Dashboards and reports are easy to commission. Building the organisational habit of using evidence in real decisions is harder — and far more valuable.
Evidence use depends on skills, incentives, timing and trust. Analysts need access; decision-makers need usable products; institutions need routines that bring both together before choices are locked in.
Mitambo & Co’s work on data-for-health impact assessment and evidence-informed policymaking evaluations in Malawi has returned to the same finding: institutions do not “adopt evidence” once. They practise it through systems, relationships and repeated use.
Treating evidence as a reporting obligation produces compliance. Treating it as a capability produces judgement — clearer priorities, better trade-offs and fewer decisions made on anecdote alone.
