Although researchers in Kenya seek to influence social protection policies and programmes with the knowledge that they generate, they face challenges ensuring that policy-makers use their evidence.

The proposed solution is to transform evidence generation and policy uptake processes through Utafiti Sera, a community of researchers, policy-makers, policy practitioners and users. Utafiti Sera aims at ensuring that research evidence on social protection becomes available and is used to inform policy decisions and practices.

The first activity was a policy-knowledge community forum on social protection that was held in Nairobi on 13 May 2015. At this forum, policy makers, practitioners, the media and researchers discussed how research that aims to influence social protection programmes in Kenya could be enhanced.

This is one of the African Policy Dialogues that are initiated by Platform members and supported by INCLUDE. With these communities, INCLUDE encourages the use of existing knowledge in policy engagement in African countries and facilitates the uptake of the findings of NWO-WOTRO & INCLUDE research projects at the national level or fills gaps in INCLUDE’s knowledge agenda not covered by these projects.