Using a needs assessment tool to identifying policymaker interests, priorities, and needs

• In Event: Institutionalizing Evidence-Based Decision-Making: Embedding a Culture of Evidence Use

Proposal

Across many of our policy engagements and labs in East Africa, we are using needs assessments where we conduct semi-structured interviews with relevant stakeholders to understand their policy agendas and questions, and where evidence and data may have the most added value. In our education related needs assessments we are interviewing stakeholders both in and outside government to gather insight related to the priorities, policy processes, and data and evidence needs of organizations such as Ministries of Education.

In Kenya, our use of our needs assessment yielded several key findings, including identifying two priority policies. Based on the identification of these two policies and their prioritization among other policy development processes, we tailored our strategy to identify where to focus our policy engagement efforts and developed ‘rapid’ reviews of existing evidence to inform their development.
Upon the development and strategic sharing of these reviews in policy formulation processes informed by our needs assessment, we are working together to develop evidence-based policies.

During this presentation, we will present the methodology used to conduct the needs assessment, share more detailed results, and discuss how we are using these results to inform our policy work in Kenya.

Author

• Bethany Park, Innovations For Poverty Action