Building a culture of EIPM (B-CuE) in Uganda project

The Building a Culture of Evidence-informed Policymaking (B-CuE) program was designed to move us past one-off reports and address the deeper, hidden barriers to progress including fragmented efforts, hesitant leadership, and organizational cultures that weren’t yet evidence-ready.

Through B-CuE, we built the durable structures and relationships that make the use of evidence inevitable.

True cultural change happens when a service becomes an institution. During this phase, ACRES matured into a stable, go-to resource for the highest levels of the state. By securing full autonomy from Makerere University and expanding our service to over 16 new departments including the Office of the President, we moved evidence-informed practice from the periphery of policymaking.

We reorganized ourselves into four functional units i.e. Evidence Synthesis, Policy Engagement, Innovation, and Capacity Building to ensure that when the policymakers demand answers, we have the specialized teams ready to respond. This aimed at ensuring that ACRES has the governance and agility to remain a permanent partner for Uganda’s future.

Cultivating the next generation of champions

A culture is only as strong as its people. We recognized that to make this shift irreversible, we needed to bridge the leadership gap in the EIDM field. This led to the development of a sustainable capacity-building program; a foundational curriculum built from the real-world experiences of practitioners.

By conducting market surveys to align our training with national needs, we are now equipping both pre-service students and current civil servants as well as knowledge brokers with a number of competencies. The goal is to ensure that the next generation of leaders and researchers operates with an evidence-first mindset by default.

Replacing competition with community

For too long, researchers, data scientists, and evaluators have operated in isolation but under the B-CuE project, we mapped the ecosystem and created a peer-to-peer learning platform, hence replacing silos with a united front.

Our role has shifted from merely translating knowledge to integrating it across disciplines, ensuring that whether the topic is climate change or urban air quality, the response is coordinated and intentional.