to start changing direction—from South to North. The upcoming sections will discuss how resource constraints have led to BI innovation in the Global South and how the Global South can go about changing the direction of the diffusion of innovation.
In what ways does resource constraints pose a threat to BI work in the Global South?
When we asked Dilip what he thought the biggest challenge in low resource contexts is, his answer was simple: reach.
“In the Global North you can reach your target market through communication, through identification, through physical distance, space and time, because you know...where they live, you can segment by postcode, you can send them emails. You cannot do that in much of the Global South.”
He explains that without these modern means of delivery, all interventions are redundant, and the only option is to “get on your bicycle and go to small villages and talk to people”—but that this diminishes the benefits of scale that you often get in developed countries because you are able to reach less people.
Dilip went on to share what he believes to be an even greater problem: “The people that need help the most are literally invisible to the state”. He referred to “the slums of Nairobi...the townships in Cape Town...the favelas in Brazil” and how these people have no home address, which removes their entitlement to a driver's license, which in turn prevents them acquiring a national identity card, and “if they don’t have a national identity card there is no way in which you even know about their existence”. He recounted that in Mumbai, India, “about 60% of the people that needed help were invisible...so as a State or somebody trying to intervene, I just don’t know how to reach them.” India is currently trying to find a solution to this data collection problem of identity registration with the introduction of Aadhaar, a national electronic identity system.
How have resource constraints led to BI innovation in the Global South?
There is one consolation we can take from the shocking evidence of structural and resource constraints in developing countries: BI practitioners have continued to innovate. Among other interventions being run in the Global South, we detail later in the article how the National Rural Health Mission (NRHM) in India generated organisational behaviour change. Additionally, MineduLAB, the innovation lab for education policy housed within the government of Peru, as well as BI4Gov, the Western Cape Government’s behavioural insights programme, have rolled out Growth Mindset interventions in low-income community schools, leading to significantly improved maths results – see Part 1 for a detailed explanation of the Growth Mindset intervention.
These are but a handful of the vast number of transferable lessons that could be put in practice in the developed world, not to mention the list of areas Dilip believes to have the most potential, including: financial inclusion, environment sustainability, food security, safety, and systems, and even the use of guidelines. Faisal Naru, Head of Strategic Management and Coordination at the OECD, also talked us through several ways to adapt operational models when confronted with low resources, representing another area for the diffusion of lessons (watch out for the upcoming blog dedicated to his interview). Whether we focus on these issues or others, Dilip reinstated the unique selling point for the change in direction of the diffusion of innovation:
“If you can innovate in a resource constrained environment, imagine how much more powerful that intervention would be when you have more resources”.
One field the Global South has developed some great insights in with global importance and application, and something that Dilip believes is the “next frontier”, is the use of behavioural insights for organisational behavioural change. This operational model involves embedding BI from the inside, in this way ‘mainstreaming’ it through an organisation and the way it functions to achieve longer-term sustainability of its effects. As a practical example of how to apply the model, Dilip explained how employee motivation can be increased using a scorecard technique. Through studying organisational behaviour he discovered:
“often when people don’t easily see the work that they’re doing or see it quantified, they’re not as motivated...so making the impact visible, making the effect of actions on impact more visible, and then putting it in a competitive setting is the way to go.”
Scorecards create this sense of healthy competition by publishing where one individual or group sits on a scale against another, which then motivates them to achieve their objectives; be it profit, engagement, or reach, to name a few.
The scorecard technique was put to the test by University of Toronto professor Prabhat Jha with the National Rural Health Mission (NRHM) in India, a government initiative to improve health indicators. As part of the NRHM programme, districts were allocated funds to distribute to any healthcare initiative of choice. However, the programme administrators came to realise that the impact of funding on optimising the district’s chosen outcomes of interest was not of primary concern to the district officers. As Dilip indicated, “they didn’t care too much, their job was to disperse the funds”.
To change this and motivate officers to generate an impact from their funding decisions, a scoreboard system was introduced. Every district’s impact on their outcome of interest was published on the district office and government websites at the end of each three-month period. Dilip remarked, “the moment that happened, incentives were aligned.” The behavioural insight that emerged was that if people knew that they were being evaluated, they became more motivated, regardless of whether people checked the results.
The fundamental value in this approach to employee motivation is that it can be transferred to all types of organisation and all corners of the world—as Dilip highlighted, “everyone within organisations is accountable for something”. In the Global North, Dilip recounted that as soon as customer ratings displays were introduced in restaurants in Canada, they became more hygienic: “once those scorecards are up we create incentives for companies to fix the game”.
Playing a central role in its global application, Dilip explained that this approach can demand much fewer resources than typical behavioural interventions because it doesn’t require a deep understanding of the business to work (which can seem foreign to behavioural scientists): “this way I just create the incentive for you to do it...because every division knows their processes better than we would ever know it.” With organisational behavioural change being a priority all over the world, these lessons are a great way for the Global South to start some of the conversations with the North, thus paving the way for a symbiotic exchange of information.
How can the Global North learn from the Global South?
