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| Dr Robson Mutandi opens the workshop | | |
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The IFAD Ethiopia
Country Office hosted a knowledge management and learning (KM&L) workshop on 10th -12th June 2014 in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. It was
an opportunity to gather IFAD supported projects in Ethiopia to take stock of
ongoing KM&L activities.
Robson Mutandi, Country director and Regional
Representative for Ethiopia, Angola and South Sudan, opened the workshop. He encouraged the 20 staff of projects
gathered at the workshop to use the learning experiences to ‘skyrocket’
people’s lives by successfully investing in agriculture, adopting best
practices and lessons learned to empower the rural poor. He urged participants
to adopt what they have been learning from exchange visits, and develop a
culture of sharing. “We have to come out of the culture of doing things alone,
and learned to share. There is nothing that is not shareable,” said Mutandi.
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| The Knowledge Management System |
During the workshop,
the participants identified challenges and opportunities to improve sharing,
learning, and exchange for improved project implementation. The workshop, supported by IFADAfrica, was
held as part of the grant’s in-country support towards facilitating knowledge
management and learning integration in projects. Participants, majority of whom had never
participated in KM&L workshops, were introduced to the “wheel of knowledge”
an integrated framework, which was used to identify opportunities to use
knowledge management tools in specific areas - information management, internal
and external communication, learning oriented monitoring evaluation and to
encourage innovations and experimentation - for improved project
implementation.
Miriam Cherogony, the
IFADAfrica Knowledge Management Coordinator shared valuable experiences from
the East and Southern Africa region to inspire future action on KM&L action
plans developed by project teams during the workshop. Importantly, she
challenged projects to take initiative and adopt new implementation approaches
having participated in learning exchanges nationwide and in the region.
Participants were keen to discuss how they were going to strengthen
monitoring and evaluation activities and find innovative ways to capture
qualitative impacts of their projects. They further shared on the tools to
improve KM&L including tips on photo captioning, designing key
messages for communication, writing case studies and future stories, and
documenting best practices and lessons learned amongst many other tools.
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| Robert Ouma facillitates the workshop |
As participants made
their personal commitment to undertake a future knowledge management activity, they
all left the workshop ready to implement activities with a new awareness of
ideas, plans and multi-media tools. Participants commented that they enjoyed
the method of facilitation and found the training materials useful. With a
clear understanding of what knowledge management and learning is about, IFAD
projects looked forward to changing implementation approaches for better results.
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| Miriam
Cherogony awards Habte Mebre with a certificate of participation at the
workshop |
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| Workshop participants |