Reflecting on Agknowledge Africa Knowledge Share Fair #sfaddis

I am still all jazzed up and energized by the great Addis Share Fair experience. So, what was so special about this event?

An African event for Africans
Well, for one thing, it was an African event, organized primarily by African for Africans. I do not have the list of participants handy, but I think I am correct to say that 90% of the participants came from Africa! We did a spectogram in the water pathway - where we organized ourselves between North and South pole. It was amazing to see that only 3 people were from the North and the rest came from the South!!

Fully immersed in Ethiopian culture
In true spirit of knowledge sharing, the organizers - the incredible ILRI team - did a remarkable job of weaving in the local culture in almost every aspect of the Share Fair. Starting with the wonderful Bunna ladies serving us coffee, to the Ethiopian horn blower - our official time keeper - to creating an Ethiopian market place where participants spent an entire afternoon learning and sharing with each other and last but not least the exquisite Ethiopian food.

Share Fair footprint
Often as KM practitioners we are asked to show the impact of our work. The Addis Share Fair provided numerous opportunities to see the impact and footprint of our collective knowledge management and knowledge sharing efforts.

For example, no matter which session you attended, be it a pathway or a focus group, we saw quite a number of highly engaged and passionate African colleagues facilitating the different sessions using different knowledge sharing methods. We also had a relatively big and vibrant social reporting team. What was wonderful was how participants immediately embraced and put to practice what they learnt on day zero.

We started off with almost no audio coverage. Thanks to Day Zero "I know how day", we ended up having a great podcasting site on Podomatic, a flourishing video section, an equally flourishing blog, many participants contributed to the photo gallery, we had an extraordinary buzz on Twitter.

Inspiring keynote address
Unlike other events that have a rigid and stiff opening session - with lots of rhetoric and formal speeches - the opening session for Addis Share Fair ended up being pretty informal and genuine. All those who took the floor talked about how their respective organizations are engaged with and have embedded knowledge sharing in their core business.

Owen Barder - a charismatic and compelling speaker - delivered an inspiring speech on the importance of knowledge for development. Listening to him talk about importance of concentrating on making knowledge in development more evolutionary and the fact that perhaps we do not really need authoritative answers but rather diversity in answers and as he said "We need diversity, engagement and feedback process", made me realize that if had more people like Owen who can so eloquently offer different perspectives, people who think and conceptualize out of the box, people who bring something new to the table, perhaps we would make huge leaps in achieving both our development and knowledge goals.

Owen is perhaps one of the kind, but at least his refreshing and unconventional talk inspired many of us to the point that we are still talking about it and sharing the gems with colleagues. So who knows, maybe as a result of his talk, we will start a change process within our respective organizations and a year from now, we can claim that this too is a result and footprint of the Agknowledge Africa Share Fair!

Learning pathways and focus groups

In retrospect, the idea of the learning pathways was quite a happenstance. In June, Peter was passing through Rome and our PROCASUR colleague Ariel also happened to be in town. In our conversations with Peter, we suggested that he meet Ariel and pick his brain... and so the idea of "learning pathways" was born from this short but intense brainstorming session.

On the last day of the fair, we heard a short summary of the learning and sharing that happened in the various learning pathways. While all the participants seemed to have enjoyed the experience and learnt from each other, perhaps we could have got more mileage from this new learning and sharing paradigm by providing a space for the pathways to intersect. For example, we could have organized a joint session between the land, water and livestock pathways. This would have allowed participants to exchange and cross fertilize ideas and would have provided the space to get to know more about each others' work, aspirations and challenges - and who knows perhaps we would have achieved different outcomes!

Another innovation in this share fair where the numerous focus groups which provided an opportunity to discuss and share experiences on a wide variety of topics - ranging from reporting on agriculture, to use of mobile telephony, the future of telecentres, process of write shops, how to make sure content travels, challenges and opportunities of working with researchers, and the hot topic of how to engage with young people and what is that we need to do to make living in rural areas enticing!

I think we should definitely replicate the focus groups at future share fairs and if we have hot topics such as youth, we should try and see how to have repeat sessions or even better, how we can have multiple sessions building on each other.

Lessons learnt
Talking of lessons learnt, at the penultimate session of the Share Fair, we finally had the pleasure of hearing the voices of farmers - the very people that we serve. The farmers were indeed the "missing link"  in the Share Fair. Perhaps the biggest lesson learnt for future share fairs is to make sure that we have adequate representation from all the people who we work with and serve - this means smallholder farmers, producers but also decision makers.

