 You were involved in the very beginning of the Nile Basin Development Challenge. What was the original idea? It was spawned out of the first phase of the Challenge Program for Water and Food. And in that program they had a lot of research projects in the various basins around the world. And they decided for the second phase to try and make it into a more coherent programme of research within each base on a specific issue within that basis. Rather than having a whole range of different projects they had a bit of trouble trying to integrate together. They decided to come up with this idea of an over-arching theme and a challenge. And within the Nile Basin it just seemed to make sense that over-arching challenge was to do with rainwater management because of the fact that most crops are rain-fed within the Nile Basin. It seemed to be the idea of working on rain-fed crops and rainwater management seemed to be a logical type of approach. So that's basically how it came about. So in the program since it started I'm a hydrologist and the role that I'm playing is basically trying to work out what happens to rainwater within a landscape. So obviously in order to manage rainwater and to manage water within a landscape you need to have a basic understanding of how we've gone off. So we've been looking at that. What were you trying to achieve specifically in your part of the project? Well, like I say we've been working in these three small research catchments. In those three catchments we've now put in instrumentation to get a better understanding. We measure rainfall, we measure climate variables, we measure surface runoff and we measure groundwater and soil moisture. And through these measurements we're trying to get this understanding of the water and what proportion could be used for agriculture, how even reducing evaporation etc. But the work that I'm doing, we've instrumented these catchments. That's taken quite a long time, it took us a long time to purchase equipment. Some of this is quite sophisticated equipment. We had to import it from overseas and that obviously took a long time. But that equipment is now in place and we've been monitoring for the last three, four months. We haven't analysed a lot of the data yet but the data we now have will be used for modelling, computer modelling. So the intention is that we can use this data now to help us understand processes. We can then feed the data into computer models and then we can do run scenarios of different interventions within the catchments within these models. So at the moment we have the data collection phase and it's starting to set up and configure the models for these three search catchments. So you're going to be leaving the basin but still continuing to work with our projects. What would you, if you look forward two or three years, what would you hope to see coming out of this work that you've been doing now? Well obviously we'd like to have good calibrated and validated models. We'd like to have good data and what we're hoping is now we'll have very good baseline data on basic hydrology of processes. So and then within the next two to three years from that we'll have to do through this modelling, gain much more understanding of how different interventions impact on the hydrology of catchments. And in the challenge you see that we, if you were to give us a piece of advice to the NBDC management, what would it be? Well basically I think this is one of the first times that we've actually been collecting primary biophysical data within the CPWF in the past. There's been very little collection of primary biophysical data. And I'm very pleased that within this project we buy this equipment and install this equipment. What we are actually hoping is that through these instrumented catchments, like I said, I think they're probably the most sophisticated there has ever been in Ethiopia. We want these to become learning sites not just for the NBDC but for a whole range of different research programmes. So we're working with the universities, the universities that are closest to each catchment to make sure that they know that their students can use these data and they can become an adult and also conduct their own research within these catchments. But having this basic baseline data available to underpin the research that they do. And then also with the communities obviously we need to get back. We need to have a way of translating what we find into information that's useful and understand.