I am writing this in the North East Scotland, where I have been spending Christmas. Not a traditional White Christmas, but a rather wet one.  However in Scotland we escaped the worst of the rain which led to flooding in some parts of England, with many trains and flights disrupted.  The storm was actually the tail end of the same storm that I saw in New York a week earlier – it had crossed the Atlantic Ocean behind me!

In early December we welcomed a number of workshops to the campus, including a USAID meeting on the challenges of scaling up.  It was attended by USAID senior staff from Washington DC as well as many USAID Missions in Africa. I was only able to attend the final day but I received very positive feedback from many of the participants and organizers, about both the content of the workshop and the hospitality provided by our staff.  Many thanks to Peter Ballantyne for the excellent facilitation of the workshop and to all the staff in Housing and Catering, Engineering, KMIS, National Liaison Office and ICT.

On 17-18 December I was in New York for a meeting of the Sustainable Agriculture and Food Systems Thematic Working Group of the United Nations Sustainable Development Solutions Network (SDSN). The SDSN was established by the UN Secretary General to mobilize scientific and technical expertise from academia, civil society, and the private sector in support of sustainable-development problem solving at local, national, and global scales. In particular it provides support to the formulation of the Sustainable Development Goals which will succeed the Millennium Development Goals in 2015. I am a member of the Sustainable Agriculture and Food Systems Thematic Working Group. We produced our first report in September this year and now we are working to identify practical solutions that can be implemented in the next 10 years to sustainably increase food production.

In 2013 we have seen a significant expansion of our activities in Ethiopia and on the Addis Campus.  During 2012 we started to make many changes to our structure to position ourselves for growth, by reducing our operating costs, improving internal efficiency, outsourcing many non-core services and consolidating some units. In 2013 we began repositioning ILRI to grow and take advantage of the renewed interest in the global community for investment in agriculture. We are now starting to see the benefits of the restructuring and repositioning as we move into that growth phase.  During 2013 we expanded the number of NRS staff in Ethiopia from 171 to 200 and we now have 17 IRS staff based here.

ILRI is not the only organization expanding – the other centres are also doing so.  We estimate that by the end of 2014 there will be an additional 60-70 people working on the campus. This will put pressure on our existing resources and infrastructure and during the coming year we will be assessing what additional facilities we may need to provide to cope with this expansion.  As you know we are have already started a program of upgrading the campus facilities, including securing our water supply, improving our conference and meeting facilities, renovating the Infocentre, building a new animal nutrition laboratory, upgrading the electricity supply system and the local area network, upgrading hostel rooms and many other improvements. We will shortly be arranging consultations on campus to get your views on what needs to be done over the next few years to further develop the campus into a world class research hub.

I want to thank all the ILRI staff in Ethiopia for their hard work during 2013 and I wish you, and your families, health and happiness in 2014.

Iain