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Knowledge Sharing at the World Bank(PDF, 3.8 MB)
This presentation, delivered in the fall of 2004, reflects the latest thinking on the role of KM at the Bank.

Fighting poverty requires a global strategy to share knowledge effectively and to ensure that people who need that knowledge get it on time, whether from the World Bank or other organizations. Sharing knowledge enables the World Bank to respond faster to client needs, deliver a quality product, encourage innovation, and continually introduce new services to its clients.

The Knowledge Sharing (KS) Program, located in the World Bank Institute (WBI), assists World Bank staff, clients, and partners in capturing and organizing systematically their wealth of knowledge and experiences; making this knowledge easily available to a wide audience both internally and externally; and creating linkages between individuals and groups working to address similar development challenges.

Through its ongoing collaboration with WBI and the World Bank’s Regional and Network departments, the KS Program promotes and helps mainstream knowledge sharing and learning as a collaborative, multidirectional, continuous, and active process. In short, its role is to help operationalize the concept, first articulated by James Wolfensohn in 1996, of the Knowledge Bank.

The benefits of knowledge sharing include:
Speed — responding faster to client needs;
Quality — delivering to clients the experiences of development experts and practitioners all over the world, and adapting them to local conditions; and Innovation — not only improving our current work, but also introducing new products and services, and testing innovative ideas.