Context and Rationale
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Legislative Oversight (ensuring...
Legislative Oversight (ensuring laws are effectively implemented)
Evidence-based Policy Making (EbPM)
Information and Research
Parliamentarians must address a broad array of complex issues as they develop legislation and debate public policies. It is of strategic importance to be able to have the capacity and skills within the parliament to provide policy makers and citizens the best possible research relevant to the problems they are attempting to solve. In addition, policy makers and citizens need to learn how to apply such research results and to understand the benefits and limitations of available information sources.
Evidence-based Policy Making, i.e. public policy informed by rigorously established objective evidence can help parliaments in making better informed decisions about legislative proposals, programmes, and projects by putting the best research results at the heart of policy development. This approach stands in contrast to opinion-based policy, which relies heavily on the untested views of individuals or groups, often inspired by ideological standpoints or speculative conjecture.
Librarians and researchers need to have the expertise to access a broad array of digital resources, validate the source, and identify those that are most useful to respond to questions posed by members and other staff and to support data-driven policy formulation.
Following the Cairo Conference it is proposed that the APKN – Information and Research Group articulate its capacity building activities of the first year focusing on:
- Evidence-based Policy Making” (EbPM) - How to build scientifically-valid evidence about the effectiveness of a program, policy, or practice that is strong enough to help inform policy decisions. What are the cycles of EbPM and the different stages of studies/evidence? What types of study designs are capable of generating such evidence?
- Africa News Monitor (ANM) - a news portal based on data mining technologies developed by the European Commission's Joint Research Centre (JRC). The system gathers on-line news reports from news portals world wide, in different languages, analyses and classifys the content of the reports, aggregates the information, issues alerts and produces intuitive visual presentations of the information found.
- Africa Parliamentary Information Exchange (APEX) - APEX is a tool to improve the exchange of information between national parliaments and the Pan Africa Parliament, and among African parliaments themselves. National parliaments in Africa may participate, with the degree of involvement decided upon by each parliament. Each parliament is encouraged to inform the other parliaments of its activities concerning cross-national initiatives and the recommendations of the Pan African Parliament.
