Courtney Calvin's Reflections from the K4Health Share Fair
This is the second of a three-part series of posts on the K4Health Knoweldge Management Share Fair in Arusha, Tanzania in April 2016. Read Wycliffe Omanya and JoAnn Paradis's reflections from the event.
The K4Health Knowledge Management Share Fair in Arusha, Tanzania brought together over 80 knowledge managers in the public health sector from Sub Saharan Africa to catalyze a knowledge-sharing community and raise awareness of the role of knowledge management (KM) in international development. More than a typical conference, the Share Fair was an opportunity for international development practitioners representing ministries of health, intergovernmental agencies, and USAID implementing partners to interact and learn how to incorporate KM into their processes together.
Throughout the two-day conference, participants shared not only KM enthusiasm, but also the strategies, tools, practices, technologies that help them use knowledge and learning to improve the programming that improves people’s lives. Participants discussed how they capture and share tacit knowledge, translate research into knowledge, and share information across borders through communities of practice. They also shared their challenges and suggested solutions to their peers so that no one has to reinvent the wheel.
Here are examples of two interactive group activities that facilitated sharing and learning:
In a popular exercise drawing on Eva Schiffer’s Exploring Network Patterns methodology to identify and discuss patterns in regional network structures, participants looked at common network tropes and discussed how knowledge is expected to be shared between and among their networks, how it is actually shared, and how to improve knowledge sharing among networks.
In knowledge cafes, small groups of participants discussed discrete topics in KM, such as engaging online communities of practice, and techniques such as knowledge harvesting to systematically capture knowledge used to review an experience, analyze root causes, and document and validate lessons learned. This evidence-focused approach facilitates learning on the ground and is part of a monitoring and evaluation approach.
The advantage of knowledge sharing events such as this is that they gather KM practitioners to not only share and learn, but also to build relationships, communities, and networks that will outlast the event to continue to leverage our most critical asset in the struggle to improve people’s lives—knowledge.
Photo credit: Wycliffe Omanya