Overview and Tools to Promote the Use of Research-Based Evidence in Policy

I will start this presentation with some definitions - some of these definitions are quite difficult but without an understanding of what we are talking about it is quite difficult to figure out what to do. I will then talk a little bit about policy processes because if you understand policy processes better, you can understand how to engage with them. I will say a bit about the different perspectives that different stakeholders have, researchers, policy-makers and NGOs and mention some theory. I will present a framework that we have found quite useful and then tell you a few stories about how we have used some of these tools to help people decide what to do to increase the impact of their programmes.

Firstly, we define research as: "any systematic effort to increase the stock of knowledge," so it is not just about academic research, but also includes learning through things like pilot projects, monitoring and evaluation programmes, and learning through reflection. We define policy as: "a purposive course of action followed by an actor or a set of actors." This means that it concerns not just policy statements or legislation but is also about how ideas get onto policy agendas and how those policies are put into practice (the process of implementation). We talked a little bit about that yesterday and some of the case studies, particularly Dr Tanveer Naim's presentation, was actually as much about policy implementation as policy development. Research can play a role in all of those processes.

This is the definition that I do not want Andrew Barnett to see: we define evidence as: "the available information supporting or otherwise a belief or proposition." Building on that, we define evidence-based policy as: "public policy informed by rigorously established evidence."

You need to understand policy processes if you want to engage with them. We talked a lot about the old linear logical model yesterday and we all know it is not like this; it clearly does not work like that anywhere ever. But as Nicolas Ducote's presentation showed yesterday, there are stages in the policy process that occur. They may not occur neatly in a circular fashion like this, some of them may be very short and some of them may only occur for a micro-second in a policy-makers head (they have an idea and suddenly they have issued a decree and it is established as policy). But there are stages of agenda-setting, policy formulation, decision-making, policy implementation and then ideally some form of monitoring and evaluation which feeds into a review and refinement of those policies. So far so good.

There are lots and lots of organisations involved in these processes, including the Cabinet, Parliament, Ministries, donors, the private sector and civil society. Government ministries clearly have a role in all of these stages. The Cabinet also has a role in all of these, although they are probably more involved with agenda-setting and policy formulation, but they can get involved in all of them. Parliament is involved in all of them. Civil society and donors are also involved in them all, and so all starts to get incredibly complicated. I presented this last week in a workshop in Delhi and somebody pointed out that all of these organisations also try to influence each other. Donors try to influence each other, for example. So it really is jolly difficult.

The next slide is about chronic poverty in Uganda. If you start looking at particular policy contexts and start trying to understand all the different sorts of factors, organisations and issues that are involved in that, and you look at all of those through half squinty eyes (because that is the only way you can look at them), you see that very few of them are research issues at all. Two are these issues are about research: when there is inadequate identification of the problem, or when the scale of the problem is not known. If you want to know more about this particular story, you can read it in the ODI working paper (Kate Bird et al, Fracture Points in Social Policies for Chronic Poverty Reduction, ODI WP242, 2004).

We have three quotes that we quite like to use to illustrate this problem. The first one is by someone called Ed Clay, from a book published in 1994 about agriculture and rural development: "The whole life of policy is a chaos of purposes and accidents. It is not at all a matter of the rational implementation of the so-called decisions through selected strategies." Policy processes are not logical and linear. They are complex, multi-factorial and non-linear. We try not to use the word chaos any more because people get very upset if you start saying that policy processes are chaotic. We were running a workshop in India looking at ground water availability in Madhya Pradesh and we had people from the Ministry of Water, the Ministry of Health, the Ministry of Environment, the Ministry of Public Works and about two other ministries there, and I gave this presentation and they were incensed. They said that their policy processes were not chaotic and that they had extremely good policy processes and research departments within all the ministries. They were doing research to advise the policies, they had teams of bureaucrats developing the policies and they had very good monitoring and evaluation systems for evaluating the impact of their policies which then feed back into their programmes. "Our processes are not chaotic," they said. Then the Minister of Water said to the Minister of Public Works, "but of course yours are wrong." The Minister of Public Works said, "what do you mean ours are wrong?" (They have different policy processes.) Then the Minister of Health said, "ah yes, but of course, you are not paying enough attention to water availability for people." And in five minutes they were arguing with each other about whose policy processes were the best, who was right and wrong, and there we had chaos in the room!

