On the heels of the wildly successful 2018 International Social and Behavior Change Communication Summit in April, the Johns Hopkins Center for Communication Programs is organizing a summit focused on the social and behavior change work being done in Africa’s French-speaking nations.

The “sommet francophone pour le changement social et de comportement” will be held Feb. 25-27, 2019 in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire, and will focus on reproductive, maternal, newborn and child health as well as nutrition. Registration for the three-day conference opens today as does the francophone summit’s abstract submission process. Abstracts will be accepted until Sept. 7, 2018, and the registration deadline is Feb. 1, 2019.

“We want to facilitate exchange around the state-of-the-art standards of social and behavior change in the French-speaking nations of Africa,” says CCP Executive Director Susan Krenn. “The summit will strengthen the community of social and behavior change practitioners in this region by building capacity, fostering collaboration and allowing them to learn from one another, especially around common challenges.”

The francophone summit will be smaller than the global summit held in Indonesia this year, which boasted 1,200 participants from 93 countries for the five-day event.

Many resources, tools and opportunities for interaction in the development space are in English and “the available resources in other languages narrows even further when you get to social and behavior change,” Krenn says.

With the francophone nations facing high maternal mortality rates, the use of modern family planning methods and nutrition indicators, the organizers say having this social and behavior change forum in French could help practitioners improve programming and thus the health of many mothers, children and communities in Africa.

A webinar will be held soon to go over the abstract submission process for the francophone summit. Sign up to receive email updates about the event.