Behavioral Insights in South Africa—A View from the Global South, Learning, Growing, and Evolving

When Behavioral Insights (BI) first informed government-led initiatives in the Western Cape Government, South Africa in 2012, it was the first of its kind in a formal effort to bring behavioral science to bear on public policy development in Africa. Housed in the Policy Unit, a small team took on the task to introduce, and implement the use of BI across departments, ultimately embarking on a two-phased journey that firmly placed the government institution on the global BI map. Phase one of the BI journey began ‘big and broad’ with the Policy Unit facilitating as many projects as possible across the policy landscape. Pilot projects focused on behavior change of our own government officials and of citizens in the Western Cape Province. The Nyanga Nudge (an application to make weekends safer for youth in the Cape Town suburb of Nyanga), and an email-based intervention and competition to reduce energy consumption in a 24-storey government building were two such pilot projects. As skeptics challenged the ability of BI to tackle the ‘wicked’ problems of the province, the team leaned into the deeper work required to do so. Marking phase two of our journey was Growth Mindset, an ambitious, collaborative project that tested whether socio-emotional learning could improve academic outcomes in low- and no-fee schools in 2017. The challenges and successes of these projects contribute to the BI community’s collective effort to document and share learnings, especially so, from the global South. Working with sustainability in mind, contextualizing your reality, and building BI capacity are some of the ‘non-negotiables’ we have discovered along the way. BI4GOV emerged as a brand, to signal how governments could harness BI to lead to widespread impact, and stand as a collective to advance this message across the world.