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| Shades of Us at the “Collectively Inspiring SBCC in Nigeria” Event Hosted by CCSI in Abuja. Image Credit: CCSI. |
When three of our abstracts were accepted for the 2026 International Social and Behaviour Change Communication (SBCC) Summit happening in Panama, I was excited. No, that doesn’t quite capture my feeling. I was over the moon with joy. I kid you not: I pranced a bit in my room because I felt super proud of myself, my team, and the work we do at Shades of Us.
This is because SBCC Summit is one of those conferences that ties directly to the work that we do, and that validation that we often need to remind ourselves that our work not only can be shared, but that opportunities to scale may be in the works.
For context, the 2026 SBCC Summit promised to be the world’s foremost event for driving sustainable social and behavior change through cutting-edge strategies. The global convening unites governments, civil society, community leaders, experts, practitioners, and the private sector to collaborate on innovative solutions that promote inclusivity, representation, and empowerment to address the world’s most critical challenges.
The Summit was co-chaired by the Johns Hopkins Centre for Communication Programs (CCP) and the Centre for Communications and Social Impact (CCSI).
Our abstracts had been accepted for different formats at the Summit. Addressing Period Poverty and Shame in Nigerian Communities through Mobile Cinema was selected for a Poster Session. Using Film to Address Period Poverty and Shame in Nigeria and Exploring the Impact of Inadequate Primary Healthcare Systems on Maternal and Child Mortality in Nigeria: A Mobile Cinema Approach were selected as Multimedia Showcases.
Three opportunities to share work that sits at the heart of what we do at Shades of Us.
But for a while, I was not sure I would be there.
I started thinking about the cost of attending.
The cost of registration was more than we could spare given the year we were already having. The cost analysis was either to drop some programs we had planned to attend the conference, or raise the funds in the timeline for registration. But…registration was just one cost: visa applications, flight tickets, accommodation, meals and incidentals, and more were part of a long list of expenses that made the light of excitement begin to fade from our eyes.
As a growing organisation, especially one that was evolving from a passion-driven nonprofit to a mission-driven social enterprise, we do not always have the resources to pursue every opportunity that comes our way. Sometimes, being selected is not the difficult part. Finding the resources to show up is.
There is a particular kind of frustration that comes with knowing that your work has found a place in an international space, while you are still figuring out how to finance the journey to that space.
I hesitated.
Weeks after the conference, CCSI sent a notice about a post-Summit event to be held in Abuja. The event, “Collectively Inspiring SBCC in Nigeria”, was an opportunity to share insights from the session and chart a course for collective action for us in the Social and Behaviour Change Communication space.
Again, I hesitated.
Did I really want to attend? Wouldn’t that reinforce the feeling of sadness that I had just gotten over? Would the conversation remind me of everything I couldn’t be a part of?
I dragged my feet for days on end until the very last day of registration. I told myself to get over the loss – which I couldn’t do anything about – and look at the opportunity: a chance to learn and improve my work. That was the convincing moment for me.
So on September 1, 2026, I went to the event in Abuja…and let me just say this: I. Am. Glad. . Did!
There was a strong recognition throughout the sessions that Nigeria has people, organisations, evidence, and experience working across Social and Behaviour Change Communication. The bigger question was how these different efforts can connect, learn from one another, and contribute to stronger systems.
The post–Summit event opened up conversations around funding, evidence, community engagement, storytelling, technology, collaboration and sustainability. Again and again, speakers returned to the need to move beyond individual projects and think about the wider systems within which Social and Behaviour Change Communication operates.
One of the sessions began with Wame Jalo of Shuga Global, formerly MTV Staying Alive, who shared the work of an organisation that has been working for more than two decades and has been in Nigeria since 2013.
Shuga Global's work is built around three components: content, community and capacity. The organisation works with nongovernmental organisations and community organisations to deliver screenings and immersive learning experiences.
What stood out to me was the emphasis on trust.
Wame spoke about the need to think about who builds trust in an environment where people are exposed to an overwhelming amount of information, and how we measure whether that trust is actually shifting behaviours. The discussion also highlighted the economic value of investing in Social and Behaviour Change Communication, including a cost-benefit analysis suggesting that every one dollar invested could generate more than 150 dollars in health benefits.
There was also a recognition that Social and Behaviour Change Communication continues to require investment, particularly at a time when funding is declining. This raised an important question: how do we keep that investment on the table?
And as artificial intelligence and digital tools become increasingly prominent, another question emerged: how do we remain authentic and relevant?
Emmanuel Nwala, an Associate Director for Research at the Policy Innovation Centre (PIC), spoke about the need to do things differently in response to declining global funding.
One of the shifts he identified was the movement from Social and Behaviour Change Communication towards systems thinking. Organisations are adapting, partnering and sharing learnings from research. There is also an increasing effort to use existing data and programmes to reach communities rather than continually creating new interventions.
