The Evidence Synthesis Infrastructure Collaborative (ESIC) is a ‘community of communities’ committed to a collective impact approach to learning from others – using evidence synthesis – to improve lives. Our communities range from 45 UN entities (through the Global SDG Synthesis Coalition) and the world’s largest producers of evidence synthesis (e.g., Cochrane, Campbell and JBI working collaboratively as Building a Global Evidence-Synthesis Community) to key networks of evidence intermediaries (including science advisors and evidence-support units) and 35+ funders (research, philanthropic, government, and international assistance).

Evidence synthesis gives us rigour in learning from scientific studies and UN/MDB evaluations; AI gives us speed. We believe that AI-enabled living evidence syntheses are the way to deliver localized, actionable insights with both rigour and speed.

We are operationalizing ESIC’s commitment to shifting power to the Global South and locating equity at the heart of each step in its development. While we will work across all sectors and regions, our initial focus is on 11 sectors and two regions.

We have mobilized US$126 million in the past year. The ESIC funders interest group (FIG) executive has made five foundational investments and put in place key transitional arrangements.

The five foundational investments include:

1. sectoral hubs to catalyze radically more timely, relevant and affordable evidence synthesis to support SDG achievement
2. regional hubs to support impacts at the country level, often amplified through UN Country Teams
3. an open data system to streamline how we share and reuse synthesis data
4. a living inventory of AI-enabled digital evidence synthesis tools to support choice and reporting
5. an agile monitoring, evaluation and learning infrastructure.

These investments can be considered ESIC’s proposed strategy for its first six to 12 months. 

The transitional arrangements include:

1. Steering group, which helps govern for collective impact and which is comprised of six leaders, with one from each of five regions and one from the multilateral system, and with a balance in gender and career stage and across forms of evidence and interest-holder categories
2. Communities council, which is comprised of leaders of groups with ‘skin in the game’ – key interest-holder representatives and newly named ESIC infrastructure leaders – who help us ‘strategically coordinate for collective impact’
3. Funder executive, which supports strategic funding for collective impact and which is comprised of representatives from the five funders that have made large (new or recent) funding commitments that are aligned to ESIC, including the Wellcome Trust and UK Research and Innovation (as co-chairs) and the Health Research Board (Ireland), Jacobs Foundation (Switzerland), and National Institute for Health Research (UK).