Tuesday, December 08, 2009

Interview with Ednah Karamagi, Executive Director of BROSDI

I had the great pleasure of meeting Ednah Karamagi (@ednahkaramagi) during the KM4Dev Brussels meeting. She is the Executive Director of BROSDI or Busoga Rural Open Source and Development Initiative. I was fascinated by this initiative from Uganda as it was an excellent example of two-way knowledge and information flow - from the governments to the farmers and vice versa. The organization feeds information using information and communication technology (ICT) to farmers who further disseminate the information to other farmers. BROSDI also gathers information from the same farmers and pushes it up to the government. Listen to Ednah explain the flow in detail.



The one question that many participants from the huddle asked was "why aren’t we replicating examples such as BROSDI in other African countries?"

2 comments:

Ednah said...

The question i always ask people when they ask: why arent BROSDI programs duplicated is: why duplicate? Why not get creative and develop a model/program that suits your target group and area? Because that way you increase chances of having a better approach.

We as BROSDI have covered a long journey to what we have now. Unless you want to do similary.

However, i strongly believe that one can learn our approaches and then see how to best customize them to fit their situation ...

... i stand to be corrected.

Gauri Salokhe said...

Hi Eddy,

Thanks for your feedback. The example of BROSDI to most people in the session was actually unheard of and everyone marvelled at its success.

People appreciated the BROSDI example. I think by duplicating the idea was similar to what you actually say: "We as BROSDI have covered a long journey to what we have now. Unless you want to do similary." Learn lessons from BROSDI could be used to understand what has worked, what didn't and also what was actually involved in setting it up. More of these examples should be shared and looked into to before we start creating our own wheels! The more we learn from each other, the easier the job gets next time around!

Cheers,
Gauri