What does the data say? Join us for a roundtable on the emerging evidence on GenAI for Social & Behavioral Change

A year ago, when we spoke with Social and Behaviour Change Communication (SBC) practitioners at ICT4D, one of the biggest challenges cited was a lack of use cases and evidence. Given the session took place just over a year after GenAI hit the mainstream with the release of ChatGPT, this was hardly  surprising, and practitioners raised more questions than the industry (and the world) had answers for. Since then, evidence has thankfully started to emerge, especially in the health space (as seen in this recent report on generative AI’s application for health in low- and middle-income countries, published by Stanford Center for Digital Health and Stanford Center for Advanced Study in Behavioral Science), and other industry blogs. 

The GenAI for Social and Behavior Change Working Group at the Natural Language Processing Community of Practice (NLP-CoP) is excited to bring together leaders in the field of SBC and AI working on sectors such as sexual health, maternal health and agriculture, for a dynamic data-focused roundtable. Each participant will take the floor to share one salient data point which they believe tells us something important about the true value of GenAI in supporting SBC programming – from using GenAI to directly answer users’ questions, to improving overall User Experience, or supporting agricultural extension workers.

 Register to join us on May 19th at 10am ET/ 3pm GMT!

We’re excited to be be joined by:

• Gayatri Jayal, Director of Consumer Innovations at Dimagi, a global tech for good social enterprise enabling frontline work through scalable digital solutions.
• Jay Patel, Director of Technology at Jacaranda Health, an organization working to build, deploy and scale maternal health solutions in government health systems. 
• Jona Repishti, Assistant Director, Global Gender at Digital Green, a global development organization working to create digital solutions to support farmers use technology and data to build prosperous communities.
• Soma Mitra-Behura, Lead Data Scientist at Girl Effect, a nonprofit working with and for girls to break down the barriers they face and reach their full potential.
• Lukas Borkowski, Senior Director of Strategic Partnerships at Viamo, a tech social enterprise helping NGOs, government agencies, donors and businesses communicate directly with the people they intend to reach via mobile.
• Sidd Goyal, Co-founder and CEO at Nivi, a behavior change digital health company behind a platform that supports charities, for-profits, and public agencies optimize engagement with their key audiences.

Attendees can expect to learn more about a wide array of data and evidence about the use of GenAI for SBC and the chance to discuss key learnings and challenges with those at the forefront of evaluating GenAI-powered interventions. 

As the use of GenAI seems to grow across many fields, having open, critical conversations about its practical implications, real-life examples and challenges is more important than ever. With this event, we’re hoping to foster a collaborative space where we can discuss hard evidence on the extent to which GenAI actually increases either digital SBC product performance, real world outcomes, or both, and have a transparent exchange about the complexities of making decisions around adopting GenAI. We hope to see you there! 

🔊 In case you’re interested in having more conversations such as this one, don’t forget to join the NLP-CoP (on Slack and LinkedIn).