The second quote, which is much more recent, is by someone called Steve Omamo, in a review of policy research on African agriculture (2003): "Most policy research on African agriculture is irrelevant to agricultural and overall economic policy in Africa." So we have policy processes which are complex, multi-factorial and non-linear and we have a lot of research going on that does not actually relate to many of the problems that the policy-makers are looking at at the time.

This third quote comes from a report which Andrew Barnett was involved in, by Martin Surr, looking at the DFID central research department's research strategy. They interviewed a whole load of people in DFID and outside and found that: "Research is more often regarded as the opposite of action rather than a response to ignorance". DFID is the largest single development research donor in the world and they were not thinking hard enough (or at least, not at that time, I think that they are much better now) about what the key issues are that we need to research if we want that research to have a practically useful output. So these are some of the problems.

Then we start to get into other problems. We ran a series of seminars a couple of years ago called Does Evidence Matter? looking at the policy end. This is quite a nice quote from Vincent Cable, Liberal Democrat MP and Shadow Minister of Finance, who used to work for ODI and has done a lot of international development work. He said that policy-makers are, "practically incapable of using research-based evidence," because of what he called the Five S's: speed (they have to make policy quite quickly); superficiality (particularly in opposition as he is, you have a huge brief and really do not have time to go into anything in any depth); spin (and he did not mean it in the pejorative form, he meant that policy-makers cannot change their minds every five minutes, they have to make a decision and then stick to it for a while); secrecy (a lot of policy decisions need to be made in secret); and finally. scientific ignorance (very few policy-makers actually understand the scientific approach, so they are practically incapable of using research-based evidence). There are also a whole load of other factors that influence what they do, including evidence, but also experience and expertise, their own judgement, the amount of resources they have, values, habits and tradition, lobbyists and pressure groups, pragmatics and contingencies. This means that there is a whole range of other factors that influence policy-makers' decisions and evidence is only one of them.

Policy-makers also have very different notions of evidence compared to researchers and we talked a little bit about this yesterday. Researchers like context-free 'scientific' evidence, or irrefutable fact, if you like. They like research that is proven empirically and theoretically driven. They like to have as long as it takes to get it, and they always cover it with caveats and qualifications. If you look at any research report, the number one recommendation at the end is: we need to do more research. Policy-makers, on the other hand, want colloquial evidence. They have a practical problem, they want a solution to that practical problem in that context at that time. Andrew Barnett talked about this in his summing up speech yesterday. Policy-makers do not want to know the best energy source, they want to know the best energy source for their people at that time. They will take anything that seems reasonable because they are usually working very fast. It has to be policy-relevant, timely and with a clear message. This means that policy-makers and researchers are coming at this from completely different angles.

I have talked a little bit about researchers and their perspective and about policy-makers and their perspectives. The other actors (and this includes us really, I guess) are the civil society organisations, NGOs, think-tanks and policy research institutes. How are they using evidence? Particularly in the business of development, how can these organisations use evidence in order to influence policy? We have done quite a lot of research on this and there is a publication on Policy Engagement. There is more detail on all of this in that report.

If CSOs use evidence better, it can have an impact in two ways. Firstly, it can have a direct impact if they use evidence better to develop their own services better, which in turn can have a direct impact on their work. Duncan Green said in his presentation yesterday that Oxfam's main role is in delivering services to the poor. If they could be a bit more systematic in learning about the impact of their work and building that into their programmes, their programmes would be better. The second, increasingly common route is through influencing policy. If CSO organisations are able to influence policy processes, that will improve government policy and services and that will also contribute towards reducing poverty. If CSOs can use evidence better, it gives them increased legitimacy and credibility, and increased effectiveness. Running pilot projects in particular, and being able to produce evidence that a certain way of doing something is effective, gives CSOs access to the policy table. It also gives them a greater impact on outcomes, because they can influence the policy process and improve policy, which will have development impact.

But there are a lot of problems. We did a survey of approximately 150 civil society organisations around the world, looking at their use of research-based evidence to influence policy and there were a number of key obstacles that they came up with. The single biggest obstacle (cited by 70% of respondents) was that policy-makers are not used to drawing on research and evidence. The second was that policy-makers have limited capacity to use and adapt evidence in policy processes. Then we start to get onto issues relating to CSOs, such as: CSOs have limited capacity to use research results; there is insufficient research capacity in the country; CSO staff have too little time to read research. So there are some problems which are external and within the context they are working - if the political context is not conducive to change, it is very difficult - but quite a lot of them are about CSOs' own capacity. We have come up with some ideas about how to deal with that, some of which Nicolas Ducote talked about yesterday.

