Knowledge management is at the heart of international cooperation. It refers to all processes and practices aimed at identifying, capturing, organizing, sharing and effectively using the knowledge and experience accumulated in development projects and programs.
Too many top-down interventions consider it necessary to provide knowledge to ignorant populations without taking local knowledge into account. This contributes to the lack of contextual awareness denounced by Jean-Pierre Olivier de Sardan as one of the causes of development project failures. Taking local knowledge into account also means taking learning methods into account.
This involves documenting and analyzing the lessons learned from both successful and unsuccessful development interventions. This includes good practices, failures, contextual adaptations and local innovations. It’s about “transforming experience into shareable knowledge”, as capitalization theorist Pierre de Zutter defines it.
The word “shareable” is fundamental to knowledge management. Many international cooperation organizations approach knowledge management by focusing on production aspects, without taking into account dissemination, whereas knowledge is organized according to a value chain approach, as in agriculture, with different gradients of impact. From production to transmission, then valorization with different targets, to co-creation by different players and adaptation to different contexts to generate innovation.
Networking, which is becoming increasingly widespread in cooperative actions, is a challenge for the organization of inclusive information systems, in order to co-construct resources and make them available to the network and even beyond, in different formats depending on the targets.
“Scio me nihil scire”
(I know I know nothing)
Socrates
