of blogs, small farmers and new Presidents

Well it seems I was wrong about Ms Baleka Mbete, and that the likely new President will be the current Deputy President of the ANC, Kgalema Motlanthe. Which just goes to show that I should not pretend to be a political analyst. Steven Friedman does that job very well, and I was impressed by his opinion piece in yesterday’s Business Day.

Currently I am involved in an interesting collaboration with 2 Dutch people – Sibrenne Wagenaar and Joitske Hulsebosh. We are together doing some research with IKM into different approaches to the evaluation of knowledge management strategies. This has involved a desktop literature study, and we are also interviewing people. We will be publishing a paper, and our findings will be presented in Holland in November and in Namibia early next year.

This collaboration has been interesting as we have done a lot of work together online, using tools such as Skype, Google Docs and blogging. This has been a new way of working for me and has led me to see the potential for using the internet as an interactive collaborative tool as well as a search engine and a networking forum.

I did have the opportunity to meet face-to-face with Sibrenne and Joitske when in Holland recently, and this certainly makes online collaboration easier, but increasingly I can see the potential for online collaboration and working over distance when one does not have the opportunity to meet one’s colleagues in person. This raises challenges in terms of how one builds trusting and cooperative relationships, minimising the opportunities for misunderstanding and conflict, without ever having met the other people.

I am also involved in developing another project together with my new Kessels and Smit colleague Julian Sturgeon. Julian is involved with an organisation called Resource Africa.

Our proposal is to investigate alternative forms of capacity building in the development sector with the intention of developing new and sustainable learning methodologies.

The ‘Empowering Emerging Farmers’ (EEF) project seeks to develop supply chains for agricultural products that can be marketed through the fair-trade mechanisms. Resource Africa’s role in the project is to assist emerging farmers to set up production systems and to develop management capacity in the community-based organisations.

With Julian, we are developing a systemic learning approach in which the project will aim to achieve the following:

Firstly, we will introduce a systemic organisational learning approach using different projects that are willing to particpate. Secondly, we will focus on measurable changes in the performance, creativity, sustainablility and impact of key organisations within the system - an example here would be a Common Property Association engaged in supplying fruit to the fair-trade system. Third, we hope this will result in a sustainable learning approach that can be applied in the arena of land reform and small-scale agriculture.

This is an exciting initiative and provides the opportunity for us to expand our work in a developmental context with a social learning approach.