 or drought. The story doesn't stop there. We pilot site it with farmers, with villagers at village level, with our partners. If they see the benefit, they go to, and it has been validated, to larger scale dissemination that you feed into large numbers of farmers adopting it. And if you really have massive adoption, we can talk about really increased productivity or production in the whole sector. Now, this is not new, but it is new that we really started to make much more explicit in what are the assumptions that this actually happens. And then, if we see, well, there are some risks about these assumptions, or some of these assumptions we think are not really met, we need to identify so-called enabling actions. What do we need to do to make sure that the products actually do flow from bottom to top? And you see here, this particular example, obviously, your first assumption is that your product, your submergence tolerance variety, actually responds to the need of a farmer. Well, if a farmer lives in a submergence prone area, that's obviously the case. But suppose you move up, and you go to the stage where you may have a large scale adoption. This means that if an area, in an area, many farmers starting adopting it, you actually have a large quantity of rice that needs to enter the market. So millers must be willing to mill it. Consumers must be willing to buy it. It also assumes that if many farmers want to adopt it, there is actually enough seed available. So you need them to look at that impact pathway, have we addressed these issues? And we started already through projects such as seed and strassar, I think, flagship projects in this matter, to actually put seed systems in place, strengthen the seed systems, so that, yes, enough quality seed is available to the farmers. You also need to look at, well, things don't automatically spread. Do we have partners who actually have the capability to organize demonstrations, to teach the farmers about the new varieties? More important, to teach them how to use these new varieties. Because quite often, especially in these unfaithful areas, just handing out a new variety might not do the trick if you don't know how to treat that variety now. So we have a whole list of enabling actions identified in the different fields that we need to be aware of. And it doesn't mean that we need to do all of this ourselves, and by we, I mean researchers, but we do need to make sure that we identify partners who can do this, and that the farmers have the capacity to help us doing this. A little bit newer, did this work of the last couple of months. We also started to be much more precise on where exactly do we want to have impact. In the original CRISP proposal, most of the impact was derived from supply demand modeling really at the global scale. We have statements like so many eight million or 11 million people will be lifted out of poverty globally. So many people will have reached caloric sufficiency. But we don't really know where they are. So we started teasing out what are the levels where we actually aim to have impact. So there are basically three levels. The global level, I just talked about a little bit, the national level, and what we call the action side. The action side is where we do really the nitty gritty research on the ground with our partners. And an action side can be a multi-location variety testing site. It can be a PBS site. It can be an innovation platform where we work with our partners. It can be one of the CISA hubs. It's one of the rice sector development hubs in Africa. It's an area where in the IRRC, or Cure and Corrigan projects, we work with our partners on the field to develop, test, adapt AWD, ecological engineering, SSNM, site-specific nutrient management, all these technologies. And out of that innovation platform where research, evaluation, adapting takes place in the field, we derive then a good generic products and services and locally adapted versions of it. And we can then scale out by, if it is successful, but actually laterally, horizontally moving into new areas. So that's the outscaling. And that is an example of what's happening a lot with our seed systems, where sub one varieties have been tested in experiment sites, and then so on farm. And now we are building on seed networks to scale out. There are other products and services that might actually go directly into national systems or even globally. Here we think just about all the entries into the gene bank that are shared annually with our partners. That's just one product that we keep here. And that is shared. And it might enter a national breeding program and enter a national seed dissemination system without really having a lot of other impacts from us. Then what is very important is that we identify that to really have impact at these scales, we need to make sure that these enabling actions are provided for at the different scale levels that they operate on. And we need then to be able to know are we on track. If we have identified a certain scale level, take a country in Bangladesh, and together with Bangladesh we have set specific targets that relate to our development outcomes, targets for production, targets for genetic gain increase, and targets for improved health and nutrition. Is Chris actually delivering? So we need to have indicators. We need to have indicators well chosen along the impact pathway that relate both to what is