CTA and CIAT to partner with the Pan-African Bean Alliance on knowledge management
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It took us some time but finally CTA, CIAT and PABRA will work together on a knowledge management initiative!
Indeed, we needed more than a year to nail down the collaboration, probably because even if relatively “small” activities are promising entry points to future growing undertakings, they often do not receive the attention they disserve.
The Pan African Beans Research Alliance (PABRA) is an international network, originally established by CIAT, now comprising 29 national agricultural research institutions, and over 350 partners from Farmers and rural communities, Non-Government Organizations, traders and private sector. PABRA sees its role as contributing to Food Security and Nutrition by improving the range of varieties of beans adapted to local environment and climate and improving the quality of seeds and cropping systems. The knowledge management intervention that we are addressing in this collaboration will involve one of the three regional networks of PABRA, the Southern African Beans Research Network (SABRN), which comprises 13 countries and is currently at the phase of program planning, with a meeting of the network scheduled for November 2015.
See recent story on how PABRA supports the deployment of new drought-resilient white beans to Ethiopia. PABRA is also currently featured at the Borlaug dialogues on Breaking the Bottlenecks to Scale up Bean Seed Systems in Africa.
Therefore, the SABRN planning event offers the opportunity to test the combined application of the two methods, namely the “KM Tree” framework and the KM scan that CTA has developed for analysis of KM within a network, combined with the application of the KM impact pathway planning tool that CIAT elaborated. The case study will also serve as a learning opportunity for both CTA and CIAT for joint documentation and sharing of the experiences, which may open the way for further collaboration on information and knowledge management between CTA and the CGIAR system.
The implementing team comprises PABRA’s KM, monitoring and evaluation specialist Rachel Muthoni, CTA’s Krishan Bheenick, CTA consultant Koen Beleen from Co-capacity, and Simone Staiger.
On this blog and during the event, we will be sharing progress and insights.