Capacity Building « GDNet Blog

GDNet-AERC Policy Brief Training Workshop – ICT and Economic Development Project

December 2, 2011 by Zeinab Sabet Leave a comment

I am writing this blog from Nairobi, Kenya, where I am helping run another GDNet-AERC Policy Brief workshop held from 1-2 December, 2011. The workshop is the fourth in a series of research communications capacity building workshops which were held in collaboration with the African Economic Research Consortium (AERC) over the past two years 2010-2011.

Workshop Group Photo

Entitled “GDNet-AERC Policy Brief Training Workshop”, the workshop was designed for a specific group of researchers who produced research papers for the AERC “ICT and Economic Development” Project. The objectives of the workshop are:

To build capacity and skills in communicating research to maximise its uptake and impact
To increase understanding of research to policy processes, and the role of Policy Briefs in this process
To improve understanding of the role of the media in communicating research, in order to be more strategic about media tactics in future
To produce an outline Policy Brief for each research project, to be finalised after the workshop with support from GDNet team

Arsène Nkama (Cameroon) & Prisca-Nadège Bibila-Nkouma (Congo)

An entire session of the workshop will be dedicated to a Mock Press Conference during which researchers will present the key findings and recommendations of their research to an audience of journalists.

For more information about the workshop, follow us on Twitter @Connect2GDNet

More blogs about the workshop will be posted soon

Filed under Capacity Building Tagged with AERC, africa, economic development, gdnet, ICT, research communications

PEM Asia Research Communications Workshop

October 14, 2011 by Zeinab Sabet Leave a comment

Being influential requires you to be clear who you are trying to influence! As basic as this sounds, it is often the reason why researchers fail to make a bigger impact with their work.

GDNet’s ongoing research communications capacity building workshops explored some of the tools to help researchers analyse and target stakeholders recently. The two-day workshop, organized by GDNet and delivered in partnership with CommsConsult, took place on October 10-11, 2011 in Delhi.

The workshop was specifically designed for a group of Asian researchers involved in the GDN PEM Project (Strengthening Institutions to Improve Public Expenditure Accountability to influence policy decisions with their research results in their respective countries. The workshop gathered 12 participants from the following countries: Armenia; Nepal; Philippines; India; Indonesia and Bangladesh.

PEM Asia Research Communications Workshop

A special session was dedicated to present and practice the Alignment, Interest and Influence Matrix (AIIM) tool. While the RAPID Outcome Mapping Approach (ROMA) had used a standard stakeholder Analysis tool to identify the audiences of research-based and policy influencing interventions, the AIIM was designed to be used in a workshop setting not only to help identifying the main stakeholders, but also suggest a possible course of action towards them.

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Filed under Capacity Building Tagged with ASIA, Capacity Building, Effective Communication, media, PEM

GDNet/BLDS Scoping Workshop

October 10, 2011 by Zeinab Sabet Leave a comment

Understanding the information literacy needs and Exploring how to build Southern researchers capacity to access and use information

In collaboration with the British Library for Development Studies (BLDS), GDNet organized a scoping workshop for its team, including the Regional Coordinators covering its regional windows: Africa, MENA, South Asia, East Asia, CIS, CEE and Latin America. The workshop took place in Cairo, Egypt, from 26 to 28 September.

The workshop aimed at:

creating an initial diagnostic tool for assessing the information seeking behaviours and skills of Southern researchers and their ability to locate sources of information;
agreeing an approach for collecting this information and promoting the GDNet’s programme materials;
improving BLDS’ awareness of the wealth of resources available through GDNet’s knowledge base;
aligning BLDS’ approach with GDNet’s vision and future aspirations.

GDNet/BLDS Scoping Workshop

An overview of the GDNet programme and platform requirements was given in day I, with an aim to provide the Regional Coordinators with an update of GDNet’s strategic goals and programme improvements. Enhancements to the website were presented by the GDNet Cairo team, including the launch of thematic windows and the Community of Practice. Regional group discussions took place on how to improve the display of the existing regional windows and the resource discovery.

