Introduction+and+welcome

=Partnership and Communication annual meeting 2012= On 24-26 January, ILRI's P&C department held a meeting in Addis Ababa.

Introduction
ILRI involved in 7 CRPs, leading CRP 3.7. Heavily involved in CRP 4 (Agric and health)
 * Lots of changes at ILRI**: new DG, changes in the CGIAR, working in CRPs.

There are thus a number of strategic funding opportunities for us (SIDA, CIDA, IFAD). Good news because funding is increasingly tight generally.
 * Some major activities that took place in 2011**:
 * BeCa involved in a large platform - visit of German chancellor and many other visitors attracted to it;
 * We reviewed the partnership strategy developed four years ago to a) better understand our partnership system (we work with partners, that's our going in position and that's a major shift) and b) better address challenges through partnerships (which will become even more important through our CRPs);
 * Our comms review took place last year and we'll delve into this later this morning. In a nutshell: ILRI's doing some fantastic things - we're leading in many areas - but we need to target our comms much better to get maximum benefits. "Some of our best kept secrets are our info products".
 * A new activity was implemented last year: Bio-Innovate, funded by SIDA.
 * We built a better strategic partnership with IFAD - great opportunity for us with Carlos Sere there now. We want to capitalise on this.

We have big challenges - and new ways of working - ahead of us. We need to understand our financial situation and reduce our deficit (to 0!) by getting new grants. We need to improve efficiency and effectiveness in our programmes.
 * Financing 2012**:
 * The Board approved a deficit of 12M USD for 2012 - this deficit will be funded from our reserves (which had been built over the 8-9 years). But there's no more money going to our reserves. We're eating into our savings.
 * We have to be able to charge all our programmes to compensate. We have to build more restricted grant money to our work. We need more large grants.
 * The only money we can recover is through CRP funding to give us a bit more flexibility.

These are the challenges as we move forward and it has implications in our work. Let's keep this in mind and come up with collective solutions, improve efficiency and effectiveness and raise our money.

Shirley, Mario, Bruce and ?? in charge of developing this new strategy. Under ILRI's new leadership, we're in solid hands, we have a new set of networks and contacts and we can go in much bigger directions than in the past. 2012 will be complex, we'll be managing. And this is a great team to get a lot of things done.
 * New strategy 2012**: