An illustration of how responsive feedback in a social marketing tobacco control intervention in Ghana enabled managers to make decisions that increased intervention effectiveness

Abstract

This report illustrates how a feedback loop, set up to provide data and insights to a donor and designers/implementers of a social marketing tobacco prevention intervention in Ghana, helped adapt the original design of the intervention to one that was more suited to the social and media contexts of Ghana. The designers/implementers had previously, successfully implemented a tobacco control intervention with adolescents in Botswana. This experience had informed the initial intervention design in Ghana. As the feedback generated by evaluators started demonstrating just how different the Ghanaian social and media contexts were from the Botswanan one, implementers started making changes to their selection of channels, resulting in a design which was quite different from the original one. The close involvement of the donor in this process enabled implementers to make rapid changes to the design of the intervention. This illustration adds to a small but growing literature establishing the importance of feedback loops to improve the design and implementation of development interventions.