We know how to conduct rigorous research, but whether it changes anything depends on what happens next: whether the findings reach the people best placed to act on them, and whether those people were involved in shaping them.
The first quarter of 2026 offered four examples of what that looks like in practice. Project and programme teams supported by the Partnership for Economic Policy (PEP) held events in South Africa, Ethiopia, Senegal, and Colombia. Each was working, in their own way, to close the distance between evidence and the decisions it should inform.
Developing the capacity to change policy
Policy-relevant research depends, first of all, on researchers who are equipped to produce it. In late February, the third cohort of the Africa Fellows in Education Program gathered at the University of Cape Town for a week-long Education Data Workshop designed to deepen researchers' ability to work with complex education datasets. In sharpening their methodological skills and analytical judgement, the Fellows will be able to produce rigorous evidence capable of informing real-world education reform. This is the upstream work that makes everything else possible. When local researchers are equipped to ask better questions of data, the answers they produce are more likely to matter to the systems they are studying.
Yet rigorous analysis is only part of the story. The intended research users need to be involved throughout the research process.
Bringing the right people into the room
In March, policymakers, researchers, and development partners validated diagnostic evidence on Ethiopia's Home-Grown School Feeding Programme as part of an ongoing initiative examining how procurement and cooking models can make school feeding systems more inclusive, cost-effective, and sustainable. They then collectively shaped the next phase of the study: agreeing on shared priority areas and outlining an intervention design.
A week later in Dionewar, a Senegalese project team took a similar approach, despite having concluded their research evaluating the “Gouvernance Féminine et Innovation” initiative, which supports women processing fish and shellfish in the Saloum Islands. The team brought together 36 stakeholders from government institutions, research organisations, civil society, and local communities to discuss their recommendations and advocate for uptake. Key participants represented women's organisations and programme beneficiaries. Their presence ensured that discussions were grounded in lived experience and kept the conversation anchored to the purpose of promoting women’s empowerment.
Also at the dissemination stage, the Colombian team convened practitioners and policymakers to explore how their evaluation of C.R.E.C.E. Mujer—a programme aiming to strengthen women’s businesses—could shape the future design of women's entrepreneurship programmes.
In all three cases, the underlying conviction was the same: when producing evidence to inform a policy or programme, the people affected by it must be part of the conversation.
Policy change takes many paths
The responses these events generated varied in character, because policy influence rarely arrives in a single form. It may look like informing how a government targets a national programme or changing how an implementing organisation thinks about evidence.
In Senegal, the impact was direct: senior government representatives expressed interest in integrating both the findings and the methodology of the team’s project into national women's empowerment programmes. In Ethiopia, the workshop produced a co-owned reform agenda and a design for a pilot intervention. In Bogotá, the programme implementer reflected that the evaluation provides valuable insights for improving the current programme, and also for informing how future initiatives are designed. He said that working with the research team throughout the study had led him to think more broadly about building evaluation into future programme proposals from the outset.
A gender lens is vital for programme success
Running through all three of these conversations was the finding that social gender norms and structures can limit the success of programmes meant to empower women.
In Ethiopia, all school cooks are women, yet only around 20% of suppliers are. As such, women carry the operational weight of the programme while capturing very little of its economic value. The evaluation of the Senegalese programme found that women with fewer resources benefitted much less from the initiative, pointing to the need for more targeted support. Meanwhile, the Colombian team identified persistent structural barriers—including care responsibilities and transport limitations—that continue to shape women's participation and outcomes, regardless of programme design.
The projects in Ethiopia, Senegal, and Colombia illustrate exactly why gender analysis is built into all PEP-supported research: when you ask questions about gender, the answers have direct implications for policy. Well-intentioned programmes are not enough to produce equitable outcomes. But specific, evidence-informed policies can.
From the field to the global conversation
What does it take for research to reach the people who need it most? And what conditions allow evidence to shift practice? The experiences of our project and programme teams over the last quarter point to some answers: researchers with the right skills, institutions willing to engage with evidence, and a shared commitment to involving the people affected by policy in shaping it. These are also precisely the conditions that much of the Global South still struggles to build at scale.
