2010 SEEP Annual Conference: Knowledge Sharing Happens In All Shapes and Sizes

Sarah Buitoni is guest blogging at the 2010 SEEP Annual Conference. Sarah is a senior associate at the Women's World Banking Center for Microfinance Leadership.

The first session in the Value Chain Development Track on Tuesday, “Agricultural Finance and Food Security,” provided definitions and models of value chain financing along with concrete case studies illustrating how value chain interventions can dovetail with enhanced food security by increasing incomes, production capacity and community empowerment. The second session, “Promoting Institutional Change to Grow Organizational Value Chain Excellence,” focused specifically on how institutions learn and adapt to new approaches at the organizational level.

A theme that ran through both workshop sessions was the importance of investigation, continuous learning and knowledge-sharing for strengthening value chain development -- from improving access, empowerment and well-being among small-holder farmers to enhancing the ability of organizations to adopt and promote a value chain approach.

Linda Jones (Aga Khan Foundation) discussed the link between value chain analysis and financing. Study and analysis of all components of the value chain—and an understanding of the financial needs of its actors—is a first and essential step in determining how and where financing enters the chain. Gaye Burpee (CRS) presented a case study of a cross-disciplinary project in rural Central America. Through investigation with local communities, the study found that innovation and learning was one of five essential skills for the success of cross-sectoral agricultural projects. In the face of unsure agricultural conditions, people need to have the skills to keep innovating, learning and experimenting.

In another case study presented by Ashok Vyas (Aga Khan) he discussed how a food security value chain project in India was able to integrate learning from over ten years—from successes and mistakes— to create a specialized loan product that has successfully generated substantial changes in income, consumption and expenditure. In all of these models and projects, investigation, learning and analysis were keys to successful interventions along the chain.

The second session addressed mechanisms for learning and knowledge-sharing within organizations that work in value chain development. Lucho Osorio (Practical Action) shared findings around enabling factors for local learning groups, defined as institutionalized routines or spaces where face-to-face learning and collaboration take place. Local learning groups are a way of sharing knowledge that reduces the costs of peer-to-peer support and learning systems, promoting practitioners in country to meet face to face and building practitioner capacity in value chain development.

Christian Pennotti (CARE) discussed the implications of adopting a value chain development approach on the way institutions learn and codify learning through monitoring and evaluation (M&E) systems. CARE’s approach to M&E seeks to situate the tracking of results and impacts beyond a specialized M&E unit to foster learning on market engagement at multiple levels. Both this and the peer-to-peer learning groups generate evidence and lessons to share while being grounded in utility for teams on the ground. The final panelist Scott Yetter (CHF) discussed learning through appreciative inquiry. ASK (Appreciative Sharing of Knowledge) looks at what is working well within an organization, focuses on concrete practices that are effective and tries to expand them. He stressed that it is impossible to introduce institutional value-chain based approaches without changing the institutional culture from project-centric to learning-centered. A theme from the three presentations is that knowledge sharing happens in all shapes and sizes, at the local level, project level and institution level.