Innovative strategies to enhance capacity to apply health policy and systems research evidence in policy-making, Georgia
Strengthening Capacity of Civil Society for Promoting Research Evidence into Policy Development in Georgia
In Georgia, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) are frequent contributors to policy debates. Through generating greater awareness and debate around political issues, civil society organizations tend to broaden participation in policy debates. However, the capacity of national NGOs and media to use the available research evidence (national and international) to, for instance, monitor and evaluate the ongoing government health care reform initiatives is quite limited. Therefore, there is a strong need to strengthen civil society’s capacity to employ research evidence around health policy and health systems, particularly in a policy dialogue with the government and with society at large. The effective use of evidence by NGOs is critical both to influencing policies and to advocacy efforts.
This project aims to develop and implement interventions to enhance civil-society capacity to employ health policy and systems research evidence in a policy dialogue, while also conducting a rigorous evaluation of the strategies employed for that capacity strengthening.
This project aims to develop and implement interventions to enhance civil-society capacity to employ health policy and systems research evidence in a policy dialogue, while also conducting a rigorous evaluation of the strategies employed for that capacity strengthening.
Developing capacity to filter and amplify research evidence is particularly important for civil society organizations. However, it is also important that other actors understand this function, and the role that civil society organizations can play in filtering and amplifying research evidence. Therefore, this project will investigate how civil society organizations understand the broader political landscape and hence how they can best situate themselves, and their use of research evidence within this landscape; and work to understand the ability of NGOs in filtering and amplifying that research evidence. What capacities do they need?
Building bridges is also required in order for researchers and policy-makers to better understand the role of civil society organizations in filtering and amplifying research, with respect to a particular policy issue, and accordingly how best to deal with such organizations. These “bridges” can help facilitate interaction between those who produce research, those who use this research to advocate for policy changes and those who are in charge of setting policy. Different models will be considered to build such “bridges”, which may include following:
- conducting informative forums for diverse group of stakeholders to help them understand the roles of various players;
- providing training about policy and political cycle of Georgia to help stakeholders be better prepared for engagement; and
- convening policy fora to allow parties to engage in a constructive dialogue around specific policy issues.
Such “bridges” we consider as creating an enabling environment promoting research-based innovation and participatory decision-making. This helps deliver research evidence for policy changes, which in turn builds trust among the key actors.
One year into the grant period, the project has successfully developed several training modules to abet the evidence-to-policy process.
- A training module in Policy and Political Cycles has been developed. The training module is designed to enhance the capacity of participants in terms of employing evidence to engage effectively in policy-making processes. The main emphasis has been placed on understanding the agenda-setting and policy-formulation stages of the public policy process.
- A training module in Evidence Search Acquisition has been developed. The objective of this teaching module is to enhance the abilities of the participants to successfully carry out analytic and research work by increasing capacity for accessing national and international sources of evidence (databases, scientific journals, grey literature repositories, governmental reports, the Internet etc.)
- A training module in Policy Brief Production has been developed. This course is designed to enhance participants’ skills in writing policy briefs, thus enabling them to adapt and summarize research in a user-friendly way.
Project description
Programme: Innovative strategies to enhance capacity to apply health policy and systems research evidence in policy-making
Research title: Strengthening Capacity of Civil Society for Promoting Research Evidence into Policy Development in Georgia
Thematic Research Area: Capacity development
Grantee Country: Georgia
Grantee Institution: Curatio International Foundation
Program Coordinator/Principle Investigator:Marina Egutia
Start date: April 2009
Status of grant: Ongoing