What can you do in difficult political contexts? We have talked about campaigns, boomerangs and pilot projects and there is a whole load of stuff that you can do to improve the capacity of CSOs. I will not go through that now because it is in the book and I will talk a bit more about it in a minute.

There is a huge amount of theory about why research does not influence policy. Most of this theory comes from research in OECD or developed countries. There is relatively little research in developing countries and they are clearly very different. We already know that the linear model I mentioned earlier is wrong, but there are some things that we think are relevant everywhere and I will talk about a few of these.

The first is the concept of policy narratives that Andrew Barnett talked a lot about in his summing up speech. This is the idea that policy-makers have to carry around very simple stories in their heads because their heads simply are not big enough to explain the world, and those stories in their heads affect the way they receive new evidence. Sometimes those stories are right and sometimes they are completely wrong. The example that I often use is the story of the 'Tragedy of the Commons'. This is the idea that commonly owned resources cannot be adequately managed. That idea, in my view, has blighted development in sub-Saharan Africa, particularly in nomadic pastoral areas. The narrative has been that nomadic pastoralists own the common resource, so it cannot be managed and we must make them settle down, and we must give them rights over grazing blocks, because if they have rights over individual blocks of land they can manage it better. This is complete rubbish, of course. Pastoralists or inshore fisher-folk left to their own devices are actually very good at managing common resources and they have long traditions of systems to make sure that land is not over-grazed or inshore fishing areas are not over-fished. Left to their own devices they are very good at managing things. That policy narrative, that story which was wrong, has really caused more problems than it has solved in sub-Saharan Africa, and those are the stories that you have to try to change if you want to influence policy-makers.

Another theory, 'street-level bureaucrats' by someone called Lipsky, is that the bureaucrats who put the policies into practice have more influence than the policy-makers who set the policies. Bureaucrats can chose to implement policies or not to implement policies; they can basically do whatever they like, even if it is not governed by a policy framework. I was in Indonesia from 1996 to 2001. In 1998 there was a political and economic crisis and President Suharto got kicked out of office. From about 1993, the Indonesians at the very highest level of government had a plan to decentralise government services, but the bureaucrats who were responsible for putting that into practice had no intention of doing so, because that would have removed the capital city-based bureaucrats' ability to take 10% off all development projects. This meant that it was absolutely against their interests to implement decentralisation, so they blocked it. Then Suharto got kicked out, and suddenly they were desperately looking for ways to do this.

Has anyone read this book: The Tipping Point, by Malcolm Gladwell? It is written by an American journalist and it is not really about getting research into policy - it is about how ideas spread - but many of the things he talks about are absolutely germane to this issue. He talks about what he calls the 'power of context' - how an idea can go in completely different ways in different contexts. He talks about the importance of different sorts of individuals: he talks about mavens, people who hoover up information, process it and provide simple stories to people who do not have the time; he talks about networkers, people who are very good at connecting with other people; and he talks about salesmen, people who are very good at selling ideas. In all policy processes, you tend to be able to see these kinds of people doing those kinds of jobs. He also talks about what he calls the 'stickiness' factor of information. Why is it that we remember some things and we forget other things?

Gladwell talks about many of the things in the policy process that we need to be aware of and they are illustrated throughout the book with wonderful stories of bizarre research experiments in (usually American) universities. There is one that I will tell you about. They wanted to find out what made people good people, so it was called the Good Samaritan Factor. They sent students all over the place on all sorts of errands, taking notices down or putting them up, collecting or returning books, doing this and that. They sent them off all over the campus and they arranged that the students would go past somebody who looked as if had fallen off his bike and was lying on the ground clutching his head and groaning and clearly in need of help. Then they tracked who stopped and who did not stop and then they did fantastically complex multiple regression analysis of all the different criteria that might be relevant. They looked at age, gender, race, nationality, the course that the students were studying and a whole range of factors, to see whether there was anything that actually correlated with whether a student stopped or not. The only factor that correlated highly with whether or not they stopped was whether they had time. If they had been given a time by which they had to complete their task, they did not stop; if they were told to do something at some point over the next day or so, they stopped. So it is the context that influences people's behaviour. The book is full of wonderful stories like that.

