Building Internal Knowledge Sharing and Communities of Practice

Knowledge sharing is the conduit through which solutions are transferred from one context to another, ensuring that effective strategies and insights are not confined to isolated areas. Often, solutions to development challenges remain buried within remote rural communities or are locked away in the minds of officials and development practitioners who have moved on to new projects, leaving valuable experiences undocumented and unshared. This leads to a significant risk that the knowledge and innovations developed during various projects may be forgotten or lost over time. To prevent this, it is imperative that the lessons learned in specific local contexts are not only captured but also adapted, scaled up, and replicated to benefit broader development initiatives.

One of the crucial steps in fostering effective knowledge sharing within organisations is the creation of internal communities of practice. These communities consist of groups of people who share a common interest or expertise in a particular area and who collaborate to share knowledge, solve problems, and innovate. By forming these communities, organisations can ensure that valuable insights and successful strategies are systematically captured, discussed, and disseminated across different teams and projects.

At the World Bank, the Geospatial Operations Support Team (GOST) exemplifies this approach by developing a suite of services and resources aimed at making geospatial data both useful and accessible across the organisation. GOST’s initiatives are designed to integrate geospatial information into the World Bank’s operations more effectively, thereby enhancing the ability of projects to leverage this data for a variety of purposes, including Monitoring & Evaluation (M&E) indicators.