Bringing Research and Policy Together
The Institute for Research and Policy Integration in Africa (IRPIA) is a pan-African think tank serving as a hub for the fusion of evidence-based research with pressing public policy issues. It is a nonprofit organization registered and based in Sierra Leone. It is also housed at Northern Illinois University in the United States.
IRPIA’s mission is premised on the understanding that public policies on issues such as security and peace, environmental sustainability, public health, education, migration, governance, just to name a few, need to be based on evidence-based knowledge which often comes out of cutting edge academic research.
As such, IRPIA focuses on promoting evidence-based research on core pressing policy issues in Africa and disseminating evidence-based research in policy relevant formats. Evidence-based research from the academic world is framed and geared toward providing policy relevant analyses and recommendations for policy makers and practitioners, especially in the areas of security and peacebuilding, environmental sustainability and resilience, and education and public health.
Abu Bakarr Bah
Founding Director
"IRPIA is a continuation of the effort to promote African knowledge which I started in 2010 with the founding of African Conflict & Peacebuilding Review (ACPR). Through ACPR, I have had the opportunity to work with diverse scholars and policy experts across Africa. I have seen many of them grow from recent graduates to becoming junior scholars and now very accomplished scholars. Even more, many of them have made contributions to African policy debates as researchers and policy experts. All of that has further convinced me of the need for evidence-based social and scientific knowledge about Africa produced by people in Africa in the service of our collective effort to solve pressing issues in Africa. IRPIA is an important part in that effort to nurture African knowledge production and make evidence-based knowledge about Africa accessible and useful in solving the challenges faced by African countries and everyday people in Africa".
The Experts in IRPIA
Our Publications
The Issues that we Discuss