Engineering the future of governance
We live in an age of unprecedented data, yet finding reliable evidence for urgent policy decisions remains a global challenge. The Research, Innovation and Evaluation Unit is where ACRES builds the future of Evidence-Informed Decision Making (EIDM). We build the tools and strategies that shorten the path from a complex question to a high-impact decision. Our work provides a clear roadmap for partners seeking scalable, technology-driven solutions to African policy challenges.
A strategic Roadmap for the next five years
To maximize our impact, we developed the ACRES Institutional Research Agenda, a comprehensive five-year roadmap that guides our priorities. This agenda emerged from an intense engagement cycle with policymakers and researchers to pinpoint the exact gaps where evidence is most needed.
Our priorities are focused on the hard problems of governance: embedding evidence use into government structures so it becomes permanent, pioneering the ethical use of AI to speed up decision-making, and ensuring that indigenous local knowledge has a defined place in evidence reviews. Most importantly, we are moving beyond simple pilot projects to understand how successful interventions can be scaled effectively across the entire continent.
The AI-powered toolkit
Innovation is the key to our sustainability. We are actively developing AI-enabled tools that drastically shorten the time it takes for evidence to reach a leader’s desk without sacrificing scientific rigour. Our Living EIDM ToolMap curates digital tools against a policymaker’s actual journey, while our AI-powered platform, cRhona, manages evidence synthesis in under 48 hours. This allows experts to co-produce rapid outputs with rigorous quality assurance steps built in.
Furthermore, our digital repository, Dr-RES, serves as our institutional memory, using large language models to generate quick summaries from a massive database of locally relevant evidence.
By using machine learning in our Data Extractor to structure data from thousands of PDFs, we have transformed a manual, months-long process into a fast workflow.
Beyond the screen
The true value of our technology is seen in its application. When piloted with the National Renewable Energy Platform, our Interactive Response Dashboards allowed policymakers to explore evidence in real-time. This led to immediate, informed action on rehabilitating solar infrastructure in health facilities, assessing energy use in refugee settlements, and identifying new opportunities for food security through regenerative agriculture.
We are also formalizing the how of governance; our situation analysis informed the 2022 Ministry of Health Implementation Guidelines, ensuring that the way stakeholder input and evidence are handled is now a formal, systemic requirement.
