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Case Study by
Seth
Kahan
Written
for Johns
Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health
Center for Communication
Programs
Sharing Knowledge at
the AIDS
Competence Programme
Download this case
study.
Download the entire report,
Managing
Knowledge to Improve Reproductive Health
Programs
.
The Joint United Nations
Program on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) and the
United Nations Institute for Training and
Research (UNITAR) established the
AIDS Competence Programme (ACP)
in February 2003 to develop the
human capacity to respond to HIV/AIDS. Countries, districts, and cities are increasingly taking on the responsibility for confronting the growing threat of HIV/AIDS. The program seeks to provide them with a supportive structure for identifying their unique strengths and working together to achieve greater
success.
The program is designed to
include many members of society: people
from corporations and municipal
services as well as people from NGOs
and people who live with HIV/AIDS. It
enables them to work together to create
effective interventions by identifying and
drawing on each others’ strengths to bring
about social transformation. According to an ACP report: "It is about appreciating and revealing
local capacity to tackle a local problem.
This process is universal; it applies
equally to rich and poor cities, to low
and high HIV prevalence communities."
When Dr. Jean-Louis
Lamboray, Principal Coordinator, was
setting up the program, he called on Geoff
Parcell to provide advice on how to make
knowledge sharing work globally. After
an initial visit, Parcell was transferred
from British Petroleum (BP) to serve
as Knowledge Management Advisor.
Parcell says, "I had used KM in a business
frame where it saves the company
money. I hadn’t thought of it in the
context where it was saving
lives."
In 2001 Geoff Parcell
distinguished himself by authoring, along
with Chris Collison,
Learning to Fly: Practical Lessons From
One of the World’s Leading Knowledge Companies
(45). The book was a useful introduction
to knowledge management based on the authors’ experience at
British Petroleum. BP (www.bp.com) is one of the world’s
largest energy businesses, made up of over 100,000 people
working in 100 countries across six
continents.
"Knowledge is not just captured or
shared, it is also created, discovered, distilled, validated,
transferred, adopted, adapted and applied. Knowledge is richer
than data and information; it’s about familiarity gained from
experience." —Geoff Parcell and Chris Collison,
Learning to Fly
WHAT ACP OFFERS
INTERESTED COUNTRIES
•
Support to the establishment and operation of a
facilitation team, whose members are able to appreciate
existing human capacity to respond to HIV/AIDS. The purpose is
to build AIDS competence countrywide through learning from
local experience and transfer of lessons
learned.
•
Experiential training in the self-assessment of
AIDS competence for local communities, municipalities, NGOs,
businesses, organizations of civil society, and of the public
sector.
•
Support to the exchange of knowledge through
"match-making" between those who have something to share and
those who want to learn, and through the synthesis of
knowledge generated from global exchanges on key
topics.
•
Assistance in the use
of eWorkspaces (eWs), a collaborative platform for exchange of
experiences within and between countries, and to the People
Connector (PCO), a "yellow pages" system of all people
committed to AIDS competence and willing to share their
knowledge.
Source: ACP,
2003
This is
the first of three pages. To download the case study in
its entirety, click here.
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