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Making evidence work for society and nature

September 2, 2020

During the last 10 years, ACED has played a key role in ensuring evidence is generated and used to address key challenges facing farmers and policymakers. Our intervention approach prioritizes evidence use by completing a cycle of evidence generation, dissemination and use. ACED will continue to focus on these three key areas.

Producing timely and demanded evidence. We will improve our collaboration with policymakers and practitioners to help them identify the most crucial and needed policy questions that can be solved with quality evidence. Our collaboration with universities, research institutions and knowledge centres will be instrumental in producing high-quality evidence for policymakers and practitioners. ACED will establish the first evidence help desk in Benin that can be reached by stakeholders, especially policymakers, in need of ‘quick’ evidence to make decisions.

Improving access to evidence. We acknowledge that researchers and other evidence producers such as evaluators and data specialists have produced a large quantity of relevant and quality evidence on food and nutrition. However, the available evidence is scattered and mostly available in formats that do not allow smooth processing and mainstreaming into the policy cycle. Through targeted activities, such as data curation and aggregation, evidence translation, and visualization, ACED will improve policymakers’ and practitioners’ access to available evidence.

Increasing evidence use. ACED will develop activities that increase the capacities of people involved in the policymaking cycle, especially political leaders and technical officers, to identify evidence needs as well as how to access the relevant evidence and use it to make decisions. Moreover, we will go beyond working with individuals to support the institutionalization of evidence use within central and local governments. The ultimate outcome of this will be to support stakeholders to embed evidence into routine decision-making processes and develop and implement evidence-informed plans and programmes that create positive change among communities.