| On behalf of the new Board elected at the Annual General Meeting (AGM) on November 24, 2009, I would like to welcome you to the CAIDC website. The minutes of the AGM and the list of Board members are now posted in the Members section of the website. As we enter 2010, CAIDC has over 200 individual and corporate members - reaching over 600 development professionals - making ours the largest Canadian professional association whose members are linked by a commitment to international development. For CAIDC, 2009 was another very busy and productive year; we expect that 2010 will be at least as busy and at least as productive. The annual conference that took place on November 23 and 24 was a smashing success, the culmination of a lot of work by the Conference Planning Committee, our wonderful team of volunteers and our conference organizer Steven Synyshyn. Over the period of 2 days, we welcomed over 160 registrants, speakers and guests. The program was a combination of professional development on a number of development themes, several ‘how-to’ sessions and several informative plenaries including presentations by the Office of the Auditor General and by Ian Smillie, our keynote speaker. One of the sessions was a consultation we co-hosted with DFAIT and CIDA on the Government’s “engagement strategy” announced as part of the aid untying policy. The report on the annual conference will be posted on the website in early 2010. During the year, we continued to pursue our interest in the question of country procurement systems in recognition of the reality that as donors, including CIDA, channel increasing proportions of their resources to multi-donor arrangements, the transparency of procurement processes and the capacity, prudence and probity of the country executing agencies will be increasingly important. We continued to participate actively as the only Canadian group in the International Technical Advisory Group (ITAG), which is overseeing the World Bank's pilot program on the use of country systems. Finally, we have continued to interact with CIDA on behalf of our members, on a range of 'housekeeping' and policy issues. Thanks to the success of our conference and of our on-going communications work, CAIDC continues to gain increased visibility and credibility within the Agency. Ensuring that our website is up to date and comprehensive is a high priority for the Board. Among others, we plan to use it more extensively to report on the work of our various committees and to involve non-Board members more fully in the work of the association. We encourage members and friends to use it and to report on improvements that they would like to see. Richard Beattie President 2009/2010 | 
