Aligning national and regional knowledge ecosystems for evidence-informed policy-making

Shifting from individual training to institutional engagement, systems change and policy-maker involvement to build research ecosystems that connect evidence to policy, especially in under-represented contexts.

Overview

To ensure that health policy and systems research contributes meaningfully to improved health outcomes, countries require strong, self-sustaining knowledge ecosystems. The Alliance has sharpened its approach to capacity strengthening, moving beyond a narrow focus on individual training towards an emphasis on institutional engagement and systems change.

This work supports the strengthening of national and regional research ecosystems by enabling institutions to act as effective brokers between evidence generation, policy-making and practice.

Systems framing

The Alliance approaches capacity strengthening not as the transfer of technical skills to individuals, but as an ecosystem challenge. Sustained evidence use depends on institutions with clear mandates, supportive cultures and aligned incentives to connect research with decision-making.

This systems-level approach focuses on:

• From individual to institutional – moving beyond short-term workshops for individual researchers to strengthen organizational mechanisms, including incentive structures and evaluation frameworks, that enable institutions to sustain evidence use over time;
• The brokerage function – addressing the gap between research and policy as a problem of connection rather than data availability, and supporting institutions to act as trusted knowledge brokers that facilitate relationships between researchers and policy-makers; and
• Contextualizing knowledge – recognizing that knowledge ecosystems differ across regions and languages, and expanding support to under-represented contexts, like Francophone Africa, to ensure capacity strengthening reflects local institutional and linguistic realities.

How the Alliance approaches this area

This area of work considers aligning and strengthening knowledge ecosystems across three interrelated dimensions: