Elias Assefa
Postdoctoral Associate
Elias is a postdoctoral associate with the Local Innovation Group conducting research on conceptual frameworks and methodologies for assessing changes in local innovation capacity under the Evaluating Capacity for Local Innovation project.
Elias received his PhD in August 2020 from the Knowledge, Technology, and Innovation (KTI) group of Wageningen University, the Netherlands. His PhD focused on understanding socio-technical change processes, focused specifically on how social learning and different forms of information and communicative interventions shape the collective action practices of rural communities in Sub-Saharan Africa. Elias’s journey of doing development-oriented social science research in resource-constrained parts of the globe started after he got his master’s degree in Rural Development in 2012 from Haramaya University in his home country, Ethiopia. Previously, he worked as a lead consultant on a joint research project conducted by the CGIAR and Wageningen university studying innovation processes for the scaling of agri-food technologies in Africa and Latin America.