What can knowledge interventions contribute to development?

I was interviewed for Vice Versa and asked for input. It was a double interview together with Eric Smaling working for the Royal Tropical Institute in Amsterdam. An interesting combination as he is well grounded in the science world as professor. I will blog what I remember as main points and issues. I hope I remember enough- waited a little too long to blog it and didn't make any notes (as the journalist was taping it). Curious to see what she will choose to publish too!

The first difference I remember is about what knowledge is. In my practitioners view- knowledge resides in the head of people, practitioners or policy makers. Eric Smaling would consider a phd research as knowledge. I would prefer to call this information rather than knowledge (if it does not reside in anybody's head except the phd student's head..). Or if you'd like to call this knowledge too, then I would like to clearly distinguish it from 'actionable knowledge', knowledge that leads to changing practices. Smaling pointed out that there is a gap between research and practice. A lot of research never gets transformed into changing realities. So how to close this gap? My solution would be to think of dynamic learning communities and networks where scientists, researchers and practitioners can meet. This solution is so logical to me, but I am now conscious of the fact that it is not all the solution for many others. I pointed out my belief in the power of south-south learning to increase the impact of development efforts. The World Bank has done a survey and the results tell us many respondents agree with this.

One of the first questions was 'what kind of knowledge should the Netherlands 'export' or 'transfer'?. I explained my vision that in my idea the counterpart model in development (the northern expert working with a southern person for a longer period of time) has disappeared because it is not how people learn and change happens. Rather, I look with a learning lens knowledge and change. Hence I start with the learner and his/her learning journey. Then it is more logical to talk about what are the knowledge needs and questions at stake. I'd say that depends on the sector and type of knowledge workers. A finance manager or minister could probably learn a lot from another manager or finance minister (through a network or community, though trainings, workshops and exchanges help too). But I guess the question of relevant knowledge within the Netherlands could be asked at a global, policy level in the sense of what are the strengths and expertise areas of the Netherlands.

This kind of led us to jump to the reciprocity in learning and knowledge sharing. Is learning north-south? Can we in the Netherlands also learn from developing countries? I definitely think so (and Smaling agreed). It is a pity if we feel that learning is north-south only, like I mentioned before, I believe in south-south learning and south-south-north learning. I gave the example of the forest landscape restoration learning network. A network where people from Brasil, Indonesia, Ghana and other countries learn, but also people from Scotland. Smaling and I both felt strongly that openess to learning is necessary. If you are in a relationship where you feel you are the expert or know more, you are not open to learning from others (but you may share). I have seen this between participants from two African countries (one looking down upon the other), I have seen it between departments in organisations and I've also noticed it myself as a trainer. What is, for instance, obstructing southern NGOs from learning is that they feel that they have obtained funding for a program because they can implement it. That doesn't favour asking questions or visiting others who may have undertaken similar programs. And sometimes it is simply lack of time. I feel when you start a new project, you should always ask around for experiences. That's not the common way of working.

Given my focus on south-south learning and networks (and alliances too by the way) to enhance learning for more impact on development, the interviewer was wondering 'but what's the role of the Netherlands'? Well, there is definitely a role to be facilitate south-south learning, to spot innovations, to compile information. As Lucia Nass, a former SNV colleague also observed there is a mindboggling number of website and manuals and even studies to compile and compare all manuals on climate change. We focus on collecting, but not enough on connecting the learners.

And ofcourse social media play a huge role and have an enormous potential to facilitate south-south-north learning, but there is a need to learn to make effective use of these media. To find information, to connect with the relevant people, to participate in online communities in ways that change and improve development practices. That's why I focus on helping people to start and facilitate communities, or to develop themselves using internet and social media. I think that we are starting to see a shift but to quote Clay Shirky "social media will not become socially interesting till they become technologically boring". In other words the real change in connecting likeminded learners and speeding up learning and change is still ahead of us.

We ended (if I recall well) with a kind of philosophical question about the role of internet and social media with regards to learning and working together in this globalised and connected world. Can we learn our way out of the global problems? On the one hand I'd like to be a sort of cyberutopian believing we will all learn to solve all global problems like poverty, climate change, feeding the growing world population. Peace through the internet. On the other hand I can imagine that there is a limit to collaboration when there is a scramble for dwindling resources. A kind of fighting for a piece of the cake. No matter how empathetic we may be, in the end we will try and make sure we and our closest families and friends are fine.

