Information Management and Impact Assessment

Context

As more stakeholders in Africa get involved with forest and tree management for a variety of goals – economic production, positive interactions with agriculture, environmental services, etc. - the demand for relevant and reliable information and knowledge is growing. Achieving SFM in Africa is particularly constrained by poor access to relevant knowledge and technologies, partly because its current availability is fragmented, and suppliers and users extremely diverse. The situation is worsened by the fact that there are very limited knowledge products specifically targeted towards stakeholders outside the forestry profession (i.e. communities, farmers, rural entrepreneurs, etc.). In the absence of systematic and targeted management of, and access to, technical knowledge, projects and programmes are not learning from previous experiences. In addition, a significant amount of data and information used in Africa is accessed from sources outside the continent, and in many instances such data, information and knowledge are used as proxies in making decisions in Africa with the obvious result that there is often poor matches between technologies and needs.

Knowledge brokerage (KB) can play an important role in managing these gaps and in supporting stakeholders within and outside the forestry sector to access relevant and timely information. KB is broadly defined as a set of intermediary activities that link knowledge production and use. KB can range from making information more accessible and understandable to helping different actors develop a shared understanding of an issue. The intent is to help decision-makers acquire, evaluate and use expertise that they would not otherwise obtain or incorporate into their decision-making. The rapid developments in ICT offer an unprecedented range of possibilities for improved and more efficient and relevant KB, offering greater reach, more access and new technologies for storing, filtering and translating knowledge into new formats.