Volume 11, No. 3, December 2001
Lessons
from a Knowledge Management
(KM) Initiative
Subhash
Bhatnagar
World Bank (on leave from IIM, Ahmedabad)
sbhatnagar@worldbank.org
The Electronic Network for Rural Asia Pacific Projects (ENRAP) was launched to facilitate exchange of information amongst the poverty alleviation projects funded by the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD). ENRAP was to promote documentation and sharing of knowledge, improve dissemination of information from research institutions to projects, strengthen communication with client communities and reduce cost of administrative reporting. ENRAP has lead to some use of email and the web amongst project staff, but there is very little impact on the way the poverty alleviation projects are being implemented. The paper analyses the reasons for the low impact and presents some lessons for other Knowledge Management projects.
In fulfilling its mandate to eradicate rural poverty and hunger through agricultural development, IFAD is supporting a large portfolio of projects (64 projects in 21 countries) with a commitment of nearly a billion dollars for building the capacity of poor farming communities. Many of the activities supported are new and innovative, involving at every step administrative, methodological, managerial and technical challenges. Building up of human network is seen as an essential feature of the capacity building process so that information and knowledge could be shared amongst a wider group of development stakeholders. Electronic networking, especially open-ended low-cost Internet, was thought to be ideally suited for promoting such an exchange of information between projects and their environments. The ENRAP project was created to fulfill this broad mandate. ENRAP was launched in 1998, as a pilot project to run till May 2001, with a grant of USD 750,000. During the pilot phase, selected IFAD-financed projects in India, Nepal, Pakistan, Philippines and Sri Lanka participated in ENRAP. IDRC, a Canadian development agency with a strong interest in knowledge management, was contracted to implement the initiative.
The objectives of ENRAP focused on developing horizontal communication between implementing partner institutions and their field staff, supporting documentation of local knowledge, improving access to technical research from local environments, and improving communication between projects. In the long run it was also expected to strengthen communication with the client communities.
Scope of Activities: Implementation in a typical project
The Maharashtra Rural Credit Project (MRCP) is a typical IFAD project covering 400 villages in three districts in Western India. India’s National Bank of Agriculture and Rural Development (NABARD) has the responsibility of implementing MRCP. Implementation involved the selection of partnering agencies by the implementers, developing a cadre of field workers, organizing the communities into 750 Self Help Groups (SHGs) and channeling micro credit to the SHGs through partner banks. Besides the usual tasks of monitoring and reporting, project partners organized activities to build capacity of field staff and SHGs. MRCP is seen to be successful as loan utilization rates in the project area have gone up from 40% to 90% and the repayment rate is up from 30% to 75%. Communities are now able to influence the development process. Communication between project officers, partners, field workers and client communities has traditionally been through letters, phone/fax and face to face meetings.
One of the middle level line managers of NABARD was appointed as the coordinator of ENRAP at the MRCP site. The projects were provided a PC to connect to the Internet. Some small equipment (one laptop and a digital camera), software and literature were also provided. Similar resources were provided to all projects.
In its implementation effort across projects in Asia, IDRC concentrated on extending support for achieving basic connectivity, and conducted five workshops and meetings over a 2 year period which brought participants together to learn about Internet and networking and to plan the future networking activities. One of these workshops was conducted at Pune (MRCP head quarters) and the coordinator of ENRAP in MRCP participated in a workshop in Singapore.
A central website was developed by IDRC, which enables dialog amongst participating projects, carries documents posted by IDRC and IFAD projects, and provides links to other sites. Many other projects have created their own web sites hosted on servers of ISPs or other free service providers. Training provided by IDRC has enabled the project staff in developing these sites. Access to these sites is slow and free space is limited.
Assessment of Performance, Outcome and Impact of ENRAP
Measurement of benefits from deploying information and communication technology has always been difficult even in profit oriented enterprises. The nature of usage and its impact is highly contextual, and isolating the impact of a single factor on increased program effectiveness is difficult. If several concomitant conditions are satisfied, of which ICT deployment is just one, programs may become more effective. Well-run organizations are known to extract greater value from their ICT investments.