What is important in knowledge sharing for innovation in development?

Next monday I will have an interview with a journalist of a magazine about international development cooperation (Vice Versa). The topic of the interview is knowledge sharing. I'm trying to put some of my ideas together and would really like your input as the topic seems so vast: what are the main trends in knowledge management/knowledge sharing within international cooperation that I should highlight?

I have a very short summary of what they are looking for which I will share with you: "The importance of knowledge sharing is more and more recognised within international cooperation. The big question is: how do you do this anno 2011? What knowledge to share, how to share, and what needs to be done for innovation in international development cooperation?"

What would you definitely want to highlight? Please contribute by replying..Even though the interview is in Dutch I will make it available in English later.

Some lessons about capacity building in social media for development organisations in the South

Over the past half year I facilitated a social media capacity building trajectory for a group of 14 development organisations (and 2 networks) in countries like Vietnam, Mali, Bolivia etc., together with Josien Kapma and Sibrenne Wagenaar. I've already blogged about our online start. It was great to work in a group of three facilitators, because you create an enormous flexibility. Someone gets sick and the others take over. It was wonderful to have the opportunity to be engaged with a group of development organisations over a longer period of time and see the process beyond an introduction session during a rainy afternoon.

Some examples of how organisations have started working with social media:

• An organisation is recruiting a communications officer and will try to recruit one with knowledge about (and experiences with) social media. Or at least affinity.
• Another organisation started using Facebook and video for youth education instead of the traditional hard copy materials. Internally 10 persons are sharing their project progress through Facebook too.
  
• Two organisations are now using skype for calls and group meetings.
  
• An organisation has opened a twitter account and blog to inform African and International partner of what the organisation is doing. They further want to host a wiki on climate change, one of their areas of work.
  
• Another organisation is looking into open source and set up a group experimenting with a list of 17 preferential tools
• One organisation wants to get more attention from donors and introduced the idea of a corporate blog and use of RSS and google alert for 'online listening'.
  

I'd also like to look back at the whole trajectory. What can we learn from it as facilitators of such a trajectory? What would I do differently if I had to do it again? We started with an intake, trying to figure out where social media could make a contribution to the organisation or to a network. This was followed by 3 weeks online training with the core participants from the organisations, who invited quite a lot of colleagues. Then we had a week face-to-face in the Netherlands, and a few months of distance coaching.

• Start online to discover a few social media tools together, yet work towards a face-to-face event to consolidate understanding. It worked very well to start online, introducing a variety of social media, getting to know eachother. It gave participants the space to experiment with a few tools in their own time. It helped us to find some real pioneers. It made me realize once again that online interaction works well as a ramp up working towards an event, or publication. After the face-to-face it was much harder to keep the online exchanges going. The momentum seemed lost. If I could design it again, I would do the face-to-face later (or ideally even twice if travel budgets allow!) Yet, in the end, face-to-face was most appreciated by the participants. A lot of social media 'landed' when they were able to see examples, to ask questions and to work on things together. Though they appreciated the online exchange a lot at the beginning of the trajectory, at the end the face-to-face had made much more impression, it was appreciated with 4,3 out of 5 and the online part by a mere 3,4 out of 5.. Maybe because it is what we're most familiar with? Or because of the human energy flows?
  

• Use a mailing list in combination with learning platform. We could have paid a little more attention to the fact that some participant had bad internet connections, one person in Uganda bought internet by the hour. In the middle of a posting, access would be cut off. Must be quite frustrating! Some had good connections, others on and off. Not everyone could join skype calls by internet, so it's good to have a phone alternative (we hadn't). A mailing list would have been more basic than the Ning learning platform we used. Working with low bandwidth, there is a trade off to make between complexity of conversations and ease of use in low bandwidth settings. On a mailing list we couldn't have created the groups which worked very well. Probably a combination of a mailing list and a learning platform could have worked too.
  

