End of Year Message

To: The ACCESS Community
From: Jimmy Adegoke, ACCESS Director & the ACCESS Management Team
Date: December 18, 2011

Once again, we are rapidly approaching the end of another calendar year. It's amazing how time flies and one cannot but be grateful for the gift of life, good health, family and friends. I am sure you will agree with me that this has been a really busy, fascinating and exciting year for the ACCESS Center of Excellence (CoE). We have seen ACCESS expand and grow in several ways this year, and while we have assembled an excellent and enthusiastic team to help us, ACCESS is no more than the partnerships that we have been forging and firming up this year, and so the credit must go to all of you!

Permit me to mention some of the highlights of our year. Following a long process that started with various partners submitting concept notes early this year and the consolidation of those concept notes into seven thematic areas of focus, we developed a prospectus for the CoE which then formed the basis of extensive engagement and negotiation with our DST and NRF principals. The success of these efforts can be summed up in the generous investment that we secured from DST this financial year, our designation by DST as the key vehicle for engagement with bilateral/multi-lateral partners on Global Change opportunities and the exciting response to our student recruitment drive that saw over 300 hundred students applying from across the country to become Global Change scholars through affiliation with the ACCESS thematic programs.

We have been on a long journey this year, lining up our partners and plans. We are confident that this effort is indeed leading to the start of a new scale and scope of work in Global Change which is set to grow into something continentally and globally significant. We acknowledge right from the start of this that there are very many people, from students, managers, HR people, lawyers, contract administrators, and senior officials on many institutions and agencies, as well as (of course) the leading scientists in our community, who have played a key role in getting us this far. Your hard word and dedication to the ACCESS vision has given us a good story to tell and it is a story that we have had the privilege to present to Parliament and directly to Minister Pandor at the extremely successful ACCESS COP17 side event in Durban. In addition, our student community is growing firmly and rapidly, Our Habitable planet Workshops continue to draw large numbers of students (350 Facebook members now!) and I am eager to see several of them taken up across our partner universities and working with our partner agencies to begin their journey of becoming the next generation of Global Change scientists and researchers. Also, we have made significant progress developing several new relationships with local and international partners that will open up new research and student training funding opportunities for ACCESS partners in the coming year.

All in all, the future for ACCESS looking really bright and I and the team, are genuinely grateful for your work, patience and understanding of the complex and challenging task we have undertaken. I ask that over the festive season you ponder the vision we are perusing and hope that you will return just as committed to this as you have all demonstrated this year.

So, on behalf of the ACCESS management team, I hereby extend season well wishes to you all at this very "special time", in this very "special place" and as a pictorial record of the year, invite you to download and watch the slideshow we put together for the festive season. Please fetch the zip file from ftp://ftp.csir.co.za/NRE/Access/ACCESSslides/ and enjoy!

Jimmy Adegoke, PhD
ACCESS Director & Executive Director
CSIR Natural Resources & Environment