Supporting the Department of Veterinary Services, Nairobi

In January our neighbours in Nairobi at the Department of Veterinary Services (DVS) suffered a fire which destroyed much of their administrative building. Following a visit by Jimmy, Dieter, Edward Okoth, Eric Fevre, Bernard Bett, Keith Huma and myself we agreed to provide some computer equipment, IT support and office furniture to help the department get up and running in temporary accommodation. I am pleased to say that on 6 February Edward Okoth and Lina Wanga handed over the first of the equipment to staff of the DVS.

Lina Wanga and Edward Okoth hand over the first IT equipment to staff from the Department of Veterinary Services Department

Visit of senior staff of University of Florida

On 23 February we received a delegation from University of Florida, including the Senior Vice President, Jack Ryan and Pedro Sanchez, whom some of you may know as a former DG of ICRAF. University of Florida aims to become one of the top ten universities in the US and is embarking on a drive to increase its work internationally. We are already working closely with University of Florida on the USAID Feed the Future Livestock Systems Innovation Lab.  We identified some additional areas of potential collaboration that we will explore further, including one health, forages, food systems and human nutrition when I visit University of Florida at the end of March for the annual meeting of the Innovation Lab.

IRMC

The Institute Research and Management Committee (IRMC) met from 27 February to 1 March in Nairobi. For those of you who may not be familiar with this committee it comprises:

• IMC Members
• Program Leaders and Deputy Program Leaders
• Regional Representative
• Heads of CapDev, Resource Methods Group and Communications Knowledge Management and the Head of Public Awareness
• CRP Focal Points
• Senior Gender Scientist

The group meets twice per year.

On this occasion much of the time was spent discussing and refining the draft Program, Regional and Unit strategies and ensuring that the synergies and opportunities for working together were identified. We also had a very interesting discussion on diversity and inclusion in the workplace and Dieter Schillinger gave us his impressions of ILRI after his first 100 days as ADG for Biosciences. I want to thank everyone on IRMC for a very open and constructive meeting.

Susan shared some photos (the link show pictures from several meetings):

Interviews for Program Management Framework roles

A whole week in February was spent interviewing internal candidates for the new roles that have been identified to drive forward the Program Management Framework. We interviewed a total of 31 candidates for a total of 23 positions.  This was quite a mammoth undertaking. Following the interviews we are now identifying which candidates fits best each of the roles.   As you can imagine with so many positions to fill and so many candidates it is taking a while to complete but we should be able to complete it soon.  Thanks to all the people who took part as panel members and thanks to Wubshet Dessie who represented the NRS Staff Council in Addis and Valerian Aloo, Keith Huma and  James Akoko  who represented the NRS Staff Council in Nairobi. Thank you to all the candidates who accepted the invitation to the interviews.  I and my colleagues on the panels were impressed by the amount of talent we have in ILRI.