When we talk about decision makers, I do not necessarily mean exclusively policy makers - that is ministers of agriculture or finance - but also our organizational decision makers. I believe senior colleagues would have benefited from experiencing the buzz and energy of the Share Fair. They undoubtedly would have learnt from the participants and it goes without saying that they would have had a lot to offer. So perhaps for next time, collectively we should make sure that these events make it to their busy agendas and they take the time to participate in similar events.

As mentioned above, it was really great to see our African colleagues facilitating the various sessions. What we need to do now, is to make a concerted effort to train and build the skills of a new cadre of African facilitators, so that at the next share fair we see new African colleagues taking the lead in training participants and facilitating many more sessions.

Building on this extraordinary experience, we should try and organize more regional events organized by the region for the region and involve much more stakeholders both at grassroots and decision making levels.

What next?
Almost a week after the share fair, I am still living off its energy - and believe me this is really extraordinary! I think I can safely say that as a result of this event, we all managed to expand and extend our networks. We met new colleagues and for sure we'll be calling on each other as and when needed.

So when will be coming back together in another Share Fair? We're all working towards orchestrating a global knowledge share fair late 2011. In the meantime, hopefully there will be more  regional and why not more focused thematic share fairs.

Last but not least, I hope that the #sfaddis blogposts have managed to transmit the spirit of learning and sharing, openness, fun and satisfaction of building colleagues capacity to take on new roles and become agents of change.

All good things come to an end: Chronicle of last day at Agknowledge Africa Share Fair #sfaddis

I am now sitting at the penultimate session of the Agknowledge Africa Knowledge Share Fair - Focus on Farmers. I am sorry the event is coming to an end. The purpose of this share fair was to share and learn and I believe that we've achieved this goal. I hope that the fair has left a footprint in the hearts, minds and souls of the participants. 


Earlier in the day I attended the radio and telecentre focus groups. The radio session was a great example of the impact of the Share Fair. The room was packed with participants who before the share fair did not know anything about podcasting, podcasting/audio software and hardware. Three days later here they were showing us the audio files they have created, sharing tips on how to conduct an effective interview and discuss challenges of interviewing with the help of an interpreter and avoiding being lost in translation.

We closed the radio session with one of the participants saying: "YES WE CAN. I now know HOW TO."  That was such a wonderful way of finishing the session and showed the footprint of the share fair.

Often we are asked "what has been the impact of events such as share fair". The impact of these events are transformative. They change the way people work. They open your mind and remove the cobwebs in your mind and as a result you inevitably change behaviour which is transformative.

The telecentre session discussed issues of sustainabililty and how to generate local content. I think we came out of the session agreeing that we should rebapitze telecentres to "Knowledge hubs"  or "Service centres". 

On issue of sustainability, Paul offered some pragmatic advice on how to create a sustainable service centre, namely make sure:

• your services are competitive
• have a number of subsidized services so that you can keep your competitive edge
• provide a number of free services - especially services that really add value and improve the livelihoods of the smallholder producers, smallholder farmers and rural people

During the session participants mentioned that farmers are willing to pay for information and knowledge which is relevant to them. Personally, I have a problem with that, as we should consider knowledge is public global good and should be made available free of charge. But I stand to be corrected.

The group talked about how in Africa the village experts do not recognize themselves as experts and this is one of the reasons why local knowledge is  not documented and shared. We talked about how Africans should exploit and make sure to systematically use their oral culture, their tradition of drama and songs to share local content.

One of the best reflections of this session was the fact that often indigenous knowledge is not valued and challenged by experts/researchers. This made me reflect that  it seems to be human nature to underestimate one's own knowledge, perhaps this is why sharing tacit knowledge is a challenge?

We just finished the small group reflection and learning session and have successfully summarized the footprint and impact of this remarkable event in a tweet. Stay tuned and we'll be tweeting them live shortly. Follow #sfaddis

Land pathway getting on their Learning route!

By Willem Bettink

This second day has been very dense with discussion and sharing of experiences that has moved the land pathway onto developing its initial thoughts for the learning route(s). The morning session opened by presenting a first digestion of thoughts based on the country experiences presented yesterday. The experiences with various local land use planning shared the concern of the risk to exclude some particular groups of the local population from access to land in particular pastoralists, and very poor women.

An innovative approach by the SWADE-project in Swaziland enabled the integration of local land use planning into local development planning involving the communities throughout the process. This led Sharefair participants in the land pathway to consider if they should address the local land issues in the broader context of a sustainable livelihoods plan instead of as a stand alone issue.

