Call to action: building a better future together, powered by evidence, guided by collective impact

A better future starts with better evidence

Imagine a world where every decision, whether in a government office, a community meeting, a hospital, or in response to a humanitarian crisis, is guided by timely and trusted evidence. A world where research is not locked behind paywalls or delayed by outdated systems but delivered in real time and adapted to local needs.

The world in 2025 faces complex challenges, but also unprecedented opportunities to accelerate progress. The Sustainable Development Goals remind us how far we still need to go, while also highlighting the transformative power of working together in new ways .

Guided by the principle of collective impact, and powered by new tools, global collaboration, and a pressing need for smarter, fairer decisions, we can reimagine how evidence drives progress. Across health, food systems, education, disaster preparedness, social protection, environmental protection and climate resilience, a stronger global evidence synthesis ecosystem can close the gap between knowledge and action.

This is the future the Evidence Synthesis Infrastructure Collaborative (ESIC) is striving to build: timely, inclusive, and reliable evidence, created through robust, interoperable systems, which accelerates development goals and improves lives everywhere.

This call to action invites governments, funders, evidence producers, intermediaries and citizens to shape that future together, replacing fragmentation with shared infrastructure, transforming how evidence is produced and used, and ensuring it reaches those who need it most ‐ quickly and equitably.

Let's act now. Let's choose a future where evidence drives collective impact.

Evidence synthesis has expanded in scope and scale, but the infrastructure has not kept pace with contemporary needs.

• Too often, evidence synthesis is driven by academic incentives rather than user demand, produced in formats inaccessible to policymakers and other decision makers, or completed too late to inform urgent decisions .

• The COVID‐19 pandemic showed both the potential and fragility of the system . Extraordinary collaborations delivered timely evidence syntheses in some areas, yet inequities in funding, leadership, and access persisted, leaving many regions dependent on institutions in the Global North .

• Geographic imbalances remain stark. Infrastructure for evidence synthesis is concentrated in a handful of high‐income countries. Low‐and middle‐income countries are home to most of the world's population and rich in contextual knowledge, but they lack sustained support . Over‐reliance on Global North institutions limits global capacity and undermines resilience in crises that demand context‐specific solutions.

• Most of today's evidence‐synthesis infrastructure is fragile and sustained by volunteers. Even when vital assets are built and widely used, they often struggle to secure long‐term funding.

• Fragmentation and duplication are widespread. Evidence is often generated in silos across disciplines and sectors, with little interoperability or reuse. Artificial intelligence (AI) tools are emerging, with the potential to improve efficiency. But, without responsible strategies that leverage the empirically based methods of evidence synthesis, they risk exacerbating problems of transparency, accuracy, and trust.

Unless addressed, these factors will continue to limit the impact of evidence synthesis. With deliberate investment, equitable collaboration, unbiased evidence and responsible innovation, we can build an infrastructure that is truly global, responsive, and fit for the future.

Five steps to transformation in five years

Supported by the Wellcome Trust, ESIC's open planning process engaged over 200 individuals from diverse sectors, regions, and disciplines. Over six months, they co‐created a Roadmap for transformation, which was stress‐tested at the ‘Cape Town Consensus’ meeting in June 2025 . The ESIC roadmap sets out a practical, scalable framework, with five steps to tackle systemic challenges, grounded in collective impact, collaboration, and equity (Figure Figure).

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ESIC Roadmap: five steps for better informed decisions

Step 1: Build a better evidence‐synthesis infrastructure to serve everyone. The ESIC planning process centred on five key evidence infrastructure elements (Figure Figure), with each element assigned to a dedicated working group. Each group was comprised of content experts, representing diverse regions and sectors, directing their collective efforts to strengthening their respective infrastructure element.

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Working groups aligned to infrastructure elements

ESIC proposes a decentralised, cross‐cutting infrastructure: interconnected regional communities supported by a lean global layer with three functions:

• a co‐ordination group to maintain alignment on collective impact;

• a monitoring, evaluation and learning function; and

• a funders’ forum to harmonise and target investment

Robust infrastructure must also include safeguards that ensure transparency, reduce bias, and protect independence.

Step 2: Make user‐centred evidence synthesis the norm. Evidence must shift from static, expert‐driven outputs to dynamic, user‐driven systems that are co‐produced, actionable, and accessible. This involves:

• delivering living, tailored evidence to policymakers, professionals, and citizens;

• embedding equity and efficiency in every process, with knowledge flowing in all directions between Global South and North;

• taking transdisciplinary, cross‐sector approaches to complex challenges;

• developing suites of Living Evidence Syntheses (LESs) on global priorities, integrated into decision‐making platforms;

• using AI‐enabled tools to deliver these LESs—automating updates, improving efficiency, and ensuring evidence remains timely and actionable.

Step 3: Work with intermediaries who support decision makers. Most decision makers rely on trusted intermediaries, such as evidence‐support units, science advisors, non‐governmental organizations (NGOs), humanitarian agencies, citizen groups, and regional bodies. They act as evidence‐to‐user conduits. Strengthening these intermediaries ensures that evidence is not only interpreted and contextualized but also delivered in actionable formats and at a pace that aligns with decision‐making timelines.

