Work on Deliverables has started - March 5 & 8

Following the meeting on Thursday, more clarity has come to the deliverables of our project. One of them being an executive overview of the presentation, the other being a french version of it to possibly serve African countries. Friday morning, Michel and I drafted a layout for an Exec overview .. of course increasing the number of slides at first. This to great joy of Sundara, who already has guessed we would not be able to condense .... wait and see. Unfortunate to say, not much capacity building goes into rebuilding slides for a person. But hey, on the other if it helps to get on track. Some other soft skill capacity building can be done as well as we have identified some soft skill areas that could be improved. Friday afternoon we worked with Sundara to review our progress. And we had to stop in due time to pack bags to leave for a weekend trip to Mumbai -more about that in another blog-.

Monday we were off to ICRISAT (International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics). ICRISAT a non profit organisation that does innovative agricultural research and capacity building for sustainable development with a wide array of partners across the globe. Their mission is to help empower poor people to overcome hunger, poverty and a degraded environment in dry tropics through better agriculture. (http://www.icrisat.org/).
Very much in line with what Janani Foods is aiming for.


The ICRISAT meeting went very well. Both IBM Hyderabad and Janani were present to outline their respective objectives for Rural India. Basically it comes down to the message that ICRISAT may have a "slot" for some funding. Of course, some more conversations are needed to come to a final statement, but lobbying now has started.

It was very good and meaningful to have experienced both the Conference last Thursday and this ICRISAT meeting, especially to identify the areas where support is needed. For example, many organisations have a clear and short slogan on their business cards, in their presentations and brochures, on their posters ... you name it and it has a slogan. This is one of the things Janani has not at present, so we suggested to start including this.

After ICRISAT, where we had a great lunch, we moved on to IIIT to give them feedback on these last two appointments and progress. A constructive discussion took place on the African "lead", and it was decided Michel still should translate some core materials into French just to see if maybe some consulting and project management services could be sold to these 20 odd countries ... an income generator though not necessarily the one Janani would like to see.

On our way home, we got to try the coconut on the street ... this after the bananas in Mumbai. Yes, we dare to try more things as no one as of yet has been suffering from any stomach issues. And that while we are here for 2 weeks already. So we try more local restaurants, and now slowly move on to safe street food :-)