This current blog summarises key messages from the pre-conference workshop at Tropentag 2024 in Vienna and invites all workshop participants and friends of the BMBF funded projects to join in upcoming Knowledge Cafes.
Available in en
The title of this year’s pre-conference workshop was “Knowledge Management for Sustainable Agriculture in Sub-Saharan Africa” and presented an exchange from across the BMBF funded regional projects on sustainable land management in Africa under the FONA umbrella, on the various steps of knowledge co-creation and management in agriculture. One special aspect delved into, providing impulses for discussion, was the African Knowledge Management for Agricultural Development (KM4AgD) Challenge run by the Forum for African Research in Agriculture (FARA).
Benjamin Abugri, FARA’s Knowledge Management Specialist, and three certified Knowledge Managers for Sustainable Development, PhDs candidates Dorcas Sanginga Alame and Melika Vodounhessi and post-doc researcher Dr. Kisito Gandji, gave a keynote and provided insights into the challenge, respectively, before diving into a fishbowl discussion with the workshop participants.
In addition, the regional projects gave their own updates on knowledge management. Friederike Froebel from the Minodu project gave a demonstration of the Local Community Network, which they have implemented in rural Togo for farmers to share sustainable land management practises. On behalf of InfoRange, Dr. Lilli Scheiterle showed the progress made on their veterinary app co-development, aiming to help pastoralists overcome critical challenges such as high transaction costs and market inefficiencies. Results on fertilizing microdosing were elaborated on by Dr. Deogratias Kofi Agbotui, also captured in a recently published blog, whereby fertiziling microdosing can ease production costs for resource-poor farmers and increase food security.
As this workshop highlighted, sharing knowledge is powerful and truly at the heart of sustainable development. Allowing time for discussion and exchange is vital for co-creation and management of knowledge. This has led to the unintended yet very fortunate consequence that this workshop is being continued in as virtual knowledge cafes.
The planned knowledge cafes will be moved to the virtual realm, kick started by INTERFACES Colloquium Series “Communities of Practice and Learning — D-Groups”, presented by Benjamin Abugri (FARA) and Aiveen Donnelly (IDOS), on 17 October.
During this session the benefit of Communities of Practices will be highlighted, showcasing D-Groups as a platform for exchange, which will consequently be used to open conversations on the following two knowledge cafes. These will deal with the knowledge products as outcomes from the KM4AgD Challenge and serve as their validation.
A brief video highlighting the KM4AgD Challenge can be found here and the full schedule of the upcoming virtual knowledge cafes can be found here. For updates connect with via our LinkedIn or D-Groups.