given that you place adaptation at the heart of your programme rationale, we need to continue to explore collaborations around adaptation to new environmental and climatic conditions.

Second on the targeting, let’s keep trying on the idea we are discussion with Tim R!!

Hi Steve – The state minister of livestock in Ethiopia has asked LIVES/ILRI to co-organize a workshop to discuss the way forward with the mass insemination program of dairy cows (target 5 million cows for GTP II). Would be good to have some inputs from your group to enrich the discussions

thanks Steve, for the ‘likely impact of an intervention’, yes, this is what we call ex ante assessment. For dairy and pig value chain, we’re building system dynamic models to do so. Contact person is Edgar Twine for dairy and Emily Ouma and Lucy Lapar for pig.

1. It works pretty well! We talk to each other all the time! However, there are plans afoot to develop a new health structure, a bit like a health equivalent of LiveGene that integrates health activities not just across Bios but across the whole of ILRI. In fact the centre of gravity of such a program would probably not even be in Bios at all.

2. We discussed with Tim using his tools to help us to choose what and where our interventions would have the most impact. We would also like to model the likely impact of an intervention – like a gene or a vaccine – with a given set of characteristics.

You are right, ‘delivery’ can mean anything from a transgenic cow to deliver an improved genotype, through improved AI, to better arrangements with private enterprise to deliver lines. Boni will be closely involved in the large poultry project that Tadelle is leading and which is very focussed on the challenge of delivery to the farmer. I hope that will ensure joined-up thinking.

I agree, targeting and delivery is critical for the whole organisation. Bios does still tend to be supply-side led, often with reasonable justification but sometimes without clear objective evidence. As you know Iain is discussing a big data integration project that would help a lot with this.

Skunkwork projects emerge from the closet at the right stage of development and at the right time – well those that succeed do, the others we quietly bury. The biorespository is the best example, it was a totally unfunded “weekend” project for 2 years. Often a bit of ‘proof of principle’ costs very little except some spare time and can help to shape ideas of what can and cannot be done.

You did not mention additional success as being improved /sustained environmental health.

Although you have indicated that we have strong and strategic partnerships, given the difficulties we have in attracting funding in targeting, modeling, electronic and high-end computer science, points us to then need to be deliberately broaden our partnerships net so as to engage university departments of mathematics and computer sciences, and attract young talents, to do develop and implement their PhD and MSc research projects with us. We need to come out of our comfort zones and begin engaging different partners. Within the Bioscience program and ILRI at large, we have enough data and related farm-based problems, that if well shared can attract so many different cadres skills to help seal the identified gaps. This is clearly envisaged in the LiveGene , so just facilitate it;