The importance of Research Quality from the Perspective of CSOs By Princess O. Ifode Programme Officer Intervention Council for Women in Africa (ICWA) Benin City, Nigeria

Background  Civil society was at the vanguard of the pro-democracy struggles of the late 1980s and 1990s in Africa;  It emerged to challenge repressive regimes, rights, violations and economic hardships attendant to adjustment policies;  The emergence of democratic rule and the challenges of its sustenance and overall development have foisted new perceptions on civil society;

 The contemporary dominant view is that CSOs should now focus on social action, advocacy, development issues and governance;  The development role of CSOs gained international recognition in the late 1980s with the emergent dominance of neo-liberalism which emphasized the market, private sector driven development and the contraction of the state, particularly in social service and welfare.

 Thus CSOs emerged as alternative providers of social services, implementers of development assistance, partners of international development agencies and major recipients of development and aid funds.  The CSOs, particularly the NGO sector was seen as more politically independent and flexible, a more efficient alternative in service delivery, more effective in reaching beneficiaries, capable of setting the pace in good governance, democratization, respect for rule of law and human rights and in pushing for social, economic and political change.

 CSOs have made much progress in aspects of advocacy, assistance and support in the areas of social welfare, poverty alleviation, human capital development, diseases control, and humanitarian assistance.  In these areas, with support from international organizations, CSOs have contributed trainings and delivered support.

Perspectives on Research Quality and the needs of CSOs  However, the effectiveness, actual performance and contributions to sustainable development of CSOs depends considerably on the quality of research available since most of them have limited capability to conduct their own research before carrying out the delivering of much needed services;

 It is in this respect that CSOs depend on quality research, particularly with respect to social services delivery and poverty reduction, provided by researchers as background for the identification and implementation of their development programs;  CSOs use various organizations such as government ministries and agencies, international agencies and Think Tanks, national university-based research centres, national independent think tanks, and other CSOs as sources of research-based evidence;

 CSOs find it easier to get research data from government ministries and national think tanks including other CSOs;  Often international agencies and thinks are not easily accessible to many CSOs. The same can be said of the university-based research output that most often published in journals not available to CSOs;

 CSOs look mainly for high quality research output that is relevant to the activities they carry out in deprived communities but in most cases such research output is not easily accessible to CSOs because they are poorly disseminated;  A growing proportion of CSOs depend on websites, print, , television, radio, social media as key format for receiving quality research output;

 For most CSOs the relevance of the research is as important as the quality. Where information is urgently needed by CSOs to develop a proposal on any poverty reduction issue it is the available relevant background information that is used;  In fact extremely high quality research output may not be accessible to CSOs and therefore may not be used;  This implies that for CSOs relevance and quality must go together in order to be useful;  In some situations CSOs may value relevance of research than quality.

Improving research quality for the benefit of CSO activities  There is no doubt that research quality is a key element of the output expected from different research organizations;  However, research institutions and organizations, particularly national think tanks, need to adopt strategies that will make their high quality research useful to various users such as CSOs;

 Research institutions should articulate their research agenda by seeking the input of key stakeholders. This is what the Centre for Population and Environmental Development (CPED) in Benin did five years ago when it was articulating its research agenda for its strategic plan;  Research institutions should focus on a better understanding of local development challenges by diversifying research into such issues as poverty alleviation, environment, natural resources depletion, gender, human rights and youth;

 Research institutions are urged to better communicate the results of their research by disseminating it to a wider audience using media, to make reports and presentations more easily understandable and to seek feedback to make sure outputs are relevant;  Researchers should work with CSOs and policy actors as partners in the execution of research programs because improving CSO and policy makers access to information is crucial for the research to be applied to interventions implemented by CSOs and to policy making.