Why we exist
A great deal of research is done in and about Sierra Leone, yet too little of it reaches the people deciding how to spend a health budget, design a school programme or respond to the next outbreak.
Why good research goes unused
Evidence is hard to find
Studies, evaluations and reports are scattered across journals, donor archives, ministry shelves and personal drives. Much of the most useful material is unpublished, so it is easily missed and often repeated.
Questions are commissioned before they are clarified
New studies are often commissioned without first checking what is already known, or before the question is framed in a way research can answer.
Researchers work in isolation
It is hard to know who is working on what, which makes it hard to collaborate, bid together or build on each other's work.
Findings stop at the report
Results are delivered but rarely revisited with the people who asked, and seldom updated as new evidence emerges.
Too little of the work is led locally
Research about Sierra Leone is often designed and led elsewhere, and early-career Sierra Leonean researchers lack clear routes into leading roles.
No single institution can close these gaps alone. They need a shared, neutral space that belongs to the whole community.
Maternal and newborn health: where the research is
An evidence gap map lays out a field as a grid: interventions down one side, the outcomes that matter across the top. This one counts the research on maternal and newborn health in Sierra Leone indexed in PubMed, the largest public index of health research.
Most of it asks whether women use services and whether mothers survive. Far less asks about the quality of care women receive: under a dozen records for any intervention. Community health workers and the Free Health Care Initiative have little research on newborn outcomes, and malaria in pregnancy almost none on costs.
Each circle opens the exact PubMed search behind it, so anyone can check the numbers or start a review from them. The Network's next step is a coded map built from Sabi Salone and members' own work, including the unpublished reports PubMed misses.
- 10 records
- 30 records
- 60 records
- Under 10 records: thin evidence
Source: PubMed, searched 18 October 2026. Counts are PubMed records whose title, abstract or subject headings match Sierra Leone, the intervention and the outcome. They are not screened or appraised studies, and one record can appear in several cells.
What the Network does about it
See how the Network turns a policy question into evidence that is used and kept up to date, on what we do.