Features Elizabeth Hunter — Canada "In one community, there was a lovely old woman who had cherry orchards and goats. She was dirt poor, but incredibly generous and spirited. It was a soul-fulfilling experience to meet people and hear them talk about their lives, their relationship to food, and the land." Read the text: Open file. Listen to the audio clip:

• Targeted training on transdiciplinarity (including leadership and teamwork skills), multi-stakeholder participation, and gender and social equity analysis for partners, including NGOs, CBOs and local government officials.  Training courses aim to maximize the use of expertise from past IDRC investments in the South on these topics.
• Cross-project learning through regional workshops, which aim to connect different projects so as to enable research teams to share and learn from one another while benefiting from a continuous peer-review process. These smaller workshops will feed into a larger conference, the second Ecohealth Forum in December 2008. 
• Short course-workshops conducted by Southern institutes on Ecohealth approaches: training themes and venues are reviewed with collaborating Southern institutions (e.g. INSP in Mexico, Fiocruz in Brazil). Strategies seek to balance classroom work with field experience opportunities for participating research teams. These workshop courses in Ecohealth are part of the COPEH in LAC, SSA, and MENA. Similar activities are also planned for Asia. 
• Targeted support to young researchers from Canada and developing countries: Ecohealth Awards are now offered on a regional basis. Both the training programs and the associated thesis-related field research grants are managed by partners of the Program Initiative. These courses allow recipients to become acquainted with the basic principles of Ecohealth research, and advance their thesis research design accordingly.  For more information on regional training programs, please visit COPEH-Can for Canada; INSP for Latin America and the Caribbean; COPES-AOC for West and Central Africa.

In addition, funding within existing and planned research projects is available for the training of young researchers, allowing them to develop the specific expertise and skills needed by the projects, and to apply these skills within a transdisciplinary context.

Browse Ecohealth's News & Networking section for updates on these and other training and award opportunities.

Visit the Training Archives page for information about previous Ecohealth Training Programs