• Allow participants to integrate social media in their own jobs before thinking of uses at an organizational level. We asked participants to come up with an organisational strategy at the end of our face-to-face training, that they had to design a draft of a full-fledged strategy. They had a whole day for it, and needed it too. Some of the strategies seemed over-optimistic or not linked to pressing organisational goals. If a social media strategy is not well thought-through, it easily becomes a list of twitter account and blogs to be created. The key question to answer is: who are you going to engage and what is the type of exchange? Despite our network mapping, this was still a hard question to answer at the end of an intense week. If I would do it again, I would focus first on the use of social media for their own jobs, and only in a later stage for the team or organisations.
  In a graph, you could say that it starts with personal use, then moves on to professional use, and then move to collective uses. We demanded quite a lot of the participants, acting as a change agent back in their organisations, introducing a networked way of working. Next time, I would try to have a longer trajectory, let's say a year. I'd use this graph more explicitly and focus on the use of social media by individuals before moving to collective uses.
  

• Recognize when it's too early to invest heavily in social media. I noticed networking and working in a networked way comes quite naturally for a lot of the development organisations. And the use of Facebook and Skype is really booming. So those are good entry points to leverage social media for your own purposes as a development NGO. However, some of the topics (like gender and energy) were not found on social media monitors, probably an indicator that few people are talking about them. when a lot of the network members are not used to social media, you might be arriving early on the scene. You then have the choice to wait or to educate. While keeping an eye on developments and learning about social media- so that you are one of the first lateron! Deciding not to invest in social media is also a strategy.
  

Working wikily 2.0 with grants

I found some inspiration in the paper

Image by Ross Mayfield via Flickr

Working wikily 2.0. It is the title of the second version of a paper by the monitorinstitute. I like their intro: it's not about the wiki, it's about how wikis and other tools engender a new networked mindset. However, I'm also guilty of talking about tools because you still have to know the tools and how to work with them. (it goes hand in hand- the tools and the culture).

The paper specifically talks about how web2.0 is changing philanthropy. I'm thinking a lot about the question how working wikily is changing developing cooperation (we are starting an online discussion in Dutch here). Don't confuse philanthropy and development cooperation by the way! Philanthropy is the act of donating money, goods, services, time and/or effort to support a socially beneficial cause, with a defined objective and with no financial or material reward to the donor. Development cooperation is slightly more complex has to do with empowerment, social change, economic development and is also a political process.

Nevertheless there is a great example in the paper from philanthropy that demonstrates a new way of working and thinking that may inspire because grants are part and parcel of the development industry. The Case Foundation, launched the "Make It Your Own' Awards People could submit ideas for improving their communities, be reviewers and then vote for the best ideas to fund. They did build in a sort of control system. An open group selected the top 100 ideas, but advisors selected the 20 grant recipients according to the foundations goals and criteria.

If the development budget of the Dutch ministry would partly be allocated by a similar process, you would get a very different dynamic than the bureaucratic process it is currently. I liked the mixed approach, because I also believe in expertise and don't think you can make every process a democratic decision-making process. But the development budget is tax money, so it would give citizens some influence on how that money is spent.

Nice experiment or dangerous?

Do wikis change development work?

Friday 13th was well and safely spent in Utrecht where ICCO organised a session with David Weekly, the founder of Pbwiki. I wrote a somehow faithful summary for the icollaboration weblog (which is starting to look more like my blog than a teamblog...but never mind since I believe in making what's happening in the group accessible online!).

I will use this space to elaborate more on my own thinking and my sceptism. Though I'm a social media adopter, I also have my reservations. For one thing, it was interesting to understand from David Weekly what the online wiki niche is. Large companies have their own online packages and stuff (like sharepoint) but that wikis like pbwiki come in handy for cross company collaboration. People in large companies are setting up wikis because the other applications run behind firewalls that are not accessible to partners in other companies. In development, this is a different case. Large organisations may have applications, but smaller development organisations in the north or organisations in the south may not have invested in any systems. Wikis (free or for a small sum of money) are then a good solution that empower people to set up wikis to collaborate with others online. If you know how to work with wikis and have a certain level of access to the internet that it. Easy and free= empowering?

However, I have the impression that so few people like working with wikis and are comfortable working with wikis that the real revolution that Shirky promised, worldwide collaboration at scales we have never seen, is still very far ahead for development. The wiki examples are more online libraries build by a few enthousiastic persons than representing a new way of collaborating. It looks cool to put a conference online is a wiki, but how does it support learning and decision making? Maybe I'm putting my expectations of wikis too high in a way. And we may not have investigated it enough.

