We are pioneering Social and Behavior Change with the Philippine human rights sector

While the Philippines has laws and institutions protecting human rights, the past few years have made the work of human rights defenders challenging and precarious.

Respect for human rights has been eroding, and democratic spaces have been shrinking due to populist policies, the surge of fake news, and massive and coordinated disinformation efforts painting human rights—and those who defend them—in a negative light. To make conditions more difficult, there is also a lack in sustainable communications infrastructures and resources within human rights civil society organizations (CSOs) to counteract these narratives and misperceptions about human rights.

What results is a sector struggling to survive.

Social and Behavior Change (SBC) has much potential in human rights advocacy.

Launched in 2019, the Initiative for Advancing Community Transformation (I-ACT) is the first program of its scale pioneering SBC with the Philippine human rights sector.

We use a strategy of behavioral science-backed Diagnosis, Prototyping, and Institutionalization—rigorously testing strategies that focus on lowering barriers before rolling out campaigns that encourage Filipinos to take concrete human rights actions.

With our goal of increasing public support for human rights, we plan to work with more than 100 grassroots CSOs across the country in applying the techniques of SBC responsively and at scale. To ensure sustainability across various fronts, we support the human rights community through a pathway of programs.

We believe that by working hand in hand, we will be able to learn, adopt, and champion new ways of shifting behaviors around rights—effectively promoting civic engagement among the Filipino public.