Eva Schiffer, former International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) postdoctoral research fellow, discusses how applying the Net-Map method at an avian influenza workshop in Ghana uncovered some “rather scary communication breakdowns and corruption hot spots” in a recent video interview. According to Schiffer, the central question researchers and workshop participants were seeking to answer was: “If there is a suspicious dead bird, how does information about that move up the chain to the national and international bodies and once the avian influenza (diagnosis) is confirmed, how does this intervention get down to the farm or to the market or to the place where this death happened so that something can be done to avoid a catastrophe?”

Eva Schiffer discusses findings from a recent workshop on mapping information networks on avian influenza in Ghana: