Tuesday, September 20, 2005
Organizational memory in the village
I have come to sink my teeth into a few projects here in Benin. They are both interesting problems from an information perspective and I would like to get some feeback as to how to procede.
The first issue that I am working on is in education. Here, village schools lack proper management. To deal with the issue, NGOs have been promoting parent organizations as a means for the village to ensure that the school is good. Heres the problem -- most parents have never been to school. They can't read or write. They've never been involved in organizations or have had to manage. So their capacity to manage the school is limited. Efforts have been undertaken to train the parents and these have had some level of sucess. However, the training focuses on the leaders of the parent association. Leaders are re-elected after 5 years so the knowledge of the past leader gets lost. Also, because they don't read and write, they aren't often able to keep track of enrollment from year to year for example. They don't know if it's gone up or down. My current job is to research to find out the capacity and then develop a way to improve parental capacity. (both immediate and organizationally - so knowledge doesn't get lost over generations)
The second issue that I am dealing with is development of a report card that benchmarks practices in food handling. We distribute lots of food and we need a way to measuret the quality of our operations. Again, a lot of the guys that work with the trucks and warehouses are not highly educated and the nature of their work is tacit (IE: there is a bag of rice with a rip in it) We are trying to come up with a way to use PDAs to capture data that is needed for the office while accomodating the work flow of workers.
The first issue that I am working on is in education. Here, village schools lack proper management. To deal with the issue, NGOs have been promoting parent organizations as a means for the village to ensure that the school is good. Heres the problem -- most parents have never been to school. They can't read or write. They've never been involved in organizations or have had to manage. So their capacity to manage the school is limited. Efforts have been undertaken to train the parents and these have had some level of sucess. However, the training focuses on the leaders of the parent association. Leaders are re-elected after 5 years so the knowledge of the past leader gets lost. Also, because they don't read and write, they aren't often able to keep track of enrollment from year to year for example. They don't know if it's gone up or down. My current job is to research to find out the capacity and then develop a way to improve parental capacity. (both immediate and organizationally - so knowledge doesn't get lost over generations)
The second issue that I am dealing with is development of a report card that benchmarks practices in food handling. We distribute lots of food and we need a way to measuret the quality of our operations. Again, a lot of the guys that work with the trucks and warehouses are not highly educated and the nature of their work is tacit (IE: there is a bag of rice with a rip in it) We are trying to come up with a way to use PDAs to capture data that is needed for the office while accomodating the work flow of workers.