A full session was dedicated to the “User Personas” concept, aiming thus at building a profile of the target stakeholder (audience) through defining a generic persona (age; ethnic background; occupation; education; home life; lifestyle; professional activities/networks; values) to facilitate the understanding of their behaviours, skills and attitudes to development information and research. The session came up with a list of interesting generic assumptions about the persona in each region, which allowed the Regional Coordinators to close the gaps and uncertainties in their knowledge and explore the best ways of engaging with the personas. Moreover, the session focused on what is known about the attitudes, behaviours and skills of the user persona; with a purpose to identify what can be done to help build their capacity (skills) and change their attitudes and behaviours. Participants worked in groups to build the profile of their target stakeholders, identify the gaps in their knowledge, explore the best ways of eliciting this information while looking at the following elements: digital ICT/IL competencies; frustrations; what kind of development information is hard to find; frequent sources of information; how they find the website; why/how barriers; recommendations for engagement/ease of access to professionals; how can GDNet help; and training needs.

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Filed under Capacity Building Tagged with BLDS, Community of Practice, gdnet, Regional Coordinators, regional windows, Thematic windows, User Personas

GDNet reflects on the challenges for building capacity in knowledge management in Africa

September 19, 2011 by Zeinab Sabet Leave a comment

Article by GDNet featured in the latest issue of the World Journal of Science, Technology and Sustainable Development

As the knowledge management and research communications arm of the Global Development Network, GDNet’s purpose is to help diverse research and policy audiences make better use of development research from the Global South. It does this through brokering knowledge and building the capacity of researchers from developing and transition countries to communicate their findings to those making decisions that affect people living in poverty the world over.

GDNet has just had a paper, published in the latest issue of the World Journal of Science, Technology and Sustainable Development, that reviews the findings of a conference it organised in 2007 on knowledge management in Africa.

In its early years, GDNet placed particular emphasis on information and knowledge management staff in developing country research institutes, thus recognizing the importance of this group in using local research to influence policy.

From 2005 to 2007, GDNet ran, in partnership with organizations such as the African Capacity Building Foundation (ACBF), the Development Bank of Southern Africa and the World Bank Institute, a series of capacity building workshops, in Egypt, Uganda, South Africa and Burkina Faso. The workshops aimed at providing training and skill building in knowledge management.

In partnership with the ACBF and the World Bank Institute, GDNet organized in 2007 a conference which gathered the experiences and lessons learned from efforts to build knowledge management capacity from across the African continent. Called “Knowledge Management as an Enabler of Change and Innovation in Africa”, the conference addressed the following key themes: the need to create an enabling environment for the adoption of knowledge management practices in Africa and the importance of indigenous knowledge assets as inputs to poverty alleviation strategies.

The Conference report summarized the challenges inherent in developing effective communication strategies and a “knowledge friendly culture” in Africa as follows: creating synergy between technological and social approaches to knowledge management synergy; prioritizing resources; ownership of the knowledge creation process; sharing knowledge sharing experiences; equity in knowledge; and partnership.

In its paper, GDNet revisits the discussions of 2007, questions progress made towards meeting those challenges and shares how GDNet’s capacity building activities have evolved in the light of the conference findings. As stated in the paper, “it is likely that if the delegates were re-united today, they would identify the same challenges as existing, and note that some, such as the need for evidence to support allocation of resources on knowledge management, are more pressing than before. Linked to this, the need for cooperation and learning from each other’s experiences in knowledge management is even greater than in 2007”.

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Filed under Capacity Building Tagged with africa, Capacity Building, knowledge management

Addressing the challenges of promoting southern research

September 4, 2011 by Zeinab Sabet Leave a comment

By Clare Gorman on behalf of GDNet

Responding to George Monbiot’s recent article in the UK’s Guardian on the exorbitant costs some academic publishers charge for access to research, Globethics.net raise an important point about how such practices “accentuate a “knowledge divide” between the global north and south. But the story doesn’t start there.

