Course Rationale

This capacity building intervention aims to enable communities and organizations to efficiently manage their knowledge assets to meet their development goals. A community is any group of people bound by a common interest. Today the meaning of community is no longer restricted to the physical community of people who live contiguously, but refers also to people separated in space and time but having a common interest. To develop to their full potential, both types of communities need to manage their knowledge resources

This course in Knowledge Management for Community Development is in response to the need to demonstrate that knowledge management (KM) is a doable human activity to leverage knowledge cumulated by a community or organization through the years, using ICT and other tools for capturing, codifying, storing, retrieving, and sharing indigenous as well as introduced knowledge among its members to create value.

Organizations throughout the world are realizing that their next critical resource is knowledge. Unprecedented advances in technology have made possible seamless operations in practically all areas of human endeavor, transcending geographic, political, and cultural divides. Now, more than ever, developing communities must learn to manage what data, information, and know-how they have cumulated through the years to improve performance and participate in an interconnected, global community whose currency is knowledge. The explicit and systematic management of vital knowledge and its associated processes of knowledge generation or capture, codification, storage, access, and sharing is knowledge management (KM). Developing communities need to acquire and grow the skills associated with these processes among its members if it is to benefit from the real value of knowledge resources available within and beyond its physical boundaries.

This capacity building intervention for KM is guided by the AIJC’s over-arching philosophy that recognizes the key role of people as creators, modifiers, custodians, sharers, and users of knowledge and the essential support of technology in the knowledge process. That philosophy also recognizes the need to liberate communities – especially the resource-challenged ones – from the constraining view that KM is a technology-intensive enterprise that can be practiced only by sophisticated and well-endowed organizations.

Course Objectives

After the course, participants will have

F. S. Azarcon, MA