Fitsum Assefa Adela

As a cabinet member and a key player in my country’s macroeconomic team, I and my team bear the huge responsibility of offering the best recommendations for effective development plans and policy designs aimed at solving societal challenges. This makes the office I lead one of the key users of evidence, both to provide a foundation on which plans and policies are based, as well as for alternative policy recommendations.

My participation in the Global Evidence Commission, as well as my engagement over the last three years at the apex of policymaking where we strive to make policies in a complex environment, have given me an ideal opportunity to re-emphasize the need for synthesizing the many forms of evidence pertinent to the issue at hand.

To support the use of evidence in policymaking and monitor our impacts, my team has been developing a new monitoring and evaluation metrics to better track progress in achieving the Sustainable Development Goals. Furthermore, we have been working with stakeholders to develop a national multidimensional poverty index (MPI) to complement existing measures of poverty. While global MPIs can set the stage for global comparisons, national MPIs can provide the sensitivity to local contexts that we need.

Thus, I strongly support the insights provided in chapter 3 about decisions and decision-makers, particularly those provided in section 3.3 about the demand for evidence among government policymakers and the context for their use of evidence. I also wholeheartedly support the insights provided about the evidence-support system in section 6.2, where the need for basing it on local (national or sub-national) contexts has been emphasized. The insights about the need for global public goods and equitably distributed capacities in section 6.1 are also important, given the lack of global equity in this regard. This report will be instrumental in guiding us in the best ways for using evidence to properly understand and effectively solve societal challenges.