Challenges in Building Knowledge Capacity

To continue with the World Bank report regarding Building knowledge capacity in Africa, I will outline below what I believe are two of the main challenges the Bank recognized in the report.

Brokering country learning opportunities: relates to the ability of teams to behave as providers of knowledge (i.e., advice on policies and practices that cumulated Bank experience considers as effective approaches to addressing development issues); and as enablers of country learning to help adapt that knowledge to the specific context.

Recognizing and nurturing the needed behavioral competencies: This is about developing processes to better identify and nurture behavioral competencies needed for teams to play the enabler/broker role for country capacity enhancement. Those behavioral competencies represent a complement to technical skills needed to play an effective role in capacity enhancement. In my opinion, this is where Knowledge Management gets linked to other fields like Change Management and Organizational Behavior. The Bank clearly recognizes that the people are the main source of knowledge and their buy-in is crucial to the success of any KM process in a country or an organization. A firm or a country has to have a clear vision, a holistic strategy and a clear understanding of how component work and affect one another.