scidev.net

Continent Backs New Body to Boost Knowledge Management

KMAadmin — Mon, 11 May 2009 09:12:45 -0600

African science researchers and policy advisers have agreed to set up a foundation, endorsed by a range of African-based banks, to promote the use of scientific and other forms of knowledge by both public and private decision-makers in the continent.

The body, to be known as the Knowledge Management Africa (KMA) Foundation, will be under the auspices of the Development Bank of Southern Africa (DBSA) based in Johannesburg, South Africa.

It will be a focal point for various initiatives across Africa, each designed to investigate an aspect of using scientific and technical knowledge to promote social and economic progress.

South Africa, for example, will host studies on the use of indigenous knowledge and how it can be enhanced through the use of information and communication technologies (ICTs) and intellectual property laws.

But the foundation could also demonstrate to external donors that African banks are prepared to support knowledge-based investment projects. And this in turn will help persuade donors to back such projects with their own funds.

The decision to set up the foundation was made at the end of a three-day meeting in Dakar, Senegal, on ways of promoting effective knowledge management in Africa, both to improve the services that governments provide to their communities and to boost Africa's role in the global economy.

A statement, known as the Dakar Declaration, approved yesterday (7 May), emphasised the need to move from "development rhetoric" to concrete, action-oriented programmes. These include the development of infrastructure and the more efficient use of resources needed to promote sustainable growth in fields such as health and agriculture.

The foundation will also investigate how to build centres of excellence across the continent as "repositories of knowledge" - and the creation of networks of researchers intended to promote knowledge-sharing and cross-border collaboration.

In addition, it will seek to increase engagement in the continent's development efforts from both the African scientific diaspora and what the Dakar meeting referred to as "friends of Africa".

"The main goal of this foundation is to promote knowledge management in Africa as a way of using scientific and technical knowledge as a productive force," says Ousmane Kane, director of the African Regional Centre for Technology, which was one of the main organisers of the meeting together with Senegal's National Academy of Science and Technology.

"To do this, we want to make the initiative more sustainable and to bring in other stakeholders and partners," says Kane. For example, he points out that, while the initial meetings were supported primarily by the DBSA, the Dakar meeting was also supported by the African Development Bank (ADB) and the Islamic Development Bank - both of whom will be represented on the board of the new foundation.

Links with the ADB in particular, which has been steadily increasing its commitment to supporting science-related projects in recent years, are likely to be strengthened by the decision to hold the next KMA meeting in two years' time in Tunisia, where the bank is based.

The decision was welcomed by Innocent Butare, a senior programme specialist for the Canadian-financed International Development Research Centre.

"It is important to see that those behind this initiative are insisting on the need to back such projects with African resources before approaching international donors," Butare told the final session of the Dakar meeting. "With that basis, the support of donors is something that you will get."

The move was also welcomed by Snowy Khoza, a senior executive within the ADBS who has been promoting improved knowledge management as central to the provision of more effective public services in South Africa.

"However long it takes, it is important to find African solutions to address African challenges," Khoza said.

By David Dickson www.SciDev.net

A voice of experience

KMAadmin — Mon, 11 May 2009 05:54:05 -0600

Few participants in the Dakar conference on knowledge management can have had more experience of the challenges facing science in Africa than Amadou-Makhtar M’Bow, a former education minister of Senegal, and director general of UNESCO from 1974 to 1987 — the first black African to head a major UN organisation.

M’Bow reminded his audience that, despite the economic challenges facing the African continent, little had happened over the past 20 years to meet them. “Africa’s share of world trade fell from 5.8 per cent in the early 1960s to 2.8 per cent in 1987,” he pointed out.

“But we are still at roughly the same level as we were in 1987,” adding that a series of brain-storming meetings held under UNESCO’s auspices 20 years ago “had the same concerns as today”.

Although now well into his 80s, M’Bow maintains much of the fiery commitment that led him on a collision course as head of UNESCO with both the United States and the United Kingdom in his promotion of a new world information order.

He acknowledged that progress in promoting science and technology on the continent has been slow. “If the capacity for scientific creativity and technology development is measured by the number of engineers, technicians and researchers, Africa remains far from a minimum threshold,” M’Bow said.

