An impressive and exciting first day hasn’t worn out participants, they’re enthusiastically joining an important session via an innovative format: an interactive chat show!

The session ‘How to incentivize actors in the Evidence Informed Policy ecosystem to better work together to achieve impact’ aims to identify the incentives that support collaboration to generate, share, and use evidence to inform policy and practice.

The session will be moderated by Uduak Amimo, host of Cheche, a current affairs show on Kenya’s leading tv station, Citizen TV.

Udauk will be joined by five other leading lights in evidence informed policymaking:

• Mark Johnson, Africa Cabinet Government Network
• Eliya Zulu, African Institute for Development Policy (AFIDEP), Kenya
• Rhona Mijumbi, Makerere University’s Africa Centre for Systematic Reviews and Knowledge Translation, Uganda
• Maurice Makoloo, Ford Foundation, Kenya
• Blandina Kilama, REPOA, Tanzania

Through an engaging, interactive “chat show” approach this session will provide the opportunity to hear from representatives of programs which have explicitly sought to promote evidence-informed policy making in different African national contexts through collaboration and from those that have participated in these programs. It will help draw out some frank, grounded lessons of what has worked in practice, what incentives have worked and how measurement can create incentives to learn. It will also draw out examples of what has worked less well. The session will explore both incentives that contribute to evidence informed policies and incentives that contribute to transforming the policy landscape to enable evidence informed policy making to become more sustainable. Participants will be encouraged to inquire into these experiences as a source of reflection for future action, and to ask themselves:

• What are the current incentives to build relationships, trust, and collaboration among those that generate, share and use evidence? How can these incentives be capitalised upon, and disincentives overcome?
• To what extent is impact measurement both an incentive and disincentive to collaboration?
• Do we have the right balance of incentives to foster both accountability and learning?

Read a summary of the session and follow the proceedings at the African Evidence Informed Policy Forum on the conference website or on Twitter using the hashtag #AfricaEvidence.