The Africa RISING project in the Ethiopian Highlands, funded under USAID’s Feed the Future initiative for global food security enters its second year this month. The project team is currently finalising site selection and the design of research components. These will deliver a fully integrated, multi-disciplinary programme aimed at the sustainable intensification of cereal-based crop livestock systems. The research that will be conducted over the coming year builds on the outputs of a set of quick win projects that have recently been completed. The research is driven strongly by partnerships. As such, it offers us some great opportunities to work in multi-centre teams in anticipation of the new ways of working that we will need to embrace in order to work successfully in the reformed CG system.

On 19 October  ILRI Addis campus hosted a visit from the Brazilian ambassador to Ethiopia, Dr. Isabel Heyvaert and the first secretary Dr. Marcelo Borges. They visited the Infocenter and met participants in a CGIAR meeting on knowledge sharing opportunities. They agreed to explore ways to use the upcoming Brazil-Africa meeting in Addis Ababa in January 2013 to explore ‘science’ links between Brazil and CGIAR in Ethiopia. They then visited the forage genebank, to learn more about the work ILRI does with forages and current collaboration with the Africa-Brazil Agricultural Innovation Marketplace ( http://www.africa-brazil.org), that is supporting the Introduction of Napier grass elite lines for screening for stunt resistance to provide feed for improved smallholder dairy productivity.

From 23-25 October, ILRI hosted an FAO AgriKnowledge ShareFair on the Addis Ababa campus. The ShareFair brought together participants from fifteen countries to discuss and share good practices, how to scale these up and on how to best address recurrent droughts and chronic food insecurity in the Horn of Africa. Full information is online at http://sfhoafrica.wordpress.com.  My thanks to Operations, ICT and KMIS who were fully engaged in making this event a success.