Project Information

The  project

“Communication has played a key role in development for over 30 years. It has supported the delivery of services, contributed to economic growth and productivity, provided spaces for dialogue and debate among communities, and has changed the way governments and citizens interact.” (Project terms of reference).  Although many people might agree with this statement, the UK Department for International Development (DFID) have commissioned the Knowledge Sharing and Learning Project to bring together evidence to back up such a statement - to lead towards more evidence based policy making. 

The evidence needs to be made accessible to policy makers in five sectors identified by DFID – agriculture, education, health, governance and growth.  Our target audience are the “passively disengaged” i.e. those who have not really considered the value of communications in their work.  The project does not argue for an exceptional status for communications in each of these sectors, but aims to inform policy debate by demonstrating ways in which good approaches to communications can enhance outcomes and add value to initiatives.

DFID commissioned the project to create a web portal through which users can access materials, and to create a synthesis paper for each sector pulling together the most compelling pieces of evidence.  The portal is presented as five separate portals – one for each sector – even though the search engine can access materials from all sectors, and users can navigte between the sector portals.  The materials have been seleted, and the papers written, by practitioners in each of the development sectors – click here for more details of the team.

It is recognised that as soon as the synthesis papers are written, and all the materials referred to are put on the portal, they will be out of date (we hope), as new research and experience is published.  In order to keep the portal relevant and up to date, we encourage users to use the site as a forum for discussing the evidence available, and for diseminating new evidence; features include:

• User data – users can give materials a star rating, and write brief reviews;
• User materials – users can upload materials that they believe constitute compelling evidence.

The portal based outputs from the project provide only a foundation on which the community of users can build.