Like many of the well-worn discussions circulating around development, the problem of northern voices dominating research itself keeps raising its head and those of us who work to resolve the issue scratch our heads and think about what else we can do to solve it. How can most southern research organisations even begin to compete with their Northern counterparts who can enjoy advantages such as good funding, greater communications capacity and technical infrastructure? And what else can be done to create a more level playing field?

While it is true that there are many southern-based research institutes doing very well for themselves (BRAC’s Research and Evaluation Division immediately springs to mind), there are plenty of smaller organisations and individuals for whom raising their profile and sharing their work beyond their circle of influence is impossible without the help of others. Happily, knowledge brokers such as GDNet are helping address these inequalities and bringing southern research to the centre stage.

By creating platforms to showcase their research and providing opportunities for engagement, GDNet is supporting more than almost 11,000 researchers from the South to contribute and debate ideas in development thinking policy and practice. Working with members and partners across eight regions, GDNet not only advocates for local knowledge solving local problems but for southern research to make the same impact as that from northern institutes at the global level. Yet this ambitious remit to promote southern research knowledge is not without its difficulties.

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Filed under Capacity Building, Research Tagged with Community Groups, development, GDNet Knowledgebase, knowledge brokers, Northern vs Southern voices, Southern research, Thematic windows

GDNet-TrustAfrica Policy Workshop

June 20, 2011 by Zeinab Sabet Leave a comment

On 7-8 June 2011 GDNet, in collaboration with Trust Africa, CIPPEC and CommsConsult, organised a two-day policy workshop for the researchers involved in the Investment Climate and Business Environment Research Fund (ICBE-RF). The workshop, held in Kampala, Uganda, gathered 22 participants from different African countries such as Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Democratic Republic of Congo, Ghana, Kenya, Liberia, Morocco, Mozambique, Nigeria, South Africa, Sudan, Tanzania and Uganda.

GDNet-TrustAfrica Policy Workshop

The Investment Climate and Business Environment Research Fund (ICBE-RF) is a joint project of TrustAfrica and Canada’s International Development Research Center initiated in 2006. It seeks to strengthen policy research that can help improving the investment climate and business environment in Africa, through grant making, capacity strengthening, and policy dialogues. During its first phase, the project supported a cohort of 54 research teams from 33 institutions in 16 African countries and more than 150 individual researchers who are conducting cutting-edge research on a diverse range of issues impacting the investment and business environment in Africa.

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Filed under Capacity Building Tagged with africa, CIPPEC, CommsConsult, communication, gdnet, media, policy, TrustAfrica

GDNet-AERC Research Communications Workshop

June 5, 2011 by Zeinab Sabet 1 Comment

Compared with other major world regions, Africa has had in recent history the worst economic performance, the highest poverty rate, and the worst reproductive health care. The poverty burden in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) today is staggering and the region is recording a dismal performance relative to the rest of the world with respect to development indicators such as growth in per capita income and availability of basic human needs. The ongoing worldwide studies on pro-poor growth provide strong evidence that despite the progress recorded in terms of economic growth in several African countries during the 1990s, there has been no corresponding reduction in poverty.

With the support of the Hewlett Foundation, the African Economic Research Consortium (AERC) embarked on a collaborative research project to examine the relationship between reproductive health, economic growth and poverty reduction in Sub-Saharan Africa.

GDNet-AERC Research Communications Policy Workshop

As part of its capacity building initiative, on May 24-26 2011 GDNet and the African Economic Research Consortium (AERC), together with the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), organised a workshop on Research Communication for AERC researchers.

Held in Nairobi, Kenya, the workshop was specifically tailored and designed to support AERC researchers involved in the Reproductive Health, Economic Growth and Poverty Reduction Collaborative Research Project to make an impact on policy decisions with their research results. The workshop gathered 16 participants from countries such as Benin, Botswana, Cameroon, Congo, Côte d’Ivoire, Ethiopia, Ghana, Guinea, Kenya, Mauritius, Mozambique, Nigeria, Senegal, Togo, Uganda and Zambia.

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Filed under Capacity Building Tagged with AERC, gdnet, IFPRI, policy brief, research, research communications