Issue 21 of Southern Lens on Development by Prof. Jane Mariara
As 2025 draws to a close, one message from Southern Lens on Development stands out clearly: sustainable development cannot be imported. It must be built from within, shaped by local evidence, lived experience, and the policy realities governments and communities face every day.
Throughout the year, the newsletter explored this idea from multiple angles. Across climate policy, education, youth employment, artificial intelligence, women’s empowerment, and research partnerships, a consistent thread emerged. When Southern researchers lead, evidence becomes more relevant, more usable, and more likely to inform inclusive and lasting policy change.
At PEP, 2025 marked a year of deepening impact. The focus was on strengthening partner capacity, advancing Southern-led research, and connecting evidence more directly to policy decision-making. A key shift was a more deliberate move towards engagement-driven approaches that start with policymakers’ questions, reinforcing PEP’s commitment to ensuring that local expertise informs timely, relevant, and inclusive policy solutions.
This shift was visible across the year’s editions of Southern Lens on Development, which repeatedly returned to a central insight: evidence does not influence policy by accident. This raised a deeper question explored throughout the year: what does evidence look like when it is created to influence real decisions?
Evidence that is designed to influence policy
A central challenge in development policy remains why so much good evidence fails to shape real decisions. Experience from local researchers and public officials working together across African countries points to a clear answer. Evidence influences policy when it is generated close to decision-making processes and shaped by the practical questions policymakers face.
This was evident in country-led work addressing concrete challenges. In Malawi, researchers worked with agricultural authorities to identify how soil fertility management could improve maize yields. In Tanzania, public health teams examined how better coordination and targeted messaging could increase vaccine uptake.
Across these contexts, local researchers were not only generating evidence but also working directly with institutions responsible for policy design and delivery. The lesson was consistent: rigorous methods matter most when researchers have the autonomy to translate findings into actionable policy options and when government partners are involved throughout the process.
Nowhere were the consequences of evidence design more visible in 2025 than in climate policy, where technical choices quickly translate into social and economic winners and losers.
Climate action that recognizes inequality
Climate change remained a defining development challenge in 2025, but the evidence pointed to a deeper truth: climate policy is also equity policy. Green transitions risk excluding women, youth, and rural enterprises unless financing and policy design are intentionally inclusive.
These tensions were central to discussions at PEP’s Annual Policy Conference on financing and inclusivity in green energy transitions, where participants examined how limited climate finance constrains low-carbon transitions in the Global South. The message was clear: technology alone is not the barrier. Progress depends on accessible finance, supportive regulation, and policies grounded in national realities.
Evidence from rural enterprises in Burkina Faso, Kenya, Uganda, and Vietnam, showed that renewable energy can strengthen food security and resilience when local actors have access to information, finance, and institutional support. Where women- and youth-led enterprises were deliberately included, benefits were more widely shared.
At the global level, macroeconomic analysis of carbon border measures highlighted how climate policies can impose uneven burdens on export‑dependent economies if development realities are overlooked. Climate ambition, the evidence showed, must be paired with fairness.
The same questions of equity, ownership, and distribution that shape climate policy are increasingly central to another rapidly expanding frontier of development policy.
Technology and the politics of inclusion
Artificial Intelligence (AI) has the potential to drive transformative change across the Global South. AI-powered solutions are already making an impact in Africa. A PEP‑co‑hosted dialogue in San Francisco brought together policymakers, researchers, investors, and technology practitioners to examine how AI is shaping economic transformation in Africa. The dialogue brought together policymakers, researchers, investors, and technology practitioners.
Evidence showed that AI was already improving outcomes in agriculture; for instance, AI-driven crop monitoring, disease detection, and resource optimization are helping farmers increase productivity. In Kenya and Tanzania, AI-powered tools are being used to enhance sustainable farming practices. When it comes to health, in Ghana, AI-based diagnostics are improving early disease detection and patient outcomes. Further, companies like Apollo Agribusiness in Kenya are using AI to assess farmers' creditworthiness, expanding access to financial resources. much of the data work underpinning AI systems is carried out in the Global South under insecure conditions, while most economic value accrues elsewhere. Inclusive AI development requires investment in local research capacity, protections for digital workers, and governance frameworks shaped by African priorities.
Yet the ability to benefit from new technologies ultimately depends on foundational systems that shape skills, capabilities, and opportunity from an early age.
Education and the foundations of opportunity
Education systems continue to face a shared challenge: improving learning outcomes while expanding access. Evidence generated through the Africa Fellows in Education Program showed that learning is shaped by factors far beyond the classroom.
Research in Cameroon highlighted how misalignment between home languages and languages of instruction undermines early learning. In Tanzania, evidence linked early‑life malaria eradication to long‑term gains in educational attainment. Studies from South Africa demonstrated the importance of socio-emotional skills.
Together, these findings point to a system's conclusion. Education reforms work best when they integrate language policy, health, pedagogy, and school organization, informed by evidence produced by researchers embedded in national contexts.
These systemic gaps in learning outcomes do not end at school completion. They carry forward into the labour market, shaping young people’s access to decent and productive work.
Youth employment as a systems challenge
Through a three‑year, ten‑country partnership with the Mastercard Foundation, PEP worked with local researchers to examine how youth employment programs operate in practice. Drawing on more than 500 interviews and over 1,500 focus group discussions, the evidence revealed persistent institutional constraints.
Across countries, youth employment initiatives were fragmented, weakly coordinated, and insufficiently linked to labor‑market demand. At the same time, the research identified pathways for improvement. Countries that aligned skills development with employer needs and invested in labour-market information systems were better positioned to translate policy into jobs.
The conclusion was clear. Youth employment is not a standalone social issue but a core economic challenge requiring coordinated, long‑term strategies.
However, labour-market challenges are not experienced equally. Gender norms, institutional design, and access to voice continue to shape who benefits from economic policy and who is left behind.
Empowerment beyond income
Evidence from PEP’s Learning and Knowledge Management Project reinforced that women’s empowerment is strongest when institutions shape how programs are governed and delivered, not only what incomes they generate.
Evaluations in Bolivia and Senegal showed that programs combining technical training with leadership opportunities and organizational capacity building strengthened women’s agency, confidence, and collective voice. Where institutions adapted interventions to context and supported longer implementation horizons, and empowerment extended beyond earnings to influence and dignity.
These findings raised a broader question that cut across every theme explored in 2025: who gets to define problems, generate evidence, and shape solutions in the first place?
Who leads research shapes what matters
Finally, 2025 reinforced that who leads research shapes both what evidence is produced and how useful it becomes. Studies led by PEP Research Fellows revealed persistent imbalances in agenda‑setting, authorship, and funding. Interviews with researchers across Africa and Asia showed how power dynamics continue to marginalize Southern leadership, particularly for women researchers.
These insights informed PEP’s Call to Action on Southern Leadership in Development Research. The conclusion is simple: fair collaboration requires shared decision‑making, equitable funding, and trust in Southern institutions to lead research about their own countries.
Looking ahead
Taken together, the 2025 insights reinforce a simple truth. Local challenges require locally led solutions. Evidence has the greatest impact when it is grounded in context, shaped by fairness, and connected to real policy decisions.
As we move into 2026, the invitation remains open: move beyond rhetoric, center Southern leadership, and ensure that evidence informs action where it matters most.
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