Podcast on Maize and Chicken in Ethiopia

“Wow, we learned more about chicken than we ever asked for…” my colleague David Spielman joked after a week of Net-Mapping poultry and maize innovation systems in Ethiopia. You can listen to the (more serious) rest of the discussion by clicking on the media player below (or here) . The project is still in [...]

Process Mapping

Regina Birner (IFPRI) has been one of the first people to really push me to go forward with Net-Map. And right from the beginning she has been bugging me: But how to I look at processes with this, not just snap-shots in time? One option is a time series of Net-Maps as discussed earlier. But [...]

From Specific to General

While I used the (general) Net-Map tool to learn very specific details about the poultry and maize sector in Ethiopia, Dawit Kelemework, our Ethiopian research officer, experienced that working on these specific issues opened his eyes to a much bigger and more general field of research approaches. He writes:
“From specific to general
Few weeks ago, I [...]

Marathon Chicken up-date

I sent my musings about Marathon Chicken Support to my colleague David Spielman in Ethiopia and he assures me that our colleagues at the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI) do demand oriented research. He writes:
“Yes, ILRI is actually working to improve local poultry breeds, rather than introducing exotic breeds. Dr. Azage Tegegne with ILRI’s Improving [...]

Marathon Chicken vs Whitebreasts

In Ethiopia people don’t care much for huge, tender, tasteless industrial style chicken. Everybody, from farmer to university researcher agreed: For good Ethiopian food you need tough and streetwise Ethiopian chicken. This poses a big challenge to the development of the commercial poultry sector: While there is a big market for eggs, farmers and extensionists [...]

Do we really need to draw all these links?

When we were net-mapping the innovation systems in poultry and maize in Ethiopia, we wondered: What is the benefit of spending so much time, drawing different links and is it maybe enough to just name the actors and put them on influence towers? So we tried a two step approach: With the first interview partner, [...]

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 Net-Map [...]

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 ways: [...]

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 [...]

Jennifer Hauck in Action

Her thoughts on Net-Map on the village level: see below.