 I'm Jerry Glover, I'm with the U.S. Agency for International Development in the Bureau for Food Security in the Office of Agricultural Research and Policy. We're here in Addis at the Illry campus to design a new sustainable intensification research and development project focused primarily on the Highland regions of Ethiopia. With this project we hope to intensify some of the production systems here in the Ethiopian Highlands, essentially increasing the productivity of the systems, but the sustainable part of sustainable intensification emphasizes that we're very focused on natural resource management. So enhancing or conserving the soil resource, better managing water, better managing nutrients, combining that into a research project that increases productivity with the ultimate goals of decreasing poverty, increasing nutrition and health of the target populations, some of these smallholder farmers in the Ethiopian Highlands. So it's a new approach to integrating component technology such as tillage practices, fertilizer practices, innovative crops such as using tree crops, integrating livestock, and certainly increasing the use and the use of legumes in the cropping systems. Some of the specific challenges are degraded soil conditions and the lack of available services and there are labor issues as well. So in our project we hope to develop innovative ways of overcoming some of these challenges, for example in areas where fertilizer is too expensive or inaccessible, perhaps using legumes such as beans and other types of legumes and fertilizer trees that are able to provide the system with nutrients such as nitrogen. So this is one of three regional projects that we're initiating. We have a project that we just initiated in West Africa focused on Ghana and Mali and we'll be launching a new project in East and Southern Africa with a focus on Tanzania, Malawi, and Zambia next week. The overall objectives of the three projects are very similar, essentially to sustainably intensify, sustainably increase the productivity of smallholder farmers in these three regions. There are some overarching themes, some overarching challenges that we face in all the systems, for example soil degradation is a key challenge in all three systems. Also the nutritional aspect, our desire to enhance the nutrition of these target populations by integrating livestock and legumes is also a key component. You know at this workshop we're bringing together some of the incredible talent and experience of the international research institutes, the national research institutes, non-governmental organizations, and the private sector to bring their experience to bear on overcoming some of these challenges and their experience with the decision-making at the household level and at the community level provides great guidance on how to move forward with these projects in terms of addressing the specific needs of farmers and their communities.