Tài liệu Indigenous Knowledge Local Pathways to Global Development doc

i

Local Pathways

to Global Development

Marking Five Years

of the World Bank

Indigenous Knowledge for

Development Program

Indigenous Knowledge

© 2004

Knowledge and Learning Group

Africa Region

The World Bank

IK Notes reports periodically on indigenous knowledge (IK)

initiatives in Sub-Saharan Africa and occasionally on such

initiatives outside the Region. It is published by the Africa

Region’s Knowledge and Learning Group as part of an evolving

IK partnership between the World Bank, communities, NGOs,

development institutions, and multilateral organizations.

For information, please e-mail: [email protected]. The

Indigenous Knowledge for Development Program can be

found on the web at http://worldbank.org/afr/ik/default.htm

The views and opinions expressed within are those of the

authors and do not necessarily reflect the views or policies

of the World Bank or any of its affiliated organizations.

iii

Contents

PART ONE: LEAD ARTICLES

1. Indigenous Knowledge—a Local Pathway to Global Development ................................................................................ 1

2. Indigenous Capacity Enhancement: Developing Community Knowledge ..................................................................... 4

3. Education and Indigenous Knowledge ........................................................................................................................... 9

4. Women’s Indigenous Knowledge: Building Bridges Between the Traditional and the Modern ................................... 13

5. Indigenous Responses to AIDS in Africa ..................................................................................................................... 18

6. Sustainable Agriculture and Rural Livelihoods: Local Knowledge Innovations in Development................................ 24

7. Indigenous Knowledge and Natural Resource Management ....................................................................................... 30

8. Indigenous Knowledge and Science and Technology: Conflict, Contradiction or Concurrence? .................................. 34

9. Indigenous Approaches to Conflict Resolution in Africa .............................................................................................. 39

10. Indigenous Knowledge: The Way Forward .................................................................................................................. 45

References .................................................................................................................................................................... 56

Authors of the Lead Articles ........................................................................................................................................ 61

PART TWO: IK NOTES

IK Notes Summaries ......................................................................................................................................................... 66

The IK Notes

1. Indigenous Knowledge Systems in Sub-Saharan Africa: An Overview ....................................................................... 72

2. Zimbabwe: Sustainable Indigenous Knowledge Systems in Agriculture .................................................................... 76

3. Senegalese Women Remake their Culture .................................................................................................................. 78

4. Ghana: From“ Sacrilege ” to Sustainability—Reforestation and Organic Farming.................................................... 81

5. Burkina Faso: Literacy for the “Little Ones” in Nomgana ......................................................................................... 84

6. Senegal: Village Bankers: The Experience of Fandène ............................................................................................... 87

7. Ghana: Literacy and Local Governance in a Rural Community................................................................................. 90

8. Nurturing the Environment on Senegal’s West Coast................................................................................................ 93

9. Mali: The Development of an Agricultural Union: Increasing Levels of Local Empowerment................................... 95

10. Indigenous Healing of War-Affected Children in Africa .............................................................................................. 98

11. Education and Koranic Literacy in West Africa ....................................................................................................... 102

12. Mali: Cultural Resources and Maternal Health ........................................................................................................ 107

Foreword ............................................................................................................................................................................ vii

Preface ................................................................................................................................................................................ ix

Acknowledgments ................................................................................................................................................................ x

Acronyms and Abbreviations .............................................................................................................................................. xi

iv

13. Sahelian Languages, Indigenous Knowledge and Self-Management......................................................................... 110

14. Grassroots Dissemination of Research in Africa: Collecting and Connecting ........................................................... 114

15. Health: Indigenous Knowledge, Equitable Benefits ................................................................................................... 117

16. Senegal: Grassroots Democracy in Action................................................................................................................. 121

17. Regional Planning, Local Visions: Participatory Futuring in West Africa ............................................................... 124

18. Participatory Management and Local Culture: Proverbs and Paradigms ................................................................ 128

19. Indigenous Knowledge and Intellectual Property Rights .......................................................................................... 132

