Four Sub-Saharan African case studies place local and diverse voices at the center of evidence-informed policymaking, with the analysis calling for multiple stakeholders to help shape research and for policy communities that can share and assess knowledge. The cases cover Benin, South Sudan, Tanzania and South Africa.
What the comparison set out to examine
The study asks what national-level evidence-informed policymaking practices operate across sectors in Global South countries and what insights from national and sub-national practice may inform international policy processes. The authors adapted Langer et al.'s framework into four parts: evidence demand, generation, communication and understanding, and use. That framework gives the phrase evidence-informed policymaking a practical meaning: whether evidence is sought, made, explained and eventually used.
Researchers used country case studies, with each drawing on a literature review, policy document analysis and key informant interviews. The methodological approaches differed somewhat from one case to another. The Tanzania case reported primary data collection through 117 focus group discussions within a multi-strand evidence approach.
A field tilted towards the Global North
One reason for looking at these settings was the uneven geography of the existing literature. A preliminary review of 75 papers published since 2015 found that 65 focused on Global North contexts, while 10 considered 19 Global South countries. The figures point to a strong concentration of evidence-informed policymaking research outside the settings the paper seeks to learn from.
Evidence meets political interests
The analysis describes evidence use as tied to politics as well as research. In South Africa and Tanzania, demand for external evidence and receptiveness to it were described as linked to pre-existing policy and political interests. Evidence that ran against the stakes of powerful players could face contestation, with the level of resistance linked to what was at stake.
Making evidence usable
Another repeated point was that evidence has to be made usable for the people expected to act on it. Across all four cases, evidence generators were described as needing to work with policymakers and adapt language and research formats to policy needs. In South Sudan, inputs were described as too quantitative and lacking qualitative detail.
Tanzania's forum is the paper's example
Tanzania's TULab is presented as an open deliberative space, meaning a forum where diverse stakeholders can bring evidence together and discuss its relevance. The case describes stakeholders consolidating different evidence strands and making them relevant to urban policymakers. The authors describe greater uptake and impact as potential.
Civil society organizations, or CSOs, appear in a different but connected role. The cases describe them as brokers between citizens, academics and policymakers, and as valued sources of practical knowledge. They were generally not treated as the actors responsible for generating technical evidence.
The call is for lasting routes into policy
Those roles lead to an institutional argument. The paper says sustained evidence-informed policymaking requires institutionalized spaces and formal processes for nongovernmental consultation and external inputs, including academics and technical experts. For international policymaking, its conclusions recommend inclusive mechanisms with structured ways to demand, communicate and integrate evidence, clearer guidance on categories of evidence, and institutional entry points for diverse inputs.
The wider claim remains open
The study is limited to Sub-Saharan African case studies, and the authors call for further research on regional and multilateral processes to deepen understanding of cross-level evidence integration. The four cases provide reported practices and interpretations, but they do not settle how the same arrangements would work elsewhere.
That leaves several questions for future work: how regional and multilateral processes integrate evidence across governance levels; how international institutions can create equitable evidence categories and entry points for diverse forms of knowledge; and how transferable the practices are beyond the countries and sectors studied.
The paper's message is ultimately about design. Getting evidence into policy, it argues, requires attention to who is invited, how knowledge is translated for its users, and whether institutions give outside voices a durable place in the process.
Paper data and sources
Original title: Strengthening international evidence-informed policy making: lessons from the Global South.
Authors: Jessica Espey, Zhengli Huang, Giada Casarin et al.
Journal/Repository: Evidence & policy : a journal of research, debate and practice
Status: Peer-reviewed
First online: 2026-08-20
DOI: 10.1332/17442648y2026d000000105
Original paper