Barriers to knowledge sharing in Africa

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Talking about African knowledge consumers, François Stepman (FOMETRO) talks about the bias towards content produced in the north and argues that the Africans need to be much more self-confident about their products.

During the Africa-Europe knowledge exchange roundtable, he suggests that Africans are not consuming the information and knowledge produced on the continent for a lack of confidence in their own capacities to produce relevant content.

At the same time, sharing information and knowledge among peers is far from seen as a win-win situation. It often does not happen due to a "survival reflex." For many people in difficult situations, keeping information is still seen as the best way to compete.

Learning from ECDPM's Pelican Initiative

Brussels, 6 June. As part of the peer to peer session on learning networks, Niels Keijzer explained the Pelican Initiative.

In 2002, several organisations took the initiative to stimulate evidence based learning for development and multistakeholder interaction. We decided to use Dgroups as the basic instrument to facilitate these exchanges.

The idea was that you get better learning when you leave the theory behind and that you create interaction between multiple stakeholders.

The group works at three levels:

1. Learning for policy change
2. Learning within and across organisations
3. Learning in the setting of multi-stakeholder alliances and networks

Around 350 members, researchers, evaluators, policy makers, communication specialists, and knowledge management officers participate.

The didactic approach for the network includes:

• One topic at the time, often accompanied by a brief case study, with a clear start and end. At the end there are summaries shared which are seenas clear and useful results of the discussion.
• The topics change every 2 months, after the summaries are sent around.Discussions can be accompanied by announcements of events, publications,etc.
• Two publications are produced to share the discussions with a largeraudience.

Facilitation:

• Encourages people to respond and share
• Provides technical support and moderate the emails
• Very few targeted invitations, most of the growth of the network through the existing members.

A few reflections:

• People share, but do not always compare their experiences with others.
• Organisational learning is a difficult issue to discuss, it seems easier to discuss the 'cuisine' rather than the conditions in your own kitchen.
• Like with many other learning networks, being a voluntary group makes it more difficult to have precise planning and deadlines.
• Like with workshops, much of the learning is invisible, but does happen often, for instance as people also contact each other directly and forward emails to colleagues.
• Capitalizing on what has been learned through sending summaries of the discussion has been an important motivating factor and a clear outcome of the discussion.
• The quality of the exchange can become an obstacle for some people, while at the same time some degree of quality in the posts is crucial for motivating others. This is a dilemma in all other mailing lists.
• Given that each online network differs in aspects as size, purpose, diversity and culture of interactions, lessons learnt from one Dgroup maynot automatically apply to others.

Following the presentation, small groups discussed the issues, especially the question: "How can we move from dissemination to spaces for learning and change?" A few remarks and questions featured during these discussions, included:

• Is an email discussion list still a good idea in 2007, compared to some years ago, given the amount of emails that people that people in development organisations need to deal with?
• In informal learning networks, ensuring the commitment of members is an important issue, given that most people contribute on a voluntary basis;
• In most online learning networks, very little attention goes into monitoring and evaluating the quality and quantity of exchanges, and whether these exchanges lead to learning at an organisational level.

Story by Niels Keijzer, ECDPM

Strategic planning as a knowledge strategy for the IDS Knowlege Services

Catherine Fisher from IDS explains how a strategic planning process of about 9 months, helps to get people from different teams talking and exchanging knowledge. It is hoped that this is a knowledge strategy that will have an influence on the culture in the organisation beyond this process. Watch the 8-minutes video to hear her explain it in her own words..

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Using an intranet to improve knowledge management

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Vathakou Eugenia from European Perspective, a Greek NGO, explains the success of their intranet in enhancing and supporting people's work in her organization. Part of the success is explained by the fact the management enthusiastically support the process, and that there's a lot to gain for the staff - they can use the intranet to document their communication and experiences related to a project. Watch the video!

Nancy White on knowledge strategies for development

Nancy White's session about knowledge stategies to achieve our missions started with Nancy telling a story and inviting others to share stories about knowledge strategies in their organisation. This post will share the story and a framework for looking at strategies to enhance knowledge management in organisations.

Nancy's story: I was talking on skype with Shawn from Anecdote from Australia, what should we do in this session? I'm also in this project to develop a knowledge sharing toolkit. How can we develop a toolkit that makes sense for all people in various cultural context? Shawn's response was that we need knowledge to do our work, to achieve our goals. So how can we better use knowledge to do our work? He'd done interviews in organisations in Australia, and 13 elements show up very often:

1. Abstract and retain the best people

2. Minimize the impact of people leaving

3. Encourage people to call for help

4. Build better relationships

5. Improve ability to search for and find information

6. Improve ability to find relevant expertise

7. Avoid wheel reinvention

8. Find and apply good practices

9. Build skills and know-how

10. Improve innovation

11.Improve how we learn from mistakes and success

12. Better deal with complex situations

13. Enhance collaboration

I then had another skype conversation with another colleague in Australia, blogged about it, and received comments, amongst others from Jay who said it ties with his work on informal learning, ping me when you have time. So everything ends up being connected. What if we explore this from a community of practice perspective?- we see that 1-4 related to the community element, 5-8 to practice and 9-13 to domain. How can I use my network and community to strategically explore and apply our knowledge sharing practices? Will leadership see why we are so passionate about knowledge sharing? Is this knowledge management?

Some feedback from the group on this framework:

Knowledge management has this connotation of structuring and controlling. We need knowledge management for decision-making, to make the right decisions. Is there a life-cycle for knowledge? Some knowledge may be related to a certain technology, whereas other knowledge is eternal, can we separate the two? Implicit and explicit knowledge has to be differentiated too, a painter has a skill, an organisation wants to turn implicit knowledge into explicit knowledge.

Story by Joitske Hulsbosch