We are pleased to inform that UN DESA 'Africa i-Parliaments Action Plan' has agreed with the 'East Africa Legislative Assembly' to work together and organise a Regional Workshop "Drafting 'Evidence-based Legislation': the case of the health sector in the EAC. The workshop has been designed and will be carried out by those organizations and by ICLAD (International Consortium for Law and Development; www.iclad-law.org) a not-for-profit non-governmental organization.

The workshop will have  the following purposes:

• To engage East African Community (EAC) legislative drafters and EAC health experts, and others, in a self-reliant learning process of drafting and assessing evidence-based legislation, with specific reference to the health sector in EAC.
• To empower participants to draft bills justified by relevant facts, logically organized in research reports.  To do that, they will learn how to translate policy into effectively implemented laws by using institutionalist legislative theory and methodology ('ILTAM'), as well as essential drafting techniques.

In recent years, a movement has arisen for 'evidence-based legislation', an approach that proposes to make sure that the drafting of bills is based on research reports that provide the facts and present them in logically organized ways so as to better understand the issues that need to be dealt with and the legislative options that may be available to address them.

The workshop aims to expose participants to the Legislative Theory and Methodology (ILTAM) providing drafters and experts with expertise and methodologies to:

• identify evidence relevant to predicting the behaviours that a new law will induce; and
• draft legislation that will work.