News

Technical staff from AFIDEP this week completed an intensive five-day training on writing systematic reviews. The training was facilitated by experts from the University of Johannesburg-based Africa Evidence Network and took place between 7^th November and 11^th November, 2016 at Westwood Hotel, Nairobi. The training was part of technical capacity-building for AFIDEP aimed at equipping the Institute’s researchers with the latest skills in knowledge translation, a critical element of enhancing the use of research evidence in the formulation of policies in the areas of population change and sustainable development as well as health systems strengthening. Beneficiaries of the training also included AFIDEP research staff based at the Malawi office.

Speaking on the last day of the training, Dr. Rose Oronje, Director, Science Communications and Evidence Uptake, reiterated that AFIDEP’s management attaches great value to continued capacity building. According to her, continuous training of technical staff is one important way of ensuring that the Institute’s increasingly essential role of enhancing uptake of research evidence by policy makers in sub-Saharan Africa is well grounded. “AFIDEP’s management recognises the need for continuous capacity building of technical staff who are the bedrock of our knowledge translation work,” she said. On his part, Dr. Anthony Ekwaro Obuku, the Coordinator of Uganda-based Africa Centre for Systematic Reviews and Knowledge Translation and also one of the training’s facilitators, noted that systematic reviews are getting increasingly recognized as highly effective tools for extracting and presenting research evidence to policy makers, hence increasing the chances that the evidence will be used. He acknowledged though that carrying out systematic reviews is a highly technical undertaking which can also be time consuming. However, given the rigour required to produce good reviews, the evidence they contain is considered to be of better value than that which is presented through other common tools such as policy briefs. The other facilitator of the training was Mr. Laurenz Langer, an Evidence Uptake Specialist at the Africa Centre for Evidence.

“It became apparent that there is a lot that goes into producing good systematic reviews. The training was therefore quite sobering when I realised the kind of work that needs to go towards developing a quality systematic review,” noted Dr. Bernard Onyango, a Knowledge Translation Scientist based at the Nairobi Office, who also manages AFIDEP’s demographic dividend programme. Dr. Grace Kumchulesi, who is based in the Malawi Office and who also works in the demographic dividend programme said: “The training was really helpful, I knew about systematic reviews generally before the training. I now however acknowledge that they can help us realise our aspiration to generate and share lessons around the work that we do on the demographic dividend because systematic reviews draw from a much wider pool of evidence.”

Collaboration between AFIDEP and the University of Johannesburg has developed in the context of a global programme known as Building Capacity to Use Evidence (BCURE) supported by the United Kingdom’s Department for International Development (DFID). It involves capacity building work to build the skills, incentives and systems that are required for evidence-informed policy making. It brings together a number of strategically linked projects that aim to improve development interventions through better decision making processes in low and middle income countries.