Background: South Africa is contending with a severe political, economic and social crisis that is being exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. The country's Presidency coordinates government action in this situation, with a particular focus on aligning mesures across policy fields.
Policy design and implementation have not been well coordinated up to this point due to insufficient cooperation among the government departments. Policy-makers often fail to adequately monitor how effective and coherent regulatory measures are in practice.
While ministries and government agencies do follow approaches based on established scientific evidence in individual cases, such methods have not been sufficiently mainstreamed and systematised. As a result, the Presidency’s work to efficiently implement the necessary reform measures is made more difficult. To improve the current situation, the Policy Analysis and Research Service (PRS) has been re-established within the Presidency.
Objective: The South African Government makes increased use of evidence-based recommendations from the Policy and Analysis and Research Service (PRS) within the Presidency.
Approach: The project aims to strengthen the ability of South African policy-makers to make use of scientific resources, and to systematise the cooperation between academia and politicians. This will help facilitate the evidence-based implementation of coordinated measures.
To this end, the project is working closely with the PRS as well as 26 universities coordinated by the University of Pretoria. The PRS now has access to the University of Pretoria's digital knowledge repository, which comprises over 150,000 relevant articles. In addition, a financing agreement is in place with the University of Pretoria, which makes it possible for policy-makers to request advisory services from scientific experts on specific subjects.