Documentation training / facilitation

The importance of documenting the work and the results achieved by the many development initiatives taking place all over the world is widely acknowledged, especially when talking about scaling up or about broadening the positive results achieved. Yet many people find that this is not an easy task.

Members of the Agricultures Network are working with different organisations, helping practitioners document their experiences and share their lessons. The results are many, including articles for our magazines!

Knowledge Sharing, Asia and the Pacific

This is an 18-month programme run by FAO and IFAD, aiming to provide project staff, as well as those from partners institutions, with the skills and tools required to ensure that knowledge, experiences and lessons learned are adequately captured and shared. The programme offers three types of workshops:

Participatory techniques in the field: systematization
Writing to share knowledge effectively, and
Knowledge sharing for your work: techniques and tools

ILEIA has run the first of these workshops in the Philippines and Nepal, with participants coming from the whole region: from Fiji to Pakistan, and from Cambodia to the Maldives. Our main objective has been to get a documentation process started, presenting systematization as a method which facilitates the ongoing description and analysis of the activities being carried out and the results being achieved; and discussing the major principles and conditions which need to be met.

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IFAD’s ESA Division

IFAD’s East and Southern Africa Division has developed a thorough knowledge management programme involving representatives of the projects it supports in different countries. Its goal is to “enable lessons, experience and knowledge generated by IFAD-supported projects and partners to contribute to innovation and upscaling for better development results”.
As part of their programme, ILEIA and the Agricultures Network were invited to Uganda, where we ran a training course with representatives of four projects:

RFSP, the Rural Financial Services Project;
VODP, the vegetable Oil Development Project;
DLSP, the District Livelihoods Support Project; and
CAIIP, the Community Agricultural Infrastructure Improvement Project.

The first workshop took place in January 2011, and each group started documenting its work. This is being completed, and will finalise with a second visit in June.

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People-led development

MISEREOR, the German development organisation, is interested in strengthening what has come to be known as a “people-led development” process. As part of these efforts, ILEIA and the AME Foundation joined its partner organisations in Bangladesh and in Eastern India in a thorough reflection process.

In a first workshop which took place in June 2009, we started a detailed documentation process, helping participants describe the activities carried out by their organisations and the results achieved and –more importantly- analysing the reasons behind the interesting results seen. This was complemented by a second visit, leading to the publication of a detailed report.

→ Documentation process

→ Report: “Strengthening people-led development: A joint effort of local communities, NGOs and donors to redefine participation”

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