UNESCO and partners to hold social knowledge for policy uptake workshop

The UNESCO Regional Office for Southern Africa in collaboration with the Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC) and the South African Department of Social Development (DSD) will hold a workshop on social knowledge for policy uptake on 17 March 2022.

The workshop seeks to narrow the gap between researchers, civil society organisations and policy-makers. As attention to knowledge for policy uptake grows, so does the need for capacity development in knowledge exchange, impact by design, skills and best practices amongst evidence producers and evidence users.

Moreover, the workshop will also create a community of practice in Southern Africa bringing together diverse and cross sectoral stakeholders to create, track, and deliver impact on the generation and sharing of knowledge on gender, youth, sexual and reproductive health and rights.

The workshop’s objectives include:

Engage participants on impact by design including key principles and impact pathways to enable researchers to implement the frameworks within the research plans and design.
Build understanding of the evidence and skills to support researchers’ efforts to develop meaningful and reciprocal relationships with policy and practice decision-makers/end-users.
Explore with researchers and dissemination experts the most effective strategies to communicate research findings and recommendations to non-academic audience for action.
Attending the workshop will be participants drawn from diverse backgrounds who are invested in achieving greater impact from their projects and programmes, including: researchers, managers, dissemination experts.

The hybrid workshop will generate and enable a creative discussion environment, through workshopping ideas and practices, in order to foster productive and lasting dialogue among participants. Two case studies will be examined and unpacked from the point of view of Impact science.

Expected Outcomes of the workshop will include:

Improved ability of designing research projects for impact
Increased capacity to support researchers’ efforts to develop meaningful and reciprocal relationships with policy and practice decision-makers/end-users.
Increased researcher’s capacity to explore innovative and diverse methods of effectively communicating research findings and recommendations to non-academic audience for action.
This workshop comes as a response to evidence based decision making gathering momentum, and an increasing recognition that the generation and publication of evidence is not, in itself, sufficient to ensure the use of that evidence. Consequently, there has been an increased focus on knowledge translation for effective use of knowledge by stakeholders.