My worry is that if development organisations set up wikis to do the same work they used to do- it might not change anything substantially in the distribution of powers in the current development process. I guess that needs more, a vision of what to build or collaborate on (like wikipedia had ofcourse a great vision of becoming an online encyclopedia), and a process to bring stakeholders together around that vision in a new manner. Or the other way around, having a spontaneous collaboration. But maybe a much larger group needs to be comfortable working with wikis and other collaborative tools before that happens. Being overoptimistic may be counterproductive.

Ofcourse a wiki is only a tool, like a hammer, and anyone is free to use it as he/she wishes. But somehow the tools seems really powerful in the hands of a community. Like the km4dev wiki is a growing resource and dynamic repository. But it's not easy to stimulate people to make their hands dirty. And many may learn more from the verbal interactions than looking at the wiki so we should not overestimate the importance. It's a gut feeling that we should not measure change by the number of wikis, but by how the wikis changed the participation in the processes, and the truth is that we might exclude people too. I'm fearing too that partners organisation may start wikis because they have the feeling some donors are suddenly into wikis. But that may be diverting attention from what we should really focus on. Any ideas? Do you share my concerns?

Social media- changing the world from the edge?

Christina Merl, whom I know from CPsquare, interviewed me last year about my experiences with social media in the development sector. She wrote an article for the rural development news from Agridea with the title: social media- changing the world from the edge? If you are interested you can read it online here. The pictures look great in black and white! Let's see if I can a quote that is not too embarrassing....

How can social media support learning processes?
There are many ways in which social media can support learning processes. They can support individual learning, team learning, organisational learning and cross-organisational learning via networks and communities of practice. For example, my own learning process is supported by blogging. I blog about what interests me and read blogs of people in knowledge management. That keeps me thinking and developing my own ideas. An important mindset of people participating in the online exchange in social media is to be comfortable with having intimate conversations in public spaces. That means those conversations are opened up to be listened to. Likewise, listening into other circles helps you to understand the world, broaden your view and learn about your interests and unexpected things. I tend to believe that social media will change learning processes of professionals in organisations and allow for more cross-fertilization of ideas. Furthermore, it is much easier to network online through social media. I had two old friends from Ghana and Mali on a Skype chat this morning. If we didn’t have Skype, I would probably lose touch. One of them helped me to find a water expert in Mali for a friend working with OXFAM in the US. The barrier to ask questions and help each other is very low. However, the basis for such contact via social media is often still face-to-face contacts.

You might also prefer to read some of the other articles from rural development news, which you can find here.

Proving versus improving

I'm involved in the accreditation process of the Business School where I'm teaching one subject of the Masters course: Interactive Project Design. Educational accreditation according to wikipedia is: a type of quality assurance process under which a facility's or institution's services and operations are examined by a third-party accrediting agency to determine if applicable standards are met.

During the test interview for the accreditation process I participated in, I had an interesting experience. I realized how quickly as a group of teachers, we were becoming into a 'convincing the accreditors' mode, ready to twist information, or withold some information smartly if that yields a better result. I did not express any of my criticisms or constructive feedback I might have had. It's clearly not a learning process, it's an accreditation process. Nevertheless, I learned something about the other courses and the views of other teachers, you cannot turn off your personal learning process.

It made me think about all the evaluations that are taking place to evaluate development projects and/or programs, I have been part of them in different roles, as project staff and as evaluating consultant. I have been struggling with the popular concept of using evaluation for learning purposes, as there is a friction between the two. The friction is referred to as the dilemma between 'proving' versus 'improving' or 'accountability' versus 'learning'. In the accreditation case, it is a clear case of assessment for accountability, proving the quality of your masters education is of an adequate level. There are no separate learning objectives. When development projects/programs are evaluated often a learning objective is added. Though people involved in a evaluation always learn something, the process is enormously flawed by the need to prove that you are right. I've know it, but I've not felt it as strongly as when I was part of this team trying to convince the accreditors.