Indeed, there are areas in which the Global North can learn from the South. To achieve this, Dilip proposed the following:
Increasing dialogue between the Global North and the Global South
Firstly, we need to really understand why the Global South works the way it does: what decisions are people making, when are they more likely to make them, what factors influence their decision? Take the example of informal banking in the Global South. To most people in developed countries formal banking is all they’ve ever known, and it may be hard to comprehend why anyone would choose anything else. However, Dilip explains that informal banking can in fact be more convenient and cheaper for consumers in certain places: “I would not join a formal bank in Thailand when I could access a money lender. I get better service; they come to my house, I pay more...but I don’t have to fill out complex paperwork, I don’t have to wear a suit and go to a bank”.
One way to convert this tip into a practical application could be through the inauguration of strategic platforms, for example global conferences, which bring together global experts from government, academia and industry to explore new frontiers, and share knowledge and experiences. Examples include: The Behavioural Exchange (BX) Conference, which has been hosted all over the globe since 2014 from Singapore to Sydney, and was meant to be hosted in 2020 by Dilip at BEAR in Toronto, but postponed due to COVID-19. Similarly, the OECD runs the Behavioural Insights conference annually; beginning in their headquarters in Paris, after two years it branched out and we were delighted to host it here, in the Western Cape in 2018. Bi-Org’s recent partnership with BI4GOV (and Western Cape Government) is an example of partnering which can assist in meeting mutually beneficial goals. It also provides a space for collaboration and contribution to behavioural research areas that can enhance the use of behavioural insights across organisations.
Following the OECD’s trajectory, we believe that to have the greatest impact, it’s crucial that these strategic platforms are set up within the developing countries, for the Global North to establish this base level of understanding behind a local person’s decisions and preferences. Additionally, the conferences must be co-created between Global North and South to guarantee an equal exchange of information in which similar contexts, decision patterns or challenges can be identified. For example, despite the varying severity of the issues, both the UK and South African governments have positioned health, community safety and violence as key priorities. With this knowledge, Dilip contends the South should convert relevant learnings into transferable lessons that are more globally applicable:
“a lot of people in the Global North will feel that what’s happening in South Africa or India or Thailand is not relevant to me but I think part of this is...we don’t take the trouble of taking the intervention and converting that into a broader concept.”
Reframing issues of low importance to the Global North to issues of global importance
Secondly, part of tailoring lessons for the target audience in the Global North should involve not only finding out where shared challenges lie, but also whether finding a solution to these challenges is important to the North, and if it’s not, to frame the motivation around something that is. For example, Dilip highlighted that water conservation is a global challenge, however its ranking on the list of priorities in a developed country like Canada is much lower than in water scarce nations like South Africa: “The amount of water that’s wasted in this continent [North America] is criminal. And because we live in an era of abundance nobody has ever thought about conserving water because they only think about water conservation as water conservation. But no, it’s energy conservation too...which therefore then is fossil fuel burning, which is the environment. People just don’t stop and think about the causal chain”.
Changing the narrative and framing the shared challenge of water conservation around its knock-on effect on something of high priority to Canada, like sustainability, will help them realise its importance and be much more motivated to solve it (with lessons learnt elsewhere). This goes to show we can apply behavioural insights to our own ways of working with simple techniques like framing information in a more attractive way, which should open the Global North’s eyes to the knowledge we have to share, and prompt the change in direction in which we share it.
These priority issues of interest can be identified at the global conferences via workshops and then solutions to shared challenges can be framed around them in the following exercises. For example, the Behavioural Insights conference in the Western Cape identified issues in the realm of safety and health to be of interest: Filippo Cavassini, the OECD, tweeted: “Take BI to the next level - get to big problems like HIV and gender-based violence - not just rearrange schools’ canteens!”.
Workshops are also useful to open the floor to discussions on the varying contexts within the Global North and South, and how to structure variations in implementation solutions to account for them, such as an individualistic vs collectivist society, for example. However, ultimately, Dilip trusts that the Global North and South share common goals and challenges: “the basic behavioural concepts are the same...people care about their families all over the world, people are loss averse all over the world...everybody has the same desires”, giving more weight to the need to equalise the flow of knowledge on these shared goals between the North and South.
In sum, Dilip suggests:
Increasing dialogue and partnerships between the Global North and Global South e.g. through the inauguration of strategic platforms of information exchange
Reframing issues of low importance to the Global North to issues of global importance e.g. framing water conservation as an issue of global sustainability
Why is it important to continue BI work in the Global South?
As more BI work comes to fruition in the Global South, it only means more lessons are learnt and insights generated. With careful consideration for contextual nuances, we can respond to a new opportunity to transfer the lessons learnt in the Global South to shared challenges being faced in the North, and begin to return the favour to our counterparts in the North. One phenomenon that is not unique to developing countries but rather universal, is organisational behaviour change. As a topic of global interest and one in which we find interventions are not often restrained by questions of resource, perhaps it represents the golden ticket for the Global South to fuel the change in the direction of the diffusion of innovation for a more symbiotic relationship, as well as creating truly lasting behaviour change.
This blog serves as Part 2 to our interview with Dilip - find Part 1 here on ‘Setting a new golden standard in behavioural insights (BI) in the Global South’.