Dear Executive Board Directors,

I have been asked to provide some background documentation for the Informal Seminar, next Tuesday, 20 April.  There is now a considerable amount of literature on the CGIAR Reform Process, all of which can be found on CGIAR website; but in order to facilitate your rapid briefing for this topic I attach four short documents (around two pages each) which give digests of the key stages.  These are as follows:

•   "Transformation of the CGIAR Brief No. 6", dated December 2008, which summarises the integrated reform proposal of the CGIAR which I presented to the Annual General Meeting in Mozambique in December 2008, and which was adopted by the CGIAR Membership at that time.

•  The Design Document was put in place by the Transition Management Team, which presented to the last Executive Committee of the CGIAR, here at IFAD in November 2009.  A brief summary of that is given in the second attachment, "Members Update on CGIAR Reform".

• The CGIAR Business Meeting in Washington in December 2009 endorsed the reforms presented then by the Transition Management Team and this is summarized in the first two pages of the third attachment: "Embracing Change in the CGIAR", December 14, 2009.

• That Reform included a Biennial Conference on Agricultural Research for Development, the first of which was held in Montpellier, in the period 28-31 March 2010.  A brief two page summary of that meeting is given in the "Embracing Change Update", dated April 8, 2010.

Kind regards,
Rodney Cooke
Director
Operational Policy and Technical Advisory Division
Programme Management Department