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You've found the wiki for the Harambee project. This wiki is intended to help document the project..., and we strongly encourage everyone involved to actively contribute by editing these pages! If you don't find what you are looking for here, please send us an email at harambee-sgf (AT) dgroups.org.
If you don't find what you are looking for here or would like to contribute an opinion or resource, check out the Harambee website.
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Workshops
Inception Meeting - Addis Ababa, May 2003
Focus Newtorks' Workshop - Addis Ababa, September 9 - 13, 2005
The project was ‘pre-launched’ in conjunction with two back-to-back workshops held in Addis Ababa in September 2005. The term ‘pre-launched’ is used because, although a significant portion of funding for the project was in the pipeline, it had not been made immediately available, but the intent was to use what had been allocated for the inaugural workshop as a vehicle for promoting the rapid and direct engagement of Focus Network (FN) Coordinators in Harambee Project design and implementation, with a view to promoting a broadly shared ownership in Harambee among Coordination Committee (CC) members and FN Coordinators.
For additional information and documentation, check out Focus Networks' Workshop - Sept 2005.
Harambee End of Phase I Workshop and Phase II Design Workshop - Kampala, Jan 12-13 & Jan 15-16
These workshops bring together the Harambee Coordination Committee, Focus Network Coordinators and successful small grant concept note applicants.
For more information on the workshops, see End of Phase I & Phase II Design Workshops.
End of Phase II Workshop
As Phase 2 of the Harambee Project is drawing to an end in mid-March 2008, the Harambee Coordination Committee is organizing a workshop to consolidate the learning from the project as well as charter a way forward for the future of the project.
For more details check out the End of Phase II Workshop wiki
Focus Networks
This section is intended for the focus networks to document the implementation of their pilot projects. The following focus networks have been granted funds to implement a pilot project that aims to introduce knowledge sharing approaches and ICTs into their networks:
Women of Uganda Network (WOUGNET)
WOUGNET is a non-governmental organisation initiated in May 2000 by several women's organisations in Uganda to develop the use of information and communication technologies (ICTs) among women as tools to share information and address issues collectively. It is hoped that the Harambee project will increase the potential for shared learning among all of its partners through its interactions with a national-level network such as WOUGNET.
Constitution and Reform Education Consortium (CRE-CO)
CRE-CO is a network of 22 like-minded Civil Society Organizations in the Democracy,Governance and Human Rights sector. The roots of CRECO can be traced to the formation and active participation of CSOs in agitation for multipartysim and constitution reform in the early and mid- 1990s. The consortium was however formed in 1998,when the Legal and Human Rights NGOs’ Network coalesced and resolved,among other things,that education on issues of constitutionalism,nationhood,democracy and governance was necessary for reforming Kenya’s political infrastructure.
CRE-CO’s national-level orientation will provide Harambee with a useful counterpoint to the regional or continental bases of the other project Focus Networks. CRE-CO is also poised to make increased use of ICTs to strengthen linkages and communications among its members, and it has a particular interest in strengthening shared learning on a thematic basis. The combination of KS-related face-to-face techniques with ICT use for ongoing work will contribute to all partners’ learning around balancing these two aspects of supporting collaboration.
Academia Research Network
With over 2,000 languages, which represents a third of all the languages worldwide, Africa cannot afford to ignore the issue of language in the development and building of an Information Society. Yet local African languages can become marginalized as a result of the Internet revolution with English becoming the dominant language. Efforts need to be made to include the use of local languages in the electronic world, if the majority of Africans are to gain access to the Information Society. Given that Africa is under-represented in the global Information Society, there is a need to build capacity to produce and collect accurate and relevant local content in official and national languages, recognizing oral and traditional forms of communications.
With respect to information and knowledge management activities for African academia, ECA considers the higher education community as the intellectual backbone to lead Africa into the digital age. The AISI framework document states that the AISI higher education and research objective is “to act as a vehicle for pooling national and regional intellectual and human resources to help contribute to research and development efforts in the continent”. In this regard, one of the four Academia Research Networks has been created to work on African Language and content development in the Cyberspace. It aims at determining the economic, political and technological aspects of language development in the Information Society, building individual and institutional capacities for addressing language needs in the academic community, and providing an information and knowledge infrastructure for local language exchange and dissemination. Coordinated by the Academia of African Language based in Bamako (Mali), the network involves more than twenty five (25) academicians and researchers from all over Africa and has adopted a strategic three phase Plan of Action. More on ARN : www.kiscam.org
African Youth ICT4D Network (AYIN)
Of two hundred and ten (210) million Africans, one-third of the population are between the ages of 10 and 24. By 2025, more than one of every five young people in the developing world – some 380 million people –will live in sub-Saharan Africa (UN Pop Division 2002). African youth are increasingly concentrated in cities, making this the most urbanized generation in history. One of the opportunities that young Africans now have, finding the economic information they need to make their way in life, is the Internet with its access to a global storehouse of new ideas and knowledge. The challenge is now how to scale up programs to actively build up the young people of today, allow them to shine as informed tomorrow-relevant stakeholder and to accelerate their participation in the global economy.