But he challenged the sector to go further.
We need to move from producing evidence to actually using the evidence available to reform our work. As he put it, “SBC is not a campaign. It is a system.”
He also spoke about the need to understand the ‘behaviour behind the behaviour’.
This is particularly important in an environment where influencer culture increasingly affects how people think and behave. There can be a gap between the way people are reached and the behaviour an intervention is actually trying to address.
Communication, he argued, cannot be separated from social norms and behaviours.
The conversation then moved into technology. Many organisations are already using digital communication and artificial intelligence to strengthen Social and Behaviour Change Communication, but these tools also come with limitations. Who has access? What does it cost? How well do these tools understand Nigeria's cultural diversity? How do we protect people's data and rights?
For a country as culturally diverse as Nigeria, these are not small questions.
Chief Moji Makanjuola, the Executive Director of the International Society of Media in Public Health (ISMPH) and a veteran Journalist and Health Advocate, brought decades of journalism and Social and Behaviour Change Communication experience into the conversation.
She shared a story from her early years as a journalist, when she reported on HIV and faced threats over a story involving a man married to a man. The experience reinforced the importance of being mindful of language and cultural norms and understanding the peculiarities of the communities in which we work.
That conversation about culture came up repeatedly during the post–Summit event.
Roselyn Odeh, the Reproductive and Family Health Specialist and Project Director of A360, an initiative of the Society for Family Health, shared an example from an intervention designed to help married adolescent girls prepare for pregnancy.
She started by mentioning that there was a prevailing belief that antenatal care was only for complicated pregnancies. Her team identified three things standing in the way of a girl who wanted to attend antenatal care: there was no perceived need, she lacked agency, and she did not have the money.
I liked that she emphasized that it was not enough to tell girls to go against the grain of their families while ignoring the role those families and communities play in shaping their decisions.
“We must find the belief before we build the campaign,” she said.
She also emphasised that an intervention targeting the girl alone would not be adequate. In all my years of working on social and behavior change, I have found this to be true in many instances. Thus, interventions have to consider the people and systems influencing her, while ownership and sustainability need to be considered from the beginning.
She also made the point that advocacy is a coalition, not a campaign.
Dayo Ibitoye, Founder of Dinovate, asked a question that was central to much of the Summit: How do we make change actually happen?
His response was that the most effective Social and Behaviour Change Communication is not just about the story. It is about relationships. He described story as the intervention itself and trust as the currency of behaviour change.
Trust.
It is always such an important component of any work you do, whether it is community-related or brand building.
At Shades of Us, we have used film to open conversations around issues that are often difficult to discuss. Our Mobile Cinema work has taken stories on period poverty, sexual consent, mental health, social accountability, and maternal and child health into conversations with audiences. None of these could have been possible if we didn’t first build trust.
Dayo spoke about why young people watch Shuga. In his opinion, they watch because it does not lie to them. It reflects their realities, their thoughts, their mess, and their dispositions. I agreed.
“When you lecture, people leave. When we mirror stories, people find themselves in it,” he enthused.
It is also why storytelling cannot be treated simply as something we add to an intervention after the strategy has already been developed. The story has to emerge from an understanding of the people, their realities, their beliefs and the systems around them.
Dayo also returned to the challenge of projects that end when funding ends. There are brilliant initiatives across the country, but new funding cycles often return to the same questions and programmes. One reason, he suggested, is that organisations are not building together. What one partner knows could strengthen another partner's work, just as another organisation's learning could strengthen ours.
The panel discussion, moderated by Adenike of CCSI, brought many of these questions together.
The conversation focused on credibility, collective action, cohesion, and institutionalising Social and Behaviour Change Communication in Nigeria.
There were questions about who the unconventional voices are that have not traditionally participated in Social and Behaviour Change Communication and how they can be brought into the ecosystem. There was also a discussion about where the strongest opportunities for collaboration exist and how we can avoid duplication.
Foyeke Oyedokun-Adebagbo, a Research Associate at Population Council, spoke about the need for a connecting system with a shared purpose. She emphasised that communities need to define their problems, shape their solutions and tell their stories. She also spoke about the need to build investment cases, strengthen accountability and evidence, and ensure that behaviour insights become part of planning in the same way that statistics, economics and health data inform decision-making.
She made another point that I found interesting: sometimes the best insights are not found in the places we traditionally look.
“If you want to hear the hottest gist, go to your tailor or stylist.”
It was a simple example of why we need to question who we consider an unconventional voice and where we believe useful knowledge can be found.
She also raised the question of visibility. Who has done what? Where has it been done? How are we cataloguing the work already taking place? And can that catalogue become something we collectively own and use?
The issue of duplication also came up. Importantly, duplication is not always because organisations do not want to share. Funding structures can create incentives for organisations to develop branded tools instead of building on what already exists.