Today I found an interesting online resource from the Society for Organisational Learning called Assessing to Learn or Learning to Assess. A quote from Senge: "... re-establish a healthy balance between assessing for learning and assessing for evaluating. If the balance has tipped to emphasis on evaluating to the extent that it actually impedes learning, learning processes will benefit from increasing emphasis on assessing for learning. It is low leverage to complain that there is too much emphasis on evaluating, outsiders wanting to know if learners are adding value. It is probably much higher leverage to build our 'assessment muscle,' to help learners to get better at assessing for learning."

I believe the emphasis in the development sector has been on assessing to evaluate projects and programs to prove value to donors, rather than structuring assessments for learning. In doing so, it leaves important opinions, criticism and constructive feedback unheard.

Blogging to raise funds for wildlife conservation

Via the Dutch blog Knowledgecafe I clicked through to the story on Wired about life, death and twitter on the African Savanah. I dislike the fact that they talk about the African Savanah, like Africa is one country, and the story is really about Kenya and Congo. It really happens a lot that people tell me they have travelled to Germany, Cambodja and Africa!! Do one country in Africa and you've seen them all.

Anyhow, this is the success story: William Deed, is an experienced and famous blogger from the UK who was recruited by Richard Leakey, the famous conversationist. He helped wildlife rangers of the Virunga National Park in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo to set up weblogs, see the Gorilla Protection blog. "The rangers' salaries are paid from park fees, but tourism has dropped 90 percent. To keep the conservancy running, the park's online outreach needs to raise $50,000 a month until the tourists return -- a job that's fallen into Deed's lap."

The park's online efforts are succesful! Kimojino is a Mara ranger who blogs here. He asked for donations on his blog: "100% of your donation, minus only a small bank fee, will go directly to the work of the Mara Conservancy.". The blog raised $40,000 from donations in March 2008, his facebook page drew about $2,000. Safari companies bought advertising on the blog too.

It's interesting example. If you peel down the elements of success, it is most likely the fact that people can read, see pictures and engage with the park stories directly. Donating directly may be nicer than donating through agencies like the World Wildlife Fund. Then they have used the expertise of an experienced blogger to set up the system and probably train and coach the rangers. And they have a well-targeted topic!

What can development organizations do with Web2.0 tools?

Some time ago, I compiled some examples of what you can do with web2.0 tools for communication within a development project. In this case, a large project in several countries. I'd like to share my ideas about the different ways of engaging with the wide range of web2.0 tools. After all, web2.0 are designed for participation, and what is more core business for development organizations?

I tried to separate four different options:

1. You can use available web2.0 tools (free or at low cost)
2. You can integrating web2.0 tools in another website
3. You can design a new website using web2.0 principles and technologies
4. You can leveraging popular web2.0 sites where crowds of people are interacting

I can provide some examples of each of these options, though there are probably lots of other examples:

1. Using available web2.0 tools

Why not make use of all these wonderful tools out there? ICCO is very innovative in trying to foster an open information sharing system, use a 'Learning Alliance wiki ' (a pbwiki) as the main basis, with other thematic wikis attached to it. In the wiki there are links to Dgroups, as a discussion forum, Blogger weblogs and google calendars for event planning. And I'd almost forget the feeds from the social bookmarking site delicious. Maarten Boers explains more in this blogpost. You can see a presentation by Peter Ballantyne here.

Another example is the Knowledgecafe wiki by CARE.

2. Integrate web2.0 tools into an existing website

The web2fordevelopment conference last year in Rome had to experiment with web2.0 tools of course. In their website, they integrated flickr photo sets, Youtube videos, and a link to the weblog and wiki. Nowadays, most webservices allow you to embed content from another site.

A special technology which is helpful in integrating web2.0 tools in another site is RSS feeds. By using a Feed to JavaScript like feedostyle you can have information or news published on one web sites- displayed on another site. So when the information or news changes, your web site will be automatically changed too. A good example can be found on the site of EUFORIC, a European network. They display various feeds on their site using feedburner.

3. Design a completely new website using web2.0 principles and technologies

Ofcourse you can also design a completely customized site for your own purpose, and use web2.0 principles like working in beta. Examples I can think of are the CIARIS website on social inclusion. There is a screencast of the design fase.

Helpalot is an example of building a site using social networking site ideas. Helpalot is specifically focused on charities. VSO build a bloggers interface expecially for their volunteer stories. The World Bank has set up a site called Isimulate for performing economic simulations.