20. Reinventing Apprenticeship and Rites of Passage ..................................................................................................... 135

21. Indigenous Knowledge for Development Program: Two Years Down the Road......................................................... 139

22. Indigenous Knowledge Goes to School: Potential and Perils of Community Education

in the Western Sahel........................................................................................................................................... 142

23. Seeds of Life: Women and Agricultural Biodiversity in Africa .................................................................................. 146

24. Strengthening Traditional Technical Knowledge: the Sugar Cane Wine Example .................................................. 149

25. Mali: Indigenous Knowledge—Blending the New and the Old .................................................................................. 152

26. Traditional Medicine and AIDS ................................................................................................................................. 156

27. Uganda: Information Technology and Rural Development:

The Nakaseke Multi-Purpose Telecenter ............................................................................................................ 158

28. Indigenous Knowledge and Local Power: Negotiating Change in West Africa ......................................................... 161

29. West African Languages: Medium and Message ....................................................................................................... 164

30. Ghana and Zambia: Indigenous Knowledge and HIV/AIDS ..................................................................................... 168

31. Malicounda-Bambara: the Sequel.............................................................................................................................. 171

32. African Traditional Healers: The Economics of Healing ........................................................................................... 175

33. Repairing the Ravages of War in Mozambique .......................................................................................................... 178

34. Tanzania: Communicating Local Farming Knowledge ............................................................................................. 181

35. Ethiopia: Traditional Medicine and the Bridge to Better Health .............................................................................. 184

36. Eritrea: The Process of Capturing Indigenous Knowledge ........................................................................................ 187

37. HIV/AIDS: Traditional Healers, Community Self-assessment, and Empowerment ................................................. 190

38. Senegal: Indigenous Language and Literature as a Non-profit Business ................................................................. 193

39. Burkina Faso: Integrating Indigenous and Scientific Rainfall Forecasting .............................................................. 197

40. Maternal Health Care in Rural Uganda ................................................................................................................... 201

41. Eritrea: Eliminating a Harmful Traditional Practice ............................................................................................... 204

42. Developing Indigenous Knowledge in Francophone Africa ........................................................................................ 206

43. Rural Seed Fairs in Southern Tanzania ................................................................................................................... 209

44. Uganda: The Contribution of Indigenous Vegetables to Household Food Security ................................................... 212

45. India: Using Indigenous Knowledge to Raise Agricultural Productivity .................................................................. 215

46. The Role of Myths and Rites in Managing Natural Resources along the Mozambican Shoreline ............................ 219

47. Using the Indigenous Knowledge of Jatropha ........................................................................................................... 222

48. Ethiopia: Potential of Traditional Social Insurance for Supporting Health Care ..................................................... 226

49. Farmer Experimenters: Self-developed Technology................................................................................................... 229

50. Eritrea: Collective Responsibility for War Orphans .................................................................................................. 233

51. Traditional Medicine in Tanga Today ....................................................................................................................... 235

52. A Qualitative Understanding of Local Traditional Knowledge and Medicinal Plant Use ......................................... 238

53. The Economics of African Indigenous Knowledge ..................................................................................................... 242

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54. Traditional Medicine Practice in Contemporary Uganda.......................................................................................... 245

55. Indigenous Knowledge: the East Africa-South Asia Learning Exchange .................................................................. 248

56. Ghana: Kanye Ndu Bowi: An Indigenous Philosophical Context for Conflict Management ..................................... 252

57. Cultural Rights for Zimbabwe’s Sui Generis Legislation.......................................................................................... 255

58. Grassroots Women’s Approach to Capacity Building ................................................................................................ 259

59. Adzina: An Indigenous System of Trial by Jury on the Ghana-Togo Border ............................................................. 263

60. Institutional Constraints in Promoting IK: Community Access to Social Networks

and Formal Institutions ...................................................................................................................................... 266

vii

n 1996, we articulated a vision for the World Bank to

become a “Knowledge Bank” that intermediates

ideas as well as financial resources. At the First Glo￾bal Knowledge Conference in Toronto in 1997, po￾litical leaders and civil society representatives from

developing countries endorsed this vision. They called

upon the World Bank not only to provide its own know￾how, gained through more than 50 years of development

experience, but to equally learn from the practices of

communities so as to leverage the best in global and local

knowledge systems.

The World Bank has responded to this challenge. We

recognize that knowledge is not the exclusive domain of

technologically advanced societies. We need to give a new

meaning to empowering poor people and helping to give

them voice—not as recipients of knowledge, but as con￾tributors and protagonists of their own development.

In 1998, we launched the Indigenous Knowledge for

Development Program to help learn from community￾based knowledge systems and development practices, and

to incorporate them into Bank-supported programs. A

core activity was the publication and dissemination of a

series of IK Notes, where development practitioners re￾port on successful local solutions for local development

problems. The present publication, marking half a decade

of the IK program, is a collection of 60 such narratives.

Thematic lead articles introduce the cases, synthesizing

the lessons learned and discussing the impact indigenous

knowledge can make on our development efforts and on

helping to achieve the Millennium Development Goals

(MDGs).

Foreword

The cases presented here demonstrate how communi￾ties and local practitioners use indigenous knowledge sys￾tems and practices to help increase their crop yields,

educate their children, reduce suffering from HIV/AIDS,

decrease infant and maternal mortality, heal the impact

of conflict, learn from each other, and empower them￾selves. The cases also suggest that the communities are

quite willing, indeed eager, to combine global knowledge

and modern technology with their indigenous knowledge

and institutions to obtain better results. Traditional

Birth Attendants in the Iganga District of Uganda, for

example, use modern walkie-talkies to refer critical cases

to the public health system, thus contributing to reduc￾ing maternal mortality substantially, one of the MDGs.

I am confident that this collection of successful

grassroots community experiences will prove to be a valu￾able resource in improving our understanding of how

communities empower themselves to manage their own

development in the larger context of globalization. Build￾ing on such practices and helping scale up the more suc￾cessful ones is critical to ensuring results. It will also

enrich the development process, making it more equi￾table and sustainable.

James D. Wolfensohn

President

The World Bank

I

ix

his publication is the five-year-milestone of the

Indigenous Knowledge for Development Pro￾gram in the Africa Region of the World Bank.

The main goal of the program is to learn from

the knowledge embedded in the practices of local

communities. A core activity of the program is the publi￾cation of the IK Notes—a monthly periodical that appears

in print and online in English, French and, occasionally,

in Portuguese, Swahili, and Wolof. We present here 60 of

the IK Notes, in which development practitioners de￾scribe how successful indigenous practices enrich the de￾velopment process.

We learn, for example, how communities have applied

their traditional judicial system to reduce or prevent con￾flict in Ghana, how rural women in India have empow￾ered themselves by developing their own capacity, how

youth in Senegal have improved their skills and competi￾tiveness, how cooperating with traditional healers in￾creases the effectiveness of HIV/AIDS projects, and how

communities in Uganda combine traditional and modern

knowledge to help reduce maternal mortality.

In addition, this publication includes several new the￾matic articles by leaders, scholars, and development prac￾titioners that synthesize the lessons from the various

themes of the Notes and discuss the conditions that make

the incorporation of indigenous knowledge into develop￾ment work successful. And, as His Excellency, the Presi￾dent of Tanzania concludes in his introduction to this

publication, the most important condition is that deci￾sion-makers and development partners must be ready to

learn from communities and to help them shape their

own development agenda.

The World Bank has contributed to this process by

helping clients enhance their capacity to develop their in￾digenous knowledge base and by creating more opportu￾Preface

nities for local communities to be involved in develop￾ment. In Uganda, for example, the Bank has supported

the development of a national strategy that incorporates

indigenous knowledge into the country’s poverty reduc￾tion program. In Ethiopia, the Bank is supporting the de￾velopment of medicinal plants for the domestic market.

The Bank also brokered cooperation for the scientific

validation of traditional medicinal practices between lo￾cal research organizations, NGOs, practitioners, and the

global scientific community.

