Gashaw Kebede

Independent KM scholar and consultant, Ethiopia

Gashaw Kebede (PhD) is an independent knowledge management scholar and consultant. For the past 25 years, he has been teaching at Addis Ababa University (Ethiopia) and consulting mainly with international organisations. He is currently based in Ethiopia.

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) have a greater chance of succeeding if they stay guided by and focused on the development concerns and desired solutions as perceived by the target locality.

One of the primary causes of the uneven effects of international
development agendas is their failure to emphasise the target community’s “local knowledge and ways of knowing.” Emphasising “local knowledge and ways of knowing,” representing the content and process of local knowledge, is significant in the development context. Firstly, local knowledge is a comprehensive, practical, and immediate knowledge system that encompasses a community’s livelihood practices, worldviews, lived observations and experiences, and intuition. These make local knowledge superior for practical and development purposes. Secondly, every locality engages in valid and unique ways of knowledge creation, accumulation, and learning that are practical and specific to the locality because local knowledge is “constructed, reaffirmed, or reworked through the social encounters, experiences, and dilemmas of everyday life”; “adjusted as part of daily routines”; gathered by the local populace; and “dynamic real-time observations of changing environments”. Knowledge production, absorption, and utilisation are also unique to each locality because prior knowledge of individuals (community) serves as the foundation for screening, judging, and integrating knowledge from various sources, as well as translating observations into new knowledge.

It follows, then, that “local knowledge and ways of knowing” must be central to SDGs’ implementation and evaluation. Understanding that local knowledge is the foundation and is dynamic and adaptable necessitates continual interaction and revision of the project’s local knowledge base in each locality involved in the SDGs. Residents’ assessments should be prioritised while evaluating the SDGs.

Keywords: local knowledge, local ways of knowing, prior knowledge, SDGs’ success, SDGs’ evaluation