Lessons Learned from Co-Organizing the Africa Evidence Summit, a Large, Free Conference

On July 23-24, 2026, the Center for Effective Global Action (CEGA) and the Network of Impact Evaluation Researchers in Africa (NIERA), in partnership with the Policy Studies Institute (PSI), and Policy Innovation Research Center (PIRC) co-hosted the 14th annual Africa Evidence Summit in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia convening nearly 500 decision-makers, practitioners, researchers and students.

Five years ago, I played a small role supporting the Africa Evidence Summit in Kigali, Rwanda — organizing our first poster session and managing a Bursary Fund competition to support the attendance of a select group of African scholars. That year, the team faced an avalanche of operational challenges: the lead organizer came down with COVID-19 the day before the event and had to quarantine; we had no poster stands, so posters taped to outside walls blew away; we realized only morning-of that there was no AV support or mic runners for parallel sessions; the list goes on. Between that Summit in 2022 and the 14th Africa Evidence Summit this past month in Addis Ababa, I’ve learned that running a free, large-scale, and high-quality academic conference in Sub-Saharan Africa hinges on cohesion and equity, from the smallest logistical details to the event’s core principles.

Each year, our ambitions for the event grow, but our core objectives remain constant:

• Center and elevate the voices of African scholars
• Share new research findings with decision-makers
• Seed new collaborations and catalyze healthy intellectual discourse
• Generate insights to advance evidence-informed policymaking and strategies for making the ecosystem more inclusive

After co-hosting our most recent Summit in Ethiopia with the Network of Impact Evaluation Researchers in Africa (NIERA) and our local partners, the Policy Studies Institute (PSI) and the Policy Innovation Research Centre (PIRC), I’m excited to share personal reflections and learnings from five years of organizing this convening.

Lesson 1: Your agenda reflects your values

What makes the Africa Evidence Summit unique (and challenging to run) is having parallel goals of capacity strengthening and evidence dissemination. These objectives can sometimes be in competition because we aim to showcase early career scholars while also featuring exceptional research. 

On top of this, the Summit has no registration fee, which drives huge demand to attend — a demand which exists because there remains a dearth of free development economics events hosted in Sub-Saharan Africa. Most development economics conferences are held in high-income countries and African scholars face steep structural barriers to participation: travel costs, steep registration fees, and visa constraints chief among them. By co-hosting the Summit in East Africa and keeping it free, we provide an accessible platform that fills a real gap: giving African scholars a chance to meaningfully expand their networks, present and receive feedback on their research, and engage with the frontier of scholarly work. 

In parallel, we purposefully build the event agenda to elevate important, yet underrepresented voices in development economics; get evidence end-users and key decision-makers in the room; and center them in the program. In this way, designing the agenda represented a series of choices to challenge the status quo. 

First, starting two years ago, we opened a public call for speakers instead of relying solely on direct invitations to our faculty, fellow, and partner networks. This shift has not been easy: we received nearly 300 applications for 12 slots this past year requiring strict selection criteria, tough judgment calls, and a lot of time. 

To meet the overwhelming demand, we also created parallel sessions and functional tracks to enable researchers at different stages to showcase their work. We were intentional in ensuring that 90% of poster presenters and almost 75% of speakers were African scholars. Ultimately, our agenda, co-created with our partners, consisted of seven panel discussions, nine research sessions on a diversity of topical sectors; two technical workshops; and poster sessions. 

This breadth matters. For example, Ethiopia’s Planning and Development Minister Fitsum Assefa highlighted efforts to advance evidence-based policymaking through collaboration with research institutions and major data-generation initiatives, such as the national census and public surveys. Panel highlights included Adia Umulisa of Rwanda’s Ministry of Education underscoring the importance of building trust with governments early to translate research into policy. Collins Munyendo from CEGA’s Data Privacy Lab shared how CEGA is thinking about this in-practice, using AI to synthesize evidence from academic research to make findings more accessible for policymakers, alongside prioritizing privacy and responsible data use. Taken together, these sessions surfaced complimentary perspectives and showcased the power of convening local researchers, government officials, practitioners and technologists — all of whom are wrestling with similar questions from different vantage points.

Lesson 2: Local partnership is paramount

In the six months leading up to this year’s Summit, CEGA met biweekly with our co-organizing partners to operationalize a shared vision. In practice, this meant our local partners had full transparency into CEGA’s event budget, and in turn, managed all finances and logistics on the ground: negotiating with local vendors, coordinating with the Ministry of Tourism to secure visa letters, and recruiting media coverage. We are especially grateful to our CEGA Fellows, Alebel Bayrau, Abebe Ambachew, Shibiru Ayalew, and Solomon Walelign who previously spent a semester at UC Berkeley and served as the connective tissue between CEGA and extensive in-country coordination. 

Our biweekly rhythm with PSI, PIRC, and NIERA ensured that nothing fell through the cracks, and simultaneously built collective trust. By the time we hit an inevitable last-minute snag — for example, needing to reprint agendas after a last-minute (and very welcome) confirmation from a high-level policymaker — we felt comfortable leaning on each other. We sat together at the printer for many (many) hours, were in constant communication often very late into the night, and celebrated how it all worked out over injera and dancing.

The shift to a consistent, transparent biweekly rhythm is one of the clearest reasons this year’s Summit ran as smoothly as it did. Truly, the relationship with your local partner is the critical foundation that supports everything else. 

Lesson 3: Invest in institutional knowledge

Successfully organizing a large, two-day event every year requires an enormous amount of institutional knowledge. Previously, many important decision-points were conveyed over email and lost in shuffle and turnover. So a few years ago, we decided to centralize documentation by creating year-over-year process documents anchored by function. There’s one for outreach, which details emails to sponsors, speakers, poster presenters, volunteers, and CEGA fellows. There’s another for finance: when and how to establish contract agreements with vendors and contingency plans for payments in foreign countries. There’s also a robust post-event debrief document to capture key learnings — from the organizers themselves and from our participant feedback survey — to ensure that we build on wins and course-correct mistakes. Each of these documents has saved us countless hours when planning the following year’s event. 

For key partners, we now create a LinkTree to serve as a standardized landing page for all event information, including a handbook for speakers to guide them through presentation expectations, with video and slide deck examples from past successful speakers. We also have a formalized sponsorship-expectation guide so that organizations supporting the Summit know how best to prepare.

For the wider audience: we update our event webpage with a livestream on YouTube and slide decks from key talks, enabling those who cannot attend in person to engage with the program.

My key learning: knowledge sharing not only applies to the research being presented, but to the behind-the-scenes organizers and participants too.

Last Reflections

Growing from 70 attendees in 2017 to nearly 500 this year, the Africa Evidence Summit represents a space where a diversity of global development actors from a diversity of countries across career trajectors are able to share, learn and engage. A first-time presenter can receive feedback that shapes their next paper, a policymaker and a researcher can end up at the same lunch table, and key partnerships solidify. To facilitate these outcomes, CEGA and our organizing partners aim to be intentional about the event’s agenda, representation, logistics and everything in between. As we look ahead to our 15th annual event next year, we will keep these lessons in mind, and continue to stretch ourselves to ensure that African scholarship drives decision-making.

Ideas to share?

Five years in and I continue to be humbled by this event. Each year, we have increasing demand, which makes registration hectic, to say the least! Registration serves as the first touchpoint and opportunity to make a connection with participants, and I would very much like our process to run smoother.

Have you been to a large conference that has done registration efficiently? Please send me an email!