"Learning Routes" - a KM tool used by IFAD

The development sector are doing some really good work with knowledge management, using simple but effective approaches. Here is one such approach.

The International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) is concerned with helping farmers in the developing world to improve their farming methods, and often uses KM and knowledge transfer in order to help this to happen. One of the knowledge transfer tools they use (working with Procasur corporation) is called the "Learning Route", described in this document (this is very similar to the Knoco uses called "Site Knowledge Visits").

The document summarises the process of the Learning Route as follows:

The Learning Route is a planned journey with the following learning objectives: 

i) To address the knowledge needs of development practitioners; and 

ii) To map the experiences of local actors who have tackled similar problems in innovative ways, with successful results, and have accumulated knowledge that is potentially useful to others. 

The Learning Route allows for an experiential encounter between “learning travellers” and “knowledge hosts”, both having mutually useful experiences and knowledge to exchange. In this encounter, participants learn distinctive lessons that bring them face-to-face with their previous knowledge and experience. The main goal of a Learning Route is that participants are able to identify potentially useful innovations, understand and learn from them, and then successfully adapt and apply them to their own organizations and contexts.

You can see a cartoon summary of the visit in the first video below, and some examples of successful and valuable knowledge transfer through Learning Visits in Bangladesh in the second video.