These reflections fitted well with the presentation of the scoping paper¹ prepared by Fiona Flintan, which provides an overview of the benefits and challenges of customary land tenure systems. These include aspects such as: a focus on groups versus individuals; what factors influence the development of the customary system; and what are the challenges for various stakeholders involved.

But how does all of this work in practice-what was learned so far? There needs to be an enabling environment in place; achieving a shared vision and consensus between stakeholders; provision of legal backing for defining roles and responsibilities and a CBO with strong leadership, ownership and capacity.

Halfway though the day the land pathway opened its doors to Ariel Halpern of PROCASUR who completed his Odyssey leaving Chile last Saturday arriving today at the Sharefair at ILRI in Addis. For sure he had not lost his energy to stimulate us with his personal reflections and thoughts. He took us through what is known as the learning route –a tool developed and successfully delivered to support small farmers, women and youth in about 23 countries by PROCASUR.

Learning Routes has proven to be a flexile tool adapting it’s use to a diversity of topics(e.g.local government, land, gender, culture assets, rural business, rural ICTs, rural youth) and a wide range of people and countries specificity. Ariel defined the learning route fundamentals to be:

• Recognize that in rural areas it is possible to find successful solutions to existing and common problems which can be adapted and multiplied in other context; and
• Use a learning strategy that enables participants to acquire direct knowledge and arouse their curiosity and interest in learning.

Mino Hardi from Madagascar, who participated in the learning route on Women and Land rights, said that she started the learning route with a lot of ideas about what to do. The powerful experience for her was to visit communities and see how people had achieved putting similar ideas she had into practice –this gave an enormous push to her motivation to pursue her ideas once she returned form this learning route to Madagascar.

At this deep hour into the day, maps of Africa were pulled out! Participants were asked to map out the challenges they face in their countries, what they have to learn and what experiences/practices they can share. Enough for now, but more to follow tomorrow from this committed lot of practitioners!!!

---

[1] Recognizing, formalizing and supporting customary land tenure in multi-use landscapes- Scoping paper (work in progress) by Fiona Flintan for the International Land Coalition.  

Day two of Agknowledge Africa Knowledge Share Fair features focus groups

Day two of the Agknowledge Africa Share Fair featured a series of focus groups. Participants had a wide choice and seamlessly distributed themselves among nine different focus groups.

I attended a fascinating session entitled "reporting agriculture" followed by a frustrating session on "mobile devices".

Susanna Thorp from WRENmedia gave a great presentation highlighting the challenges and opportunities of reporting on agricultural related issues. "Agriculture is a multidimensional and multifaceted subject", said Susanna. I was so pleased to hear Susanna refer to smallholder farmers as entrepeneurs.  This statement resonates exactly with IFAD's vision!

She then proceeded to touch upon another topic close to IFAD's heart - young people. "We need to reach out to the young people, agriculture is not SUBSISTENCE only. Agriculture is a source of business!", said Susanna.

Not pre-empting the youth session later during the day, we talked how we can keep young people in the  farming business. There was a consensus that for this to happen farming has to become a source of income.

The participants recognized that farmers do farming in an integrated manner and they do not just tackle one single aspect. This may be a challenge when one has to report about the topic. At the same time everyone recognized that farmers need to trust their information/knowledge source.

Moving to challenges and opportunities of reporting on agriculture, participants mentioned that one of the challenges we collectively face is to make journalists understand the value of reporting about agriculture. How can we make agriculture an enticing and attractive subject matter?

Rob Burnet shared a wonderful story of convergence of various technologies to communicate effectively. So we start with gold old radio. There was unanimous recognition that radio is an important communication tool for farmers to share information and knowledge.

Rob  talked about an FM station run out of Kenya by young people called Shujaaz. What these young people are doing is absolutely remarkable. Besides running the FM station, they are disseminating agriculture related stories via a comic book, which they are distributing through the National Kenyan newspaper and through 12,000 M-PESA kiosks!!!

Moving on from radio, more convergence with social media tools. Shujaaz.fm also has a Facebook account with over 5000 followers, uses Twitter and of course the ubiquitous SMS messaging.

Susanna concluded the session by saying: "If you want to sell anything - especially if you wish to share and report on agriculture you need to be passionate!" And believe me there were many many passionate participants under the tent!!

Later during the day, I attended the  mobile session and also virtually participated in the youth session thanks to Gauri's tweet coming out of that session.

I was very frustrated by the mobile session, as I heard more and more about pilot programmes which did not quite make it to the real world. This is really sad. I fail to understand why we need to duplicate and reinvent the wheel when it comes to developing mobile applications. How many market information applications do we need? How many pest control applications do we need.

