A List of Actions and Channels for the Dissemination of Materials Generated by Task JLP1.1

TheUniversity of Zambia

a list of actions and channels for the dissemination of materials generated by Task JLP1.1 and JLP1.2

Output from Task KM2.2 of the NEPAD Southern Africa Network of Water Centres of Excellence (SANWatCE) Project

Table of Contents

1.Background

1.1.Introduction

1.2.The Southern African Network of Water Centres of Excellence (SANWATCE)

1.3.Output of Tasks jlp1.1 and jlp1.2

2.Outputof Task 2 – Improvement of Knowledge Management (KM) and Development at Regional Level in the Water Sector

2.1.Methodology

2.2.Target Groups and End-users

2.3.Knowledge Dissemination and Timing

2.4.Issues to be Disseminated

3.Knowledge Dissemination Channels and Instruments

4.Existing courses/seminars already available at the SANWATCE

5.Dissemination Strategy

6.Conclusion

7.Recommendations

8.References

1.Background

1.1.Introduction

Nothing is more fundamental to life than water. Not only is water a basic need, but adequate safe water underpins any nation’s health, economy, security, and ecology. The strategic challenge for the future is to ensure adequate quantity and quality of water to meet human and ecological needs in the face of social inequities, competition among domestic, industrial-commercial, agricultural, and environmental uses[1].

Management of water resources is a concern for the whole humanity as the survival and well-being of humans is dependent on their access to the right quantity and quality of water resources to (i) meet their basic biological needs, and (ii) to promote their socio-economic development.According to the World Health Organisation (WHO, 2007), 88% of the 4 billion annual global cases of diarrhoeal diseases are attributed to unsafe water, as well as inadequate sanitation and hygiene, while 1.8 billion die from diarrhoeal diseases each year. The WHO further estimates that 94% of these diarrhoeal cases are preventable through modifications to the environment, including access to safe water. In Africa, about 300 million still lack adequate water supplies, while about 313 million have inadequate sanitation.

The consequences of climate variability/change, especially with regard to changes in rainfall patterns, are shifting the paradigm for water management. The sector requires, more than ever, sustainable development solutions and management of the available scarce water resources.

The sector is intensely knowledge-based and service-orientated, and through innovative responses to water scarcity, is able to actively contribute to the sustainable development of nations and their people. It in this regard that world leaders adopted, in the year 2000 and set to be achieved by 2015, the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) with concrete and numerical benchmarks for tackling extreme poverty in its many dimensions. The MDGs – with theireight goals – provide a framework for the international community to work together towards making sure that human development reaches everyone, everywhere. Goal 7 addresses the immense task of ensuring environmental sustainability through four key targets, one of which (Target 7C) aims at halving, by 2015, the proportion of people without sustainable access to safe drinking water and basic sanitation. The measurable indicator for its success was set as the proportion of population with access to an improved drinking water source by 2015. Access to improved drinking water sources is directly linked to improved health status of a nation’s/region’s people. However, many countries have registered slow progress in the attainment of this MDG target because of inadequate hygienic conditions, including inadequate access to safe water and improved sanitation. Therefore, safe water supply remains a challenge in many parts of the world, in general, and the SADC, in particular, with half of the population of the region still lacking sanitation.

In order to deliver on the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), a basic requirement is that a country has the necessary skills base that must include: engineering, water infrastructure construction companies; water distribution entities; educational and research institutions; finance companies and government. It also requires individuals and communities to work together and to find solutions in particular situations. ‘Goods and services’ include, among others, consulting and engineering services; construction and operational services; planning, management, legal, regulatory and institutional advisory services; research and development services; and education and training services.

1.2.The Southern African Network of Water Centres of Excellence (SANWATCE)

The SANWATCE is a New Partnership for Africa's Development (NEPAD) initiative that was set up to promote a number of the Region’s skills: including research, education and training, networking, service rendering, and information brokerage. Knowledge generated by the Centres of Excellence, including that generated through new research, needs to be made accessible to the Region’s water stakeholders through knowledge sharing and knowledge transfer activities.

In early 2011, the Network was invited to participate in the DG EuropeAid of the European Commission to launch a pilot project ‘Support to the NEPAD Water Centres of Excellence’. The aims of the pilot project were to foster capacity development and ownership of south-to-south networking and cooperation in water science in the Southern African Development Community (SADC) region’s high education, training, research, advocacy and consultancy communities in line with the principles of the multi-stakeholder participatory approach fostered by the European Water Initiative (EUWI).