We have seen that this is very complicated. There are many factors that influence policy processes. The policy process is not linear and it is not logical. So how on earth can we try to do what we are doing better? What we have tried to think about is developing some simple ways to help people to get a better understanding of the context that they are working in, so that they can make better decisions about what to do. We have grouped all these factors into four main groups. One set of factors we call 'external influences' and these are socio-economic and cultural influences from outside the context that you are working in. If you are working in a particular country, these will include the donor policies that affect what happens in a country. If you are in a sub-Saharan African country, where somewhere between 20% and 40% of government revenue comes from external aid, you are hugely influenced by what the aid donors want to do. Even if you want to do research, you can only research what they are prepared to pay you to research. If you are in a country like India, which gets only 0.2% of its revenue from donors, the donors are much less influential. The point is that there are factors outside the context you are working in that affect what happens in that context. This is also the same within an organisation. If you are working within a particular organisation in a country, trying to work out how you can work better, you are affected by the context you are working in, so the national legislation affecting NGO activity, for example, will be a serious factor that you need to take into account when you are trying to develop your programmes.

Then there are factors in what we call the 'political context'. These are the political and economic structures and processes in a country, including the policy narratives that policy-makers carry around in their heads, as well as whether policy-makers are interested in change or not and whether there is a policy window.

There are also a lot of factors about the evidence itself, including credibility, the degree to which the evidence challenges existing ideas, the message being conveyed, and how it is packaged. There is also a whole set of factors that we call 'links', relating to how evidence gets into the policy process and we have talked about these.

All this is, if you like, is a list of questions. If you can find answers to all these questions covering the whole context then you will be in a better position to decide what to do. We have used this framework or list of questions to analyse a number of policy processes that resulted in an indisputable policy change. For example, in 1999 the World Bank and the IMF adopted Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs) as a fundamental instrument for the second Highly-Indebted Poorly Performing Countries initiative (HIPC II) on debt-relief, and then subsequently for concessional lending to developing countries. Suddenly every country had to produce a PRSP. Where did that change come from? We tracked back from that policy change to try to understand who made what decision when, and what factors influenced them at that time. We have done this with a number of different stories.

I will tell you one of these stories, which is about animal healthcare in Kenya. This is a long and complicated story but basically, in the 1970s, it was illegal for anybody except a trained vet to treat sick animals in Kenya. That is patently absurd in a country where many of the animals are hundreds of kilometres away from a trained vet. In the mid-1980s, there were a whole range of action research projects looking at new forms of animal healthcare delivery, where local farmers or livestock keepers were trained to provide the service, which they then charged for. It was a sort of paravet approach, or decentralised approach, and it spread like wildfire across the whole of northern Kenya. And yet, in 2006, the law has still not changed.

Why is it still illegal for this approach to animal healthcare, which has spread so rapidly across the region? On the one hand, this can be regarded as a policy failure. Why have the policy-makers not responded to this evidence? You can look at the political context factors, which are to do with structural adjustment factors (I will not go into the detail). They set up vets all over the country and they actually stopped untrained people based in the rural areas from providing services, through the use of so-called 'vet scouts'. They decided that they wanted to professionalise the service and they set up vets, vet schools and veterinary offices dotted around the country. Then structural adjustment came along and suddenly they had no money to do anything, so all these trained vets were there, but they could not move and they could not get out and do any work. These projects started to happen and then the concept of privatisation came along, so that vets could make money if they became private vets, rather than government vets.

In the late 1980s, the Director of Veterinary Services changed. Before that happened, these projects had spread across the whole of northern Kenya and were starting to attract a lot of interest. The Director of Veterinary Services knew that and thought maybe it was quite a good idea as a way to provide veterinary services in this context. He asked us to go and meet him to talk about this approach and then suddenly, the day before we were due to meet, the meeting was cancelled. We rang up to find out why and were told that he was busy and the meeting was postponed. It was repeatedly postponed and we never managed to meet him. Then about four months later, he was replaced and new director of veterinary services came in. The new director of veterinary services had never worked as a vet. He came out of vet school and he was obsessed with the veterinary ethical principle that only trained vets should treat sick animals and that nobody else could know enough to treat them properly. The result was that this idea was just starting to gain acceptance and might have been adopted, but suddenly, because the individual in the post changed, the whole context changed and disintegrated.

