Our Work

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PACE serves as the host to the AEN by providing the secretariat for the Network. The AEN is a broad community of over 4,000 diverse people who share a vision to see an end to poverty and inequality in Africa. The Network’s mission is to work with others to contribute to this vision by increasing the use of evidence in decision-making. The Network is pan-African, open to all who live and work on the continent. You can learn more about the AEN and its services here.

The REAP project is developing and testing a fully online platform for capacity support to evidence units in Africa to enable them to deliver evidence for policy within their contexts. REAP supports five diverse units to deliver effective evidence services to their governments via a scalable model for online capacity development which integrates a range of approaches, including a robust monitoring, evaluation and learning process to inform future development of the platform. Co-ordinated by the PACE in partnership with eBASE Africa, REAP is implemented in five African countries: Cameroon, Chad, Kenya, Niger, South Africa. 

Across the continent, emerging evidence-informed decision-making (EIDM) leaders have been raising their voice to play a more active role in finding solutions for the challenges facing African countries through the better use of data and evidence for decision-making. The Africa Evidence Youth League (AEYL) brings together these emerging leaders and provides a platform for them to share ideas, build connections, and take part in mentoring, career- and institution-building activities. The AEYL is centered around burning issues which were identified by emerging leaders and in phase 1 will focus on education, bringing together emerging evidence education leaders from all around the continent to a facilitated community of practice and in-depth EIDM mentoring programme. 

We systematically gather, organise, and synthesise scientific and experiential knowledge on evidence-informed policy and practice (EIPM) to understand and be able to offer evidence-backed interventions to bolster evidence use in decision-making. Our work provides a comprehensive overview of primary evidence about what works to support evidence-informed decision-making, and aims to translate this knowledge into practical advice for policymakers. This research is crucial for equitable policy distribution, heightened transparency, and optimal resource use and this body of work supports LMIC governments that are already investing in this evidence-based approach to policymaking.  

This body of work aims to support evidence-informed decision-making (EIDM) and implementation in Africa by understanding how best to assess the impact of interventions to support EIDM. We are building a body of evidence that will allow decision-makers to reliably assess and compare the effectiveness of different EIDM interventions across contexts. We focus on interventions that support evidence-use for decision-making and implementation. Our work has uncovered over 400 indicators of evidence-use for decisions and implementation. All these indicators are displayed in an interactive Prezi here: 

The Youth Employment Evidence and Insights Hub is a pan-African consortium hosted by PACE and composed of key organisations from across and beyond Africa. Together, we are working in partnership with the Mastercard Foundation to support the delivery of their Young Africa Works Strategy, which seeks to enable 30 million young people in Africa, especially young women, to secure dignified and fulfilling employment. Youth unemployment is desperately high across the continent. Through the integration of local and living evidence, and youth voices, the Hub is supporting the Mastercard Foundation in making evidence-informed decisions to help millions of young people in the African Continent find a pathway out of poverty. 

The Digital Gender-inclusive Tools for Evidence Use (DG-Tools) project is a partnership led by the Pan-African Collective of Evidence (PACE) in South Africa and the Centre for Rapid Evidence Synthesis (ACRES) in Uganda. Together, we are exploring how digital tools can be integrated in data and evidence creation, mobilization, and use. The emphasis of DG Tool is developing tools to support knowledge brokers in their work to enhance decision-makers’ use of evidence. To this end, we are innovating digital solutions to develop more timely, effective, and equitable pathways for evidence to action and to inform decision-making for development impact. We will create a series of testable pilot programs to design, test, and evaluate how digital technology can be integrated in the data and evidence creation to use pathway and make recommendations for further investment of scale. In the initial two years pilot phase (2024 and 2025), DG Tool is focussing on gender policy decision-making in Uganda, Ethiopia, and South Africa.