The first month of the year, January, has been extremely busy.  We all enjoyed the Addis Staff Party on 17 January, which was an opportunity to relax, appreciate good food and enjoy ourselves thanks to the hard work of the organising committee and the Housing and Catering Staff.

Frank Rijsberman, CEO of the CGIAR Consortium was in Addis along with Piers Bocock, Director of Knowledge Management and Communications on 14-15 January.  It was a good opportunity for Frank to interact with the organisations on the campus as well as have specific discussions with ILRI staff on our new strategy and the role of livestock research in the CGIAR portfolio. He was impressed by the degree of interaction and collaboration among the Centres and Jimmy and I discussed with him how the Consortium can assist us in our plans to create a real CGIAR campus here. I accompanied Frank to the Africa Union where he and the Agriculture and Rural Development Commissioner, H.E Rhoda Peace Tumusiime, signed an MoU committing CGIAR and the AU to work closely, especially on aligning CGIAR programmes in Africa with the Comprehensive African Agricultural Development Plan (CAADP)

The LIVES project which is being implemented by ILRI, IWMI, Ministry of Agriculture, EIAR and several regional organisations and other partners was officially launched at a well attended event on 22 January. It was attended by Ato Wondirad Mandefro, State Minister and member of the ILRI Board of Trustees, Dr Solomon Aseffa, DG of EIAR and His Excellency David Usher, Canadian Ambassador. All three were extremely enthusiastic about this important project as were the representatives of the partner organisations.

Our two DDGs, John McIntire and Suzanne Bertrand visited us for a couple of days to get to know the campus and the staff. It was also a good opportunity to us to get to know them and we look forward to having them here regularly.   I will be working very closely with both of them as we develop and increase the volume of research that we do in Ethiopia.

I made my first visit to Ghana this month. Unfortunately it was literally a flying visit to Accra for a meeting of the Program Coordination Committee of the Africa RISING program.  Africa RISING is a 5-year, USAID funded program with three projects, one in West Africa, one in East and Southern Africa and one in the Ethiopian Highlands, which ILRI coordinates.  There is still some way to go in getting a common vision for the three projects and aligning research approaches.  However I am very pleased to say that our project, led by Peter Thorne, and with very close and effective collaboration among all the other CGIAR Centres and other partners is in the vanguard of thinking of how to carry out systems research on sustainable intensification of mixed crop-tree-livestock systems.

Till next month