Step 4: Ensure more people start using or keep using actionable insights generated with rigour and speed. Evidence synthesis must be visible, localized, and relevant. This means ensuring products are multilingual, culturally adapted, and seamlessly embedded into the digital platforms on which decision‐makers already rely. Building continuous feedback loops is essential to refine outputs, strengthen trust, and maintain relevance, so that high‐quality evidence becomes not just available but indispensable in everyday decision‐making. These feedback mechanisms are most effective when supported by robust infrastructure (Step 1) that can deliver insights efficiently, and when evidence products are designed with users at the centre (Step 2), ensuring they meet real‐world needs.

Step 5: Enable better informed decisions to improve lives and save money. Timely and trusted evidence reduces waste, scales effective interventions, and accelerates progress toward development goals. Embedding synthesis into decision‐making systems ensures insights are delivered in the right format, to the right audience, through the right channels. This approach not only supports immediate action by aligning stakeholders on short‐term strategies but also builds the foundations for long‐term resilience, ultimately enabling better‐informed decisions that improve lives and save money.

Together, these five steps form a five‐year pathway toward a fully transformed evidence ecosystem that is decentralized, equitable, agile to emerging priorities, and integral to decision‐making at all levels.

Equity as method, metric, and mindset

Equity is ESIC's foundational principle. It shapes every part of our work: infrastructure, governance, implementation, decision making, and impact. A transformation in evidence synthesis cannot be achieved without redressing historic imbalances and embedding leadership from the Global South as the norm rather than the exception. At the same time, equity must be pursued through balanced and interconnected partnerships, ensuring that leadership, power, and resources are shared across all regions. Transformation requires:

• Global South leadership in design, governance, and implementation, with reciprocal opportunities for leadership across all regions

• Diverse teams spanning sectors, disciplines, languages, and career stages, with inclusion built into recruitment and decision making

• Clear and transparent metrics to measure representation, power‐sharing, and resource allocation

• Governance structures grounded in collective impact, ensuring accountability and shared ownership of progress.

Foregrounding equity can enhance applicability and maximize the impact of research . When evidence is generated and applied across diverse populations and contexts, it deepens our understanding of how interventions work in real‐world settings. This benefits everyone, especially those historically excluded from global decision making. This is how we build a resilient and responsive evidence ecosystem: one that draws strength from diversity, delivers value across contexts, and enables truly global impact.

Call to action: act now, start small, think big

The time to act is now. We cannot wait for ideal conditions or for others to take the lead. The world's challenges are too urgent, and the tools for change are already in our hands.

Transformation will only happen if each of us takes responsibility within our own sphere of influence, whether as evidence producers, decision makers, intermediaries, funders, or citizens. Progress does not rely solely on large grants or global mandates. It also depends on small, immediate steps that, when connected, add up to collective impact (Figure Figure).

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Mobilizing the ESIC community of communities: practical actions for transformation

The choice before us

The ESIC Roadmap and Cape Town Consensus Charter , provide a clear, co‐created framework for action. But without immediate commitment, they will risk becoming yet another set of unimplemented recommendations. We need to act together now to build an equitable, user‐centred evidence infrastructure that improves lives, strengthens resilience, and saves resources, or accept another decade of missed opportunities, wasted investments, and deepening divides. The future could look like this:

• AI‐enabled, living and actionable evidence embedded where decisions are made

• Open, reusable data supported by responsible AI

• Timely, trustworthy, unbiased methods that keep pace with global challenges

• Shared capacity and leadership rooted in the Global South

• Governance built on principles of equity and collective impact

What happens next will not be determined by a single institution or funder. It depends on what each of us—government officials, funders, producers, intermediaries, and citizens—chooses to do now. By committing to collective impact, sharing openly, and embedding equity in both what we do and how we do it, we can create an evidence system that is fast, fair and fit for the future.

The time to act is now.

Feedback on this editorial and proposals for future editorials are welcome.

End Notes

Declarations of interest

All authors are part of the Evidence Synthesis Infrastructure Collaborative (ESIC) Secretariat. KSW is employed by Cochrane, the ESIC grant holder. ZJ is employed by JBI, who develop tools and resources to support evidence‐based healthcare. LB is employed by Instituto Veredas, and has received payment for consultancies for Cochrane (2025, during ESIC) and PAHO/WHO (2021‐2022), payment by Cochrane for ESIC‐related travel (2025), by PACE for ESIC‐related travel (2025), travel to EVIDENCE 2023 (2023), and the Global Evidence Summit (2024), and has received public funding through Instituto Veredas and funding from international organizations such as UNDP and PAHO to carry out evidence‐informed policy‐making work. WM is the CEO of Campbell Collaboration. RF is employed by Cochrane, the ESIC grant holder, and has received travel funding through the ESIC grant to attend ESIC events. JL is an advisor to the Wellcome Trust on the ESIC. Wellcome funded the planning process described in the manuscript and will fund key parts of the infrastructure proposed through the planning process.

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to acknowledge and thank the co‐chairs and members of the five working groups and the planning group, as well as our citizen partners, for their significant contribution to this important work.

This editorial was informed by discussions with all members of the ESIC Secretariat.

This work was supported by the Wellcome Trust [323143/Z/24/Z].

Provenance and peer review

This editorial was commissioned, based on an idea from the author(s), and was not externally peer reviewed.