Operational Information and Knowledge Production: a Challenge for Information for Development

The local role of private and/or non-governmental practitioners (NGOs, consultancy firms, producers' organisations, etc.) in development processes has grown in recent years. The number of these stakeholders has grown and they are progressively becoming increasingly professional.

• They must be able to find information either pragmatically to undertake their activities and meet the needs of the populations they are helping or more generally to not be marginalised when it comes to development challenges and the policies that are elaborated so as to be able to contribute to them.
  
  
• Inversely, they must be able to have their skills be recognised and therefore must be able to optimise their activities and know-how. They must also be able to put themselves in a position to have their analysis of the stakes in the field be heard and therefore they must develop their ability to produce information and communicate their experiences and accomplishments.

These stakeholders need to have access to and exchange operational information in order to avoid repeating what has been tested elsewhere and to benefit from validated references (on what has worked and what has failed) that exist elsewhere.

Development Practitioners' Needs

These stakeholders' request is not so much formulated in terms of research on this or that subject but rather in terms of responses to problems encountered in the field in the framework of their day-to-day activities: "How can one define a project locally?", "Who has already done so and how can one contact them?", "What were the results and main difficulties encountered?", "Who can provide technical support?".

We are getting closer to the need to have a panel of summary and validated information able to give perspective on the various parameters that enter into the picture when solving problems in a given context and that allows stakeholders to increase their options and better master them.

Once the need for operational information is stated, one arrives very quickly at the need to act to consolidate and support development practitioners' ability to design and manage their information systems.

Because operational information exists. It is to be found above all in stakeholders' experience.

Collect information: field practitioners are the crucial stakeholders because they are the ones who undertake actions, support them and can identify them.
Disseminate information: again, practitioners are crucial because they are the ones in direct contact with grassroots groups and populations, develop support-advice, and implement projects.

A Methodological Challenge

While it is easy to share the choice of information that is useful for action, the precise definition of information treatment modalities reveals differing visions and practices. How can one make a true exchange of experiences possible? How can one make sure that the knowledge accumulated can become tools for action?

Treating operational information raises a series of methodological questions: :

• How are practitioners able to formulate information on their practices themselves?
  
  
• How can one analyse an experience pertinently so as to make it accessible to other stakeholders?
  
  
• What information analysis and treatment methods make it possible to produce knowledge that can be used by others in different contexts?
  
  
• How can one manage and display such knowledge, which is by definition fluctuating: practices are adapted continuously, contexts differ and change, comparing differing points of view is needed to make information operational.
  
  
• This makes treating the information very demanding. It is not so much a matter of providing the results of experiences as it is analysing how they were conducted, their implementation constraints, and the opposition and conflicts that they may have inspired. Accordingly, the system would be led to privilege difficulties over successes because one often learns the most from failures. Yet they are often the most difficult to highlight for various reasons: obligations vis-à-vis donors, alliances, progressively forgetting difficulties when the end result is convincing, etc. How can one give oneself the means to achieve this?

In addition, the challenge lies in the ability to elaborate a jointly validated methodology that makes it possible to document an experience. Forging a common culture is necessary for the exchange of experiences. This basis is indispensable to help systematise information pertaining to day-to-day work so that it can be compared and discussed. Without possible comparison, there can be no shared knowledge.

If we want to act sustainably in this field and endeavour to systematise the collection and optimisation of experiences by practitioners themselves, elaborating mechanisms and methodologies that can be shared is indeed a challenge. The way in which we all think of experience exchanges is thus an area for experimentation in its own right.

The InterDev Experience

After a few months of analysing the InterDev service, we have come to various conclusions:

• Analysing experiences leads to re-examining the actions undertaken to take into consideration the actions' impact, the dynamic surrounding the dissemination of results (the context and description are elements that are better mastered). The most difficult aspect is to communicate certain elements that are at the heart of the experience exchange and that are most difficult to take into account concretely: lessons learnt, reproducibility of the experience, and changes of scale. We feel that taking into account these elements is what really makes it possible for the information to be useful to others. This requirement makes up a self-training process for practitioners.
  
  
• The difficulty of taking into account these elements on lessons learnt and the key elements defined as one of the major descriptive fields in analysing experiences was observed. The ability to analyse these aspects does not exist if the information did not come from a project. When experience records are related to a project implemented by an organisation, these key elements can be collected because the project both allows for critical distance and supposes a regular assessment process for activities implemented.

Two Major Lessons Learnt:

In so much as analysing an experience leads its author to "revisit" the experience in question and find the additional information necessary for understanding what was implemented and measuring the impact of the activities undertaken, a process such as this can act as self-training in assessment and research. In short, it can act as a factor for the quality of the actions themselves. The challenge is to encourage experience capitalisation as a form of self-training and knowledge-building for practitioners themselves.

It is necessary to integrate processes to manage information on experiences in activity implementation approaches within projects themselves. In other words, it is necessary to budget time in order to give oneself the means to regularly evaluate the activities undertaken and begin a process of regularly analysing actions and communicating from the start of the project, without waiting for the end results. It is on this condition alone that experience exchange networks and services have a chance of: - gathering pertinent information, - becoming sustainable. The capitalisation process is included in the very framework of the activities undertaken and does not become additional work.