the stage of our product development, what is the stage of our science leading to new products, but also what is the stage of adoption, dissemination, diffusion, the enabling environment. And here we started looking at the different scale levels. I only have examples here on this slide for the national scale and action side, where we identified some key indicators that can help tell us are we on track with delivering development outcomes. Not only with the science that we do, but specifically with the development outcomes. And what we started doing now in Africa, in Latin America, and at Erie, is actually design, surveys, inquiries, data management systems that allow us to collect, capture, store and analyze these data in a consistent manner across our development outcomes, across our spatial skills, and across the institute. So we can get a consolidated picture for the whole of prison. There's also still science involved, and I'm going to highlight the yield gap. The yield gap is an important indicator. We want to basically increase rice production, total production, to be able to feed the still increasing population, to meet demand, and make sure that the price is at the level where poor people can afford to buy them. So in many ways to raise yield, one of them is to put out varieties which have a higher yield potential. But the other is economic practices that allow farms actually to realize that high yield potential, to optimally exploit the advantages of the material. And there are quite some yield gaps already or still out there. Take the Philippines. We know that even the current in red varieties in the dry season, depending on weather, could have a potential yield of 8 to 10 tons per hectare. However, as with yield, some would be in the order of 4 tons. So there's still what you call a yield gap of 4 tons, that we need to look how can we approach that with improved information, improved management practices. We need to find out what is the bottom line that creates the yield gap. But first we need to know what are the yield gaps, and then we can specifically target research. This is an example again coming out of Andy Nelson's laboratory using the same technologies that I explained about radar, GIS, hot modeling, and overlaying potential yields with simulated actual and statistical yields. He is able to create maps that look like this, though we need to go into detail. But basically a different color indicates a different degree, a different size, magnitude of the gap between what farmers are currently getting and what they could potentially be able to get. You can do that for the dry and wet season. And this gives a large overview picture at national scale, and you can drill down to the districts or whatever. This is an example of what Africa is doing at the action sites. This is information that they derived from their baseline surveys, the same surveys that some of Andy's team think the whole of social science is involved, same baseline data that we started collecting in Asia. On the horizontal sites, each bar stands for a village, and what has been done here graphed the yield of the 10% highest yields in an area versus below that the average yields, and the difference gives the yield gap. So this is more at the action site where you get hold of the yield gap, and then we can follow that up and that's being done, what causes the yield gap, and what are the ways that we can close that yield gap. So there is learning again, an approach that Africa Rise is basically leading in how to collect and analyze and work with yield gaps at the action sites that can be relevant for the work that Evely is doing, and vice versa, Evely taking the lead on doing this at the national site. So I think these are, to me these are the two very important examples where Chris is on the right track, and I think it is delivering at least part of his promises on doing things differently and extracting value added. Out of the analysis that we've done so far, obviously there are also things that can still be strengthened. And here I also have two examples, one relates to the Chris themes. It has been observed that our themes are pretty disciplinary. We have pre-breeding, we have breeding, we have agronomy, and we have post-harvest, we have social science, and actually this may hinder us in developing truly interdisciplinary modes of collaboration and more holistic answers to the problems out there in the field. Some, and this is mainly from the outside world, ask us whether we are not too technocratic and when you look at our themes, yes, it does paint a rather technocratic picture, whether that's right or wrong, that's in this case beside the point, if this is an image that the outside world has, we need to look at how can we really do a better job or else correct that image. I expound it on what I see as a very much improved collaboration among the centres and across the continents. I think building on these examples we could still strengthen this and that will be a continued focus of attention. The role of theme leaders, especially of global theme coordinators keeps coming up and theme leaders might actually not be sufficiently well resourced to really do their job well as a theme leader and we still need, I believe, more clarity on the role of the global theme leader. As you know, the early program leaders are responsible for leading a particular theme at early but have the additional