ABSTRACT
The humanitarian sector is being forced to adapt its way of providing aid services;for instance, donors expect to see improvements in efficiency, effectiveness, and data visibility of service delivery. This entails the use of new technologies for collecting data and evidence of the aid sector's needs and proposals for prompt and tangible measurable solutions. The COVID-19 pandemic has shown significant disruption in aid organisations' value chains. The new approach to knowledge transfer (KT) includes the exploitation of the three types of knowledge - tacit, implicit, and explicit knowledge - held by a group of experts, who are being left behind for lack of an inclusive KT management vision. This empirical research also explores the hidden knowledge sources held by the underrepresented female workforce (35%) observed during the COVID- 19 pandemic, as essential to cover the existing knowledge gaps in the aid sector. It verifies whether the underrepresentation of female workforce is related to their low mobility due to carrying multiple roles in their society and family, including the factors causing the disruption of the value chain. The paper assesses whether the pandemic had a positive effect in accelerating the organisation's KT between people and to the field staff, and it finds no relationship between gender difference and the extensive use of contingent workforce to deliver results (X2 [1, N=147] =2.580, p > 0.05). It finds no relationship between the underrepresentation of female workforce and mobility (X2 [1, N=151] =0.041, p > 0.05). It confirms that there is no relationship between an employee's gender and their attitude to rating the use of virtual coaching to delivery knowledge to frontline teams (X2 [1, N=298] =1.212, p > 0.05) yet, it finds a strong relationship between an employee's gender and attitude toward rating the use of AI-based technologies in aid sector (X2 [1, N=581] =14.921, p < 0.001). Finally, it confirms that gender is related to the designation of female workforce to management positions in the aid sector (X2 [1, N=128] =5.010, p<0.05). This paper concludes by providing recommendations for action and for the efficient handling of each of the four knowledge sharing dimensions: Reshaping the contingent workforce;adapting the management of employee mobility;innovating approaches to coaching;and deregulating the use of technology for efficient knowledge transfer between people. © 2020 Academic Conferences and Publishing International Limited. All rights reserved.