Overall, the pilot project’s contract is aimed at reaching two objectives of the DG EuropeAid support project with reference to the NEPAD Southern African network:

1. To implement the second phase of the Joint Learning Programme (JLP Train4dev) on Sector Wide Approach through the regional networks of Centres of Excellence in the water sector.
2. To improve knowledge management and development at regional level in the water sector

Within this context, the contracting of the SANWATCE by the European Union’s Joint Research Commission (JRC) to conduct independent investigation into the skills shortages in the SADC region’s water sector offers an excellent opportunity for the new network to learn how towork together in:

Generating research activities

Producing data, information and knowledge

Managing data, information and knowledge, and

Disseminating the generated data, information and knowledge to the wider group of water stakeholders.

In other words, the JLP offers the new network the possibility to become a community of practice (CoP), which according to cognitive anthropologists Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger, is a group of people who share an interest, a craft, and/or a profession. To the Water Centres of Excellence, the JLP offers an opportunity to collectively form a sharing and learning communitybonded together by exposure to a common challenge/opportunity.

1.3.Output of Tasks jlp1.1 and jlp1.2

At the projected population growth and economic development rates in the SADC region, water will increasingly become the limiting resource, while its supply will become a major restriction to the future socio‐economic development of each of the region’s countries in terms of both the amount of, and the quality of water available. This will require specific targeted skills to manage the complexity of the water sector in the region(NEPAD SANWATCE (2012a)).

In recent years, countries in the SADC region have commissioned a number of studies to determine the skills gaps in itswater sector. From most of these studies,it has become evident that the sector faces gaps and shortages in certain skills’ areas. It is in this regard, that the SANWatCEwas also contracted by the European Union’s Joint Research Commission (JRC) to conduct another independent investigation into the skills shortages that existed in the SADC region with the following objectives:

JLP 1.1 Survey on requirements in higher education and within training for practitioners in the water sector.

JLP 1.2. A study on how the Centres of Excellence could better address sector expertise consultancy and advocacy needed for sector development in the region.

According to the EU JRC, this survey formed a fundamental step in the understanding of the needs of the region’s water sector in terms of capacity in order to:

Improve participation of stakeholders in contributing to the sector’s development in the region, and

Formulate necessary interventions to address the skills shortages and knowledge gaps in the region’s water sector.

This survey provided information on the number of professionals in the region required by the water sector, and the specific expertise required – hydrogeologists, middle management, informatics and GIS experts, etc. Its findings willpave wayand provide avenues for theCentres of Excellence to assist in strengthening the skills gaps,and provide an advocacy platform for sustainable development of the water sector in the region by developing appropriate actions and channels for disseminating the findings of Tasks JLP1.1 and JP1.2.

2.Outputof Task 2 – Improvement of Knowledge Management (KM) and Development at Regional Level in the Water Sector

Management of scientific and technical information and knowledge is an important feature that supports effective and efficient human and institutional capacity. Knowledge management (KM),

Knowledge management is the name of a concept in which an enterprise consciously and comprehensively gathers, organizes, refines, and disseminates its knowledge in terms of resources, documents, and people skills (Rouse, 2006 on In an Information Week article, Angus and Patel (1998) describe this four-process view of knowledge management as follows:

Gathering is the bringing in of information and data into the system.

Organizing is the process of associating items to subjects, giving them context, making them easier to find.

Refining is the process of adding value by discovering relationships, abstracting, synthesis, and sharing.

Disseminating is getting knowledge to the people who can use it.

The art of using people as a resource is a hallmark for capacity development, technology transfer and technical co-operation and technical assistance. Therefore, activities under this task will 1) assess how knowledge is currently being used in the water sector 2) identify needs of stakeholders using existing knowledge resources, and 3) formulate strategies to address identified needs of/in the sector. This is in fulfillment of the overall objective of the network, namely: to contributing to the development of flagship programmes that focus on water quality, sanitation and water resources management through the realization of the following specific objectives:

a)To improve conservation and utilisation of the region’s water resources;

b)To improve the quality and quantity of water available to households in the region’s rural andurban areas;

c)To strengthen national and regional capacities for water resources management and reduce impacts of water related disasters;

d)To promote co-operation and knowledge transfer among water research institutions to secure adequate clean water and manage resources for national and regional development.

e)To enlarge the range of technologies for water supply and improve access to affordable quality water.

This document is dealing with outputs of activities of Task KM 2.2, whose main objective is todevelop a list of actions and channels for the dissemination of materials generated by Task 1 (JLP1.1 and JLP1.2)with a view to attracting the required attention of key water sector stakeholders.