So you can track the political processes. You can also look at how research feeds into this process. In most of these stories, you find that research does not actually contribute very much and the only substantive academic research, this thing called the Hubl study, was carried out very late in the day. Interestingly, you can also track how the ideas spread around between the different people: between the knowledge producers, the researchers and the policy-makers. A guy called Dr Kajume got a letter one day from some of his vets in northern Kenya who said that they had been invited to a workshop to look at paravet projects. They asked whether they could attend. Dr Kajume said that he did not know anything about this and rang up the new Director of Veterinary Services, Dr Wamokoya to ask whether they could go. Dr Wamokoya said that they could not go because it was completely illegal, and that Dr Kajume must go there and shut it down. So off he went to this NGO workshop in Northern Kenya to shut the programme down. At the workshop, he took everyone out into the field and spent time talking to livestock people, to animal health people and to the paravets actually working on this programme, and he thought that this was actually quite a good way of providing a service in a context where it was otherwise impossible to do so. He changed overnight from being the man who was sent to close it all down, to being the person who subsequently went back to the Director of Veterinary Services to tell him the issue needed to be looked at seriously, to see whether it was possible to review the government's policies. He started a whole series of multi-stakeholder workshops that produced new policies, but these have still not been approved or passed, and that is another story which we do not have time for.

The point is that you can track how these things happen. If you want to use the RAPID framework as a research framework, we would be very interested to hear how you get on. We think that it is also quite a good practical framework, because it actually maps onto real life events. The framework looks at: the political context, including politics and policy-making; evidence, including research, learning and thinking; links, including media, advocacy and networking. It is fairly obvious really, but even the overlaps between the three different spheres map onto real life things. For example, the interface between evidence and politics and policy-making is what is known as policy analysis. We heard Dylan Winder talking yesterday about how DFID's policy division had been turned into a think-tank and they are really doing policy analysis, looking at existing knowledge from particular policy angles. A second interface is scientific information exchange, and another is in the area of campaigning and lobbying. We have done lots of case studies and, as Andrew Barnett was saying yesterday in relation to the importance of engagement, we have found that it is in situations where researchers work very closely throughout the whole process with policy-makers and the other stakeholders that there is a greater chance of having an influence on policy. This means that you need to be working in the middle of this. It is no good doing ivory tower research in a university, publishing a report and assuming that somebody will pick it up and work on it. These are the key things that you need to think about if you want to improve the impact of your research on policy. As Andrew Barnett said yesterday, not all research needs to be policy relevant; there is still a huge need for blue sky research, but if you want your work to have an influence on policy, spending a bit more time thinking about these factors can help you to decide what to do.

If you want to influence people, you need to be much more than a researcher. You need to be a very good story teller. You need to be able to put your research results into a convincing story. You need to be a good networker and a good engineer, and you need to have the evidence ready so that when the policy window opens you can use it. You also need to be a bit of a Rasputin, a bit of a political fixer, knowing who the movers and shakers are and who you need to influence.

There are a lot of tools out there to help you to do this. These tools have been developed from all sorts of disciplines. There are tools for understanding the political context from political science, tools about communications and tools about policy influence, lobbying and advocacy, to help you to do all of these things. What we have started to do in RAPID is to pull these together into various toolkits. If you come to the Mapping Political Contexts workshops, you will get one of these toolkits. I am not going to tell you about many of these tools now because that is what we will do in the workshops, but I will give you a few examples of where they have been used.

The groundwater in India project, which I was talking about earlier on, was a research project looking at groundwater availability in Madhya Pradesh. It is vanishing very fast so that poor farmers can no longer get water out of the ground. The policy-makers were thinking that the problem was deforestation but what these researchers discovered was that it had nothing to do with deforestation. It was actually down to the fact that electricity was subsidised and rich farmers could invest in electrical pumps so that they were pumping the water out to put onto their crops and then selling the irrigated crops in the cities. The policy narrative was wrong and the policy-makers had the wrong story in their heads, so the challenge was how to change that story. What they realised was that there was no need to do any more research. They needed to invest all of their energies in communication and engagement with policy-makers, so that is what they did. They have actually been very successful and have managed to get one of the State Ministers to support their approach. So that is one story.

