Practical Answers
Information provision for poverty reduction
While it implements development projects, Practical Action aims to document its experience and lessons to share widely with others to scale up successes. Our Technical Enquiry Service is one way for sharing knowledge with others - to facilitate the usage of the technologies and knowledge for better advocacy and lobby purposes through building the capacities and potentialities of the partners to sustain the knowledge brokering services.
To be able to serve a wide audience, the technical enquiry service has been decentralised and partnerships with Sudan University in Khartoum and the Women's networks in El Fashir and Kassala have been established and their staff were trained.
Appropriate ways for providing knowledge and information to local communities
Practical Answers also contributes to poverty alleviation by providing knowledge directly at the community level. This project aims to be the first point of contact (direct and online) for development practitioners and communities interested in technologies appropriate for poverty-reduction initiatives. The project is targeting 160,000 and 400,000 poor people directly and indirectly, not including those who will benefit through worldwide online service. In its first year, the project reached 6,735 direct and 56,814 indirect beneficiaries.
To expand this project, the Practical Answers project has recently produced CDs & video films in local languages - an effective mechanism to address the needs of the poor people with little or no basic education. Through these methods, poor people in Khartoum, North Darfur, Kassala and Blue Nile States were able to solve problems in the fields of food production, water supply, sanitation, tools manufacturing, transportation, building and creating additional localized and contextualized knowledge materials. This has led to technologies developed here in Sudan being replicated in other developing countries such as Gambia and Mozambique.
To extend our reach, a website is also being established in Arabic - www.sustech.edu/sudannewar/institute_women - in addition to the English one - www.sustech.edu/institute_women.
