Capacity Building for the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources

Eric Welch and Aseffa Wedajoo have just completed intensive workshops in Uganda and Rwanda as part of the Genetic Resources Policy Initiative undertaken in collaboration with national research teams in the two counties and with Bioversity International. The workshop participants included biological and plant scientists, social scientists and genetic resources specialists from two counties. The workshops were designed to provide an introduction on social network analysis to the national research teams and to provide training on the effective use of social network software to analyze data. Drs. Welch and Wedajoo made use of network data collected by the Uganda and Rwanda research teams from Internaional Treaty policy actors in their respective counties to demonstrate how social network analysis can assist capacity building for policy implementation. Ongoing collaboration will continue with Rwanda and Uganda as their research teams produce the policy implementation reports due later this year.