 Hi, I'm Purvi Mehta and I joined ILRI in January 2009. I have a crop, come from a crop background. I actually was trained as a crop agriculture biotechnologist and then went into the whole area of capacity development. So before joining ILRI, I was the director of an NGO in India which worked with a very large number of ministries and had members who were 68,000 farmers in several states of India. Basically it worked on technology transfer and capacity development. So I came from that kind of background and worked with IFPRI for three years, again doing similar things, building capacities and trying to take biotech crops closer to the farmer kind of work. And then came to ILRI to work with the capacity development unit about three years ago. But one of the historical things that has happened and one of the historical contributions of this institute has been its investment in capacity development. I mean in the last three years I've come across ministers in Africa, university deans, university teachers, researchers, people at the National Agriculture Research Systems all over Africa who have said that they have a soft corner. It's funny, you go to a conference and they see the ILRI Badger when you're speaking, they see ILRI there and they want to come talk to you, especially because they have a soft corner for ILRI and a large number of people I've come across in Africa which in a way is a new region for me who have come up and said they know ILRI because they've been trained as ILRI, they have been graduate fellows at ILRI or they've had short training set ILRI. So this is a huge investment. So when we say investment in capacity development I think we often don't realize the kind of impact we have created by running this kind of a program, by creating that kind of pool of expertise in the region. I feel that investment in capacity development is not only investment into future generation but also our investment into sustainability because frankly speaking, projects come and go but the kind of capacities it builds in the regions whether it is Africa or Asia or any regions those capacities stay on the ground. Those capacities have a long impact and they don't get limited to those people but then they spread across. So I see them as ambassadors of ILRI but also ambassadors of the livestock agenda per se. Many CG centers and I've been associated with several many CG centers, we talk about capacity development we talk about impact, we talk about having that sustained effect on the ground but I think one of the best pathways towards these things is to rather than sort of importing capacities from outside to build our own capacities and that's only by building capacities of the regional people so that they can take the message forward rather than people like me coming from other regions and trying to do work. When we say capacity development at ILRI or when we say the cast of the capacity strengthening unit we're talking about two things. One is the whole area of graduate fellowship program if we look at our two major campuses Addis Ababa and Nairobi we have on an average 43 students every year joining us for their PhD and MSc program some stay with us for three to four years while they're doing their PhD some could be very short term, eight months, one year kind of students but these students basically are our links with the various universities so if we look at the links that we have with the universities we are at the moment in sort of collaboration or relationships with 39 universities across the world and these students come and work with us for a long period of time interestingly a lot of these students then decide to stay with us for a longer time for example Steve Stoll came as a graduate fellow and decided to stay with us Delia Grace stayed with us Rob Skelton and there are many such students so it is not only our investment into the region but I think it is our investment into our own human resource as well and getting good scientists and leaders for the future something that I'm really very proud of is the gender balance in these students at the moment in Nairobi it is exactly 50-50 we have 50% men and 50% women graduate fellows working with us in Nairobi so that's pretty cool we are one of the largest graduate fellowship programs in the CGIR this is only when I'm counting Addis Ababa in Nairobi we have a large number of students who are also based in Asia and these numbers are definitely growing the second part of the capacity strengthening is this whole area of how do we take the research outputs to developmental outcomes over 80% of our donors or people who invest money into institutions like Illry are developmental donors people who want to see developmental impact people who are interested not only for example in developing a vaccine but interested that that vaccine reaches out to the farmer or creates that developmental impact and that's another area where capacity strengthening comes into picture how do we take the research outputs how do we extend it to the larger community it could be communities of farmer it could be community of the national agriculture research system universities and all these boundary partners who work between who are present between us and the end user which could be the farmer and how do we build capacities of them we are associated with a very large number of ongoing programs at Illry not only in Africa but quite a few in Southeast Asia South Asia where we are trying to take the messages that comes out of the research and then sort of translate them into the messages at the grass root level this includes conducting training of trainers programs building training manuals doing some face-to-face training but then I think we need to go beyond that and get into the new areas like distance learning program putting Illry's messages through the various ICT programs something I'd love to see maybe in next five years at Illry is when these large number of mobile phone networks for example that are now reaching out you know it's a well-oiled machine now where health messages and seeds and the messages on seeds or the messages on agriculture especially crop marketing is reaching out to the farmers in many many countries in five years time I would love to see if when Illry's messages are translated through those those systems and those channels and we reach out to the people in five years time I'd love to see more Illry material turned into local vernacular languages so that not only the research community understands what we do but also the farmers and people at the grass root level see it and interestingly you know my experience says that even policy makers learn much more by reading out the material that's meant for farmers than the material that's meant for researchers for example so translating Illry's messages to various policy decisions translating Illry's message to various developmental impact is something that I'd like to see in next five years