Building farmers’ capacities for networking (Part I): Strengthening rural groups in Colombia through network analysis

This paper (Part I) present a case study of work conducted by the International Centre for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT) to adapt network mapping techniques to a rural and developing country context. It reports on work in Colombia to develop a prototype network diagnosis tool for use by service providers who work to strengthen small rural groups. It is complemented by a further paper in this issue by Louise Clark (Part II) which presents work to develop a network diagnosis tool for stakeholders involved in agricultural supply chains in Bolivia. The prototype methods used in both Parts I and II are based on social network analysis (SNA) methodology. SNA is a rapidly developing methodology that is gaining increasing popularity as an analytical and visualization tool with a wide range of applications across a number of disciplines such as health care, psychology and business organization. The focus of SNA is the nature of the relationships that exist between different actors in order to better understand how an actor’s position in a network influences their access to resources such as goods, capital and information.