Below is the citation and key messages of a paper on health policymaking, drawing from experience in Bangladesh, Gambia, India and Nigeria.

CITATION: Strengthening capacity to apply health research evidence in policy making: experience from four countries

Sarah Hawkes, Bhupinder K. Aulakh, Nidhee Jadeja, Michelle Jimenez, Kent Buse, Iqbal Anwar, Sandhya Barge, M. Oladoyin Odubanjo, Abhay Shukla, Abdul Ghaffar and Jimmy Whitworth

Health Policy Plan. (2015)

doi: 10.1093/heapol/czv032

First published online: April 21, 2015

KEY MESSAGES

  • There is widespread acknowledgement of the need to strengthen capacity to increase the use of evidence in policy cycles and that capacity needs to be developed on both the supply and demand sides of evidence production. However, little experience of capacity strengthening in health sectors in low- and middle-income countries has been published to date.
  • Strengthening the capacity of individuals and organizations is necessary but probably insufficient to ensure the sustainability of evidence-informed policy making. Institutional capacity needs to be strengthened too. This requires resources, legitimacy and regulatory support from policy makers.
  • Evidence of what works to develop capacity to use evidence is needed — but rarely measured. We propose a new conceptual framework to evaluate the impact of capacity strengthening activities across a variety of levels and activities.
  • For sustainable change, the politics of evidence-informed policy making needs to be understood and addressed—particularly the incentives facing policy makers to support the use of evidence in policy cycles.

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