I came out of that session thinking that there is little or no hope for private-public partnership. I think the only viable way of making any head way is for governments to play a much more prominent role and take things into hand!

In my virtual conversation with Gauri it was nice to see IPSAfrica (@ipsafrica) chipping. I hope they take the suggestion of hosting a virtual converation with young African people to see what is needed for them to stay in rural areas and become the future entrepreneurs!

We finished the morning with a lovely typical Ethiopian lunch. As today was Wednesday, we had a special "fasting lunch", which was based on beans, fish and vegetables!

I've now become an addict to the Bunna, so I proceeded to the Bunna corner and thoroughly enjoyed the wonderful Ethiopian coffee.

Tonight promises to be an exciting night. We'll be having a barbecue and we've been promised good music by the best DJ in town!!!

Sharing practices to make land tenure securer #sfaddis

By Willem Bettink

The land pathway got underway with knowledge from land right practitioners from Benin, Tanzania, Niger, Madagascar, Swaziland, Ethiopia and the Philippines. The focus of this pathway is to map out complementary good practices and innovations as part of a knowledge exchange programme on the customary land tenure and management systems.

Mike Taylor of the International Land Coalition opened by saying that, “Access to land and secure land tenure are key to poverty reduction”. During this first day participants shared their experiences with local customary land issues. Michael Odhiambo(Reconcile) identified a set of challenges they face in working with pastoralist in East –Africa and how empowerment of smallholder producers- pastoralist, farmers and fisher folk-is one of the ways to address these challenges. A participant stated” Can we empower pastoralists? Or have they been disempowered-as it is they who have all the knowledge about the land.”

As the day progressed it became clear that different countries (Tanzania, Benin, Madagascar) are facing the same challenge. As so often the problem is how we address the challenge together building upon each other knowledge rather then facing it alone deprived of that shared knowledge.

All in all the land practitioners proofed to be people of endurance and passionate commitment as this pathway went on for the whole day- and two more intense days will follow. Hopefully as of tomorrow with the participation of Ariel who has been travelling with his knowledge from Chile since Saturday!!

An afternoon well spent at the agknowledge Share Fair market place!

One of the great things about the Addis Share Fair is how the organizers have weaved in the local culture in this event. We've now got used to drinking Bunna - Ethiopian coffee, have wonderful Ethiopian lunch. Tomorrow we'll have a special lunch - because it is fast day!!!

The market place was the "pezzo forte" of the day! In line with the underlying principle of sharing the local culture, the market place mimicked an Ethiopian market place. The idea was that everyone walks around the market place and share their knowledge.

The participants had a great afternoon walking through the ILRI complex and visiting the various stalls. At the merkato we found wonderful ladies selling typical Ethiopian garments, scarves, shoes, belts and jewellery.

The climate change stall used GIS maps to show the impact of climate change. At the Guilt we saw lots of knowledge sharing happening. The art exhibition and the Bunna station was a nice pit stop to replenish and where you could see some beautiful paintings and have a nice cup of coffee.

Since ILRI is hosting this wonderful event, all the organizers were equipped with a livestock head - a donkey. We used this means of transportation to share our knowledge within the market place. It was FUN!!!!

Everyone had a great time and found the use of this innovative transportation mean very amusing. We finished off the day with "tasting session" where we  we tasted different types of Ethiopian honey and were served local Ethiopian drink.

It was a great day! Now we are doing the after action review of the day and we'll be going out to celebrate PierAndrea's birthday.

Tomorrow the pathways will continues and we'll start with focus groups!!! So stay tuned.

A domani!

Agknowledge Africa Share Fair officially opens with a compelling talk by Owen Barder #sfaddis

At 8:50 on the dot, our Ethiopian horn blower - the official time keeper - called us to order and over 300 participants gathered in the big tent for the opening session of Agknolwedge Knowledge Share Fair. What a nice turn out!!!

For the opening session we had short statements from Bruce Scott ILRI's boss, followed by Lamourdia Thiombian, FAO representative, Koda Traore, CTA and I had the honour of representing IFAD.

Bruce talked about the how important it is for smallholder farmers to have the required knowledge to support and boost the agriculture sector in Africa. He talked about how smallholder farmers hold the key to transforming agriculture in Africa - something very close to IFAD's heart, mission and vision.

Mr Thiombian stressed the importance of informal gatherings, such as this very event to facilitate knowledge sharing across all levels. He also underscored the fact that people in Africa have a very good culture of sharing knowledge which has not necessarily been used for scientific purposes.

