Stakeholder/geographical variations

The workshops also shed some light on the ways that different groups access information within a region, and between regions. For example, technical practitioners – engineers, technical advisors etc. – in Peru found the World Bank website and email discussions most accessible and useful, and CD-ROMs better than Internet because you can share it with others at home and they are easier to carry. In contrast, this group in sub-Saharan Africa rated CD-ROMs of low usefulness and only medium accessibility because they do not have the equipment to read the technology. They used newsletters as a valuable source of reference to locate other information, and ranked workshops and seminars very highly because they gave access to other individuals (both from peer groups across the world, and the likely funders of future work). In the UK, the consultants who worked as both practitioners and advisors in their consultancy role, also found the networks and meetings to which they belonged or were invited to be the most useful form of communication. In common with their colleagues from other regions, they valued the information derived from personal contact with WB and DFID staff but complained that this source was not particularly accessible.

The workshops showed that government institutions/policy makers in Zimbabwe found nothing that the World Bank produced very accessible, and cited Country Reports, grey literature and training manuals as highly useful but inaccessible. Peruvian policy makers, on the other hand, found websites and email discussions to be both extremely accessible and useful, but complained that books were inaccessible because they were in English.

Researchers in Peru found many materials to be highly useful but particularly the DFID newsletter, World Bank reports, working papers and discussion papers although the last four products they found to be very difficult to get hold of (language?). Researchers gathered in Zimbabwe however cited databases as the most useful and accessible source of information.

All groups liked to read documents on paper in preference to reading on the screen, and the costs involved in printing out grey literature (if they are downloaded or shared through CD-Rom) becomes an issue for some groups with scarce resources: this includes government policy makers and planners especially at the end of financial year-ends (Zimbabwe).

Community groups and poor households were not represented at the workshops, but studies show [i] that social networks that already exist in the community are the main source of information for the poor, along with information brokers that put in place mechanisms to deliver information and communicate with marginalized groups e.g. NGOs working with farmers.