Given this caveat, it was still necessary for IFAD to evaluate the performance and impact of the KM initiative to decide whether the initiative should be continued, and if so, in what form. It was also necessary to determine if the project staff and implementing agency delivered on their commitments. A team of consultants was hired to carry out the evaluation. The team was advised to maintain a balance between an audit of the achievements of the first phase of the initiative, and understanding the information and knowledge needs of project managers, implementers and client communities that could be useful in the design of a subsequent phase of the KM initiative. The evaluation mission visited eight project sites in India, Nepal, Sri Lanka and the Philippines (visited by the mission leader). Discussions were held with Project Management Units (PMUs) at the country level, with staff at the field sites, with some of the partners involved in implementing the projects, and with some representatives of the communities where such projects were being implemented.
The evaluation focused on Inputs, Activities, Outputs and Outcomes. Inputs and activities were easier to measure and evaluate against the levels indicated in the proposal documents as these were well defined. The outcomes were not defined in any level of detail. The resources provided by the ENRAP to the various projects (hardware, software, training and participation in workshops); and activities (levels of electronic communication activity like email, web browsing, documentation of best practices, uploading information on ENRAP web site, development of a project web site) were reviewed.
Email was beginning to get used by the PMUs, and in a few cases, by the field units. The use was however sporadic and for ad hoc purposes and special events. For example, the organization of an international workshop in Pune was completely facilitated by email. On the other hand notices for regular meetings were often not conveyed through email even though many of the participating organizations had the facility. ENRAP website was visited once in 2-3 weeks by the project staff.
The content on the ENRAP web site emphasized knowledge management and ENRAP project related issues. Few documents that provide learning for poverty related work were carried. Just a few field experiences have been documented by projects. An analysis of the log of website usage indicated 5-7000 hits per month. 55% of the users were based in the US. Visitors from the ENRAP countries accounted for a mere 17 user sessions during a 3-month period. Developing countries accounted for only 3% of the total sessions.
Major gains of the ENRAP project have been in the area of raising awareness and capacity building. Projects now recognize the need to capture and share local knowledge and best practice. Some key players benefited from technical training and began to share these skills with colleagues and partners. Local capacity was developed for Internet use, design of web sites, and use of tools for managing information. Communications between projects improved marginally.
Many of the IFAD projects had just begun their poverty alleviation work. In places where significant successes were achieved, the role of ENRAP in the success was not evident. Project managers were unable to site instances where ENRAP had helped them in solving problems of design or implementation. Since the actual documentation and sharing of knowledge was at a very limited scale and the use of email and Internet was at a low level, it appears that some of the key pre-conditions mentioned below need to be significantly strengthened for a second phase to be launched.
Analysis of why the impact was marginal
For a project like ENRAP to succeed the following pre-conditions should have been defined at the start of the project:
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A large number of key actors involved in the implementation of IFAD projects have convenient and reliable email and Internet connectivity. Project staff are keen to share knowledge and information with other projects, have the skills to document knowledge in a form that will make it useful for others and have the resources for documentation work.
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Those who can access the Internet have the time and necessary computer skills to do so and are aware of the potential benefits of seeking information and knowledge from external sources.
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Budgetary allocations are available to pay for ISP charges and local telephone calls to cover a reasonable amount of Internet usage.
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The information available through the ENRAP web site or in list serve exchanges is useful for their day to day work (e.g. solving operational problems).
Access to Internet was limited to Project Management Units. Many implementing partners had PCs but did not have the operational budgets to get an Internet connection. Even at the PMUs the use of Internet was restricted because of inadequate operational budgets to pay for ISP charges and telephone costs. The data transfer rates were often very low (100 bytes per second) in some areas and the connections were not reliable. A large proportion of the ENRAP budget was spent on the activities of the implementing agency: management and co-ordination (36.6%), needs assessment and training support (39.6%), technical aspects covering development of knowledge networking prototype and a website (14%) and audit and evaluation. A very small amount was allocated to the projects.
