Overview

The World Health Organization (WHO) has released a new technical guidance on “How to Develop an Evidence-Informed Theory of Change (ToC) for Health”, aimed at helping health professionals and policy-makers integrate evidence into program planning and policy-making.

This guide aims to support efforts to use evidence in a systematic and transparent way for developing and updating ToCs in the health sector. While ToCs are widely used for policy design, implementation and evaluation, there is a lack of structured approaches to using evidence to inform ToCs. This guide is an attempt to fill this gap. . This guide focuses on how to use evidence to develop ToCs.

Target audience

The target audience of this guide is health professionals, policy-makers, researchers, members of civil society, staff in international organizations such as WHO, and other stakeholders interested in promoting effective health policies through the use of ToCs and high-quality evidence. This guide can also be useful for project managers and planning, monitoring and evaluation officers in ministries of health and other ministries, as well as in civil society and nongovernmental organizations.

Why should I use this guide?

ToC frameworks can be applied to a range of objectives, such as designing and planning interventions, implementing interventions, monitoring and evaluation, promoting transparency, policy transfer and scaling up, as well as supporting institutional strategic plans. As such, ToCs are an important resource for evidence-informed health policies. By combining different types of evidence, a more comprehensive and nuanced understanding of the programme or intervention can be attained. The six-stage process for integrating evidence into ToCs presented in this guide offers a practical step-by-step approach to developing and updating ToCs, helping organizations to effectively plan, implement, monitor or evaluate policies, programmes, and interventions in the health sector. This guide aims to improve the capacity for developing and utilizing ToCs, ultimately empowering readers to devise more effective policies and interventions that significantly enhance the quality of people’s lives.

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