Samson Tolulope Odukogbe, the Senior Knowledge and Communications Officer of the Association for Reproductive and Family Health, made the case for organisations to stop working beside each other and start working with each other.
“We are not competitors.”
Oh. That statement stayed with me.
When I first came into the development communication space, I could see the competition a mile away. Everyone was doing similar things but acting like we were not working on the same issues. When we expanded Shades of Us from digital activism to include community engagement and advocacy, one of the first things I set in motion was collaborative approaches. How could we bring our storytelling to match your service delivery or empowerment approaches? I knew I didn’t want to compete.
Samson challenged participants to ask what has been learned, who needs to know it, and what can be done to move that learning forward.
He also pointed out that one message cannot connect across the board. Nigeria's diversity requires approaches that work with community structures, while the growing influence of content creators means the sector also needs to think about how to partner with new voices that are already influencing behaviour.
Halima Buba, the Program Manager of the Nigeria Learning Collaborative on Social Norms (SNLC) and Engagement Manager for ACSM of Solina Centre for International Development and Research (SCIDAR), similarly spoke about the need to move away from vertical programmes that do not adequately consider what happens when they end.
For her, sustainability needs to be a consideration from the beginning.
She also reminded us that Social and Behaviour Change Communication overlaps with the economy and that the output from one partner can become an input for another. What a simple, yet profound statement. In a diverse country where people and contexts are constantly evolving, we need to continue learning rather than assuming that we already understand the context.
She also highlighted groups that are often excluded from these conversations, including young people and transient populations such as market women.
The point was clear: we need to go to the communities where people actually are.
There was considerable discussion about the role of government.
Bako Kantiok, a Programme Manager at CCSI, argued that Nigeria needs diverse voices across the Social and Behaviour Change Communication ecosystem and stronger platforms through which professionals can access research materials and tools. He also emphasised the importance of advocacy and policy-maker buy-in if Social and Behaviour Change Communication is to become an integral part of policy and sustainability.
There was a useful tension in the conversation around whether government should simply be handed responsibility for sustaining these systems.
During the questions, Ujenyu Joy Sani, a Programme Manager at Co-Creation Hub, challenged the idea that the answer is simply to hand everything to government. What happens when government changes? What happens with bureaucracy? She asked whether there could instead be a form of trusted or steering leadership, perhaps through a secretariat with a roadmap.
The response from the panel was more nuanced.
Halima Buba described government as an instrument, while noting the role of technical working groups in contributing to what needs to work. She emphasised that communities are the real owners of interventions.
Samson Tolulope Odukogbe also raised the question of what happens when donor funding ends. He pointed to government Health Promotion Officers as people who remain within the system even when administrations change.
The conversation therefore was not simply about government versus civil society. It was about how the different parts of the system can work together and how we build something that can survive beyond individual projects, organisations and funding cycles.
I also had an opportunity to contribute to the discussion. One thing I raised was the tendency to assume that the social norms within communities are the only norms that matter. Of course, cultural sensitivity is important. We cannot design interventions without understanding the communities in which we are working. But we also need to recognise when there is a need to challenge the predominant norm.
The example of Shuga came to mind because the programme demonstrates that being culturally aware does not necessarily mean simply reproducing what already exists. Sometimes storytelling has to create a space where people can see another possibility.
That balance is important.
We need to understand culture without becoming trapped by every existing norm.
Perhaps the most important part of the post–Summit event was that there was no shortage of ideas. The harder question is what we do with them.
How do we create mechanisms for organisations to actually share learning? How do we stop starting from zero every time a new project begins? How do we bring communities into the process as co-creators rather than simply as beneficiaries or sources of information? How do we bring young people, content creators, market women, and other voices that may not traditionally sit within Social and Behaviour Change Communication spaces into the conversation? How do we build sustainability into programmes from the beginning rather than thinking about it when funding is ending? And how do we use technology, including artificial intelligence, without losing the trust, cultural understanding and human connection that make communication meaningful?
These are not questions that one organisation can answer. They require the kind of collective thinking that the Summit (and post–Summit event) called for.
The 2026 International Social and Behaviour Change Communication Summit may be over, but our collective action needs to continue, get strengthened, and grow.
I went into the post–Summit event after hesitating about whether we should attend. I came away reminded that sometimes the value of showing up is not simply in what you get to present. It is also in what you get to hear, question, and take back with you.
Our three accepted submissions would have given us an opportunity to contribute our own experience of using film and storytelling to address complex social and health issues. That didn’t happen at that level, but it doesn’t mean it cannot happen in the future. The post-event allowed me to see that work within a much bigger conversation.
There is a lot of good work happening in Nigeria. The challenge now is to connect it. To learn from it. To build on it. And, ultimately, to work together to create the kind of Social and Behaviour Change Communication systems that can continue to deliver long after individual projects and funding cycles have ended.
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