Behavioural Insights Team and partners make anti-corruption progress in Nigeria.
From its start, the seven United Kingdom civil servants on the Behavioural Insights Team (BIT) called itself “the world’s first nudge unit,” a catchphrase for the idea that small, well-crafted prompts can influence human behavior without coercion.
What goes into that nudge is at the core of BIT’s work.
Fourteen years later, BIT is now a global social purpose company with offices in seven countries, focused on how to influence human behavior for positive social change. It pursues that goal by utilizing behavioral research and findings from psychology, economics, and other fields and applying evidence gleaned from that work to real-world challenges.
The “nudge unit” has run more than 1,500 projects, including 700-plus randomized controlled trials in 80 countries—making progress in health, criminal justice, education, energy, international development, and other areas. And it has worked with a wide range of clients, including the U.K. Cabinet Office, United Nations Development Programme, Meta, and the job search site Indeed.
One of the more compelling examples of BIT’s work is in Nigeria, where the organization is helping to build an innovative network of anti-corruption efforts—from a TV drama to a collaboration of religious leaders—in a country that loses billions of dollars annually to corruption and financial crimes.
“We’re really doing a deeper exchange of knowledge between ourselves as behavioral scientists and our partners as anti-corruption professionals.”
“If I were to say what the biggest impact has been,” said Erin Britton, a Senior Methods Advisor at BIT Americas, “it would be seeing the creation of this community of anti-corruption practitioners who are thinking about and examining problems through a behavioral lens.”
An important element of BIT’s work is evaluating if an initiative worked and by how much. Nigeria practitioners’ thirst for knowledge and commitment to assessing their work have been inspiring, Britton said.
“We’re really doing a deeper exchange of knowledge between ourselves as behavioral scientists and our partners as anti-corruption professionals,” she added, “so that we learn from their depth of experience working in anti-corruption over decades in Nigeria, and they learn from our approach to behavioral science to deepen their practices.”
To run and facilitate the anti-corruption behavioral interventions with several of MacArthur’s On Nigeria grantees, BIT has forged a strong working relationship with Griot Studios, a Nigerian company that provides human-centered design training and research. BIT works with Griot on a range of efforts, including identifying optimal behaviors, barriers to those behaviors, and interventions that might change negative behaviors for the better. Griot has redesigned interventions based on feedback and supported the evaluation of the results as well.
Although still early, the efforts BIT supports have shown promise. Here are a few examples:
Anti-Corruption ‘Pep Talks’
Palace of Priests Assembly, a faith-based organization, committed to empowering Nigerians to promote peace and social justice when it was established in 2016. In October and November 2022, Palace of Priests coordinated a behaviorally-informed WhatsApp messaging campaign encouraging ministers to deliver sermons or short “pep talks” on anti-corruption or dedicate a Sunday service to anti-corruption.
A rigorous evaluation concluded that ministers who participated felt overwhelmingly positive about the campaign and were influenced to speak more about anti-corruption in their services.
Social Change Storytelling
A Hausa-language TV channel, Arewa24, was launched by BIT-supported Equal Access International in 2014 in northern Nigeria, where electoral corruption is widespread. The channel featured shows highlighting peacebuilding and countering violent extremism messages. Efforts included weaving anti-corruption messaging into a season of a popular political drama with the goal of reporting suspected electoral corruption in Nigeria’s presidential elections in early 2023.
The goal is to change attitudes, beliefs, knowledge, and behavior around reporting electoral corruption. Evaluation research on the effort is under review for publication. Today, Arewa24 is an independent corporate entity which continues to promote social change through storytelling.
Private Sector Focus
Integrity Organisation, (IO) an anti-corruption research, advocacy, and consulting entity, focuses on accountability and transparency in public and business life. As part of its anti-corruption mission, IO supports private sector professionals through tools such as honor/ethics codes, public declarations against corruption, and resources for establishing internal controls in their company. IO also uses advocacy and awareness raising.
In 2021-22, IO’s partnership with BIT and Griot applied behavioral insights to a new social media campaign targeting private sector workers who have not yet engaged with anti-corruption tools, or who may be hesitant to do so. Three months after the campaign launched, IO reported more than 30,000 visits to its landing page and 124 individuals who downloaded tailored anti-corruption resources.
Monitoring Procurement
Public and Private Development Centre (PPDC) supports state governments establishing websites that allow non-state actors—community-based monitors, civil society organizations, and investigative journalists—to access information on public procurement. Also, PPDC has trained the non-state actors to use the information in the online open contracting portals and field investigations to monitor procurement.
In 2021 through 2023, PPDC partnered with BIT and Griot to use behavioral insights to redesign the Adamawa State Open Contracting Portal. The goal was to make it easier for non-state actors to screen projects for “red flags” that could indicate corruption in the procurement process. The new portal is a model for other open government procurement portals.
In addition, BIT is working with Akin Fadeyi Foundation on redesigning its FlagIt app to increase public reporting of roadside corruption and bribe solicitation by Federal Road Safety Commission officers. Data analysis is underway.
Gleaning and Sharing
When she looks ahead to BIT’s work in Nigeria, Britton is perhaps most enthusiastic about building partnerships with Nigerian behavioral science practitioners who bring different perspectives that expand the research base and push for new solutions to entrenched issues.
She also sees promising potential in edutainment—entertainment designed to be educational—and in behavioral science initiatives to reintegrate individuals affected by conflict. Continuing to add partnerships and accumulate evidence of what works will be crucial, Britton said.
Also important are performing deep, exploratory work and relying on the expertise of collaborators who have been working in behavioral science in a variety of policy areas. Those efforts present opportunities to break the science out from a limited group of specialists and expand the application of it to other issues, including climate change, inequality, water, health, and sanitation, Britton said.
“These collaborations—learning and testing new things—are really productive, fruitful, and exciting,” she said. “It makes us feel like we're all in this together.”
Between 2018 and 2023, MacArthur provided nearly $2.2 million to Behavioral Insights (US) Inc., the U.S. subsidiary of Behavioural Insights Team, to support On Nigeria grantee partners, including Nigerian civil society organizations, government agencies, and practitioners, in learning and applying behavior-change approaches to reduce corruption. Griot Studios has been awarded $900,000 since 2017 for its work to develop issue-based films and video games to galvanize citizens to act against corruption.