4. Leverage popular web2.0 sites where large numbers of people are interacting

Examples of popular web2.0 sites are Youtube, Facebook, LinkedIn, Ning, and many others. You might also leverage the crowd of people hanging out there by going there yourself. An example of this is the World Bank channel on Youtube. Even though the World Bank has enough video capacity on their own site, they added a channel on youtube to reach out to a different audience.

Global Voices in the top 200 blogs

I've been a fan of Global Voices, since I discovered it. Via Ethan Zuckerman's blogpost I learned that it's now in the top 200 blogs of Technorati, the blog search engine. The slogan of Global Voices is: "The World is talking, are you listening?" and they hope to make information available via blogs all over the world, but particularly in the south more accessible. You can search and subscribe per country or per theme. Via Beth Kanter, and Emmanuel K Bensah, who are both bridgebloggers for Global Voices (Cambodja and Ghana respectively) I learned what a bridgeblogger is. A bridgeblogger is a person who reads blogs from a particular country and reposts information that may have value to a wider audience. For local bloggers, it's a great way not to drown in the ocean of blogs and become more visible. Reuters , the news agency, places a feeds from Global Voices. See above for the example of Global Voices of Ghana on the Ghanaian page. So if you are a new Ghanaian blogger, and you write a good post, you may appear on the Reuters page!

From Ethan:

22.4% of our visitors come from the US, 3.6% from the UK, and the other 74%
are spread around the world, including substantial userbases in China, India,
the Phillipines, Brazil, and Qatar. Compare that to the New York Times, with
over 50% of users in the US, or BBC, with over 30% in the UK, and it’s clear
that we’ve got something of an unusual audience pattern.

The fact that only a minority of visitors are from the north (though Ethan doesn't talk about Europe), shows that you cannot 'push' information to people who aren't interested, in the north. I believe that it's hard to evoke changes in development by websites alone, but it can be a good supportive strategy. And ofcourse, it is a great resource for people in the south, and the people who ARE already interested in what's happening in the south

Aid is a knowledge industry?

picture: Mariette Heres

In the Broker you can find an article called Aid is a knowledge industry in which Mariette Heres argues that "although NGOs are taking more interest in knowledge management, they have so far failed to recognize that they are part of a knowledge industry, of which the delivery of goods and services is only a part."

I think it is interesting to put up such a statement, which makes people think. Unfortunately she does not define what a knowledge industry is, which makes the argumentation weaker. And there is no definition to be found on wikipedia. It made me think about what a knowledge industry is, compared to a service/product industry. The knowledge worker is a term I use myself at times. Anecdote wrote that the word knowledge worker is now meaningless in developed countries because the shift from manual labour to job requiring knowledge work is now complete. If you look at it from that angle, all professionals are knowledge workers, and the term becomes obsolete. Is a farmer not a knowledge worker?

Mariette explains the 'stock and flow' approaches to knowledge. (by the way an article from 2002 by Dick Stenmark that I still like very much for its explanation of the two approaches can be found here). He states that supporters of the flow view of knowledge:

"may thus understand knowledge management systems not as an IT artefact but as an environment of people, organizational processes, business strategies and IT, where the objective is to leverage and advance the knowledge of those people."

And states that: "the ICCO alliance is one of the few NGOs to have taken a step towards adopting the flow approach to knowledge." I think it is a bit tricky to use the approaches to label one or the other organization. It might be better to use the distinction between the two approaches to point out where some approaches may be flawed or to understand a difference in thinking about the best knowledge management intervention in a certain situation.

Wenger furthermore talks about a third wave of knowledge management:

" The third wave is now starting to focus on strategic capabilities. It reflects a view of knowledge as strategic asset and places the emphasis on the strategic stewardship of knowledge domains. The promise of knowledge management now lies in a systematic knowledge strategy and in the potential of communities of practice as a vehicle for engaging
practitioners in the required strategic conversation."

Maybe organizations should learn how to manage knowledge as a strategic asset?

Let me finish by trying to formulate my opinion about the statement made by the article: I think the development sector can indeed benefit from improved knowledge management interventions. Nevertheless, I think I disagree that knowledge was never a concern. Lots of organizations started out with 'knowledge transfer' strategies. For instance, it is a sector where evaluation is really institutionalized and embedded.

