 The world has long been looking to the enormous potential of Africa as it emerges from a deeper colonial past and from various social difficulties that have occurred since. Africa has incredible potential in terms of food production and it's essential that it gets that right as economies continue to develop. One of the things that contributes greatly to that is having a good science base both within institutes like ILRI and within the national governments themselves. Over the years ILRI has trained more than 8,000 young scientists, many from Africa, many others from other developing countries. This has made a substantial contribution to building a science base within the developing world and ILRI is justifiably proud of that. That continues. There are now many, currently many young graduates and post-graduates training at ILRI and they will cede out to various national institutions. In addition, there's the BECCA initiative which seeks to promote bioscience development in East and Central Africa, which is again enormously important and can use ILRI as an intellectual, if not a technical home. This type of activity delivers enormous benefit for the dollars spent, some of which can be measured very directly, some of which cannot be that directly measured, but there is no doubt that as Africa continues to develop and becomes a food powerhouse, this will be a major factor. At the moment, Africa is still importing a large amount of food. That is costing an excess of $40 billion a year. That can and should change and there is no reason why that cannot happen with well-organized national strategies based in evidence.