The Bank has also integrated indigenous knowledge

into Bank-supported programs to obtain better results.

In a number of West African countries, programs to com￾bat HIV/AIDS include regular consultations with the tra￾ditional healers. In Burkina Faso, the Bank is helping to

promote a traditional water harvesting and soil conserva￾tion technology throughout the country. Bank-supported

social protection projects in Malawi, Tanzania, and

Northern Uganda build on community-based institutions

for local management of the projects.

Over the past five years we have learned a lot about the

efficacy and sustainability of indigenous practices in de￾velopment. We also see a growing pattern of integration

of indigenous practices in development programs for im￾proved development results. With this new compilation of

IK Notes and related thematic lead articles we offer the

development community a collection of good practices

and ideas that can help in designing programs that em￾power communities through the validation and use of in￾digenous knowledge systems.

Callisto E. Madavo

Vice President

Africa Region

T

x Local Pathways to Global Development

This publication is the result of an international

partnership by a network of promoters, practitioners,

and protagonists of indigenous knowledge. The editors

wish to record their gratitude to all the contributors.

For over five years, the authors of the IK Notes have

taken the time and effort to share their experiences,

impressions, and lessons learned. The editors trust

that they will extend our thanks to those who are the

source of the knowledge discussed here: the communi￾ties, women farmers, traditional healers, birth atten￾dants, village elders, herdsmen, and many others.

The editors wish to express their profound gratitude

to His Excellency, The President of the United Repub￾lic of Tanzania, Benjamin W. Mkapa, who has been

kind enough to author the introduction to this publi￾cation and whose central message we have adopted in

our title: local pathways to global development.

The authors of the lead articles have patiently en￾dured the editors’ proposals for amendments in for￾mat, style, and diction. We thank them for engaging us

in a fruitful discussion on context and content—up to

the very last minute.

The editors further wish to thank the team members

of the Indigenous Knowledge for Development Pro￾gram and other World Bank staff, who provided useful

commentary and contributions.

On behalf of the Africa Region’s IK Program for De￾velopment, the editors wish to express their gratitude

to the President of the World Bank, James D.

Wolfensohn, and the Vice President of the Africa Re￾gion, Callisto E. Madavo. The Foreword and Preface to

this commemorative publication are symbolic of their

vision, which helped to promote the recognition of in￾digenous knowledge as being critical to the develop￾ment process. This publication would not have been

possible without their support and guidance.

Any errors of this publication remain the responsi￾bilities of the editors.

Reinhard Woytek

Preeti Shroff-Mehta

Prasad C. Mohan

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Acronyms and Abbreviations

ABC Abstain, Be Faithful, Use Condoms

ABEL Achieving Basic Education and Literacy

ADR Alternative Dispute Resolution

ARV Antiretroviral (drug)

C2C Community-to-Community Learning

and Training Exchange

CBO Community Based Organization

CCD Convention to Combat Desertification

CDC Center for Disease Control

CDD Community Driven Development

CE Capacity Enhancement

CIDA Canadian International Development Agency

CIRAN The Centre for International Research and

Advisory Networks (former department of

NUFFIC)

CISDA Center for Information Society Development

in Africa

COSECHA Association of Advisors for a Sustainable,

Ecological and People-Centered Agriculture

CSIR Council for Scientific Industrial Research

ECA United Nations Economic Commission for

Africa (UNECA)

ENDA Environment and Development Action

FAO Food and Agriculture Organization of the

United Nations

FGM Female Genital Mutilation

GM/CCD Global Mechanism of the Convention to

Combat Desertification

GTZ Deutsche Gesellschaft für Technische

Zusammenarbeit (German Development

Agency)

HIV/AIDS Human Immunodeficiency Virus/Acquired

Immune Deficiency Syndrome

HYV High Yielding Variety

ICT Information and Communication Technology

IDRC International Development Research Centre

(Canada)

