1.1 Planning for engagement

Ideally, before beginning a project, those wishing to provide evidence for AMR policy should plan for policy engagement activities. However, even at the end of a project, they can still plan effective ways of bringing the message to people who can make a difference.

Think about the policy impact of your research early, when you design research projects. Scientific curiosity is a powerful driver for research, but if you are serious about policy impact, you must be prepared to adapt your research to the needs of policy actors (JRC, 2020).

Plan for impact strategically: policy-makers need quick responses, and questions evolve with political discussions. Who from government, civil society or industry would be interested in your results?

Before you engage with policy-makers, you need to think about:

• What is the key message with relevance for policy? (discussed in this section and Section 2)
• Why is this important for policy? (discussed in this section and Section 2)
• Who has the power to influence policy? (Section 3)
• When to engage? (Section 4)
• Where to engage? (Section 4)
• How to engage? (Section 5)

There are organisations that hold training sessions to cover the foundations of evidence-based policy development. In one recent example, the African Institute for Development Policy (AFIDEP), the Drivers of Resistance in Uganda and Malawi (DRUM), and the African Research Collaboration on Sepsis (ARCS) teams organised a four-day training workshop for policy developers in 2020, working on issues concerning AMR and sepsis. Video 1 shows one participant’s reflections on the workshop.