As noted in the report from the Secretariat, this is GFAR’s first annual report, and is therefore necessarily a modest effort in some ways. First, it does not include contributions from all of GFAR’s stakeholders. Apart from an overview from the Secretariat, only the Regional Fora and four ongoing Global Partnership Programme Initiatives contributed to the report. Other GFAR stakeholders such as consortia of NGOs, farmer organizations and private-sector interests did not contribute to the report, mainly because many of these groups are not yet fully organized to be able to provide a common report on their GFAR-related work. This situation is quite challenging and is why the GFAR Secretariat initiated a CSOs Project aimed at reinforcing these constituencies, in this case in sub-Saharan Africa. The design and fundraising were worked on throughout 2003, and the Directorate of International Cooperation of the European Commission is expected to support this important project in 2005.
Second, we deliberately left out a number of activities begun in 2003 but not fully completed that year. Two such activities are the ongoing GFAR charter review and the preparation of the Business Plan for the triennium 2004 - 2006. The Charter review will be completed in 2004 and fully reported in the next annual report as an accomplished task. The GFAR Business Plan for the next triennium was not completed in 2003, and therefore was not included in this report. Nevertheless, since developing the plan was a major undertaking in 2003, we briefly present here a few highlights.
The Business Plan was developed after consultations with all GFAR stakeholders, as well as thoughtful and comprehensive analyses and syntheses. The result of these preparations is a three-part plan as follows:
A Strategic Document that briefly describes key issues that shape the vision of GFAR and which will guide the choice of its activities for the immediate and near future
A comprehensive three-year rolling plan
An annual Programme of Work for the Secretariat, to facilitate implementation of the three-year rolling plan.
Four priority areas for GFAR work over the next three years are recommended: 1) inter-regional collaboration; 2) collaborative research partnerships; 3) advocacy, public awareness and strategic thinking; and 4) the development of a management information system. Private-sector engagement and the full participation of CSOs in ‘agricultural research for sustainable development’ processes were considered sufficiently important to be identified as cross-cutting issues in all GFAR activities. Two other noteworthy features of the Business Plan are that stakeholder groups will be responsible for providing leadership for the implementation of well described activities, and that implementation of the plan is further supported by a comprehensive Secretariat work programme.
We are confident that future annual reports will be more comprehensive. They will include contributions by all GFAR stakeholders and will document processes and products, outputs and demonstrated impact.
Ola
Smith
Executive Secretary, GFAR
