Designing an Exploratory Indigenous Knowledge Management Framework for Soil Conservation Mechanism in the Konso Community

Abstract

Today, Indigenous knowledge (IK) has a lot of contribution all over the world which it is the traditional knowledge that didn’t codified and not supported by technology. Furthermore, in Ethiopia there are different Indigenous knowledge Management (IKM) in different regions and ethnicities. In addition, Konso people also have different indigenous knowledge that used for various purposes like for forecasting weather, traditional medicine, soil conservation for protecting their environment and productivity. The main goal of this research study is to explore and design the Indigenous knowledge management framework for soil conservation mechanism in Konso People. As far as the knowledge of the researchers, this very power full knowledge is not explored and also
not supported by emerging technology for making easy knowledge management processes like sharing, transferring, utilization and preservation. Therefore, it is very import to explore and design the IKM framework and develop the prototype to make enabled knowledge management process easy. The exploratory research method and design science research design were used to explore the knowledge from sources. Hence, both qualitative and quantitative research approach used data were collected from the sources using data collection tool like interview (questions), survey (questionnaires), technical observation (check list) and existing documents analysis. From the collected data new knowledge was revealed and the newly proposed IKM framework for soil conservation were design and developed using SWI Prolog tool for implementation. In addition, the designed and developed IKM framework for soil conservation were evaluated and validated by using ISO-1826 I standards. As per this study revealed, this study is significantly very import for sharing, transferring utilization and preserving
Knowledge and for police development that used to protect the soil erosion and land degradation in Ethiopia and in Konso people specifically. Accordingly, this research, user and expert evaluation was assessed and its result as 70% respondents were responded that knowledge deliverability, 87.5% respondents were assented with attractively, 75% of respondents were agreed with accessibility and 62.5% of respondents were responded with suitability of proposed IKM framework and prototype. Furthermore, the obtained result significantly shows that, the proposed IKM framework for Soil conservation in Konso People have the ability to share, transfer and preserve Indigenous knowledge for the next generation.

Keywords: Indigenous Knowledge, Soil conservation, Knowledge Management, Knowledge Preservation.