The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation in Menlo Park, California, has announced a new Evidence-Informed Policymaking strategy.

As part of its Gender Equity and Governance (GEG) program, the foundation assists those working to build an inclusive society where everyone, especially women and girls, can thrive. Since 2015, the GEG program has been dedicated to promoting Evidence-Informed Policymaking (EIP) in East and West Africa and encouraging policy makers to incorporate evidence into their decision-making processes. Over the past five years, the program has invested more than $120 million in almost 60 organizations. In September 2022, the foundation launched a strategy refresh process to evaluate the outcomes of the previous five years, and this month it released a refreshed Evidence-Informed Policymaking Strategy 2024-2027 (16 pages, PDF), which details lessons learned, what the foundation aims to accomplish with the refreshed strategy, potential risks, and what the foundation hopes to learn with partners.

Going forward, the refreshed strategy will be focused on more proximate actors, particularly those that work closely with governments in East and West Africa, which, in turn, will require winding down or reducing support that currently goes to global organizations. In addition, the foundation aims to pursue the refreshed goal through three separate, yet interconnected efforts, which also will act as intermediate goals to assess overall progress: strengthening African data and evidence organizations, particularly those that have strong relationships with governments; strengthening the capacity and incentives of policy makers in East and West Africa to responsibly use data and evidence; and strengthening the EIP ecosystem at the local, regional, and global levels to better support use of data and evidence in those regions. Across all these efforts, the foundation aims to attend to and address power imbalances—ensuring that evidence is produced, used, and valued in ways that promote genuinely equitable and inclusive policymaking processes.

(Photo credit: Getty Images/Eric1513)