“Too often, African countries maintained a technological dependence on other countries, but also suffered from a lack of modernisation, for example in its agricultural system.”

“That is the situation of Africa today, despite the progress that has been achieved since independence,” M’Bow said. “The causes lie in the fact that Africa has not been able to draw on the enormous possibilities that are offered for its development by scientific and technological knowledge.”

Despite this, he remains optimistic. “Everything is possible if we have the will power, and are bold enough to pull together African intelligence and expertise to do what others can do.”

Collaboration between African countries to promote science and technology was essential “for the destiny of the African people and the future of the continent”.

The solution, said M’Bow, also lay in changing attitudes towards education, and especially in training a new generation of managers “who are proud of being Africans”. It would then be up to these people “to build a new Africa capable of both resolving its own problems, and contributing solutions to the problems faced by the rest of the world”.

But speed is essential. “The African continent must act, and must act quickly, to change the course of history.”

By David Dickson www.SciDev.net

A role for “honorary Africans”?

KMAadmin — Mon, 11 May 2009 05:50:52 -0600

It’s relatively rare for a non-African participant to receive a warm round of spontaneous applause from an audience gathered to discuss African solutions to Africa’s problems — a key idea behind the concept of an Africa “renaissance”.

That was the response, however, to a suggestion from Malaysian Lee Yee Cheong that individuals who had lived and worked in Africa should be accepted as honorary members of the African diaspora, even if they do not have blood relations with the continent.

Lee, an engineer by training, is a familiar figure on the “science and technology for development” scene. He was co-chair of a Millennium Project task force which issued a report on the topic four years ago, and also a driving force behind the creation of the International Science, Technology and Innovation Centre for South-South Cooperation (ISTIC) which opened in Malaysia last year.

But, as he reminded his audience, he is currently acting as an adviser to the Kenyan government. He suggested that this entitled him (and others in similar situations) to consider themselves part of an international community dedicated to helping Africa solve its problems.

“Please extend the term diaspora to those who love Africa,” he said. “I suggest that you include those foreigners who have worked and lived in the continent, or generally consider themselves to be ‘friends of Africa’, not just those who were born here.”

His remarks, based on his own experiences on the support that non-Malaysians have given his own country, went down well in the room, to judge by the warm round of applause with which they were greeted by other participants – almost entirely African.

“It’s a good point,” says Nigerian-born Patrick Ezepue, a researcher in quantitative modelling for business at Sheffield Hallam University in the United Kingdom, who is setting up an organisation through which African scientists currently based in Britain can contribute their skills to African development. “We don’t want to be parochial about this kind of thing”.

By David Dickson www.SciDev.net

Take-home message: it’s not what you know, it’s what you do with it

KMAadmin — Mon, 11 May 2009 05:46:42 -0600

There’s a famous line Moliere’s play Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme where, after a lesson in social style, the lead character expresses both surprise and pleasure at his discovery that he has “been speaking prose all my life, and [I] didn’t even know it!”

At the end of three days of intensive discussions, a significant proportion of the 300 or so delegates attending this week’s meeting in Dakar, Senegal, may well be returning home with the same feeling about the concept of “knowledge management”.

Some of the presentations to the 3rd Knowledge Management Africa (KMA) meeting applied the term to the new opportunities to put science and technology to productive use that are being opened by, for example, novel communication technologies (including both the Internet and mobile telephone).

Others, however, pointed out during the meering that in areas such as health and food production, finding ways of putting medical and agricultural science to use has been a central concern of development programmes for several decade.

But despite – or perhaps because of — the continuing lack of a precise definition, the meeting ended not only with a consensus that improved knowledge management, within both the public and private sector, is vital for Africa’s future prosperity, but also agreement on steps that will hopefully help this to happen.

One of the most concrete will be setting up of a new foundation, based at least initially in South Africa, that will seek to become a hub for Africa-wide efforts to boost knowledge management, while at the same time providing support for practical activities aimed at this goal in different parts of the continent (See story here).

Importantly, the foundation will provide a mechanism through which a range of African banks will be able to explore ways in which their lending policies can be broadened to include not only conventional investments, but also those aimed at building up Africa’s scientific and technical capacities.

(To be continued)

By David Dickson www.SciDev.net