The end of a year is always busy – and this year especially so for N2Africa. While we work on the final reporting on many milestones and on the consolidated report of Phase I of the N2Africa project, we are winding up for Phase II. Adverts for the staff positions are posted on the website – and Phase II officially starts on the 1st January 2014. Please help us to circulate these as widely as possible. The success of N2Africa depends on pulling together a winning team!
One of the major operations at present is to collate and archive all of the data collected by N2Africa over the past years. We have an agreement with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation that all data will be made openly available. We have good back-up systems in place to ensure that we can safeguard data for you so that it does not get lost. So we are relying on all staff and partners to assist in collating all of the data, reports and other information. The website continues to be updated – do have a look at the N2 Map and N2 Media pages which are quite new features you may not yet have seen.
In this issue we have reports from some of our students, Amaral Chibeba from Mozambique who is studying in Brazil, and two Dutch students Elise Bressers and Jori Langwerden who are in the Usambara Mountains in Tanzania. This is where I started my own work on nitrogen fixation in beans in Africa back in 1986!
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We also have reports on a recent visit I paid to Bruce Knight of LegumeTechnology UK Ltd and a report from Pedro Lage, Lage y Cía. S.A. on inoculant development in Uruguay. One of the photos that Pedro sent in shows him with Prof Carlos Labandera and Dr Yakov Okon who the older ones amongst the nitrogen fixation community will remember well. We wish you all a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year – with the N2Africa Christmas Tree Greeting that Charlotte prepared – and look forward to working with you in 2014! |
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Ken Giller