The Knowledge Management Forum of the Senegal River Valley Resilience and Community Development Project (PRDC-VFS), organized in partnership with Gaston Berger University (UGB), concluded this Thursday with a major breakthrough. After three days of discussions and consultations, participants approved a roadmap and established an operational team tasked with developing a territorial knowledge management platform designed to strengthen the sharing of experiences, the consolidation of achievements, and the coordination of development stakeholders in the valley.

Bringing together researchers, academics, experts, state technical services, local authorities and institutional partners, this meeting made it possible to identify the main directions that should guide the design and operationalization of this strategic tool.

For Mamadou Diedhiou, coordinator of the PRDC-VFS, the outcome of these three days is largely positive. He points out that this initiative is a continuation of the partnership agreement signed between the PRDC and Gaston Berger University of Saint-Louis.

“We have just completed three days of reflection and sharing on knowledge management. The outcome is satisfactory. Since the signing of the protocol with Gaston Berger University, several meetings have allowed us to develop a roadmap. Today, an operational team, coordinated by the university, is being set up with all the services present in the territories, in particular the SAED, the ARD and other structures concerned,” he explained.

According to him, the forum is an essential step before the drafting of a methodological note that will define the terms of implementation and operation of the future platform.

The various panels and group work thus made it possible to delve deeper into several essential themes, including the architecture of the platform, its governance mode, the mechanisms for collecting and managing data, the tools for capitalizing on experiences, and research priorities.

“The discussions produced very rich results which we will now exploit. The next step will be to regularly bring together the operational team in order to improve the guidance note and translate the forum’s recommendations into concrete actions,” said Mamadou Diedhiou.

The PRDC-VSF coordinator also emphasizes the need to ensure the sustainability of this tool beyond the project's duration. In his view, the platform should not be a mere internal instrument of the PRDC-VSF, but a genuine territorial mechanism capable of uniting the various existing initiatives in the valley.

"This will not be a platform exclusively reserved for the PRDC. It will have a territorial focus and will have to network the platforms and systems already developed by the ARD and other structures operating in the area," he explained.

This approach aims to promote better information flow, knowledge sharing and enhanced coordination among territorial development stakeholders.

At the close of the forum, Mamadou Diedhiou commended the strong mobilization of technical and institutional partners. He specifically thanked the World Bank for its support, the supervising ministry, PUMA, the governor of Saint-Louis, the rector of UGB, and the delegation from PRDC Mauritania who came to participate in the proceedings.

The coordinator believes this meeting marks a decisive step in the project's implementation. While the various components of the PRDC-VFS have been engaged since the program's inception, the knowledge management platform was the last major project to be launched.

With the validation of the roadmap and the installation of the operational team, the foundations are now in place to make this platform a reference tool for resilience, innovation and sustainable development in the Senegal River Valley.