Addis share fair focuses on ways to create, share and use livestock knowledge

Making knowledge travel by Donkeys - ILRI and GTZ

Donkeys at the share fair

The recent ‘AgKnowledge Africa’ share fair on the ILRI campus in Addis Ababa brought together more than 300 people from Africa and beyond. The heart of the event was a series of four learning pathways on different subject areas. One of them was on livestock.

The first discussion round aimed to ‘map’ the interests and activities of participants … which ended with participants forming three groups defined by their primary area of action: grassroots level, project level, and organization/policy level. Beatrice Ouma already reported on the discussions from the grassroots and project levels … here we document what the organization people discussed.

What types of knowledge management tasks were on our agenda? They included:

capturing and sharing knowledge of staff and projects – challenges being to translate knowledge for the right audiences, and to locate often scattered local content
communicating best practice – through networks
data collection, analysis and translation with mobile phones – key questions include how to define the right questions, coping with data overload, and turning information into data
capturing and sharing indigenous knowledge – translating it for wider use, keeping it ‘alive’ and accessible
co-creating knowledge with partners
facilitating multi-stakeholder knowledge sharing – which requires good coordination, dialogue that is ‘actionable,’ and a regognituion of the limitations of online platforms
facilitating dialogue among practitioners
capturing learning
improving the quality of operations – by capturing field level knowledge that demonstrates impact and learning
brokering knowledge sharing – where knowledge champions have a key role

Some over-riding questions emerged:

How do we communicate and put to use the vast amounts of data and information we already have?
How do we create truly demand-driven information and information services?
Should we be shifting our roles from being primarily information service providers to more brokerage roles as information exchange platforms?

The mapping session was followed by a series of presentation/discussions where different people introduced their activities:

Yetnayet Mamo spoke on DAGRIS – an animal genetic biodiversity system
Gatarwa Kariuki spoke on livestock market information systems in Kenya
Joel Lehmann spoke on the use of mobile phones in the East Africa Dairy Development project
Beth Cullen spoke on ways that participatory video has been used by pastoralists in Ethiopia
Francis Keita spoke about livestock market information systems in Mali
Andre van Rooyen spoke on learning and innovation platforms in Zimbabwe
Sintayehu Alemayehu spoke on livestock early warning systems in Ethiopia
Silvia Sperandini introduced the a community of practice on pro-poor livestock (COP-PPLD)

Read more about the livestock pathway discussions:

Find out about the share fair: