Evidence for who?

Reflections from Evidence 2025

Last week, I had the privilege of participating in the Evidence 2025 conference in Benin as a winner of the Africa Evidence Leadership Award 2025. Standing in that closing session alongside fellow award recipients Akaninyene Obot Amos Njuguna Peter Kasadha - each representing different dimensions of the evidence ecosystem - I found myself reflecting on a question that has guided much of my work in research and evaluation: evidence for whom?

The field of evidence-informed decision-making in Africa has come remarkably far. Walking through the conference halls, engaging in sessions that spanned innovative methodologies to parliamentary engagement in evaluation, I observed the technical sophistication, the commitment, and the sheer volume of evidence being produced across the continent. We have built platforms for rapid evidence synthesis. We have trained government officials in evidence use. We have created data infrastructure and AI tools. We have documented what works.

Yet in conversation after conversation - over coffee breaks and in the margins of panel discussions - a tension kept surfacing. We have made tremendous progress in evidence production, translation, and even in creating mechanisms for decision-maker access to evidence. But we have been operating on an assumption that deserves interrogation: that if decision-makers have access to evidence and understand it, they will act accordingly.

Policy decisions, however, are not technical exercises. They are political acts.

The Missing Stakeholder

Chairing the session on "Youth at the Center: Reimagining Evidence, Cooperation, and Systems for Africa's Future" brought this tension into sharp relief. As I listened to Sinenhlanhla Tsekiso describe her journey from emerging evaluator to the board of SAMEA, to Ana Beatriz Pizarro and Claudia Alarcón López discuss how early-career professionals are shaping evidence infrastructure globally, to Sephora Axelle AGUESSY share work on including young evaluators in national evaluation systems, a pattern emerged.

These weren't stories about youth as beneficiaries of evidence systems. They were accounts of youth as architects of those systems. They were challenging not just who produces evidence, but whose questions evidence answers, whose definitions of success it validates, whose voices it amplifies.

This is the deeper question facing our field: we have been building evidence systems for decision-makers—government officials, programme managers, funders. But what if we centred citizens instead? What if we built evidence systems for the public, for communities, for those who hold accountability power?

The Work of Changing Organisations

In my own presentation, I shared the work we do at ForAfrika across the continent. Our goal is ambitious: supporting 20 million Africans to become self-sufficient by 2032. This isn't just a programme challenge. It's a challenge of building evidence structures that enable the organisation to move from delivering outputs to achieving impact, whilst ensuring the communities we serve have voice and decision-making power throughout.

The responses from fellow participants revealed something important. Many resonated with what I call "the missing middle"—that gap between output-level monitoring and impact storytelling. We know how to count what we do. We have developed a sophisticated impact monitoring system. But connecting these coherently, in ways that demonstrate causality whilst respecting community agency, is the critical bit of work.

The task isn't purely methodological. It's also cultural and political. I described the multiple fronts we engaged in at ForAFrika: strategy conversations to understand the impact baselines, design workshops with programme teams for integrated programming, week-long immersive training with staff in each country to solidify results-based management, continuous capacity building on methodology and results use, regular review meetings, monthly highlights celebrating accomplishments. This isn't about implementing a framework. It's about organisational change that must evolve from history, expertise, and values.

One participant asked during a side chat: "How do you maintain momentum when leadership changes or priorities shift?" The honest answer is: imperfectly. We have leadership support, but it requires constant cultivation. We design monitoring frameworks that give communities voice, but these mechanisms need protection and resourcing. We try to build evidence literacy across the organisation, but culture move slowly.

Beyond Technical Solutions

What struck me most about the conference was not the innovation—though there was plenty, from Ismael Kawooya 's Rapid Evidence Synthesis Platform to the work eBASE Africa is doing with AI for behaviour change communication in local languages. It was the growing recognition that technical solutions alone won't create evidence use.

Christine Kelly's presentation on enhancing evidence use in economic policy decision-making made this point elegantly. Evidence influences decisions when it speaks to the actual questions decision-makers face, in their political and institutional contexts. Not the questions we think they should face. Not the questions our methodologies are designed to answer. The questions they actually grapple with.

But this still centres decision-makers. The session on valuing evidence differently - examining intersections of gender, youth, and equity - pushed further. If evidence systems perpetuate existing power dynamics, if they reinforce whose knowledge counts and whose doesn't, then improving evidence quality or accessibility simply makes these systems more efficiently inequitable.

Harsha Dayal, PhD from South Africa's Department of Planning, Monitoring and Evaluation spoke about her work on gender-based violence and femicide. We discussed how evidence about women's economic empowerment can't be separated from evidence about power, safety, and structural inequality. The question isn't just whether we have rigorous evidence. It's whether our evidence systems themselves embody the complexity of the issues we are trying to tackle.

The Promise and Responsibility

Being recognised as an AELA 2025 Emerging Leader carries both validation and responsibility. It validates that the approach I helped build at ForAfrika - centring communities, focusing on self-sufficiency rather than dependency, questioning the political economy of evidence use—resonates within the field. It acknowledges that emerging leaders aren't just inheriting existing systems but actively reshaping them.

But it also brings responsibility. The conversations I had with researchers from International Development Research Centre (IDRC) , government officials, practitioners from Center for Rapid Evidence Synthesis (ACRES) and ACED , with technology innovators from eBASE Africa - were invitations to collaboration, to pushing these questions further together.

One conversation particularly stays with me. A researcher asked: "If you could change one thing about how evidence systems work in Africa, what would it be?" My answer: I would make evidence systems illegible to funders and legible to communities.

I don't mean this literally, of course. But I mean it philosophically. Right now, evidence systems are designed to answer donor questions, to meet compliance requirements, to demonstrate value for money by external standards. Communities become sources of data for evidence that flows upward and outward. What if evidence flowed differently? What if communities commissioned evidence about their own development? What if accountability ran primarily to citizens rather than to funders?

This would require fundamentally different systems. Different questions. Different methodologies. Different notions of rigour and credibility.

Moving Forward

The conference reinforced something I've long believed but sometimes struggle to maintain in daily practice: technical capacity in evidence production is necessary but insufficient. We've built that capacity remarkably well across Africa. Now the challenge is ensuring that capacity serves justice, equity, and genuine transformation.

This means continuing to ask uncomfortable questions. Evidence for whom? Evidence answering whose questions? Evidence strengthening whose power? Evidence advancing whose vision of development?

It means recognising that closing the "missing middle" between outputs and impact isn't just a methodological challenge. It's about connecting what we do with the change people actually experience, in their terms, by their definitions.

It means acknowledging that our efforts remain fragmented. One conference, however inspiring, doesn't create the sustained connections and collaborative learning required. We need mechanisms for ongoing exchange, for collective problem-solving, for building a community of practice that can challenge itself.

This is the work ahead. Not abandoning rigour, but reimagining who defines it. Not rejecting technical expertise, but interrogating who holds it and how it's used. Not dismissing evidence systems, but reconstructing them to serve those they claim to benefit.

The AELA recognition is not an arrival. It's an invitation to this work—messy, political, difficult, essential. I'm grateful to have peers across Africa and globally engaged in similar struggles, wrestling with similar questions, building toward evidence systems that genuinely serve transformation.

Evidence for whom? For citizens. For communities. For those who hold accountability power and deserve evidence systems that answer to them.