Institutional roles, structures, funding and research partnerships towards evidence-informed policy-making: a multisector survey among policy-makers in Nigeria.

The study revealed that although institutional structures such as institutional policies, fora and stakeholder engagement existed in the organizations studied, there was suboptimal use of evidence obtained from research initiated by both internal and external researchers. Organizations surveyed had budget lines for research, but this funding was depicted as inadequate. There was suboptimal actual participation of policy-makers in the co-creation, production and dissemination of evidence. The implementation of contextually relevant and sustained mutual institutional policy-maker-researcher engagement approaches is needed to promote evidence-informed policy-making. Thus there is a need for institutional prioritization and commitment to research evidence generation.