2.1.Methodology

The study involved:

a)A review ofoutputs of JLP 1.1 and JLP 1.2 – survey on requirements in higher education and within training for practitioners in the water sector, and a study on how the Centres of Excellence could better address sector expertise consultancy and advocacy needed for sector development in the region, respectively.

b)An extensive review of existing literature;

In our local library, and

On the internet

c)Identification of:

The target group (different stakeholders in the water sector),to which/whom knowledge must be disseminated.

Existing courses already available in the Centresof Excellence and compatible as generated by from Task 1.

Dissemination channels for different identified stakeholder groups.

d)Definition of a strategy for disseminating the material through/by existing activities/courses of CoEs.

The outcome of this extensive review was the compilation of this report, which, in addition to the AQUAKNOW, also proposes additional platforms for knowledge, data and material dissemination.

All the literature that was consulted has been included in the list of references given in section 8.

2.2.Target Groups and End-users

The main geographical/territorial target for knowledge dissemination should include all stakeholders in the water sectordefined by their inter-relationships (Figure 1).

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Figure 1.Key stakeholders in the water sector and their inter-relationship (Adapted from theEuropean Commission, 2009; in NEPAD SANWATCE, 2012b)

However, the definition of stakeholders outlined in Figure 1 omits research and higher-learning institutions (referred to as science by Turton, et al., 2007) as another major cluster of stakeholders. Table 1 gives a more detailed list of water stakeholders and listed by their roles.

Table 1. Stakeholders and their roles in the water sector

According to Turton et al. (2007), stakeholders in the water sector policy field may be clustered into three main categories, namely (i) Government, (ii) Society, and (iii) Science, which he refers to as the TrialogueModel on Water Governance (Figure 2):

a)Government is responsible for policy formulation, enactment of legislations and regulations, sector financing, andmaking authoritative decisions. It also charged with supervisory and regulatory roles, financial and legal monitoring, complaint handling, programme implementation, etc.

b)Society, which is impacted upon directly by decisions made by government, has a vested interest in the architecture of decision-making. Society has the need for water supply and sanitation services and for that reason it is imperative that they know how to align their interests to/with those of policy and how these would impinge on the delivery of service.

c)Science plays a role in informing both the Government and Society Actor Clusters as they engage around the process of decision-making. It is responsible for providing capacity and awareness issues to the sector with regard to sustainable development, utilization and management of the available water resources.

Figure 2. The Trialogue Model (Source:Turton et. al. 2007)

2.3.Knowledge Dissemination and Timing

Till a man says something, both his strong and weak points remain hidden (Anonymous)

Dissemination of knowledge does not refer to the processes of distribution and collection, but rather to the spread of knowledge (Zariski, 1997) – getting the message out to the right people and in a form that can, and will be used. The discussion, debate and dissemination of new ideas lie at the very heart of what it is called a university. In fact, participation in the dissemination of knowledge is recognised explicitly as both a right and responsibility of higher education teaching personnel (UNESCO, 1997).

Dissemination of knowledge plays a very important and integral role in communicating and relaying research results and sharing of knowledge with a wider audience.In order to effectively reach the identified target groups, and to maximise the project’s visibility, the SANWATCE’s dissemination programme will be executed at two different levels:

a)International – at SADC level

b)National – within each of the SADC countries

Local – in communities, where some of the project’s activities will be conducted and three groups will be targeted for dissemination, namely policy makers, civil society (NGOs,) and the general public.

Academia – researchers, lecturers, students and other water experts.

In this pilot project, dissemination of knowledge will be undertaken in three different phases (RossoHarandzove, 2009), namely:

a)Phase 1. Dissemination for Awareness although this will start from 1 – 6 months, it is an activity that will be present throughout the period of the project. The importance of this phase is to build and make all stakeholders aware of the specific knowledge and skills gaps that pertain to their cluster group.

b)Phase 2. Dissemination for understanding, which will occur in the first 7–12months of the project, with the essential objective of involving all stakeholder-clusters for the purposes of raising awareness of the project. Creating such awareness is usually a necessary pre-requisite for generating interest in the project’s deliverables/outcomes, which may open up new dissemination channels. Critical and key content for dissemination here is information on the project’s aims, objectives and outputs.

c)Phase 3. Dissemination for Action undertaken from the 13th month for the remainder of the project period. Action refers to a changing the way things are done, which is expected to result from the adoption of products, materials and approaches that will be offered by this project. Targeted in this dissemination will be groupsthat would be in a position to influence and/or bring about change within their institutions and/or the wider community. This will involve alarge number of respondents in the targeted stakeholder groups, representing persons equipped with the right skills, knowledge and understanding of higher education in order to influence real change.

Table 2 shows the level of dissemination that is envisaged to be achieved at best for each of the identified target groups/end-users – government, science and society.