Comments on: Development as knowledge

By: Andrew Skinner

Andrew Skinner — Sat, 12 Dec 2009 15:13:14 +0000

That is certainly a much deeper form of capacity development than I witnessed, yes. However, one exception to this is Engineers Without Borders. I’m not sure what you have heard about Lita’s brother’s experience so far, but what they do is pretty cool. We will have to talk about it at Xmas, as they are a group I am very enamored with.

By: G Cameron

G Cameron — Sat, 12 Dec 2009 05:14:43 +0000

That’s really interesting, Andrew. I found it significant that I never heard Juma mention ‘capacity’ in our conversations. He always talked about competence and about innovation — often in relation to the acquisition of practical knowledge and technical skills. I think that much work done in the name of capacity building actually builds very little capacity because it is too short-term and often focuses on abstract managerial or organizational capacities. Juma is talking about training programs, expert accompaniment, and the like. He referred to recent experiments where ICT universities were taken out of a ministry of education and put under the ministry of telecoms — making an immediate connection between training and practice. He also referred to Chinese experiments of bringing hundreds of African post-doctoral scientists to work in Chinese science parks for a year and then sending them back with $20,000 worth of equipment. These indicate more significant forms of knowledge development than your average NGO capacity workshop.

By: Andrew Skinner

Andrew Skinner — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 16:25:57 +0000

It would be interesting to hear Prof. Juma’s take on the World Bank and bilateral aid agendas that now focus on ‘capacity development’. In my placement report in Ghana I wrote that the theory behind ‘capacity development’ was a sound step in the right direction for the development community, but that most development actors were struggling to step outside of their old frames of reference. Implementing capacity development projects in a truly equal partnership, with a genuine offer of knowledge, is unfortunately not the norm in my experience.