Demonstration of a Cultural Indigenous Knowledge Transfer Prototype

It can be a difficult task to develop a successful system without involving end users, and when the target group resides in Sub-Saharan rural areas, it is almost impossible to design and implement without mixing semantics with subjective ideas on the end users’ situation. The research presented in [1], reveal deep rural interest in the understanding, transferring and storing of indigenous knowledge from the Herero tribe in Namibia. The Herero community elders possess a great amount of cultural knowledge on husbandry, herb knowledge and religious rituals and the modus operandi of transferring this knowledge to the community’s youths has for many years been situated locally and through intrapersonal interactions. This method of conduct is now being attacked by ‘modern schooling’, where the youths are dislocated from their original communities into the capitol to prepare them for a demanding world, increase their digital and textual literacy and to support the development and stability of the country they live in. By using a modern toolbox of animations and game dynamics, we have developed a prototype to allow sharing of indigenous knowledge and to avoid a Western approach the first steps have been evaluated in situ to allow fusing of thoughts and critique into the development process.