Annabella Busawule Johnson
Consulting and managing partner, Austria
To serve effectively across an international community of knowledge for development partners, we must have first and foremost people, knowledge and technology while, of course, not taking for granted the peace and security and conducive social entrepreneurial environment, effective policies, trusted partnerships on both local, national, regional and international levels. I want to emphasize the role of ICTs in the advancement of social entrepreneurial knowledge for sustainable development, especially in underdeveloped and developing countries.
People want to solve social problems in a trusted and sustainable manner. They want to be able to build on innovative knowledge and techniques they have learned, gained and experienced from a pain point. Their experiences drive them to solve social problem in a way that makes sense to them. It is not enough to provide them with theoretical, academic, political, international standards and foreign frameworks to simply ‘copy and paste’ into their natural day to day business and or social communities. They want to be involved in the entire process of generating knowledge ecosystems that make sense to them and their developmental needs. They want to know that they can share their knowledge safely securely across boarders for sustainable development.
The Knowledge for Development Partnership provides a strong human community with a robust communication framework, namely the Agenda Knowledge for Development derived from the Agenda 2030 for the UN SDGs. In this network, we are ready to engage, support and inspire local knowledge for development partners from various communities and businesses that work together to build, document, share and maintain social entrepreneurial knowledge ecosystems that are effective in informing developmental policy in different nations across the globe.
As we all know, knowledge technologies play an important the way we collect knowledge, store it, share it. ICTs are especially useful in detecting patterns the information flow that maybe too complex for human comprehension and or detection. These technologies can save us time, ensure safe retrieval and delivery of information from right one person to the other through identity verification and further more present it in a way that is easily interpretable and understandable. At their best, technologies that support any data/information systems like knowledge ecosystems, if well designed, can relieve practitioners and communities of mundane activities, allowing them to focus on what humans do best when creating knowledge ecosystems. These activities are: communication, negotiation, creative problem solving, relationship building and living.