E.3.1.c Banga

(Knowmadic meetings)

Banga means time and space in Luganda, a Ugandan language, and means ‘tide’ in Lithuanian.

Issa Samb’s studio. Dakar, 2015

While the Assembly takes place annually and with participation by all the AC member organisations, Banga (Knowmatic Meetings) are small-scale, sporadically held meetings based on a ‘call for gathering’ for friendship, self-care, reciprocal support, and collective study on a particular subject/issue. Banga can take different forms including 1) ‘advice meeting’ for getting advice from the AC members on a particular issue that a member is dealing with, 2) ‘collective study meeting’ for delving into a topic, 3) ‘event meeting’ to be held next to an event that a hosting organisation organizes or attend and 4) skills sharing meeting.

Like the Assembly, the spirit of Banga is for working, conversing, and learning being together, not showcasing or promoting. Nonetheless, tooling this collective study/learning process for wider sharing is crucial, as well as being embedded in a local context.

The Banga is a “form of replacement for the institutional anchoring of important world intuitions at one place, hence a unique postcolonial approach in which instead of funding structures, mobility is funded, which lead to heavy reliance on know-how instead of a heavy reliance on institutions and structures.”[11]

Practical Framework

• Each member who wants to call for Banga should look at the AC Resource Maps to see where resources to support them could be found;

• Partners should also make a ‘self-diagnosis’ first through Study Buddying (interview chains and skyping AC partners) in order to check if a Banga would be resourceful;

• A rotativing Banga team/committee will be formed (to be selected in the next Assembly), and will consist of 3 AC organisations in order to decide on which Banga calls to support. Decisions will be made in line with our Ethical Principles—including the value of self-limitation, non-hierarchical self-organisation—this team will look at whether the meeting should take place with the AC members and whether there is a translocal benefit. The meeting could be with other local organisations or practitioners. AC will also investigate how Banga could benefit the AC in general in light of its resource map;

• The actual organisation of a Banga is to be done by the host organisation, including the travel arrangements;

• Each Banga budget is a maximum of 8,000 Euros, which will be used to cover all of the costs of the Banga meeting. These funds typically come from the Collective Pot of the host organization (the organization that is calling for the Banga) or, by mutual agreement, they could come from the collective pots of the other participating organizations. If the costs of the Banga exceed the 8,000 Euros the host organization will have the choice of either paying the difference from its own funds (not the collective pot funds), raising the additional funding from sources outside of the AC ecosystem or requesting permission from the entire AC ecosystem to use additional funds from the Collective Savings.