What determines women's participation in collective action? Evidence from a western Ugandan coffee cooperative

Women smallholders face greater constraints than men in accessing capital and commodity markets in Sub-Saharan Africa. Collective action has been promoted to remedy those disadvantages. Using survey data of 421 women members and 210 nonmembers of a coffee producer cooperative in Western Uganda, this study investigates the determinants of women's participation in cooperatives and women's intensity of participation. The results highlight the importance of access to and control over land for women to join the cooperative in the first place. Participation intensity is measured through women's participation in collective coffee marketing and share capital contributions. It is found that duration of membership, access to extension services, more equal intrahousehold power relations, and joint land ownership positively influence women's ability to commit to collective action. These findings demonstrate the embeddedness of collective action in gender relations and the positive value of women's active participation for agricultural-marketing cooperatives

Potential of Genome Editing to Improve Aquaculture Breeding and Production

Aquaculture is an increasingly important component of global food security, and there is major potential for genetic improvement to contribute to sustainable production. The high fecundity and external fertilisation of most aquaculture species are amenable to the application of genetic improvement technologies, including genome editing using CRISPR/Cas9. Disease resistance is a major target trait for improvement, and CRISPR/Cas9 offers new opportunities to fix existing alleles, to perform introgression-by-editing of alleles from wild populations or related species, and to create de novo alleles. Combining in vivo and in vitro screening approaches has the potential to identify functional disease resistance alleles for downstream functional testing and application. Using genome editing to achieve 100% sterility of production animals is a promising avenue to prevent interbreeding of escapees with wild stocks

POLIWORK - Telekooperation und Dokumentenverwaltung am persoenlichen Arbeitsplatz Abschlussbericht

POLIWORK was a pilot project primarily aiming to develop and to compare Team Workrooms, Manager Workplaces, and Desktop conferencing systems for use in public administration. It was also a case study on the telecollaborational support of administrative work processes between dislocated groups in the Federal Ministries (Ministry of Economics and Technology (BMWi) and the Federal Ministry of the Interior (BMI), committees of the Federal Government (BTA-FTTA) and the Ministry of School and Further Study (MSW)) in NRW. The main purpose was to optimise the integrationof groupware technologies and evaluate the suitability of desktop conferencing systems (including multipoint sessions) for supporting the work of the German Federal administration through a complete document management. On the one hand standard tools like multipoint audio/video conferencing and application sharing were integrated seamlessly, on the other hand specific features like conference reservation and group awareness fulfil requirements that could not be met otherwise. Therefore the exploration of current and potential application contexts for groupware technology had to be done as well as the evaluation of qualitative and quantitative benefits of groupware support in dislocated work processes and the limitations of the technology had to be analysed. The introduction of groupware technologies into the technical infrastructure, into work groups collaboration practices, and the coaching efforts necessary to support the use of telecooperation and document mangement technology is dislocated work processes were to be tested by the pilot users. BIFOA's main task was to work out - step by step - the hard- and software-systems provided by the industrial partners under consideration of the users view. The central results of these evaluations were suggestions for extension and improvement for the revision and detail of the functional specifications for the gradually improved solutions for application. The partners IBM and GMD responsible for the technology development were the receivers of these suggestions. Furthermore the reactions upon the research and working process of the other partners as well as hints of the pilot users and the evaluation of the researchers should be demonstrated. Further activities, not planned at the beginning of the project, were to put on the investigation of the internal and external communication as well on the demands of the usergroup within the Federal Ministry of Economics and Technology and a market analysis for the selection of a Multipoint Conferencing Unit (MCU). This analysis was needed for the carrying out of the multipoint conferencing which should go on in the second phase of the project. (orig.)Available from TIB Hannover: F98B2192+a / FIZ - Fachinformationszzentrum Karlsruhe / TIB - Technische InformationsbibliothekSIGLEBundesministerium fuer Bildung, Wissenschaft, Forschung und Technologie, Bonn (Germany)DEGerman