Recognizing these critical roles African Youth should play, ECA has been assisting in raising awareness and building capacity of Youth organizations within the framework of AISI. Furthermore on the 4th of February, 2005, the African Youth ICT4D Network (AYIN) was created during the African Regional Conference for the World Summit on the Information Society that took place in Ghana. A bureau was elected with a coordinator and six sub-regional representatives. The purposes of the Network include:
- To ensure youth input into Africa’s Information Society interventions
- To maximize youth potential/energy in the achievement of the Millennium Development Goals, within the context of regional initiatives such as NEPAD and National strategies
- To engage relevant stakeholders in the implementation of all aspects of the WSIS Plan of Action
A comprehensive strategic action plan to strengthen Youth involvement in the process of building an inclusive Information Society at national level has been developed. The short term plan includes regional capacity building workshops and Multimedia Community Center implementation. More on AYIN. www.ayinetwork.org
APC-Africa-Women
APC-Africa Women is a network of organisations and individuals that work to empower African women's organisations to access and use Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) for equality and development. APC-Africa-Women has its origins in the APC Womens Networking Support Programme (WNSP). This linkage with the WNSP presents a positive case for learning about the relationship between a relatively new regionally-based entity and its more mature, globally driven parent.
Capacity Building for Community Wireless Connectivity in Africa
Community Wireles, a project led by APC, aims to stimulate the establishment of community wireless networks in Africa, through capacity building around the skills and knowledge required to make appropriate technology choices and set up community wireless networks; and to promote contact between users and developers of wireless technologies. The Harambee project proponents view this initiative as a particularly interesting one insofar as it takes an institutional network approach to the adoption of a very new technology that has great potential for enhancing connectivity in Africa.
The networks and communities highlighted above are not only playing pivotal roles in African development, but they each present strong learning opportunities for the Harambee project and its participants as they experiment with the use of ICTs and collaborative processes to further strengthen their respective networking efforts. The Harambee project aims to provide targeted support to such initiatives in order to enhance their capacity to engage in setting development priorities in the sectors in which they are situated through their various research, advocacy, innovation and dissemination activities.
Small Grants Facility
Processes supporting collaboration and partnership are critical to enhancing the participation of Africans in their own development. There is both an immediate and strong need in Africa for capacity development in the design of processes that assist in the creation, use and sharing of knowledge, and in the use of information and communication technologies (ICTs) to support such participation. The Harambee project, and the Small Grants activity, has been conceived to address many of those needs.
For more information on the SGF including eligibility requirements and criteria, refer to the SGF Call for Applicants.
In the second round of the small grants, we used an open source software called OPA. While we had a great programmer customize the software to our needs, we still came across a number of OPA issues with the software. These and others were captured in the final technical report drafted by Neal McCarthy.
Learning Framework
A challenge with which we are currently grappling is that associated with monitoring and evaluating the project as well as ensuring there is a lasting learning element to it. To assist with this, and in addition to the various mechanisms for communication and sharing information which have already been described, we have developed a Learning and Evaluation Framework which outlines a process for learning in the implementation of the Focus Network pilots and of the project in general.
The plan is to have processes that will guide learning and evaluation without imposing an onerous burden of additional work for project implementers. To the extent that these processes are relatively light and provide direct benefits to those implementers, they will not only be more thoroughly applied, but they will also contribute to deeper and more shared learning among project participants.
Learning within the Harambee initiative is already taking place at different levels. The learning framework outlines an approach to learning at the following levels:
Coordination Committee: Here, the coordination committee outlines what it is that it wants to learn in the implementation of the Harambee initiative and suggests how this learning should take place.
Focus Networks: This is a proposed learning process which is intended to promote learning with and from the actitvities of the focus networks. Each Focus Network is provided with a page in the wiki where they can record what's working and not working so well in the design and implementation of their activity.
It is noted that this is an experimental approach to learning and documentation with the intention of collecting information in the wiki that can contribute towards the development of a network related product. For example, in the case of AAW, the network coordinators will be developing a database or form of yellow pages. In AAW's wiki, we could record the following:
- Reflections based on the situation, outcomes and actions of the pilot's activities
- What's working and what's not working so well.
- What is being learned and should be shared with others.
- Useful resources
This information will be analysed and packaged in a way that would be useful for other network coordinators/facilitators.
Small Grant Recipients: Network Coordinators implementing activities through Harambee's Small Grant Facility each have their own wiki space to record what's working and not working so well in the implementation of their activity.
They, too, have been invited into the learning framework process and will be interviewed at three stages in the implementation of their activity.
A wiki page Documentation template has been created though network coordinators are encouraged to collect information and resources in a way that works for them.
Online training for Harambee Networks
As part of its efforts to build the collaborative capacity of networks in Africa, the Harambee Project provides online training in the use of various collaborative tools and technologies to network coordinators.
