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Caribbean Network of Rural Women Producers (CANROP) completes KM SCAN

Laureene Reeves Ndagire

It was in Georgetown, Guyana, that the Technical Centre for Agricultural and Rural Cooperation (CTA) offered a workshop to CANROP from June 30 to July 2, 2014 on Knowledge Management (KM) to strengthen the capacities of CANROP. CANROP was established in 1999 with the vision of becoming the most effective facilitator to improve the well-being of women producers in the Caribbean. It constitutes twelve chapters from Antigua and Barbuda, Barbados, Bahamas, Dominica, Grenada, Guyana, Jamaica, St.Lucia, St.Vincent and the Grenadines, St. Kitts and Nevis, Surinam, to Trinidad and Tobago.

CTA and the Caribbean network, CANROP earlier identified the need to improve on the KM skills of this organisation in order to enable the network to better interconnect in order to efficiently achieve their objectives.

During the workshop which brought together 21 participants from the Caribbean, CTA’s project therefore intervened to raise awareness among CANROP stake holders about KM with the aim of strengthening their network and activities.

The CANROP members who took part in the KM workshop were introduced to the concept of knowledge management in theory and they had the opportunity to review KM in practice taking their own example of mapping CANROP. They were introduced to  KM scans at chapter/cluster level and had the opportunity to see results from a KM scan at different levels, review KM scan exercise outputs and evaluate the work.

The KM scan used for the integral KM approach is developed to provide insight, at an individual, organisational or network level, in knowledge awareness as well as the status of knowledge management (or similar) activities and challenges.

At the end of the workshop the stakeholders captured a well-structured message which could be synthesized into three distinctive topics, as follows:

  1. Knowledge management to increase and share knowledge among members, this as a way to revive CANROP and revitalise the role of women in agriculture and support learning for better management and accountability at individual chapters;
  2. Communication – networking, taking CANROP as an opportunity for members to grow and learn from each other and look for ways to enhance communication in general, and to share and exchange business ideas. Also highlighted was the need to make CANROP and clusters/chapter visible through the utilisation of social media tools; and
  3. Empowerment – development: emphasis on skill development for further empowerment, with mobilisation being seen as an improvement towards development.

Read more about what we do here: http://www.cta.int/en/article/2013-11-14/strengthening-methodologies-skills-and-tools-for-knowledge-management.html