The use of evidence in decision-making in the health sector and other development efforts remains sub-optimal due to bottlenecks that operate at individual, system and institutional levels. There are many widely acknowledged barriers to evidence use, including lacking or weak relationships between decision-makers and producers of evidence, untimely and/or irrelevant evidence, inappropriately packaged evidence, politics and interests, weak capacity among decision-makers to find and use evidence, lacking wide dissemination of evidence, among others.
The development of the evidence-informed policy-making training (EIPM) course presented here responds to the challenge of weak capacity among decision-makers to find and use evidence in decision-making.
The goal of this training course is to strengthen the technical capacity of mid-level policymakers (i.e. technical staff) in the health sector in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) in accessing, appraising, interpreting, synthesizing, and utilizing research evidence in decision-making.
The curriculum was developed by AFIDEP, FHI 360, College of Medicine (CoM) at the University of Malawi, East, Central and Southern Africa Health Community (ECSA-HC), Consortium for National Health Research (CNHR), and the Parliamentary Office for Science and Technology (POST) as part of the Strengthening Capacity to Use Research Evidence in Health Policy (SECURE Health) programme implemented in Kenya and Malawi from Nov 2013 – Jan 2017. The SECURE Health programme is funded by the United Kingdom’s Department for International Development (DFID).