EIDM advocates: how do we begin to measure the impact of our work?

Article type
Authors
Madonsela A1, Mahlanza-Langer L
1Pan-African Collective For Evidence (PACE), Rosebank, Johannesburg, South Africa
Abstract
Background: There has been a growing recognition and investment toward initiatives that support evidence-informed decision-making (EIDM) and implementation. But it is not clear if these initiatives actually contribute toward improved development results. This is because most initiatives only measure the use of evidence, not whether this use is translated into policies that contribute toward improved development results. Objectives: Our objective was to understand what measurements are being/have been used to assess the impact of intervention to support EIDM. Methods: For methods, we followed evidence mapping processes to collate evidence that develops or proposes indicators, measures, outcome constructs, or other means and instruments to measure the use of evidence in both policy-making and implementation. We searched 36 different organization and government websites/repositories and 6 academic databases, using an exhaustive search string featuring Boolean operators. We included studies from all around the world and considered all publication types. We identified 26,881 citations in total from the searches. After scanning these results on title and abstract, we considered 56 studies at full text. This led to the inclusion of 32 studies. Results: We found 37 EIDM measures in this evidence base, with over 400 individual indicators which measure evidence use. We mapped these measures on an interactive Prezi presentation but further grouped the indicators into 4 categories—those measuring the process of evidence use, the context of evidence use, the outcome(s) of evidence use, and the impact of evidence use. Conclusion: We found much more than we had anticipated, and this field of measures for evidence use has a long and rich history. However, we found a big gap for measures developed in and sensitive to Global South contexts, and a big gap for measures that aim to assess the impact of an evidence-informed policy on desired final social change and transformation objectives.