responsibility of coordinating with their colleague theme leaders in the other centres and the need to look at this unrealistic expectation. The second major set concerns the partnerships. Again, I think we have very solid partnerships but it's not always easy to capture that value added and even the work that our partners are doing. It's so far very difficult to really capture the work that our non-CGIR partners are doing. It's very difficult to capture that in the formats and in the protocols that are very peculiar to the CDIR system. So we need to look at how can we do better there. And even boundary partner achievements. And I'll just give one example again from Africa. We've all heard a success story about sub-bound varieties in Asia that the improved seed networks in Strasza and in Cure have produced enough seed to reach four million, four and a half million farmers. Just one month ago the DGGR of Africa was in Nigeria where he was told, oh, and by the way, that variety that you gave us three years ago is actually planted now by four million farmers. We didn't know that. No. So how do you know it's four million? Because actually in our country each farmer registers the seed that he or she is growing. And we have a database on that. And we never even knew about that. So this is just one example of the challenges we face in capturing the achievements of what we call our boundary partners. Also we need to document the value adding these examples that I gave. Most of them are just extracted from PowerPoints, from field visits, from snippets of rice today, and other magazines. And we have not been very good yet at really thoroughly documenting these success stories. And I think that's something that we can improve on. We have our 900 plus partners. And of course we still need to ask ourselves, well, what does that really mean? What is the strength of these partnerships? And what are the results of these collaborations? So moving to, okay, how do we design some of these improvements? This is what we think we can already accomplish now and in the year ahead. We are really looking at improving the development of theme leaders, more resources, plan for roles and responsibilities. More resources should really be substantial. And we are not, as most of you know, be calling for new, new frontier projects this year because of uncertainties in the budget. But that does free up something like $1.5 million that we decided to put into the pockets of the theme leaders. So that's an additional $1.5 million annually on top of something like $300,000 and $200,000 for workshops and partnerships. So we are looking at the substantial strengthening and investment in the themes. And as we are listening and I'm speaking, theme leaders have sent out requests for ideas from their partners. We really look forward to seeing strong thematic responses on how to use this money. We started moving away from institutional workshops to really thematic workshops. We did that already this year and we had successfully already a number of workshops that were organized by theme tackling very crispy issues that related to how can we use the collaborative mechanisms to really address very specific problems. And still three of them are to come. First week in December we have a crisp theme on dream quality, for example. We will also strengthen the interaction among the themes. Next year we will again organize a theme leader meeting where we will bring all the theme leaders and focus persons together. We will really engage more with Andonsky partners to get hold of their reporting. We hope to organize internal workshops in France next year to increase the visibility and buy-in. And maybe you will receive an email. There is an institutional learning and change initiative that developed protocols and procedures to analyze partnerships, analyze the strength and composition of partnerships and map the results of partnerships over time. And we have asked them to also have a look at the crisp partnership and give us a picture from the outside, from independent outsiders on how our partnership is doing and evolving. Quickly, the extension proposal, most of you are aware that crisp will formally end December 2015. However, all CRPs have been requested to submit an extension proposal that would extend each CRP to the end of 2016. And after that, proposals for second phase CRPs should kick in. We have developed that extension proposal from around here. It was just approved by the first council last week. So that's good news. We strongly built on these impact pathways and theories of change by theme that I just showed you. We worked with concrete IDOs and we hope to start operationalizing our indicator framework. There are some changes. Theme 4 will disappear and its work will not disappear but will be redistributed among other themes. So that the embedment and the connection with other themes are strengthened. For example, the grain quality work is much better placed in theme 1 and 2 rather than stand alone. The post harvest work can better be integrated with a lot of the mechanization work and the production work. So that will happen and Theme 3 will move to be much more of a rise value chain looking at both production and post production processes. Looking at CRP 2, the constituent organizations, all six of them, have basically committed to developing a strong CRP 2 proposal that should theoretically start seamlessly in January 2017. We actually started the process of designing CRP 2. We will first of all obviously look forward. We will again do an inventory of what are the major drivers of change in the three continents we are working on. What can we learn from foresight analysis? And then specifically what does that mean for CRP? Just noticing that the world will be increasingly an urban world and the population will grow to 9 billion people. That doesn't say much. You really need then to drill down what does it mean for the rice sector and what does it mean for R&D. We need to be more responsive to the goals objectives, outcomes of the CGIR. As the CGIR is moving through its reform process, the donors are also becoming much more specific on telling us these are outcomes we need to fund. They are developing also a set of intermediate development outcomes and we need to be responsive to that. We also need to be responsive to the needs of our partners. What are the development priorities and the R&D priorities of our major partners? And some of you know that we started using the CORA, the Council for Partnership for Rice Research here as a mechanism to update our inventory of national rice development strategies and R&D strategies so we can be responsive. Then we need to distill what is the typical CG center niche for the free CG centers and for the non-CG centers who have an international mandate and then we need to develop a focused agenda with very strategic use of R&D. Coming back to the themes, we noted that our current themes, they work very well but we have this disciplinary focus which may hinder development of more integrated, multi-disciplinary holistic approaches so we will be, and they may be viewed as technocratic, bottom-up, researcher telling what is good to the world and what the world just should adopt so we will still be developing how can we base on the things that we have to do a better job but we will also be exploring alternative things that are less disciplined and maybe more based on agroecologies, socioeconomic conditions and we started to develop some ideas there and say well these are the problems that exist in for example the major deltas in Asia and in the deltas in Africa and the hard production and rice growing cells in the coma of Latin America. These are the particular problems, challenges, these are the opportunities and this is how we may frame our R&D structure to develop answers to this particular problem. So we will be probably looking at these two options and tease them out a little bit more in the months ahead. So what are the next steps? Well first we have a number of institutional internal planning meetings as you know, we will have its science week from January 26 to 30. The first few days are really early science and the last two days, first and Friday we will work more towards two and it's a theme structure. Africa rice follows in February. Seattle will do this within the rice program probably in January. Seattle, my dear, and Jercas are thinking about how they can organize themselves. Then by the end of February we have the Latin America rice conference and that will be the first opportunity where we will bring together the whole PP&T and some key theme leaders are expected to come there. There will be senior research management meetings at the institutes and stakeholder engagement is a continuous process. The final point, the last bullet point in the slides we will also be, I would say helped, assisted, guided by an external evaluation. There is an independent evaluation arrangement operating at the CG level and they have a task to review externally all the CRPs before the end of their lifetime. So the preparations for the review of Christmas have started already, the team will be in place soon and they will have their launching meeting in the third week of January here at Erie, or the second, it's here before or after the Erie planning meeting. It will last for nearly the whole year, but by July we should have interim reports and we really look forward to this outside evaluation of CRISP to help us in the design process of CRISP 2. So this is where I would like to stop and thank you for your attention, I'm not sure how much time we have left I haven't seen any facts going on but I'm happy to take any questions. Open for questions? I'm quite struck by the first slide the 100 million dollars going into CRISP and GSC and CRISP. What are we going to do? I'm saying to try and evaluate the last contributions so that we would see something like the total positive of this activity. I think that who really would be good to have? I'm not sure about the feasibility because it's difficult for our partners to actually identify what belongs to CRISP and not and what we have in the 100 million dollars are only bilateral projects that we can rise and see out. So all flow through money from our donors to the partners is captured in that money. But take for example our collaboration with ICARC I forgot how many collaborative projects with ICARC use money on the table. We have not been able to capture those amounts or even make a fair estimate of it. But when we move ahead and really look at CRISP as a global partnership it's certainly worthwhile to do so. Thanks very much. That was an excellent presentation and it was very thought provoking in so many areas. I was going to follow up on probably the point we just mentioned in terms of ICARC.