Mr Thiombian very succinctly shared the connecting and collecting dimensions of knowledge management, knowledge sharing in this soundbites: "Knowledge sharing is not only about sharing, it's about people networking and working together".

Koda representing CTA talked about how we should not confine knowledge in a box and highlighted the importance of sharing it and allowing knowledge to flow freely, horizontally and vertically.

I had the honour of representing IFAD and gave a bit of history of how this share fair came to be and how Share Fair 2009 co-organized by the Rome-based agencies has positively impacted our respective organizations and helped us to demystify knowledge management. No doubt, this Africa Share Fair will bring another wave of these changes.

I also talked about importance of putting local knowledge in the forefront and sharing it, sharing it and sharing it!

Owen Barder gave a compelling talk entitled "is agriculture the key to development". You can download at http://www.owen.org/wp-content/uploads/101019-Addis-Share-Fair.pdf. Owen is a very charismatic and compelling speaker, so I probably will not do him justice by trying to summarize the salient points of his talk, that is why I recommend you look at his presentation yourselves - especially the slide on

He talked about why knowledge is important for development. He talked about how through out history information and knowledge matters because it is a fundamental driver for economic growth. He then introduced the concept of wicked problems which are at the heart of development, and how we sometimes fail to understand these problems let alone even dreaming to coming up with a solution for them.

He showed a video to make the case that all successful complex systems are the result of evolution!!! What a concept, right?!!! And proceeded to make the point that development is "wicked problem" and has many complexities.

He made the case that we need to concentrate on making knowledge in development more evolutionary and the fact that we do not need authoritative answers, but diversity in answers. He said: "We need diversity, engagement and feedback process".

He underscored the importance of feedback loops as they drive performance in terms of service delivery and made the case that as change makers we need to build feedback loops. He proceeded to say that people get information in the context of something that they are doing and in the context of their daily life!

He made the case for publishing information in an open standard way to allow a seamless sharing of information.

His slide on shift of paradigm and how knowledge for development has evolved over time from secrecy to communication to being wired - or rather all the concepts that have expired, or are tired and finally the new paradigm of engagement is a gem!!!! One to live by!!

Thank you Owen for such a refreshing and unconventional talk. Much appreciated. I sincerely hope our paths will cross sooner rather than later, because all of us have a lot to learn from you!!!

So this was just a short summary of this morning. As I am writing this blogpost, the market place is well under way. I'll be posting the pictures shorty, so do not run away!!! Stay put. More coming soon.

Day zero: "I know HOW day" starts at Agknowledge share fair #sfaddis

Our day started bright and earlier. At 9:00am sharp, the wonderful Ethiopian horn blower called us to order and we all gathered in the tent for Day Zero - or what was rebaptized as "The I know HOW day".

Before breaking out into parallel sessions, the participants identified language barrier and choice of appropriate tool and/or method as knowledge sharing challenges. The group also discussed how it would be unreasonable to expect a farmer who does not have access to the internet or cannot read or write fluently to use the internet as their primary source of information. We also talked about the challenge of technicians and researchers writing a 500 page highly technical report which hardly anyone would read. The participants recognized the fact that we need to prepare succinct and well written knowledge products which summarize and provide the salient points and findings!

The face-to-face session was facilitated by KM4Dev colleagues: Pete, Ewen, Gauri, Willem and Roxy. We started off with an icebreaker giving the over 30 participants to share something about themselves. Since we did not have a set agenda, to come up with an agenda, Pete and Ewen used open space to develop "an agenda".

Colleagues proposed a number of face-to-face knowledge sharing methods and by voting the group decided to learn more about peer assist - hosted by Willem, After Action Review - hosted by Edna, Story telling hosted by Roselin.

The participants then got organized and attended the various sessions. At the end of the session we did an After Action Review, which helped us to further fine tune the afternoon session.

As a result, we decided to use speed geeking as an icebreaker, rather than the ball in the room method. I must admit it was better!!! Especially  because it was after lunch and the speed geeking also served as energizer!!!

If you've been following our tweets, you would have undoubtedly noticed that Ethiopian culture is one of the underlying principles of this event. So we not only have the horn blower who helps us to keep time, but also the Bunna corner - which is traditional Ethiopian coffee.

These wonderful ladies are around all day and ready to serve us coffee and to share their culture and history!! So knowledge sharing is not just about the highly tense technical documents, but also sharing the social and cultural aspects of what we know!!!! Never underestimate that.... That is where bonding happens and that is one of the many ways people will start trusting each other!!!

Now moving on to another session. More to come soon.