Building Institutional Capacity for Development

The conditions of economic and social progress include participation, democratic processes, and the location of necessarily diverse organizational setups at the community, national, regional, and increasingly global levels. Access to and judicious use of information underpin all these. (No. 47 | May 2009)

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Building a Learning Organization

Learning is the key to success—some would even say survival—in today’s organizations. Knowledge should be continuously enriched through both internal and external learning. For this to happen, it is necessary to support and energize organization, people, knowledge, and technology for learning. (No. 46 | May 2009)

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Collaborating with Wikis

Wikis are websites that invite voluntary contributions to organize information. They harness the power of collaborative minds to innovate faster, cocreate, and cut costs. They are now serious business. (No. 45 | May 2009)

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Learning from Evaluation

Evaluation serves two main purposes: accountability and learning. Development agencies have tended to prioritize the first, and given responsibility for that to centralized units. But evaluation for learning is the area where observers find the greatest need today and tomorrow. (No. 44 | May 2009)

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Disseminating Knowledge Products

Dissemination is the interactive process of communicating knowledge to target audiences so that it may be used to lead to change. The challenge is to improve the accessibility of desired knowledge products by those they are intended to reach. This means ensuring physical availability of the product to as large a proportion of the target audience as possible and making the product comprehensible to those who receive it. (No. 43 | May 2009)

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Dimensions of the Learning Organization

Organizational learning is still seeking a theory and there can be no (and perhaps cannot be) agreement on the dimensions of the learning organization. However, useful models associated with learning and change can be leveraged individually or in association to reflect on the overall system of an organization. (No. 42 | April 2009)

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Overcoming Roadblocks to Learning

The gulf between the ideal type of a learning organization and the state of affairs in typical bilateral and multilateral development agencies remains huge. Defining roadblocks, however numerous they may be, is half the battle to removing them—it might make them part of the solution instead of part of the problem. (No. 41 | April 2009)

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