This year I have the opportunity of teaching a part of the online course Food Security: Assessment and Action, part of the program on Food Systems, culture and society offered by FAO (the Food and Agriculture org of the UN) and the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC).
This course seeks to provide an understanding of food security, and create capacity on people working on food security projects in areas such as framework, information systems, reporting, assessments etc.
The part of the course I’m teaching is focused on Collaboration and Advocacy Techniques, a small part compared to the wealth of information that students are receiving on different frameworks and analysis.
I will try to cover three main issues:
1. Knowledge sharing tools and techniques in the context of a food security initiatives.
2. The challenges and advantages of choosing a collaborative approach to work on assessments and analysis.
3. Elements of advocacy: how to plan for it and how to design a basic strategy.
All contents of the course are incredibly interesting. Right now, students are discussing the issue of “What is Targeting & Why is Targeting important?”. A student explained targeting as “identifying the people, groups, families or communities most in need or most vulnerable, and designing the actions or delivery method so that it reaches (ideally) all of these people”.
Other topics include Monitoring and Evaluation and Food security policies.
I’m really impressed with the diversity of students and their backgrounds. Most of them are already working in Food Security initiatives all over the world. Instructors on this course are also incredibly saavy and experienced on all these topics. I’d link to their bios but they seem to have disappeared from the website. I’m learning the most by reading their comments and their posts on the virtual classroom.
You can check out the materials and the class references at the Distance Learning website maintained by FAO and the European Union.
Sulá Batsú has been working on the project “Information and Knowledge Management (IKM)”. The project is reflecting about and improving the knowledge processes, as well as the connection between diverse types of knowledge. It is a global project with 4 different work teams, one of them looking at local knowledge processes, and Sula’s initiative fits into that work area.
Sula’s project is directed towards youth empowerment and intergenerational knowledge sharing supported by ICT tools. The idea is to generate a collectively constructed product based on the experience of key actors and stakeholders, analyzed from the perspective of young members of the community. There is a blog to follow up on the project advance. The group so far has created a variety of methodologies including games, photography, painting, storytelling, interviews and group dynamics, all directed to recover the history of the community and to create capacity to generate and share new knowledge.
There’s more information about the project in Spanish, and there’s a video about some of the project activities (activate the English subtitles by clicking on the CC link of the Youtube video).* There is also a Flickr account for the project, where we have photos taken mostly by the children in the communities.
*A technical detail: I helped with the subtitling of this video. I used Jubler to do the subtitling and then used YouTube feature for including subtitle files. Days later, I learned the folks at Miro are coming up with a cool solution for subtitling in multiple platforms. Remind me of writing a post specifically about that.
El libro “Compartir conocimientos para el desarrollo rural“, recoopilado por Sally Burch y publicado por ALAI, contiene varios artículos sobre experiencias de intercambio de conocimientos en América Latina. Mi aporte tiene que ver con el uso de distintos medios (nuevos y viejos) para documentar, apoyar y generar procesos de intercambio. Las experiencias que decidí retomar en el libro son parte del trabajo que hemos hecho en la cooperativa Sulá Batsú en los últimos años. El libro está disponible en formato PDF en Español.
The book “Sharing Knowledge for rural development“, coompilation by Sally Burch and published by ALAI, contains several articles about knowledge sharing experiences in Latin America. My contribution is focused on the use of different media (old and new) to document, support and generate sharing processes. The experiences I talk about in the book are part of the work that Sulá Batsú has been developing in the last years. The book is available in PDF format in Spanish only, for now.
