kasante@wacsi.org
The purpose of this workshop was to provide practical assistance to partners on the use of technology resources to facilitate information and knowledge management. The session focused on cloud adoption, especially Office 365 to support organisational productivity, collaboration and knowledge sharing. The workshop sought to showcase specific ways of operationalising a knowledge management system, leveraging technology to create an environment of trust where people can easily collaborate and share knowledge.
Thirty-three (33) staff members of the two partner organisations involved in the implementation of the E4L initiative participated in this interactive workshop, which highlighted the importance of building a secure and functional infrastructure or system to facilitate adequate knowledge capture, storage and sharing.
During the opening remarks, Osman Abdel-Rahman, GDCA Executive Director and the Programme Coordinator for the E4L Programme emphasised on the importance of the existence of a comprehensive knowledge management system in an organisation. “The E4L programme needs to ensure systematisation of creating, capturing, storing, updating and sharing knowledge to ensure that knowledge is utilised and shared, and I believe Techsoup West Africa could be a good support on that’’, he said.
During the workshop, participants were taken through a practical Office 365 end user training. The methodology adopted included mini-lectures, group exercises, demo/tutorials, practical sessions and questions & answers.
This helped participants to become more familiar with the Office 365 environment and how it could be useful to them. They discovered main applications of the Office 365 suite and their functionalities such as Microsoft Teams, Outlook, OneDrive, SharePoint, etc. Participants engaged and sought clarification on how it could specifically help them address some of the perennial challenges they encounter in their work, especially in the management and reporting of their projects, both in the field and in the office.
The practical end user training enabled participants to deepen their knowledge on the benefits of Office 365 and its relevance for their work. At the end of the training, Abdulai Suweidu, Monitoring, Evaluation and Research Officer at GDCA stated that, “we thank WACSI so much for a great and wonderful job done. We enjoyed every bit of the workshop and the facilitation was fantastic. We hope to have this kind of interaction in the future.”
This workshop originated from a request from GDCA following a Technology for Development Conference organised by Techsoup West Africa in Tamale (Northern Ghana) in October 2018. At the end of the conference, GDCA registered on the Techsoup platform and expressed demand for support. Today, GDCA has received Office 365 as a donation from Microsoft through Techsoup and is planning to request additional subsidised products to assist the organisation support its effectiveness and increase productivity.
The Empowerment for Life Programme (E4L) Phase III is a five-year programme which started in January 2015 after going through two successful Programme cycles. The Programme is implemented by Ghana Developing Communities Association (GDCA) and Youth Empowerment for Life (YEfL), both Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) in Ghana, with funding from DANIDA and Ghana Venskab (GV).
This workshop provided a platform where team members of the Empowerment for Life Programme engaged in practical sessions to build their knowledge and skills on existing tools and resources available to enable them promote learning and retain institutional memory to achieve greater impact.