By Bruno Ittia*
Researchers in Central Africa are producing more policy work than ever. Not enough reaches the desk where the decision gets made. On September 7-11, Yaoundé hosts an attempt to close that distance.
Ask why one government builds a functioning health workforce plan while its neighbour does not, and the answer is rarely that one had better data. Both had data. Both, in all likelihood, had a report. The difference sits in a quieter space: whether anyone with signing authority read it, believed it, and could act before the political window closed.
Policy research moves through three stages. Data gets produced, knowledge gets transferred, and decision-makers integrate it into what they actually do. Each stage fails in its own way, a point made at the 2024 Central Africa Think Tank Forum by Canada’s then High Commissioner to Cameroon and Gabon, H.E. Lorraine Anderson, who identified the disconnection between researchers and policymakers as the weak link in the whole chain. Nearly all the money and professional prestige in African policy research sits at stage one. Stages two and three are where the work quietly dies.
The numbers behind this are not subtle. At the 2025 edition of the Central Africa Forum, participants debating the financing of policy research put Cameroon’s national investment in the field at roughly 0.03 per cent, raised less as a precise statistic than as an illustration of where independent analysis sits on the priority list. Across Sub-Saharan Africa, more than 70 per cent of think tanks depend on foreign, project-based money.
That dependence sets the agenda elsewhere. An institution working through a three-year grant cannot easily pursue the question its own society is asking if that question does not map onto a donor’s programme cycle. As researchers in Yaoundé put it bluntly, project funding often casts local institutions as data collectors on someone else’s study rather than authors of their own.
The consequences compound. Think tanks in the subregion have short institutional lifespans. Several have carried months of unpaid salaries, then watched trained researchers leave for the UN system or abroad. Competition for the same narrow pool of grants pushes organisations apart when the strategic logic points the other way. And in a 2024 session, the funders themselves said what organisations seldom hear directly: the African think tank landscape is enormous, and Central African institutions in particular are hard to see from the outside. Good work exists. It is not legible to the people who would pay for more of it.
Weak policy institutions do not produce a vacuum. Decisions still get made, only with thinner evidence and shorter memory. Reform models arrive pre-packaged from elsewhere and get applied to problems they were not designed for. Ministries lose the recall that would let them ask whether something similar was tried in 2011, and why it failed.
Central Africa can afford this least. The subregion carries some of the continent’s lowest human development indicators, its most precarious youth employment picture, and its weakest record on regional integration, this last despite decades of CEMAC and ECCAS architecture built to fix exactly that. It is also split down the middle linguistically, so a Gabonese finding and a Cameroonian one can address the same problem for years without meeting.
A forum that names its own failure
On 10 and 11 September, the Nkafu Policy Institute convenes the fourth Central Africa Think Tank Forum at the Hilton in Yaoundé under the theme “From Evidence to Action: Strengthening Policy Uptake in Central Africa.” It is a more self-critical choice than it first appears, putting the sector’s central weakness on the agenda and inviting the people responsible for it into the room.
Six sessions carry the two days. From Research to Reform examines how findings move beyond publication. Think Tanks and CSOs in Policy Influence takes on credibility and independence, the currency without which nothing else works. Institutional Capacity and Governance looks at the incentives that determine whether evidence is adopted or shelved. Data, Monitoring and Learning addresses how anyone knows a policy is working. Regional Cooperation asks what ECCAS and the African Continental Free Trade Area can realistically carry. A final set of roundtables works through sector-specific problems.
Why the Forum needs a week around it
A convening is only as strong as the counterpart community it convenes. Filling a hall with ministers and funders achieves little if the researchers and civil society leaders across the table cannot hold their end of the conversation. That is the reasoning behind the two programmes Nkafu runs in the days immediately before.
The Emerging Leaders Program opens on 7 September with twenty Cameroonians aged 18 to 35, drawn from all ten regions. Three days on public policy, ethical leadership, advocacy, and the craft of writing a brief a busy official will actually read. The Executive and Strategic Leadership Program follows on 8 and 9 September for people already running institutions, with a curriculum that reads like a diagnosis of everything above: governance and accountability, resource mobilisation, evidence and communication, and the strategic adoption of artificial intelligence.
This year, it opened beyond civil society to private-sector, public-enterprise, and government leaders, on the grounds that the hardest management problems of the moment are not sector-specific.
Both end where the Forum begins. Every participant from both programmes walks into the Hilton on the morning of 10 September, one group three days into a policy education, the other having just spent two days interrogating its own institutional weaknesses with peers. What they bring to the plenaries is different from what they would have brought the previous week, and the Forum is designed to absorb it.
The proof that the sequence holds is in the people who come back: Ferdinand Sonyuy passed through the Emerging Leaders Program as a young participant and returned in 2025 as a facilitator, by then executive director of the Africa NCDs Network. Anissa Yambé did the same a year after her own cohort.
None of the underlying problems will be solved in two days at a hotel in Yaoundé. Funding models will not diversify because a panel recommended it. What these gatherings produce is not policy but the connective tissue that makes policy influence possible later, and one uncomfortable discipline the sector has adopted about itself: that anyone demanding transparency from the state must first practise it, and that criticism carries weight only when it arrives with a workable alternative.
Central Africa’s next decade will be decided on employment, health systems, regional trade and governance, with or without good evidence. The only real question is who is in the room when it happens.
The 4th Central Africa Think Tank Forum takes place on 10 and 11 September 2026 at the Hilton Hotel, Yaoundé, in English and French. It is intended for think tank and research institution leaders, policy analysts, government officials, development partners and funders, civil society leaders, private sector executives, academics, and journalists covering policy in the subregion. Registrations are ongoing at cattf.nkafu.org
*Bruno Ittia, Director of Communications, Partnerships, and Strategic Initiatives, DLFF