IFAD International Fund for Agricultural

Development

IK Indigenous Knowledge

IKS Indigenous Knowledge Systems

ILO International Labour Organization

IPR Intellectual Property Rights

IPGRI International Plant Genetic Resources

Institute

ITU International Telecommunication Union

IUCN World Conservation Union

IUCN-ROSA IUCN Regional Office for Southern Africa

MDG Millennium Development Goals

MTA Material Transfer Agreements

NARO National Agriculture Research Organization

(Uganda)

NCP Natural Crop Protection

NGO Non-Governmental Organization

NIH National Institutes of Health (USA)

NORAD Norwegian Agency for Development

Cooperation

NUFFIC Netherlands Organisation for International

Cooperation in Higher Education

PELUM Participatory Ecological Land Use

Management (Network in Eastern and

Southern Africa)

xii Local Pathways to Global Development

PICTA Partnership for Information and

Communication Technologies in Africa

PLWHA People Living With HIV/AIDS

PROMETRAPromotion des Médecines Traditionnelles

R&D Research and Development

SADC Southern African Development Community

SARNIKS Southern African Regional Network on

Indigenous Knowledge Systems

SEWA Self-Employment Women’s Association

(India)

STI Sexually Transmissible Infections

TAWG Tanga Aids Working Group (Tanzania)

TBA Traditional Birth Attendant

THETA Traditional and Modern Health Practitioners

Together Against AIDS and other Diseases

TRC Truth and Reconciliation Commission

UMADEP Uluguru Mountains Agricultural

Development Project

UNAIDS Joint United Nations Programme on

HIV/AIDS

UNCED United Nations Conference on Environment

and Development

UNCTAD United Nations Conference on Trade

and Development

UNDP United Nations Development Programme

UNESCO United Nations Educational, Scientific

and Cultural Organization

USAID United States Agency for International

Development

WBI World Bank Institute

WCC World Conservation Congress

WHO World Health Organization

WIPO World Intellectual Property Organization

Part One

Lead Articles

1

In Laetoli, near Olduvai Gorge, Northern Tanzania, paleontologists have

found footprints of early hominids, presumably two adults and a child, ideal￾ized as father, mother and child. We do not know where the three walkers in

the “cradle of mankind” came from, where they went and what their plans

were. But it is reasonable to assume that were they capable of speech they

would have shared thoughts, ideas, knowledge, while walking along the plain

some three and a half million years ago. Ever since humans walked on earth,

they have sought more knowledge to feed their families, stay healthy, argue

with their neighbors, getting a better understanding of their environment or

just have some distraction from an otherwise rather challenging life.

For hundreds of millennia, local needs and constraints and day-to-day chal￾lenges drove the quest for knowledge. Scientific approaches to knowledge gen￾eration, as we know them today are, historically speaking, a very recent

phenomenon. These modern approaches have brought about tremendous re￾sults: we have the capacity to feed more than six billion people satisfactorily;

vaccinations protect our children from once deadly diseases, we communicate

with the help of satellites around the globe and we compete on global market

places with our products. Yet, despite these achievements, we still have crises

of hunger, HIV/AIDS, illiteracy, isolation, and conflicts and abject poverty.

While the debate on the causes of poverty is not closed, we have learned that

science and technology alone cannot provide all the answers or solutions to

these unsolved problems or how we can overcome living in a disparate world

characterized by unequal distribution of wealth and opportunities.

As scientists struggle to respond to global challenges, they have increasingly

distanced themselves from local ways of solving problems. Local solutions

were even discriminated against as hindering progress, outdated, “old wives

tales” or simply just unfashionable. As we “modernized” our societies, a “de￾gree” in traditional or indigenous knowledge was not planned for. Hence, we

overlooked its potential as a resource and even further neglected the knowl￾edge that women and men, families and communities had developed them￾selves for centuries.

The sixty cases presented in this collection of IK Notes demonstrate that in￾digenous knowledge (IK) is a resource that can help to solve local problems, a

resource to help grow more and better food, to maintain healthy lives, to share

1. Indigenous Knowledge—a Local Pathway

to Global Development

Benjamin Mkapa

Benjamin Mkapa is President of the

United Republic of Tanzania.