About UstawiUstawi Incorporated, is in the business of facilitating development of knowledge in health, business, technology and society. Ustawi formalizes such knowledge through enterprise construction, strategic design, enterprise finance, enterprise governance, and enterprise leadership. Ustawi focuses on the problem of effectiveness of global health delivery using systems thinking. The problem of effectiveness in global health delivery refers to the paradoxical increase in the incidence of diseases and poverty in sub-Saharan Africa, at a time when there is increasing investment in fighting the diseases and poverty. Although expenditures to fight the diseases and poverty have increased, these problems continue to proliferate, creating a relevance paradox, whereby highly relevant projects bring about negative results, and many unintended consequences. Relevance paradoxes occur because of implementation of projects without awareness of the social or individual tacit knowledge within a target community. The understanding of the individual and the social tacit knowledge in a given community, which is a function of knowledge emergence, is the foundation of effectiveness in leadership practice. The specific problem was that there lacked an organization that addressed the process of emergence of relevant knowledge from within the stakeholders of global health. The objective of Ustawi is to assemble a systems thinking sensitive organization that will provide leaders with processes that enable the emergence of relevant knowledge from within the stakeholders of global health. Traditional salient stakeholders of global health include (a) the members of the international development community (e.g., the World Bank, the World Health Organization, the International Finance Corporation, the United Nations Organizations, and the International Monetary Fund); and (b) country. Fringe stakeholders of global health and human development include the local nationals of developing countries, diaspora nationals of developing countries, and the business. In this context, the members of the international development community design programs related to global health delivery such as the structural adjustment program, the poverty reduction strategic papers, the global fund, roll back malaria, and the millennium development goals. National governments of the developing countries facilitate the implementation of the development projects. Global health decisions directly affect the local nationals and diaspora nationals of developing countries in sub-Saharan Africa. These two groups of stakeholders remain in the fringes, if not exterior to the decision-making organs. The business community is a stakeholder of global health because business is a social construct requiring a healthy society as a market for its products, and a source of a healthy workforce. In the current context, researchers perversely consider business as a fringe stakeholder of global health and human development. Exclusion of the local people, the diaspora, and the business community from the design of solutions to problems that affect them excludes the possibility of gaining access to the tacit knowledge from these groups. Exclusion of the tacit knowledge from a community during the design of a project results in failure to incorporate important details in the design structure of the project, with attendant failure of the emergence of knowledge that is relevant to the success of the project. Projects that lack important details in their design structure are problematic, and fail at implementation because of not being relevant to the problem at hand. The phenomenon of project failure that results from the lack of acknowledging the tacit knowledge within a target community in project implementation is known as the relevance paradox. Relevance paradox is a condition where interveners do not see the relevance of certain information that is of critical importance for making better decisions. Because the interveners are blind to this information, they do not seek it, resulting in inevitable, unintended, and undesirable consequences from project implementation. Focusing on the tacit knowledge provides the point of access to the knowledge resources of a human being, or a group. The problem is that, unlike the easily expressed explicit knowledge, the tacit knowledge is internal, not codifiable, and only transmitted through experience. Tacit knowledge does not lend itself easily to identification by project implementers. |
