Comments on: Complexity trap: Local vs. global knowledge in development work

By: peter ballantyne

peter ballantyne — Wed, 28 May 2008 12:24:59 +0000

Hi Christian,

For a long time in Britain, the best place to share and gain knowledge was in your ‘local’ (pub)! Not sure how this is in Eschborn?

I think the newer social media have a huge potential to strengthen the local basis and focus of much development work, by creating and sustaining demands, maybe even small ones, for information expertise and knowledge that is local, for local purposes, by local people.

I did some work a few years ago at IICD on ‘local content’ on the Internet … we concluded that one of the urgent challenges is to ensure that this content, that is the expression of a local community (not what is sent to them), is properly valued. If it isn’t valued, it dies. Ironically, the local people themselves often need to persuaded to much more value this knowledge; they are often educated and trained to value external ‘global’ knowledge above that of their neighbours.

I still come across many many information and communication efforts in development that are based around the notion that they – the poor farmers or whoever – ‘need to know’ whatever it is that is being promoted … Hardly anyone invests in ways to ensure that they themselves are able to know what the farmers know.

cheers

Peter

By: John Powers

John Powers — Fri, 23 May 2008 05:03:33 +0000

Late to the party, but want to pipe up to say this is a great post.

By: Bijan Kafi

Bijan Kafi — Sat, 17 May 2008 18:32:57 +0000

I’m currently developing a global network for social entrepreneurs with the basic aim to bring people together in real life wherever they are to work together and learn from each others expertise. We are specifically seeking to avoid the organisational stereotypes of classic formal learning, e.g. “a learning institution like a university has to be XYZ”. That said, I would consider the breaking down of such stereotypical barriers (who is competent/who is not; where learning should occur/should not etc.) a crucial step to opening up repositories of expertise etc. that could be supported significantly by social networks – but not virtual networks alone. It’s not only about the learning – it’s also about the work. So, sites like “neighbour” are going in the right direction to open up local/localised knowledge but that won’t be enough.

By: Meryn Stol

Meryn Stol — Tue, 13 May 2008 15:32:36 +0000

I think this is why micro-finance is so successful. It’s based on the assumption that poor people are trustworthy, and in fact do know how to improve their situation when they’re extended some trust (i.e. given a bit of money).

What’s more, I think the most important thing (the right mindset) has not much to do with knowledge. It’s very tacit. Every person can be a problem solver. Of course, those persons may choose to learn about best practices elsewhere, be it in communities near them or in whole different countries. Often, solutions are so context-dependent that you must be really sure the approach you’re copying is indeed applicable to your own situation. Sometimes, it may turn out to be faster to solve the problem by yourself. The basic idea of roads, public transportation, health care or education are not that hard to grasp…

I think Grameen has very good DNA in that sense. Do you know more big organizations that share such a community-oriented / bottom-up approach?

By: mohamed

mohamed — Tue, 13 May 2008 05:40:05 +0000

You’re spot on – too often people trying to do good think that they can drop a foreign solution in and expect everything to work as it would in London or New York.

Without a grounded understanding of the local environment, it’s culture, history and traditions most well intentioned work is wasted…

(tragically, your random anti-spam captcha is “export”)

By: Christian Kreutz

Christian Kreutz — Mon, 12 May 2008 21:21:27 +0000

blogged about an important topic for me: Complexity trap: Local vs. global knowledge in development work http://tinyurl.com/5e5259