Greetings from Scotland where I am on leave for a week – which partly explains why this blog is a little late!

Leadership training

Early May saw me at a three-day leadership development training. This was the second module of a two-module course for ILRI senior managers. ILRI has invested considerably in staff development and training, especially management and leadership training over the past few years – an important investment if ILRI is to be ‘fit for purpose.’ To be effective we need to have sound management and leadership at all levels and ensuring that staff are equipped with the right skills and tools to play those roles is important for the success of the institute.

IRMC meeting

On 8–10 May, the Institute Research and Management Committee (IRMC) met. The IRMC comprises the Institute Management Committee (IMC), program and deputy program leaders, regional representatives, some heads of units (Business Development Unit, CapDev, Communications and Knowledge Management) and the CRP/Platform focal points. It meets twice per year and is a useful platform to discuss a range of topics related to the management of the institute. We spent considerable time on how we can reorient the way we describe and manage our research to be more product oriented and impact driven and how we can develop value propositions for what we do. In addition, we self-reflected on how effective we are at program management, institutional management and resource management and identified some areas for improvement. Other topics of discussion included resource mobilization, partnership management, capturing data on training and use of the software Salesforce to capture information on donors and donor intelligence.

South Sudan visit

A cattle camp outside Juba, South Sudan (photo credit: Iain Wright).

Henry Kiara and I spent a week in South Sudan (21–25 May) as part of a mission of seven CGIAR centres to explore how CGIAR might contribute to supporting the humanitarian assistance program and rebuild resilience in agriculture and communities in the country. The long civil war prior to independence from Sudan and the more recent conflict among different political factions has left the country devastated. The UN estimates that of a population of about 12 million, the number of food insecure people has risen from just over 4 million in 2015 to over 7 million in 2018, despite a humanitarian aid budget of USD1.7 billion this year. The number of refugees outside the country is projected to rise to 3.1 million by the end of 2018. There is considerable debate about whether some of the humanitarian aid budget should be used to start to rebuild resilient agricultural systems and communities despite the ongoing conflict. Our mission was initiated by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and we had very useful discussions with the Government of South Sudan, donors, UN agencies, such as the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), the World Food Programme (WFP), the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and non-governmental organizations. Our initial conclusions are that there are aspects of the humanitarian assistance program that CGIAR could support such as advising on the varieties of seeds to use for emergency distribution and helping to target emergency livestock vaccination campaigns and there are a number of technologies, tools, approaches and interventions that we can offer that, through working with partners on the ground, could contribute to the resilience agenda. We undertook to develop, by November, a strategy and plan for such engagement.

Tanzania visit

Amos Omore, ILRI’s country representative in Tanzania, describes ILRI’s research in Tanzania to the Minister of Livestock and Fisheries at the ILRI stand (photo credit: ILRI/David Aronson).

To coincide with World Milk Day on 1 June, the Tanzanian Dairy Board and the Agricultural Research Council of Tanzania organized the first National Livestock Expo and Conference in Arusha on 30 May–1 June. It is planned that this will be an annual event to highlight and promote the livestock sector. Although Tanzania has the third largest livestock population in Africa the economic contribution of the sector compared to many other countries is relatively small because of low investment. I was invited to give a keynote address on the potential of the livestock sector and attended the event with Amos Omore and David Aronson. I am very grateful to Amos for providing much of the material for the presentation. The minister of livestock and fisheries, Hon ‎Luhaga Mpina, opened the event and was very supportive of the need for greater investment in livestock and referred several times to the livestock master plan that ILRI has been supporting the Ministry to develop.

Till next month.

Iain