How to share knowledge we manage?’

Dear friends,

This is Mrs.Suma Mathews writing from Socio Economic Unit Foundation,(SEUF) an NGO very active in the field of watsan sector in Kerala, South India, for last two decades. SEUF has been involved with Knowledge Management initiatives since last year.

SEUF have been, involving in many innovative activities. SEUF is one of the pioneers in decentralized community managed water supply schemes, popularised rainwater harvesting, capacity building of communities for planning implementing and monitoring sustainable watsan projects, School health clubs for promoting SSHE, Urban community managed water supply schemes, Tribal water supply schemes, Women empowerment programmes, decentralized solid waste management, developed a strategy of sanitation with education, IEC materials etc through participatory approaches and community participation.. These rich experiences have been the achievement of entire SEUF team.
But documentation of these have not been given adequate attention

KM was a new terminology to most of our colleagues when it was introduced in 2004.
KM workshops were an eye opener and realised the value of sharing of experiences among colleagues as well as to sector agencies. KM initiative could instill the culture of documenting the process, challenges, success and failures of their projects and share with others. SEUF intends to produce KM products like case studies, articles, papers etc from our field experiences.
This has also contributed to the quality of various outputs we have produced.

SEUF has recognized that KM is valuable tool for professional growth of an organization.
We can share the knowledge we gained through KM products which has come out of real project situations. This can be in the form of leaflets, promotion materials, articles case studies etc.

In SEUF we have established a small group with representatives from each project offices to collect materials from experiences and forward to head office. It will be shared through our website. Bimonthly meetings of this group are planned and appropriate measures will be taken.

By versioning and repackaging we can reach all sector stakeholders. Resource centres are the ideal platform to make these available and accessible to all stake holders.The partner organisations of RCD also has expressed their interests in KM.

SEUF works with community groups, supporting them in developing their capacities to plan implement and manage their watsan facilities. In this process we have trained programme support group (PSG) at the grass root level. The relevance of KM is also shared with them and encourage them to share the field experiences in workshops, seminars documents with differnet stakeholders like other PSGs,Local governments and NGOs.

The website of SEUF will be uploaded with these materials shortly.
KM is all about changing the attitude, developing a culture and establishing a new system within organizations. Since KM is an organic process, it is time consuming and the results will be visible only after a period of time. SEUF has started KM initiative which definitely will contribute to sector as we are working in challenging projects.
This is SEUF's KM story ...