A People Centred Approach in Knowledge Creation

The creation of knowledge is expensive and most developing countries especially in Sub-Sahara Africa and Latin America invest very little in research and development activities (John Valantin, 1997). There has been a heavy dependency to acquire knowledge from outside the country without an equal effort to tap into local sources like the people themselves and local experts. The result often is that either development programmes are ineffective or irrelevant to local needs.

There is a need for a new approach in the way information and knowledge is created and disseminated using new technologies like the Internet. Top-down approaches to development of infrastructures have done little to improve the lives of a majority of the people in Sub-Saharan Africa as they are complex political and social factors that need to be taken into account by information providers (Lisham Adam, 1997). Adam goes on to say that there is a need to generate "knowledge and information through local participation".

Adebayo Adedeji (1993), then head of the African Centre for Development and Strategic Studies (ACDESS) at a conference on strategic development in Africa attended by some leading academics and scholars pointed that there was one unanimous point reached by all the contributors. They all agreed on one issue - "the need for an uncompromisingly human-centred and sustainable development strategy" across every front if Africa's overall dependency on the West is to be reduced. This also included development of information and knowledge infrastructures.

The Internet presents an opportunity to purposefully develop information resources that have local content if the process of human development through the uses of information and knowledge is to be accelerated.

Professor Adedeji goes on further to state that "growth on a sustained and sustainable basis; the indigenisation of the forces of growth and development...effectively utilising human resources; empowering the people economically; unleashing their creativity, enthusiasm and energy through the effective practice of popular participation in development" will change the face of Africa - people take heed, this is so TRUE! This is what the World Bank Report calls "approaching development from a knowledge perspective". A deliberate realisation that local knowledge has to be fused with technical know-how from abroad is needed to reduce ubiquitous knowledge gaps between the countries of the North and South.

Helen Appleton and Andy Jess (1991) further say that many top down approaches on technology transfer are concerned with which hardware to choose and how to best deliver the goods from developed to developing countries. This approach completely ignores existing local capacity and expertise. The importance of working with and strengthening that capacity is ignored and local priorities and decision-making frameworks are little considered. In their paper they examine some of the links between technology transfer and indigenous knowledge and argue that the former is only valid when it builds on the latter and aims to reduce dependency and support self-sustainability. According to them true technology transfer is to 'know why' and not 'know-how' - expertise transfer.

Hans-Dieter Klee (1993) says that Africa is threatened by further marginalisations from the emerging technological 'global village' because of the failure to indigenise these technologies. He calls this a perpetuation of "cultural imperialism by invitation". He puts these concerns succinctly by saying that globalisation of communication technology through use of satellites, data networking and the Internet is a characteristic of the new information age and the slogan 'Global Village' comes to mind. This convergence is applicable in the field of Information Technology and does not hold true in the "socio-cultural sector". There is no threat of a global "unitary culture" with a Western bias. Where the Internet is being used, in many ways the systems are modelled on the American culture and value systems and the predominant people using this technology are the elite and the middle class. What is even more interesting is that African socio-economic settings are being inundated with these new technologies without thinking though the whole process of development and implementation of a technology that is bearing fruit in cultures where people are literate and economically advanced.

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