Looking back onto eight years of project implementation and a composite partnership under the West Africa Water Initiative (WAWI) banner brought to notice that the facilitating of a network from Accra to Zinder offers great opportunities, but requires a solid communication and knowledge management approach.
Published on: 07/04/2011
Looking back onto eight years of project implementation and a composite partnership under the West Africa Water Initiative (WAWI) banner brought to notice that the facilitating of a network from Accra to Zinder offers great opportunities, but requires a solid communication and knowledge management approach.
In a fact-finding mission, subcontracted by ARD (WAWI grant manager for USAid) and organised by IRC International Water and Sanitation Centre, a team visited and interviewed implementing partners on the ground in Ghana, Mali and Niger to document their experiences within WAWI.
The aim of these missions was literally to find facts, to collect documentation and figure out what lessons have been learned. There is no central WAWI documentation centre (any longer). It seemed logical and necessary to contact, visit and interview WAWI partners. A consultant from TREND (Accra, Ghana) visited Anglophone WAWI partners in Ghana and consultants from CREPA Siège and CREPA Burkina Faso (Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso) visited the Francophone WAWI partners in Mali and Niger. A number of documents were retrieved from the web and its archives.
These fact-finding missions have provided invaluable insights. They have been incorporated in this document which formulates a feasible and practical strategy on knowledge management and communication for WAWI and its successor projects in West Africa. The starting point is the local reality, the two languages French and English, the limited access to information and information technology and, crucially, the oral culture that prevails in the region and impacts processes of passing on knowledge.
At the heart of communication (and knowledge management) lie the development of information and the sharing of that information with others to add insights about it – turning information into knowledge. Knowledge management takes the matters further to a) ensure information is well organised and accessible (i.e. information management), b) optimise the frequency and richness of dialogues (through various channels) that take place to solve current / upcoming issues and come up with new solutions (i.e. social learning and innovation) and c) keep a learning attitude at various levels to ensure continuous improve these information and knowledge processes.
In West Africa, these basic assumptions are checked by a predominantly verbal culture which favours dialogues but hampers their passage to the written format, a necessary precondition to a wide dissemination that is time and place independent. Organising conversations, documenting these conversations and managing the information that derives from them in favour of specific groups are prerequisites to spreading WAWI experiences and helping WAWI become increasingly relevant in the region and in the global WASH arena.
The present knowledge management and communication strategy proposes a practical approach to address the challenges and opportunities missed in WAWI. It suggests a number of activities to capture and manage information, enrich it through conversations, increase the recognition of WAWI and ensure that its members are supporting it adequately. At the same time, the strategy proposes to support the WAWI network by lowering the threshold to share knowledge with one another and beyond WAWI itself.
Ultimately, the present strategy (full document in a separate file) hopes to help WAWI create a community to connect people from various countries and communities, expressing that people are at the very heart if this strategy is to succeed.
