ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the use of evidence from the Diagnostic Review of South Africa’s response to violence against women and children (VAWC), carried out by the Department of Planning, Monitoring and Evaluation and Department of Social Development between 2014 and 2016. Organisations may use research evidence to make minor changes to policy and programmes, but necessarily to transform policy approaches. Lessons shared in the chapter should improve uptake of research evidence in the VAWC sector in South Africa and offer insight and suggestions for improving uptake of evidence in multi-sectoral interventions to address complex social problems. The democratic political system of government at national, provincial and local level is a result of the 1994 consolidation of the apartheid state’s racially fragmented administrations. The case study showed how when a piece of evidence is completed it becomes part of an existing body of knowledge and moves between existing networks of people and institutions.
