Cleaning up our mental cabinets…

The other day I talked with Jonathan Agwe from the World Bank (WB) about the possibilities of making the Innovation Systems Approach more accessible and innovativeness more measureable by using Social Network Approaches. His excited reaction made me smile because it reminded me of my own first reaction to Social Network Analysis: “I didn’t know [...]

Jumping into cold water

As I mentionned before, I’m in Addis Ababa now, to use Net-Map with my colleagues here to get a better understanding of innovation systems in the agricultural sector. When I woke up this morning, I had no idea about the poultry sector in Ethiopia. To structure and fine-tune our research approach, we drew our first [...]

Listen to this!

I can’t hide how excited I am: This blog is going audio! Go to the case study section, click on pod-cast and let me tell you how I developed Net-Map to tackle the challenges that the White Volta Basin Board faces.

Struggling with the Matryoshka Effect

You know these Russian dolls where a little baby doll sits inside a slightly bigger one that sits inside a slightly bigger one etc.? Sometimes, when doing institutional Net-Maps, I feel like I’m on a Russian tourist market, just surrounded by Matryoshkas. Only that the way organizations are nested inside each other is far more [...]

Knowledge transfer as two-way street

Yesterday I had lunch with Michael Barth, founder and CEO of upublic, an education consultancy with international focus and in our brief conversation something came up, that I have been thinking about for a while and I seem to be observing a very subtle shift of thinking – at least amongst some of my colleagues. [...]

Food Safety in the Dairy Supply Chain in Uzbekistan

or: Net-map Uzbek Style By Ekin Birol and Marites Tiongco We have just come back from Uzbekistan where we participated in a World Bank (WB) and World Health Organisation (WHO) funded research study on safety of food in Uzbekistan. As Eva said in her previous blog entry, we used the Net-Map tool in two different [...]

Toolkit for Policy Monitoring

My colleague Klaus von Grebmer pointed me towards a great resource for everyone interested in the nuts and bolts of policy analysis. CAFOD (the overseas development agency of the Catholic Church in England and Wales) together with Christian Aid and the TroCaire College developed a “Toolkit for Civil Society Organisations in Africa: Monitoring Government Policies” [...]

Fresh from Uzbekistan

My colleagues Ekin Birol and Marites Ticogo are back from their research trip to Uzbekistan, where they used Net-Map for a study about food safety. They promised to tell me all about it and to write up their experience when using Net-Map in two different ways: As interview tool on the farm level and to [...]

The Role of Networks in Innovation Systems

My colleagues at the ISNAR (International Service for National Agricultural Research) Division of IFPRI have done a lot of research into the role of networks in agricultural innovation systems in such diverse settings as Bolivia and Ethiopia. So I’m excited that David Spielman (ISNAR) and Regina Birner (also IFPRI, Development Strategy Division DSG) asked me [...]