Using Indigenous Knowledge

Abstract

Indigenous knowledge is now celebrated by many of its advocates as ‘the single largest knowledge resource not yet mobilized in the development enterprise’ (Richards, cited in Warren, Slikkerveer and Brokensha, 1995, p. 476) Recent titles such as Tradition as a Modern Strategy, Modern Dilemmas and Traditional Insights The Indigenization of Modernity and reflect the growing prominence accorded to culture and tradition in current development thinking and research. For a long time, African customs and traditions were misperceived as irrational and incompatible with the conventional strategies for economic development, or at any rate as ineffective in coping with present-day needs and challenges. But with the development crisis of the 1980s and 1990s, and the policy failures associated with the formal government system, there is increasing loss of faith in the Western, ‘external-agency’ model of development imposed from the top by national governments and international development agencies. The undue emphasis which this pattern of development places on purely economic and quantitative growth is now blamed for the worsening problems of environmental degradation, widespread poverty, inequality and the undermining of those values and institutions which hold these negative forces in check.