The members of the External Review Panel wish to express their sincere appreciation to the Board, management and staff of WARDA for their full, frank and open cooperation throughout the Review. The arrangements made for our visits to the Headquarters, the Sahel Programme in Senegal, the Mangrove Programme in Sierra Leone, and the Lowland Breeding Programme in Nigeria were excellent, and so were the visits to national programmes in Côte D'Ivoire, Sierra Leone, Burkina Faso and Nigeria. We appreciate the assistance received from WARDA's cooperators in the region, who met with us and shared their views. We were treated as friends everywhere we went.
Dr. Eugene Terry, Director General, and Dr. Peter Matlon, Director of Research, deserve our special thanks for ensuring that our work could be done under optimal conditions at all times. Thanks are also due to Dr. Kouamé Miezan and Dr. Martin Agyen-Sampong and their teams for their assistance and hospitality during visits to the Irrigated Sahel and Mangrove Swamp Programmes. We express our grateful thanks to Mr. Maxwell Adjei-Fah who coordinated the logistical arrangements for the Panel, and Mr. Boniface Talata Ouedraogo who, along with Maxwell, accompanied the Panel on portions of their country visits.
We gratefully acknowledge the help received from several of the staff of the TAC and CGIAR Secretariats throughout the Review. We are particularly grateful to Dr. Selcuk Ozgediz and Ms. Elizabeth Field at the CGIAR Secretariat for guidance on management aspects; to Ms. Madeleine Shearer at the TAC Secretariat for help in the compilation and analysis of the information from the NARS survey on WARDA's past and future programmes; and to Ms. Marioara Lantini, Ms. Irmi Braun-Castaldi and Ms. Ann Drummond at the TAC Secretariat for their valuable assistance and logistical support during the course of the Review.
We are grateful to Ms. Dominique Veck-Rosignoli, of the TAC Secretariat, Ms. Olga Gueyes and Ms. Blanche Kiniffo for the excellent work they did in the preparation of this report. They were ably assisted by Mr. Issouf Ouattara, Mr. Kofi Asante Emmanuel, and Mr. Kouamé Kouadio dit Koffi. We thank Dr. Anthony Youdeowei, Director of Training and Communications, for making the arrangements for the printing of the report, and Dr. Edgar Richardson for ensuring that our equipment functioned satisfactorily right up to the end.
