Intake report West Africa Water Initiative [WAWI] : knowledge management project : final version, September 2010

In 2008 IRC wrote a proposal for a knowledge management component of the West Africa Water Initiative called ‘WAWI KM project’. The WAWI KM project aims to help WAWI with a very practical KM strategy also leading to a communication strategy or plan to disseminate and offer the ‘lessons learned’ of the public private partnership WAWI. For this the WAWI KM project entails a fact finding mission by local consultants. Public consolidated information on WAWI is hard to find. Several attempts to maintain a website failed and no public easy assessable repository with facts, figures, plan, progress and achievements is currently available. Definitely one of the aims of the WAWI KM project is to take stock of available information and annotate the documents. Another basic is to get an overview of activities. For the latter a generic, more global overview can be found in the annex. Underlying the WAWI KM project is the WAWI KM framework shown in annex ‘Framework for WAWI KM research’. It shows that information from (knowledge sharing) activities and / or dialogues (workshops, building latrines, raising awareness, running a country WAWI platform, creating a newsletter etc) has to be created and managed, where taking stock, as WAWI KM project does, is crucial. To WAWI this is not new as in various reports, interviews and reviews it has been mentioned this should have been addressed better and centrally. See the recommendations in the annex: WAWI - Mid Term Status Review - March 2007 and WAWI – Rapport final d’évaluation de WAWI.

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