The Learning Collaborative

Global and Regional Learning Communities 

The Learning Collaborative to Advance Normative Change, a cooperative effort funded by USAID, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, envisions a world where the powerful influence of social norms in shaping lives is widely understood, and where projects and programmes improve health outcomes by applying normative science at scale. 

About the Learning Collaborative

The Global Learning Collaborative is an initiative for identifying, sharing and discussing norms-shifting interventions focused on improving adolescent sexual and reproductive health and well-being. Organised in three focused Learning Communities (Theory, Measurement, and Scale-Up), the Learning Collaborative aims to build consensus on promising practices for program design, implementation, monitoring and evaluation and scaling of proven norms-shifting initiatives. 

About the Regional Learning Communities

In an effort to accelerate normative change around the world, regional learning communities are forming in Francophone Africa, East Africa, Nigeria, and Asia. Given the expansion of the number of researchers and practitioners working on social norms, it is critical to make the latest knowledge and evidence on social norms widely accessible and to provide opportunities for practitioners and researchers from different disciplines and sectors to share and produce knowledge. Representatives from the government, NGOs, researchers and donors are forming regional social norms learning communities to strengthen networks, build sustained expertise and capacity in organizations and institutions, and support good quality programming. The regional learning communities will address gender and social norms across multiple health areas, such as maternal, neonatal and child health, routine immunization, nutrition, malaria, family planning and women’s economic empowerment. 

The goals of the regional learning communities are to: 

1. Share social norms evidence, approaches and resources.
2. Integrate social norms into ongoing and new normative and behaviour change initiatives.
3. Improve social norms program implementation and evaluation.
4. Strengthen networks within and across norms-shifting programs to improve learning and practice.
5. Generate and share knowledge between practitioners in the region and the global community.