Institutionalizing an Evidence-Based Practice in a Selected Government Agency in Nigeria

Abstract

The need to tackle the discrepancy between research outputs and the execution of the findings into real practice is a crucial factor in establishing evidence-based practice in a selected government agency. There is a need to increase the number of experts in our education sector who can synthesise, translate, and package the evidence for ready use by decision-makers and to foster entrepreneurship in Africa. To achieve this, the activities of a 28-man Evidence Leaders in Africa (ELA) team were recruited to drive the project through capacity building training and workshop sessions. Thereafter, a non-random purposive sampling technique targeted at policy makers at various government and non-governmental organizations was adopted as the study design. In all, purposive administration of 424 copies of questionnaire to individuals in different governmental and non-governmental organizations was done by the recruited personnel. The retrieved data from the questionnaire were analyzed using standard statistical method. Socio-demographic characteristics of respondents reveal 34% representation of (31-40 years) age bracket, with (57%) of them working in the University spanning over 2 to 5years (47%) work experience. Approximately 64% of the respondents are not aware of EIDM while 71% had no understanding of EIDM. As regards knowledge of EIDM, 36% had no knowledge of EIDM, 29% had moderate knowledge, 34% were beginners while approximately 1% had advanced knowledge of EIDM. Also, approximately 99% of the respondents have neither been trained nor involved in training others in EIDM. It was also observed that 8.5% of the respondents were policy-makers in the organization, yet 90.7% of the respondents agree that EIDM is useful in policy-making while 81.3% of the respondents engage their colleagues in EIDM. From this study, it is safe to infer that institutionalizing EIDM in NNMDA has numerous benefits as shown by the findings of this study. This will only be possible when all parties involved in producing and using research evidence are well informed and knowledgeable in EIDM.