As part of her master’s thesis in 2018, Martina Eichler analyzed knowledge management in low-income countries among NGO’s, municipalities, and other stakeholders.

Most for-profit organizations and companies have their own internal systems  to manage their knowledge securely and ensure  it is not shared with potential competitors. Nonprofit organizations, on the other hand, want to share their knowledge with other nonprofits to avoid duplication of effort. For nonprofits, the aim is often to collaborate to make improvements to the world instead of seeing each other as potential threats. Given there is little market demand is knowledge sharing between organizations, there is little information regarding how to most efficiently share knowledge between the nonprofit organizations.

Martina used a volunteer project in Quelimane as a case study to see how one could improve knowledge sharing from the field study of one volunteer group. The goal was to determine whether the knowledge  acquired during the group’s  time abroad was stored in the most efficient way. Through interviews with stakeholders, volunteers, nonprofit organizations, and the Quelimane municipality, she investigated the challenges with information gathering from all the volunteers who had worked in Quelimane. She found that one challenge organizations face when trying to share knowledge in low-income countries is that they often lack resources, such as having enough computers and reliable internet connection. Martina analyzed how creating a prototypical instruction manual as a way to share knowledge from the case study. Building on that would be to involve people in creating  the prototype, since learning by doing is the easiest way of sharing knowledge, especially when a language barrier exists between stakeholders.