PEP Leadership Reflections and Outlook for 2026

Message from the Chair of the Board

Rohinton Medhora

As we begin 2026, I am honoured to step into the role of Chair of the PEP Board at a moment of both reflection and renewed purpose for the organisation.

Research for development and capacity building has been central to my professional journey from the very start. It is therefore a privilege to help steward an organisation whose mission—advancing locally led, evidence-informed policymaking in the Global South—is not only enduring, but increasingly vital in today’s complex and uncertain global environment.

The past year demonstrated PEP’s institutional strength and strategic maturity. In 2025, PEP successfully delivered a wide-ranging portfolio of research, capacity-building, and policy-engagement initiatives across multiple regions and partnerships. Equally important, the organisation continued to evolve in how it works—consolidating approaches that place policymakers’ needs at the centre, strengthening local leadership, and ensuring that evidence is designed for practical use within real-world policy systems without compromising methodological rigour.

From the Board’s perspective, this period reaffirmed the importance of strong governance, clarity of strategy, and responsiveness to a rapidly shifting geopolitical and geo-economic landscape. PEP enters 2026 as an organisation that combines deep experience with adaptive capacity—able to deliver rigorous evidence while engaging meaningfully with policy processes at local, national, regional, and global levels.

I would like to express my sincere thanks to outgoing Chair Carol Newman for her outstanding leadership and dedication over the past 6 years, and to Dominique van de Walle for her valued service as a Board member over the same period. 

Their contributions have helped position PEP for its next phase, and we look forward to their continued engagement as part of PEP’s extended community.

I am excited that Jenny Aker and Kimberly Cernak have agreed to join the Board. They bring exceptional expertise and experience in institutional development that will strengthen the Board’s contributions and support PEP’s strategic direction.

On behalf of the Board of Directors, I thank PEP’s partners and donors,  mentors and affiliates, management and staff, and of course the backbone of the organisation—our  researchers—for their continued commitment and collaboration. I look forward to working closely with Prof. Jane Mariara and the entire PEP team as we guide the organisation through 2026 and into the next chapter of its mission—deepening impact, strengthening Southern leadership, and ensuring that evidence continues to inform policy where it matters most.

Message from the Executive Director

Prof. Jane Mariara

As we reflect on our work in 2025, we do so with a clear and enduring conviction: that every country should have the local evidence and expertise needed to make informed decisions about its own future. In a global context marked by uncertainty, competing priorities, and widening inequalities, PEP’s role in supporting locally led, policy-engaged research has never been more relevant.

In 2025, PEP continued to demonstrate the value of Southern leadership in generating and using evidence to address complex development challenges. As some research and capacity-building programmes commenced, and others advanced or concluded, we reaffirmed our long-standing commitment to strengthening Southern research leadership and supporting evidence-informed policymaking.

This commitment was reflected across priority themes—including gender equality, youth employment, climate action, education, and health—where local research teams produced rigorous, policy-relevant evidence while engaging policymakers throughout the research process. In 2026, this work is evolving toward even closer collaboration with decision-makers. The ongoing programmes supported by the Hewlett Foundation for Building sustainable and synergistic evidence-informed policymaking (EIP) ecosystems in Africa, demonstrate PEP’s new policy engagement approach. The project teams are working directly with government partners on policy questions defined by national priorities.

Youth employment was a central focus of PEP’s work in 2025, marked by the conclusion of What Works for Youth Employment in Africa, implemented in partnership with the Mastercard Foundation across ten countries. The initiative combined robust analysis with extensive stakeholder engagement, including youth, policymakers, educators, employers, and civil society actors. Its findings were consolidated into the book Youth Employment Programmes in Africa and an open-access repository, providing actionable insights to inform youth employment policies and programmes across the continent. Building on this strong foundation, in 2026, PEP will sustain engagement with policymakers and practitioners while launching a new phase of research focused on inclusive employment policies and interventions for young women and marginalised youth in Africa.

Advancing women’s economic empowerment (WEE) in the Global South remained a core priority in 2025, reflected across several research and capacity-building initiatives. Through projects such as the Learning and Knowledge Management Project (LKMP) (supported by Global Affairs Canada), renewable energy and sustainable agriculture research (supported by the International Development Research Centre (IDRC), and the What Works for Youth Employment in Africa initiative, PEP-supported teams generated evidence and strengthened capacity to address gendered barriers to decent work, access to resources, and economic opportunity. This also included experimental research in Ethiopia, supported by the Fund for Innovation in Development, assessing reforms to community-based health insurance systems, with a focus on financial protection, equitable access to health services, and women’s empowerment. In 2026, this work moves into a decisive phase as policy engagement within the EIP programmes will translate evidence on WEE into structured policy dialogue and action, and as LKMP findings are disseminated to inform future programming.

In response to the growing urgency of climate change and sustainability challenges, 2025 saw PEP-supported researchers contribute evidence on green transitions, sustainable agriculture and food systems, and climate policy through initiatives supported by Canada’s IDRC, and the European Union’s Horizon Europe programme. As well as PEP’s contribution to the Sustainability, Performances, Evidence and Scenarios (SPES) consortium, this includes work on inclusive and sustainable procurement and cooking models to strengthen local food systems, and renewable energy and agriculture. Towards the end of 2026, PEP researchers will be sharing policy-engaged findings to inform inclusive reforms in Burkina Faso, Kenya, Uganda, and Vietnam.

Capacity development remained central to PEP’s mission throughout 2025. In partnership with the University of Florence, PEP continued to deliver its online training in development economics. Alongside specialised monitoring, evaluation, and learning support for researchers participating in the LKMP, PEP strengthened local capacity to conduct high-quality impact evaluations, helping ensure that evidence meaningfully informs policy design and implementation. We also expanded access to skills and knowledge through a self-paced, interactive, bilingual online course on Gender Equality and Inclusion (GEI) supported by IDRC. In 2026, PEP will consolidate and sustain these investments—delivering the development economics micro-program for the ninth consecutive year, concluding the GEI course, and strengthening links between training, research, and policy engagement. Meanwhile, the Africa Fellows in Education Program (AFEP)—hosted in collaboration with the Global Education Analytics Institute—will continue to nurture new cohorts of African education researchers through targeted mentoring, research dissemination, and policy outreach.

2025 was also a year of organisational consolidation and learning for PEP. We continued to strengthen our policy engagement, monitoring, and communications functions to ensure the organisation remains accountable, resilient, and well-positioned to deliver impact at scale. We also invested in how evidence is communicated, expanding platforms that amplify Southern perspectives and make research more accessible to policymakers, practitioners, and the wider public. These efforts reflect our conviction that evidence achieves impact not only through technical rigour, but through effective engagement and influence.

As PEP moves into 2026, we look forward to convening researchers, policymakers, and partners through the 2026 PEP Annual General Meeting and Policy Conference, hosting PEP-led webinars, supporting national policy conferences that disseminate research findings and deepen country-level engagement, and we also anticipate the participation of PEP researchers in international conferences. These efforts will be guided by PEP’s forthcoming Strategic Development Plan (2026–2030), which will shape the organisation’s priorities for growth, partnership, and impact.

Together, we enter the coming year with clarity and confidence, committed to a future in which countries across the Global South have the local evidence and expertise needed to shape their own development paths, even as the global funding landscape continues to shift rapidly. By strengthening local capacity, co-producing relevant and rigorous evidence, deepening collaboration between researchers and decision-makers, and mobilising PEP’s global expert community, we will continue to ensure that evidence informs policy and practice where it matters most.