Today, Ewen Le Borgne officially joined the KMIS team, based in Addis Ababa. Ewen will lead a range of activities around knowledge sharing/management, learning, event facilitation, communication and monitoring & evaluation.

He believes that development is “all about empowerment and that learning is essential to empowerment because it gives the means to continually improve one’s life.”

He brings a strong experience in events and process facilitation – he has facilitated countless workshops, meetings and conferences and he really enjoys designing participatory events and building a safe space for dialogue, to get the best of everyone present. As a core group member of the global community of practice KM4Dev (Knowledge Management for Development) Ewen has worked with highly skilled facilitators and his personal ambition is to take those skills to another level at ILRI, as well as to build a critical mass of facilitation skills among ILRI (KMIS) staff members. In his own words: “knowledge management is all about getting good conversations going and facilitation is crucial in ensuring structured, effective and enjoyable conversations.”

For the past few years, he worked in the WASH sector (Water, Sanitation and Hygiene) with the IRC International Water and Sanitation Centre in the Netherlands. He was particularly involved in projects setting up learning alliances (multi-level, multi-stakeholder processes) and he will bring his experience in facilitating, coaching and documenting these processes to ILRI.

Social learning also happens through virtual means and Ewen social medias have been a very important component of Ewen’s work, although he is not so much interested in the tools themselves as in what they can do and how people can find useful ways to apply, adapt and combine them. As a senior editor of the Knowledge Management for Development Journal and member of the IKM-Emergent research program (on issues of local development through knowledge management), Ewen has written and reviewedg articles, book chapters and papers. He blogs at http://km4meu.wordpress.com and is active on twitter at http://twitter.com/ewenlb.

A native of France, Ewen has been working in Francophone and Anglophone West Africa, Ethiopia and Latin America for the past 10 years and speaks five languages 🙂 hopefully soon Amharic too!

Ewen’s mantra is ‘fun, focus and feedback’; he is really “ecstatic” about joining ILRI and resettling to Ethiopia with his family (Elisabeth and now five-month old Ilan who will join in January 2012).