This seems a good time to catch up with you after the season’s break and to wish you a happy and successful new year!

We ended last year with two stakeholders consultation on Volta and Limpopo basins, that enabled us to design through a lively and participatory process, the content of the corresponding basin development challenges, for which the call for expressions of interest will be launched shortly.  You can follow the results of the Volta workshop through the stakeholders report.

CPWF Phase 1 results are receiving considerable attention from our partners and donors over the last weeks, with several resulting invitations. GTZ requested a presention to a gathering of its project leaders (Fachverbunde), a biennial event in Germany. 

Next month we'll present to the UN Commission on Sustainable Development  in New York on how our partnership approach could help implement CSD-17 decisions on 'Agriculture, Rural Development, Land, Drought, Desertification, and Africa'. And in April we contribute to training World Bank staff in Washington DC on choices of models for interventions in land and water management, while hosting a brown-bag lunch meeting on 'How integrative research for development on water and food can alleviate poverty'.

I'm pleased to announce that SIWI and the scientific committee of the Stockholm World Water Week 2010 have invited the CPWF to co-convene a workshop together with the Stockholm Resilience Center on 'Resilience, Uncertainty and Tipping Points'. 

This is a recognition of shifting our program’s objectives in Phase 2 to “increase water productivity and resilience of social and ecological systems”.  We of course expect contributions from CPWF Phase 1 projects, for which we will soon send a call for abstracts; but general submission information can be found here.

On our agenda for the next months are our active contribution to the CGIAR reform discussions, a field visit organized for our donors on 8-11 March in Cambodia, and the launch of our Basin Development Challenges through the inception workshops on the Nile (Addis Ababa, 26-28 January), Mekong (Vientiane, 3-5 February) and Andes (Cali, 9-11 March). We look forward to interacting with you in one of these venues.

Best wishes to you,
Alain
a.vidal@cgiar.org