People Meeting

Regional hubs for evidence intermediaries that support impacts at the country level

Hub capabilities

Each hub will have the following capabilities:

  1. maintain a regional question bank (with country-level questions), keep attuned to regional and national 'windows of opportunity,’ and support regional synergies (e.g., rapid evidence response, local evidence contextualization, and science-advice development)
  2. support (i.e., connect and share capacity among) country-level evidence-support mechanisms and networks, including UN Country Teams (and humanitarian-assistance teams where they exist)
  3. partner with sectoral hubs on agile delivery and local packaging of global public goods and advance timely, demand-driven evidence support at country level
  4. contribute to sectoral question banks, piloting of data sharing and reusing through the open data system, engaging local technology companies, and translation into key local languages
  5. build partnerships with embedded units (and those working with other forms of evidence) and support new partnerships (UN country teams and government departments)
  6. contribute to developing standards for methods and data enhancements related to contexts and groups (including contexts such as least developed countries, small-island developing states and landlocked countries; transboundary challenges)
  7. convene and build capacity among a panel of citizens to participate in evidence synthesis and support
  8. support capacity sharing (informed by rapid evidence-support system assessments), often in partnership with UN regional collaborative platforms, INGSA (International Network for Governmental Science Advice) regional chapters, Embedded Evidence Labs, Global SDG Synthesis Coalition and others, as well as support connections to the full array of local interest holders
  9. be prepared to pivot to address local, regional or global crises and to address cross-sectoral problems, polycrisis and system change.

These capabilities align to a number of ‘solutions’ proposed in the ESIC roadmap:

  1. capability 1 aligns to what – in the roadmap – was called ‘regional demand-side secretariats’ that were proposed to be developed in partnership with the Global SDG Synthesis Coalition (solution 1.1 in the roadmap)
  2. capability 2 aligns to what was called ‘implementation support to intermediaries’ that was proposed to be developed in partnership with the Global SDG Synthesis Coalition (solution 1.2)
  3. capability 3 aligns to what was called ‘co-production labs’ that were proposed to be developed by the sectoral hubs and the Global SDG Synthesis Coalition (solution 1.3)
  4. capability 4 aligns to our open data system, or what was called the ‘federated repository,’ and was proposed to be developed with the sectoral hubs (solution 2.1)
  5. capability 5 aligns to what was called the ‘embedded-support units embedded in user organizations’ (solution 4.1)
  6. capability 6 aligns to our proposed methods transformation, or what was called ‘shared quality standards for different types of synthesis’ and proposed to be developed in partnership with the sectoral hubs (solution 4.2)
  7. capability 7 aligns to what was called the ‘panel of citizen partners at regional, sub-regional levels’ (solution 4.5)
  8. capability 8 aligns to what was called ‘regional and country-based learning and development centres’ and was proposed to be developed with the Global SDG Synthesis Coalition (solution 5.3).
One or two regional hubs may take the lead and/or work with others on the developmental work needed for some of these capabilities.