Another story concerns the small and medium scale enterprise policy project (SMEPOL Project) in Egypt where, again, a research project thinking about increasing their impact on policy used some of these tools and developed an action plan and again, much more of the work focused on communication and engagement than on research.

You can even use these tools to understand how policy processes work within an organisation; for example, we ran a workshop in DFID looking at policy processes within DFID. How do ideas spread? Andrew Barnett also talked about this in his summing up presentation yesterday, and we looked at some of the policy ideas that had evolved in DFID over the last five years or so. We got people to identify the factors that influenced why some ideas succeeded and some did not succeed and we used participatory pair-wise ranking, which was quite fun. What we discovered was that in DFID, policy ideas succeed if they are intellectually coherent (DFID is quite an intellectual agency) and if they have a strong champion within DFID (preferably a strong champion with a budget) to progress this idea. Documents were not as important as those two factors.

I am going to look at one or two tools now. You may remember that, at the beginning, I talked about the fact that capacity issues were amongst the main constraints and that there are quite a lot of tools out there to help organisations with capacity issues. Here is a book called Managing Think Tanks. It talks about all the different capacities an organisation needs if it is to succeed. I think that what emerged during the discussions yesterday was the fact that the challenge is often about how to learn systematically from different sorts of evidence. We have done quite a lot of work on learning and knowledge management. The trick is to learn throughout the process, which means learning before, during and after. There are some tools to help with this: 'peer assist', 'reflective inquiry', and 'after-action review'. There are tools to help collaborate with other stakeholders, such as 'e-discussions' and 'shared workspaces'. We talked a bit about managing information yesterday. Intelligent search engines are also very important, as are incentives. Having the right incentives within an organisation for people to spend time learning and sharing their own experiences with each other makes a big difference, and we have a toolkit about that as well.

All of the toolkits are available on our website (see Toolkits or Publications).

Looking at the policy-making side, there are a number of approaches to increasing policy-makers' ability to use research. In the UK, there are approaches to increase the demand for evidence, by requiring policy-makers to publish the evidence-base for a particular policy and providing open access to information. These are very important principles and processes which force policy-makers to be more evidence-based in their policy-making. There are a number of tools and approaches to help them to use evidence better, one of which is to co-locate policy-makers and internal analysts. Dr Tanveer Naim talked yesterday about putting policy analysts in with the bureaucrats as an explicit part of their strategy in Pakistan.

UK policy-makers have a whole range of tools, all of which are in this toolkit so I will not talk about all of them now. I will just talk very briefly about a couple. Regulatory impact assessments and improving standards in qualitative research are approaches designed to force people to use evidence. This means that if a policy-maker wants to introduce a new policy in the UK, they have to do a regulatory impact assessment beforehand. The assessment looks at the evidence they have concerning the need for the policy change, the likely impact of the policy and also the results of the consultation process. These are published, so it forces policy-makers to be more evidence-based in their policy-making. Another tool focuses on how policy-makers can better use the results of qualitative research because policy-makers are not very good at that. There are 18 questions that people have to go through, designed to encourage people to explore the research thoroughly and get a better understanding from it.

So there are tools for policy-makers, there are tools for researchers and there are tools for civil society organisations to help them to do all of this.

In terms of conclusions, whatever side of this game you are on - whether you are a researcher, a policy-maker or a civil society organisation or an NGO - wherever you are, if you want to increase the use of research in policy, you need to have what we call 'clarity of intent'. You need to have decided very clearly and set up explicitly how you want to use the results of your research to influence policy. You need to be strategic about that. Once you have done that, you need a systematic approach and you need to ensure that you have the right incentives in the organisation. In ODI, for example, we have a huge problem to the extent that we are contract driven, because this means that we can only do work that we are paid by someone to do. It is very difficult to have a coherent strategy when you have to find people to pay for every single bit of work that you do. You need to establish the right systems and you need to spend more. We discussed yesterday that IDRC spend 40% of their budget on this. You need to 'engage, engage, engage', with all stakeholders, and you need to produce the right products for the right people at the right time.

So that is an introduction to a more systematic approach to doing all this stuff. If you want more information, it is all available on the RAPID website.