KMAFRICA FINANCIAL PARTNERS

• Government of Senegal

• the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA)
• The Development Bank of South Africa (DBSA)
• the Agence Universitaire de la Francophonie (AUF)
• the African Development Bank (AfDB)
• the Islamic Development Bank (IDB)
• the Technical Centre for Agricultural and Rural Cooperation ACP-EU (CTA)
• the International Development Research Centre (IDRC), and the NEPAD.

We are starting to add full text conference papers from the KMAfrica2009 conference. The papers are to be found in the SIGs on http://isivivane.com/kmafrica/?q=og - currently we are looking at the economics and governance streams and more papers will be added on an almost daily basis. In amongst the conference papers, we have interspersed some general SIG conversations to approximate the kind of activity you'd find at a conference like KMAfrica2009; in amongst the formal papers we have informal conversations where a surprising amount is learned and exchanged.

Archive of key pages from KMAfrica2009, Dakar, Senegal including call for papers , key addresses etc. If you want to look at the actual papers and paper abstracts, please go to http://isivivane.com/kmafrica/?q=group.kmafrica

One of the pleasures for a European visitor attending a conference in Africa is the colourful clothes that many delegates occasionally choose to wear — a welcome change from the drabness than usually dominates back in the UK.

Adding to the colour of the proceedings at the 3rd Knowledge Management Africa conference in Dakar this week have two long-standing champions of science journalism in Africa, Diran Onifade from Nigeria, and local science journalist Armand Faye.

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.

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.

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”.

Dakar, 7th May, 2009

African science researchers and policy advisers have agreed to set up a foundation, to be known as the Knowledge Management Africa (KMA) Foundation to promote the use of scientific and other forms of knowledge by both public and private decision-makers in the continent.

KMAfrica2009 Poster

Conference Photo