Students from Purdue University

 Harvesting potatoes in 1976 to raise funds for a study tour of southern Africa – that’s me on the left (credit: Iain Wright).

On 13 March a group of undergraduate students from Purdue University, all of whom were taking a course on food security, led by Gebisa Ejeta, a 2009 World Food Prize Laureate, were in Kenya. The students were visiting several organizations and field sites in the country to study different aspects of food security. For most of them it was their first visit to Africa.

It reminded me of my first trip to Africa in 1977. I was about to enter the final year of my BSc in agriculture course at the University of Aberdeen, and along with five classmates and our agricultural botany lecturer, I spent a month in southern Africa (Lesotho, South Africa and Swaziland) studying aspects of southern African agriculture. While we received some financial support for the trip from the university, we raised most of the funding ourselves including growing an acre of potatoes for sale on my father’s farm. That first visit to Africa kindled my interest in developing-country agriculture and although it was another 20 years before I started working in developing countries and 35 years before I moved to live in Africa, it was an important event in my life. Who knows what the visit to Kenya by these young students from Purdue might lead to. One day one of them might be deputy director general of ILRI!

A4NH planning and management committee meeting

I was in Hanoi, Vietnam, for the planning and management committee meeting of the CGIAR Research Program on Agriculture for Nutrition and Health (A4NH) from 19-23 March. ILRI is a major contributor to in A4NH in Vietnam and it was good to see and hear about the partnerships and research that the team in Hanoi is engaged in, especially in food safety and zoonotic diseases. The work is attracting a lot of interest from the Government of Vietnam and other stakeholders and influencing thinking and policy on food safety in the country. Thanks to Hung and the team in the Hanoi office for looking after me during my stay.

Technologies for African Agricultural Transformation

Iddo Dror, Tunde Amole and I were in Cotonou, Benin, on 28-29 March for a meeting of the program steering committee of Technologies for African Agricultural Transformation (TAAT). TAAT has been under discussion for over two years and is now finally up and running. It is an African Development Bank (AfDB) initiative that aims to scale out proven technologies and interventions to bring about transformational change in agriculture in Africa. CGIAR centres, led by the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA), are implementing the program in many countries. ILRI leads the livestock component with the International Center for Agriculture Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA), the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT) and many national partners. The AfDB has earmarked USD120 million over three years for the program but the intention is to leverage further funding from loans that the AfDB and other development banks provide to countries. We are already in discussions about providing technical support to loans in Mozambique and Zambia. I represent the implementing CGIAR centres on the program steering committee. During the meeting, presentations were made by the centres leading different components of the program and the committee should approve the first batch of projects in the next two weeks.

Till next month.

Iain