Engagement and impact stories from 2025

PEP’s research model is grounded in the principle that evidence must be both context-specific and designed for practical uptake. This is why PEP supports, almost exclusively, research initiatives led by locally based teams, who are required to work in collaboration and continuous consultation with the people who are most likely to use the evidence, particularly policymakers and stakeholders directly concerned with the issues under study.

To support these processes, PEP’s approach to engagement and evidence translation includes a range of outputs, advisory mechanisms, and training activities designed to strengthen institutional practices and capacities for evidence-informed policymaking.

In 2025, PEP continued to promote its research co-production approach, bringing together researchers and decision-makers to jointly identify policy challenges, generate evidence, and translate findings into actionable insights. Through consultations, workshops, advisory dialogues, and national policy events, PEP-supported research contributed to policy discussions across several thematic areas, including youth employment, education policy, sustainable transitions, and women’s economic empowerment.

In parallel, PEP launched a major initiative focused on strengthening evidence-informed policymaking practices at the institutional level, through the creation and support of formal collaborative frameworks between research and government institutions across Africa.

A common thread runs across all of these initiatives: effective policymaking depends not only on the availability of rigorous evidence, but on the systems, relationships, and capacities that enable its use. By investing in both the production of evidence and the institutional ecosystems that support its uptake, PEP is contributing to more responsive, inclusive, and evidence-informed policy systems across countries and sectors. 

The following examples illustrate how PEP’s research and engagement activities helped connect evidence to policy processes across different contexts in 2025. 

Informing youth employment policy across Africa

Kenya • Niger • Ghana • Nigeria • Rwanda • Senegal • Uganda • Burkina Faso • Ethiopia • South Africa

One of the most significant initiatives shaping PEP’s work in recent years has been the What Works for Youth Employment in Africa programme, implemented in partnership with the Mastercard Foundation as part of its Young Africa Works strategy. The initiative aimed to generate rigorous, context-specific evidence on how youth employment programmes and policies can be strengthened to support the creation of dignified, fulfilling and sustainable work opportunities for young people.

Across ten African countries, PEP-supported research teams worked closely with national stakeholders—including ministries responsible for labour, youth affairs, education, and economic development—to examine the effectiveness of existing youth employment policies and programmes.

Supporting policy dialogue and institutional learning

The initiative generated a wealth of new evidence to strengthen policy discussions on youth employment and support governments as they explore and develop strategies to improve labour market outcomes for young people. In 2025, PEP compiled key findings and outputs from this multi-country initiative into an open-access repository, providing policymakers and researchers with a valuable tool to access comparative evidence on youth employment programmes across Africa.

One of the most important cross-country insights is that a key impediment to the effectiveness of national youth employment strategies is the lack of coordination among the multiple programmes and actors working to address the issue. This often results in the duplication of efforts, inefficient use of resources, and limited sharing of data, knowledge, and experience.

Addressing such coordination challenges is central to PEP’s broader approach, which promotes intersectoral consultation and collaboration across all supported research initiatives.

Strengthening institutional practices and ecosystems for evidence-informed policymaking

Burkina Faso • Cameroon • Ethiopia • Ghana • Kenya • Nigeria • Senegal • Tanzania

In 2025, PEP launched a major initiative to strengthen institutional capacities and systems for evidence-informed policymaking (EIPM) across Africa. The initiative represents a shift from traditional research-to-policy approaches, and PEP’s project-based interactions, toward the establishment of structured, sustained collaboration between research and government institutions that enable continuous evidence use. By combining capacity strengthening, structured collaboration, and real-time advisory mechanisms, the programme contributes to building more resilient and responsive evidence-to-policy ecosystems across participating countries.

Establishing formal and sustained science–policy collaboration frameworks

A central innovation of the initiative lies in the creation of formal collaborative frameworks—through Memoranda of Understanding—between participating research centers and government institutions. These agreements are designed to support the co-identification of policy priorities and enable the provision of timely, demand-driven evidence to inform ongoing policy processes.

Throughout 2025, participating research teams engaged extensively with government stakeholders to define shared objectives, identify priority policy questions, and establish the foundations of these collaborations. Over 25 joint planning meetings were held across countries to support this process, reflecting a strong emphasis on dialogue, alignment, and co-production of policy-relevant knowledge.

Building capacities for effective engagement and policy advisory

The initiative also places strong emphasis on strengthening the capacities of both researchers and policymakers to engage effectively with the evidence. In 2025, PEP designed and delivered the first phase of a comprehensive training program for researchers, focused on political economy analysis, stakeholder engagement, and knowledge translation. All participating researchers completed this training through a combination of online modules and intensive in-person workshops held during PEP’s Annual Conference.

This capacity-building effort has already contributed to reshaping how research teams define their objectives and engage with policy actors. In several cases, initial research plans were significantly refined through political economy analysis and consultations with government partners, leading to more targeted, relevant, and actionable evidence support strategies.

Embedding real-time, demand-driven evidence support

Beyond individual projects, the initiative is designed to test and institutionalise mechanisms for delivering real-time policy advisory support. By linking research teams directly with policy counterparts through structured collaboration, the program ensures that evidence generation is closely aligned with policy timelines and decision-making needs.

While most collaborative agreements were still being finalised at the end of 2025, the groundwork established through the consultations, training, and joint planning has laid the foundation for a new model of engagement—one in which research is not only policy-relevant, but embedded within policy processes.

Bringing Southern perspectives into global debates on climate policy

Global South

PEP researchers also contributed to national and international policy discussions on sustainable development and energy transitions through work conducted under the Sustainability Performances, Evidence, and Scenarios (SPES) initiative. Funded by the European Union’s Horizon Europe Programme, SPES is implemented by a consortium of research and educational institutions across Europe and beyond, with the aim of generating evidence to support policies that promote shared prosperity, inclusiveness, and environmental sustainability.

PEP’s role in the SPES project is to ensure that the insights developed are globally applicable, particularly by exploring the implications of sustainability transition models in the Global South.

Studies carried out by PEP researchers examined policy challenges associated with global climate policies and their implications for developing economies. One area of analysis focused on the European Union’s Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM) and its potential economic impacts on countries in the Global South. PEP researchers engaged policymakers and stakeholders in discussions to better understand these implications and inform policy responses.

Highlighting implementation gaps in energy transition strategies

PEP also supported the organisation of national policy dialogues involving high-level officials and decision-makers from multiple ministries and government agencies in countries such as Kenya, Nigeria, and Pakistan. These discussions highlighted that, despite growing policy ambition, energy transition strategies often overlook the social, political, and institutional challenges associated with implementation.