As you all know that the Support for Effective Cooperation and Coordination of Cross-border Initiatives in Southwest Ethiopia-Northwest Kenya, Marsabit-Borana & Dawa, and Kenya-Somalia-Ethiopia (SECCCI) is intended to address the drivers of conflict and instability, irregular migration and displacement in the cross-border areas of the Horn of Africa through improved cross-border coordination and cooperation.
The SECCCI project has developed the Knowledge management Platform (Portal) to upload knowledge products, best experiences and practices in order to widely disseminate them to cluster level communities and stakeholders of multi-disciplinary and multi-sectorial institutions and organisation.
Just for your information the first online discussion was on the topic ‘’How has COVID-19 pandemic affected implementation of project activities in IGAD cross-border clusters’’ the online discussion was closed on 21st July 2020, finalized successfully and the outcome summary report was uploaded on the portal.
Based on the number of participants/ stakeholders in the first online discussion and to increase the number of participants, now we will discuss how we can increase the use of knowledge management portal by the SECCCI and other project stakeholders.
- To what extent have you been able to use the knowledge management portal?
- What improvements do we need to make for you to use the portal more regularly?
- How can we improve the participation and use of knowledge management portal by the stakeholders and benefit end users at SECCCI project cluster areas?
1. Consultation of information and resources.
2. In the homepage, in the part left to “About the Portal”, insert information on the newly uploaded resources, if possible.
3.
– Inform all the projects’ partners on the existence of the portal;
– Consult the projects’ beneficiaries on the information they would deem useful to find on the portal;
– Send a monthly newsletter with information on past/upcoming events and newly uploaded resources (including a brief abstract on the latter);
– Link the portal on other websites related to the broader EUTF-programme;
– Organize an online event to present the platform and guide the users through it.
Dear Irene
I am in agreement with the three points that you have mentioned and linking the information with stakeholders and it is one of the shortest ways to disseminate the information.
But what we have to look into is the community level participation and get a benefit from the knowledge management portal? of course, it is not possible within a short period of time to see a paradigm shift in the mind set up of the community, therefore the sustainability of KMP will be critical.
Effective and Efficient use of the portal has to be accompanied by innovative ideas aimed at connecting various types/levels of expertise existing in the field and beyond the project target areas.
The opportunity to exchange information availed by the Platform should therefore be followed by concerted efforts that will see a live interaction ( online workshop?) on topical issues informed by experiences between experts in borderlands development. This will encourage recognition of gaps/failures/weaknesses, take stock of progress made so far and avail a window of opportunity for future interventions to learn from existing experiences and yield better results.
To know the existence of a platform for information sharing and best experience of knowledge product, the most important thing is to know the place where the information was found and if we are circulating the link among our network then the use, innovative ideas and new knowledge products and sharing of information might reach a high number of beneficiaries.
The usage of the platform should be included in all possible activities where it can bring extra value to the output of the activity. The type of usage should be determined on an activity-by-activity basis. When preparing agendas for workshops, meetings, and trainings it should be assessed if the tools, information systems, or reports or assessments uploaded to the platform. For these kinds of events, the forum could be utilized to inquire for feedback.
The use of the KMP should be integrated into regular project activities. In order to do this, it should be assessed for each activity if the use of the platform would bring any additional value to the output of that activity and how.
A couple of examples would be using the studies and assessments, such as spatial data, for planning the content for meetings, workshops or trainings. Another example could be using the forum for collecting feedback and engaging the participants to further discussion on the completed activities.