Knowledge resources such as web sites would be used if the content were operationally useful and structured to provide easy access. For example the content of ENRAP should have included topics such as: micro credit, self help groups, community mobilization, natural resource management, land use and entitlements, participatory monitoring, among others. The content has to be practical and useful. Electronic interaction needs to be facilitated by a moderator with special skill of e-facilitation.
In many projects the motivation to learn from the experience of others was not strong. Project staff felt that some new ideas may be picked up through sharing but often there was little immediate usability of information/knowledge that was picked up. In some projects the culture of sharing information was weak. Most projects were keen to use the ENRAP platform to project their own achievements but not necessarily to learn from the experience of others.
Many project personnel perceived ENRAP to
be a separate entity unrelated to poverty alleviation activities. Knowledge
management was seen as an end rather than a means to make the poverty
alleviation work more effective.
Key Lessons
The formally stated objectives of the first phase of ENRAP were perhaps ambitious. The project was formulated at a time when there was a great deal of euphoria about knowledge management. Experience seems to indicate that it is easy to systematize documentation of knowledge, indexing, storage and providing access to such databases. Large bandwidths have made it possible to store and transport documents in a variety of forms and formats covering all types of media. However, utilization of this knowledge for making organizational functioning more effective seems to be far more difficult. Few organizations claim to have done it successfully.
There is a hierarchy implicit in the usage pattern of new information technologies. People begin to use computers for simple tasks such as preparing documents and organizing presentations. Some graduate to its use as a tool for analysis and decision support. Email of course is the killer application. Browsing is helpful if a specific need for information is identified. Perhaps the users of ENRAP needed to be supported through the entire cycle of usage before they could become adept at creation and use of knowledge. The process of adoption of new information technologies can be lengthy as an attitudinal and behavioral change is involved.
Access to knowledge can impact effectiveness when individuals feel enriched (with new ideas, solutions to problems) and are able to seek information at the time and place where it is needed. Individuals need to trust the information before the distilled knowledge is applied to a specific action. Projects like ENRAP can at best hope to create large electronic networks which will then support the emergence of human networks keen to consult each other and begin to value and trust the information/knowledge that is pooled and disseminated. Any significant impact is almost likely to happen through serendipity. Knowledge management initiatives should therefore supplement traditional networking through face to face contact, rather than supplant such initiatives.
Exchange of knowledge is more likely to happen in a network when there is commonality of interests and shared problems to solve. It is therefore important to make an appropriate choice for the domain of the network (international, national, sub national). For example in ENRAP the primary focus of knowledge networking could have been at the national and sub-national levels to ensure the usefulness and applicability to local interventions.
KM initiatives need to be integrated with the core work of the organization. High profile KM initiatives tend to become dysfunctional. Knowledge projects like ENRAP should have a strong buy in from the mainline functionaries. Coordinators with experience and responsibility in implementing some aspects of poverty alleviation programs are likely to be more successful in integrating the knowledge activity with the core work of poverty alleviation. Reliable, affordable and convenient access to Internet for a large proportion of the staff that will form a KM network is a pre-condition to any exchange of information and knowledge.
Documentation of indigenous knowledge and sharing it within and across client communities is a potentially powerful idea, but one that is difficult to implement. Bearing in mind the ground reality of short supply of Internet connections and electricity in developing countries, the most practical approach to connect with rural communities is to provide Internet connectivity through multi-function public access points or telecentres. There may already be experimental telecentres established by Government or other agencies with which partnerships can be established to deliver relevant content.
The rural populace in developing countries, to a great extent, lacks the skills required to filter through the vast information available on the Internet and identify information most relevant to them. Capacity of grassroots workers to act as intermediaries would have to be built. They would need to facilitate easy filtering of information, testing of solutions offered to specific problems and their adaptation till the villagers themselves acquire the skills needed to access relevant information.
The documentation of best practice needs to focus on process rather than outcomes so that others can learn how projects could be successfully implemented.
In promoting electronic communication between project staff, field workers, and the client communities the use of local language should be emphasized and supported.
This paper is based on the report of the evaluation of ENRAP carried out by the author for the International Fund for Agriculture Development, Rome. It has befitted a great deal from comments by Jeffrey Rinne, World Bank.