This interview is part of the initiative “Resonating Voices: Listening to the Voices of Evidence Users in the LAC Region”. The project is a collaborative effort with the LAC Hub acting as the implementer and Overton as the funder. In this conversation, the LAC Hub engages with José Enrique Velasquez from Peru.

José Enrique Velasquez is a medical physician with a master’s degree in Public Health and Clinical Epidemiology. He currently works as a university professor and as the General Director of Monitoring and Evaluation at the Ministry of Development and Social Inclusion (MIDIS) in Peru.

1. What are the priority issues or problems in your organization? 

In 2022, we approved the updated version of the National Policy for Development and Social Inclusion, a policy that gathers 14 sectors and identifies 81 services. This policy has five priority objectives, and we are currently working on three of them, which represent a significant social problem for our country.

The first one is related to food security. We are currently intensifying efforts to implement the most effective interventions to improve food security, especially among the poor and vulnerable populations.

The second issue is related to poverty. We are transitioning from measuring poverty monetarily to a multidimensional approach. Not only because of MIDIS’ own work but also because we believe that combining both measurements can provide a better understanding of poverty among the population.

And the third issue is related to the previous ones, which is childhood anemia. There is a need to improve the outcomes of anemia in children under three years old, particularly focusing on infants under 12 months old, as this is a period of intense neural connections formation.

2. What role has scientific evidence played in addressing these priority problems or issues, and what partnerships or synergies have supported or enabled this process?

I can take the example of the conditional cash transfer program in early childhood.

During the pandemic, there was uncertainty about how the closure of services and the absence of home visits would impact the immediate postnatal population.

We had to conduct an intense search for international evidence because we did not have national evidence to identify whether significant developmental outcomes could be expected in early childhood with a conditional cash transfer program. We found all kinds of evidence, categorized them, and created an evidence matrix.

Thanks to this initiative, we implemented an innovative pilot by adapting an existing program called “Juntos.” We expanded assistance to pregnant women and mothers of newborns, adding services such as screening for anemia, iron supplementation, and access to vaccination, coordinated with the Ministry of Health. By fulfilling these minimum responsibilities, a household transfer was immediately granted.

The evidence supported the design and implementation of the pilot program, facilitating support from the Ministry of Economy and Finance and subsequent approval by an emergency decree from the Ministry of Development and Social Inclusion.

After a year of implementation, the initial evidence was complemented with new data, including an evaluation of malnutrition and access to services for early childhood. These results, together with international and locally generated evidence, supported the proposal to extend and scale the program nationally and in rural and urban sectors.

For this work, we received support from the Inter-American Development Bank, the World Bank, an expert in conditional cash transfers, and academic institutions.

3. What are the main barriers and facilitators you identify for institutionalizing and systematically incorporating evidence into the decision-making process?

Barriers

The time between the political decision required and the technical work necessary to gather the best available evidence. The demand for evidence to make these political decisions can be as short as a week, while technically, it may take months to provide that evidence.

The second barrier is related to budget constraints. We would like to have sufficient budget to conduct all the evaluations and studies required to generate our own evidence, but resources are extremely limited.

The third barrier I would like to highlight is access to quality information sources and resources, which includes access to search engines. While there is increased investment in democratizing evidence, we still face difficulties in accessing certain types of evidence.

A fourth point I would like to highlight as a barrier is the need to always work on maintaining a culture of evidence at the institutional level, one that facilitates alliances with other institutions within the country, not only with academia but also with different organizations from the public and private sectors.

Finally, more of a challenge we have is to disseminate evidence and make it available to different target audiences and ensure they understand the real scope of the evidence. This means translating knowledge for different audiences.

Facilitators

Once evidence is used to make decisions, if a conducive context is maintained, a snowball effect can be generated. So, starting from something small, something increasingly significant can be achieved, generating a minimum culture of decision-making always supported by the best available evidence, and that is something that needs to be emphasized and reinforced.

We have achieved outstanding results by sharing our evidence on the MIDIS portal and involving international researchers in other spaces. These collaborations have allowed us to access new international evidence, strengthening our evaluations and results. Identifying and seizing similar opportunities can lead to more positive outcomes.

4. What advice would you give to researchers and decision-makers who want to improve the impact and use of scientific evidence in policy decisions?

Decision-makers need to understand that their decisions will have greater support, better outcomes (which can also be measured politically) as long as they are evidence-based. Decision-makers are subject to judgments, questioning, and internal control for the decisions they make, but these can clearly be satisfactorily defended if they are evidence-based.

It can also present a different image to the media, positioning them differently.

The needs of decision-makers in the political sphere may differ from those in academia. Therefore, for researchers to ensure that decision-makers use evidence, it is crucial to identify needs in the political sphere.

Researchers, especially in academia, because there are also researchers in other areas, need to understand that politicians have to make quick decisions.

Finally, once the best available evidence has been collected, it is essential to make it available in dissemination and reflection spaces when and with whom it is appropriate.

---

Interviewee contact: jvelasquez@midis.gob.pe