From 1 -3 November 2011, the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), the African Union Commission (AUC), the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA) and the Forum for Agricultural Research in African (FARA) held a conference on “Increasing Agricultural Productivity and Enhancing Food Security in Africa.”

Our Knowledge Management and Information Services (KMIS) team in Addis Ababa were asked by IFPRI to produce a daily newsletter for the event – see links below. To do this, we reported from the daily sessions, took photos and generally tried to capture some of the flavor of the meeting through the InfoBrief.

It proved to be a challenging and a learning exercise – getting the content, organizing and structuring the issues, and managing the print process.

After the meeting, Dr. Kwadwo Asenso-Okyere, Director of IFPRI’s Eastern and Southern Africa Regional Office wrote: “The delivery of the newsletter for all the three days was superb and the pictures that were taken were splendid. I received several positive feedback from participants of the conference and one of them even referred to the positive impact of the newsletter from the podium. This is a real example of IFPRI-ILRI collaboration and we should do more of it in the future.”

Read the InfoBriefs:

1 November Issue 1:

• Stronger linkages needed
• Agricultural productivity ‘the’ way forward for Africa
• Africa needs integrated markets, coordinated value chains
• The critical bottleneck is infrastructure
• We must keep innovating
• Interview: Bart Minten on the importance of policies to food security

2 November Issue 2:

• Opening with style
• Overcoming challenges to agricultural productivity
• Business unusual
• Interview: John Dixon on new International Centre for Food Security

3 November Issue 3:

• Africa’s green revolution
• Sitting at the same table
• Overcoming challenges to food security: Points of view
• Agriculture and climate change mitigation
• Radio feeds farmers . . .
• Interview: Monty Jones on walking together to increase productivity

The ILRI team for the InfoBriefs comprised: Apollo Habtamu, Genevieve Renard, Liya Dejene, Peter Ballantyne, Tsehay Gashaw, and Zerihun Sewunet.

See our pictures of the conference on IFPRI’s Flickr site [note, the photos were uploaded by IFPRI staff without titles and descriptions.]

Conference web site

For previous ILRI events, we produced a daily newsletter – the ‘Daily Tail‘