In 2023, the Dgroups Foundation partnered with IDRC to scope, design and develop a Knowledge Management (KM) platform for the CLARE programme, a research initiative focused on Climate Adaptation and Resilience. CLARE aims to support socially inclusive, sustainable actions that build resilience to climate change and natural hazards across Africa and the Asia-Pacific region.
The KM platform was conceptualized with three core objectives:
- Monitoring and Evaluation: To collect and consolidate M&E data across projects.
- Internal Collaboration: To foster peer learning and collaboration among CLARE projects.
- Outreach and Communications: To showcase information and evidence from CLARE projects to external audiences.
To bring this vision to life, the Dgroups Foundation assembled an international team of experts in project management, consultation, facilitation, design and branding, web development, M&E, knowledge sharing (KS), and online collaboration.
Guided by the Principles for Digital Development
Adhering to the Principles for Digital Development — a framework for sustainable and inclusive digital innovation — was fundamental to the platform’s creation. Central to these principles is “Design with people.”
To ensure the platform aligned with user needs, the Dgroups Foundation undertook an extensive consultation and research process:
- A digital persona workshop to identify and understand the platform’s primary user groups.
- Three focus group discussions involving 76 participants to define user needs and platform requirements.
- Eight interviews to gather in-depth insights into specific platform features.
- A technical review to evaluate existing platforms and identify suitable solutions.
- Two surveys to shape the design of the public website and understand the existing project ecosystems.
Insights from these activities informed the platform’s final design, which leveraged existing tools and technologies rather than building a singlec system from scratch.
Showcasing CLARE’s work
The public-facing website of the KM platform serves as a hub for CLARE’s outreach and impact. It allows stakeholders to explore programme outputs, follow project developments, and engage with cross-cutting initiatives like Capacity Strengthening (CS) and Research for Impact (R4I).
WordPress was chosen as the content management system due to its open-source nature, robust ecosystem of developers and plugins, and its ability to support multi-site configurations.
Integrating research outputs
A critical feature of the public website is its integration with IDRC’s institutional repository on DSpace, which houses programme materials and project outputs for long-term discovery and reuse. Using the DSpace API, outputs are programmatically imported into WordPress, enriched with metadata, and organized using a robust taxonomy.
This approach enhances discoverability and ensures outputs are searchable, shareable, and integrable into other repositories like FCDO/R4D. The outputs also feed into the M&E system, providing evidence of project progress.
Facilitating collaboration and interaction
For internal users, the CLARE Base website provides a secure, members-only space that shares the same WordPress instance as the public site.
The CLARE Base website serves as an interface and aggregator for the collaboration and interaction activities across the programme. These are enabled by groups.io, which combines website and email features – a powerful pairing. Although other options were considered, many participants preferred email because it works well for asynchronous communication and doesn’t require continuous internet access. Users from different programme and project groups can add internally-directed content, interact, find resources, seek assistance, and collaborate on content and activities.
M&E Center
From CLARE Base, users can also access the M&E Center, a dedicated hub for monitoring and reporting. It provides:
- Tools for data input and review.
- Key MEL documents.
- Dashboards and visualizations.
- Support resources for users at various levels.
Empowering Users for Success
Following the platform’s development, comprehensive user testing and training sessions ensured the KM platform met CLARE’s objectives. By enhancing collaboration and streamlining M&E processes, the platform keeps CLARE’s diverse community aligned, informed, and focused on building resilience to climate change.
This platform reflects a thoughtful approach to design, aiming to facilitate collaboration, knowledge sharing, and the generation of insights to support climate adaptation and resilience.
CLARE is a flagship research programme on climate adaptation and resilience, funded mostly (about 90%) by UK Aid through the Foreign Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO), and co-funded by the International Development Research Centre (IDRC), Canada. CLARE is bridging critical gaps between science and action by championing Southern leadership to enable socially inclusive and sustainable action to build resilience to climate change and natural hazards.