Universities and agencies push for managing knowledge

FIIAPP has organized, alongside the Complutense University of Madrid (UCM) and the Latin American Social Sciences Institute (FLACSO), the ‘Knowledge Management Workshop and Agenda 2030; Partnerships between Development Agencies and Universities’. This activity, taught at the Faculty of Education of the UCM and at FIIAPP headquarters, is part of the Complutense Summer School 2019 framework, and has received support from the EU-LAC Foundation. 

The aim of this event was to understand the different knowledge generation and management processes being used by cooperation agencies and universities in the Euro-Latin American space. Likewise, during the meeting potential mechanisms were identified for generating partnerships between these actors for the implementation of the 2030 Agenda and the fulfilment of the Sustainable Development Goals.  

“The more people who have access to knowledge, the more people will be willing to collaborate make the fulfilment of the 2030 Agenda possible,” according to Ernesto Jeger, Coordinator of the Sustainable Development and Economic Affairs Programme of the EU-LAC Foundation. 

In this context, the workshop highlighted the importance of fostering meeting and co-creation spaces between agencies, as well as cooperation programmes and universities, to promote the “construction of collective knowledge” capable of building up all the stakeholders. Specific initiatives have also been proposed in terms of knowledge management to get this idea moving, such as the creation of networks of experts, the opening thematic practical training communities, defining new measurement systems to understand the impact of joint products.    

Institutions participating in the workshop 

The workshop has been attended by numerous institutions involved in Spanish cooperation, such as AECID, Fundación Carolina, the Andalusian Agency for International Development Cooperation (AACID), European and Latin American development agencies, as well as universities and other institutions linked to the field of research and innovation. 

In addition, European agencies such as the Directorate General for International Cooperation and Development of the European Commission (DG DEVCO), and programmes representative of European cooperation, such as SOCIEUX+ and EUROsociAL+, which are funded by the European Union and managed by FIIAPP, have also participated.  As far as Latin American agencies go, they were represented by the Uruguayan Agency for International Cooperation (AUCI) and other multilateral organizations, such as the Ibero-American General Secretariat (SEGIB) and the Union of Ibero–American Capital Cities (UCCI). 

Finally, an academic point of view was contributed by European universities, such as the Complutense University of Madrid, and other institutions such as ISGlobal, the Observatory of University Cooperation for Development (OCUD-CRUE) and the Spanish Network for Development Studies (REEDES). On the Latin American side, we had the perspective of the University of Santiago de Chile (USACH), the SDG Centre for Latin America and the Caribbean (CODS – University of the Andes), and FLACSO, co-organizer of the workshop.