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Background: The West African Health Organization (WAHO) is promoting the use of evidence in policy-making within West Africa. The need for increased understanding of the complexities of the evidence-to-policy process among policy-makers in West Africa necessitates the development of evidence-based policy-making (EBPM) guidance. The purpose of this study was to interact with policy-makers from West African countries to identify the necessity of EBPM guidance for the subregion. Methods: A cross-sectional qualitative study design was used to elicit the views/opinions of senior health policy-makers from across the 15 West African countries on why an EBPM Guidance is necessary for the subregion. The policy-makers were engaged during WAHO-organized regional evidence-to-policy meetings on the improvement of maternal and child health outcomes held in Senegal in 2019. Face-to-face, one-on-one interactions, interviews, and deliberations during the meeting plenary sessions were held with the policy-makers, who participated in the regional meeting. Results: Up to 23 policy-makers representing 15 West African countries participated in the study. Policy-makers who took part in the study supported the development of an EBPM Guidance to facilitate evidence-to-policy process. Among the identified reasons why an EBPM Guidance for West Africa is a necessity were to understand: (i) how to deal with barriers and facilitators that influence evidence to policy process; (ii) how to acquire, access, adapt, and apply available research evidence in policy-making; (iii) how to deal with contextual issues and broad range of evidence; and (iv) how to engage parliamentarians and policy legislators to promote policy development. Conclusion: An EBPM is a valuable tool that can provide health sector policy-makers the needed guide on the evidence-to-policy process. Studies that will evaluate the impact of EBPM guidance on the policy-making process in low-and middle-income countries are advocated.
The 15 countries that make up the West African subregion include Benin, Burkina Faso, Cape Verde, Cote d’Ivoire, the Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Liberia, Mali, Nigeria, Niger, Sierra Leone, Senegal, and Togo. With a combined population size of up to 360 million, the subregion is home to about one-third of the entire African population and majority of the countries have a poor Human Development Index.[7] Some countries in the subregion such as the Gambia, Liberia, Nigeria, Mali, Benin, and Sierra Leone record maternal mortality rate (MMR) and under-five mortality rates (U5MR) that are among the highest in the world (MMR 706–1360/100,000 and U5MR 100–118/1000).[8] The region has a rich and complex social structure which to a large extent influences the policy-making process. We employed a cross-sectional qualitative study design to elicit the views/opinions of senior health policy-makers from across the 15 West African countries on why an EBPM Guidance is necessary for the subregion. The policy-makers were engaged during WAHO-organized regional evidence-to-policy meeting on the improvement of maternal and child health outcomes held in Senegal in 2019. Face-to-face, one-on-one interactions and interviews were held with the policy-makers representing each of the 15 West African countries who participated in the regional meeting. The policy-makers were engaged before the meeting started, during break time, and at the end of the meeting. The interaction lasted about 10 min and notes were taken on the response of the participants. The policy-makers were asked if an EBPM Guidance for West Africa was necessary and if yes, how they thought such Guidance can help to promote the evidence-to-policy process within the context of West Africa. The importance and need for the EBPM Guidance were also discussed during the meeting plenary sessions and additional information in that regard was obtained. Prior to the engagement, verbal consent to participate in the study was obtained from all participants. At the end of the meeting, all responses were reviewed and analyzed using the phenomenological approach first described by Giorgi[22] and elaborated by Albert et al.[23] The following sequence was employed in the analysis: (i) going over all the textual data to gain an overall impression; (ii) identifying all comments/responses that appeared noteworthy to the research and extracting these meaning units; and (iii) independent abstracting of the meaning units, followed by discussion and consensus.
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