The Gyaner Haats – knowledge bazaars – of Bangladesh
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Version 0 of 1. A lot has been written about how we should reach the "last mile" – ensuring supplies and personnel reach the people who need them. This is particularly true in knowledge sharing and communication for development. It is relatively easy to share knowledge with development practitioners, educated people and people based in urban areas – but reaching isolated people in poor rural communities (mostly semi-educated and illiterate) can be much more challenging. But it is something that Practical Action has been working on and learning about for the past few years. The government of Bangladesh with the support of the UN Development Programme has established some 4,500 information centres across the country with the aim of giving people greater access to various government and private e-services and multi-sector information associated with their livelihoods. These centres are at union level, and geographically at sub-district level. But while representing decentralisation – they are still facing challenges in reaching the last mile, ie households at the community level. <strong>Establishing the Gyaner Haat</strong> In a pilot project in 30 of these centres, we established the Gyaner Haat (literally – knowledge bazaar). They are often located in a room as part of the local council office and are managed by a committee which includes representatives of the local authorities, the local technical and administrative departments and other key stakeholders. On a day-to-day basis the haat is managed by an entrepreneur who generates enough income to keep it going. They usually do this through selling ICT services, photocopying and similar activities. From each haat a network of 12 or so extension workers reach out to the community, gathering people's queries about agriculture, fisheries and livestock and spreading knowledge and skills about best practice – particularly when it comes to the use of technologies. The extension workers are self-sustaining because they also sell value-added services like crop spraying or animal vaccinations. This sharing and effective use of knowledge at the grassroots really works. Babur Ali from Biralakkhi village, in the coastal Shatkhira district, has benefited from advice and support from extension worker Abdul Ahad. He had a goat that had stopped feeding. He received de-worming tablets, powder and vitamin injection from Ahad, which significantly improved the goat's health and it began feeding again. Similarly, shrimp farmer Bishawjit Mondol of Jhapa village, has been able to control snail infestations at his farm after he learned how to use tobacco powder as bio-pesticide from a fisheries rural extension worker who had been trained through the Gyaner Haat in Atulia Union. The exciting thing is that we are helping the official government extension workers to reach much further down into the community, to real farmers who can benefit from their knowledge – really reaching that last mile. This helps a large and slow bureaucracy turn into something more agile and able to meet the needs of the poor. Initially some extension officers were suspicious of the service, and saw it as a threat to their own work, but now they recognise that it adds real value and can help them have greater impact. <strong>Donors fear knowledge sharing projects</strong> The other struggle we have had has been finding funding to expand the project. We want to move from 30 centres to 4,500. Even if our running costs are eventually covered by income, it still requires money to set up and train local committees and extension workers and equip them with knowledge resources. Donors seem apprehensive of knowledge sharing projects – either because they do not believe them to be sustainable – or because it is incredibly difficult to predict and measure impact. But what could be more sustainable than sharing knowledge? Once you have taught somebody something they will know it. An international programme has led to some interesting similar experiences in different contexts. In Nepal, our workers are not as technical, and work out of community libraries established by Read Global. There is less emphasis on being able to answer people's enquiries immediately and more "gathering of enquiries" to take back to get experts to answer. In some cases the enquiries are passed right up to a national radio station who record an interview with an expert for broadcast – which is then taken on a laptop back to the community. Voice recordings have also been a key part of work in Zimbabwe – where we have taken podcasts into the community on MP3 players. We started this digital extension and are now trying to get the national ministry extension service (Agritex) to adopt and expand it. Again it is local knowledge brokers who go out into the field, meet communities, play podcasts and then pick up further feedback and enquiries. There are sustainability challenges about meeting the travel expenses of the knowledge brokers – we want to try to recruit more people from other organisations who would be travelling into these communities anyway to become the conduits for the voice recordings. Our work isn't always successful. An attempt to set up knowledge centres in Sudan has not gone so well because the set up costs were relatively high, and the size of the communities which they sought to serve was not big enough. They also didn't employ the outreach methods which have been key to our successes in the cases above. Finally, their focus on appropriate technology was too narrow, whereas in Nepal, for example, the Read libraries also offer information on human health and microfinance under the same roof. From these experiences, the top three challenges facing those working in development are: • How do we get donors to dedicate more resource to knowledge sharing and management for the people living in remote, disadvantaged areas – particularly to outreach activities which are the most effective, but also the most expensive? • How can we get better at measuring the impact of knowledge sharing – compared, for example, to traditional service delivery projects? • How do we get effective knowledge centres which house all the information that a poor community might need in one place – rather than making people go round a whole host of specialist centres? I firmly believe that putting knowledge into the hands of poor communities is one of the best routes out of poverty – but getting through the last mile is a real challenge. <em>Dr Faruk Ul Islam is head of organisational development for Practical Action in Bangladesh</em> <strong>This content is brought to you by </strong><strong>Guardian Professional</strong><strong>. To get more articles like this direct to your inbox, sign up free to become a member of the Global Development Professionals Network</strong> |