Background: Access to child spacing services in northern Nigeria is hindered by social norms and poor male engagement among other barriers. These norms dictate how men define wealth and the value placed on women. A wealthy man is defined by the number of children he has and those with large family are highly respected in their community. While a woman's value is linked to her ability to bear and raise children. The pilot Human Centred Design (HCD) project was launched shift these norms.
Intervention: The tea vendors and their wives were trained on effective business practices for increased profit, to drive business diversification, initiate conversation with each other and customers about their business, family, child-care, and child spacing. The conversations amongst men at the tea vendoing shops or Majalisas focused issues affecting men, marriage, the benefits of child spacing, the need to redefine wealth in line with the Gagarabadau concept, and to refer customers to take up child spacing services.
Results: The norm change interventions were successful at increasing communication between the men and their wives, redefined wealth, value of women, uptake of child spacing for the right reason and raised child spacing champion in the broader community. The Peer to Peer (P2P) conversations were able to generate similar discussions to the Tea Vendor activities, providing additional opportunities to expose community members to key messages. The diffusion of the term Gagarabadau worked extremely well as a way to address a complex social norm in a simple and contextually appropriate way.
Conclusions: The interventions successfully shifted the social norm around male engagement, women's value, agency, and access to child-spacing services and should be scaled.