It would be good to see a better knowledge systems analysis of the development sector and where knowledge creation and innovate is hampered. I see the gap mainly in separate learning circles in the south and in the north that do not sufficiently merge. And Dick Stenmark gives a hint to why this gap may exist: 'only individuals who have a requisite level of shared background can truly exchange knowledge. Tradition, profession and organizational belonging all carry their own assumptions. The more overlapping these tacit assumptions and experiences the better (eg. if all three realms overlap likelihood of understanding will increase.'

Don't laugh!

Via the Dutch blog of Wouter Rijneveld I found this short video which is part of the HIVOS campaign Stop de derde wereld. The video shows two journalists who try to get a laughing boy to look like a boy you would donate for: 'please take off your shirt and don't laugh'... I had to blog it because of the resonation with my experiences with journalists. When my husband worked in Somalia and a journalist team came and did not have enough malnourished children, they intersected pictures of malnourished children in other areas of the world.

Can blogging contribute to overcoming this bias/attitude? Probably only if a critical mass of different thinkers would write and blog and get read/heard. But it might be that a majority of bloggers have a similar bias.

For instance, it also resonates with the spirit of a lot of self-help projects that are springing up. Though I try to see the positive side of it, some of the projects are helping the 'pathetic' or 'zielige' mensen, and is really pure charity rather than development. Yet, it is mistaken as development work. For me, the basis of development work is that you respect the situation people are in, and their own aspirations. There needs to be some equality in the relationship.



By the way, Wouter is a very nice example of a person whom I met just once. We don't have time to work or get together. But through our blogs, we can lightly stay in touch and I'm my thinking is often sharpened by his critical thinking about development issues. Maybe what's more important, even if we would meet, we would probably not get to exchange some of the ideas that we exchange on the blogs!

Technology: embeddedness and escape in Ghana

Don Slater and Janet Kwami wrote a very interesting paper talking about social use of technology in Ghana: Embeddedness and escape: internet and mobile phone as poverty reduction strategies in Ghana

From the abstract: " The paper argues that Internet and mobile phone use represent two opposed configurations of ICT use, rather than a single movement into an ‘information society’. Moreover each configuration exemplifies quite different poverty reduction strategies deployed by poor urban Ghanaians. Internet use is widespread and is predominantly used to chat with or email foreigners, generally in the North, as part of a strategy of accumulating foreign social, economic and cultural capital; it is part of a poverty reduction strategy of ‘escape’ that is generally conducted in a fantasy modality. Mobile phones, by contrast, are used to manage existing and embedded social networks, the complex family, business or
social connections that constitute both resources and obligations."

The story about the use of internet is amazing, the internet is a chat connection for brief encounters with foreigners. They interviewed a 14 years-old called Asma and describe her use of internet as an example. She uses the internet to get into contact with foreigners like she used to do with penpals. She has 15 MSN windows open at the same time, getting into contact with people abroad and adding them to her contacts list. She feels her experiences are broadened by these connections. By contrast, mobile phone is use very pragmatically. Michael, for instance, flashes the same five people every morning (flashing is phoning without talking). Two of the flashes are to young female relatives boarding at a school in Accra, over whom he has a familial watching brief. The flashing discharges these obligations which would otherwise involve considerable inconvenience and worry. His other flashes are to friends he went to school with and now live in another city.

The conclusion is: if we want to get anywhere, we better start from where we are. An understanding of the use of these media can lead to better strategies for NGOs and government. For instance, internet use now takes place in a vacuum, and is solely used for communication rather than informational use. There are some very practical and small scale suggestions made:

. public information posters listing useful websites and how to access them,
to be displayed in cafes, schools, churches and clinics;
· the enrolment of information intermediaries such as local teachers, religious
figures, health workers, café owners and operators, through local meetings
and training. This will inevitably involve public-private partnerships and
new organizational structures to involve ICT stakeholders;
· connecting informational resources to the actual communicative uses of
Internet and mobile phone, by focusing on chat rooms, listserves and email
rather than websites, or by distributing information through SMS;
· focusing on mediating information through a range of media, rather than
attempting to shift Internet and mobile use: egg, enrolling information
intermediaries (such as local youth groups) to source information online
which can be disseminated through posters, leaflets, loudspeakers, local
meetings and local radio.