Windhoek:   The Director General of the National Planning Commission this week expressed the hope that an action plan will emerge from a three-day seminar in the capital that will encourage a partnership that will generate empirical evidence on which to plan social interventions, which in return will be empirically validated for impact.  Professor Peter Katjavivi was the guest speaker at the seminar that brought together several deans of Human and Social Sciences from universities in the Southern African region. The seminar was held at UNAM.
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“The seminar will also provide a starting point for Social and Human Sciences faculties in member countries to sharpen their research and operational agenda, based on the identified role of Social and Human Sciences in national development,” Katjavivi said.
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He shared some views on the important role of the Human and Social Sciences in policy making and implementation in the development arena, particularly the role of research in the social sciences in informing the process of policy formulation.
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“Empirical social science research can support government accountability and transparency by providing the evidence on which policies are made and the impact of public policies evaluated. We are moving now to the era of evidence-based policy making and implementation,” he said.
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In his view, one of the challenges is the need to investigate the obstacles to social science research knowledge utilization by African governments, including the attitudes of policy makers to the use of research results, in order to improve the quality of decision making.
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“There is a need to investigate the skills among government planners to absorb and make sense of research reports and findings. Equally important is the need to investigate the way social science researchers carry out research and, indeed,