Welcome to BOAT which was founded 21 years ago by a group of Devon farmers who wanted to help people from developing countries to produce more food and improve their livelihoods. They planned to do that providing training to people in institutions that trained others such as agricultural colleges or institutes. In this way they could reach a larger audience and effectively train the trainers. Since it began it has provided training to nearly 100 trainers from a range of countries particularly in east Africa. Some of this training has been vocational in nature in disciplines such as farm machinery and dairy goat husbandry. More recently BOAT has offered residential training courses at Bicton College in Devon, UK, to help senior people to manage their organisations and institutes more effectively and efficiently. These courses have been called Institutional Management and Business Planning and are now accredited by the University of Plymouth. We have just welcomed six participants to our latest course and we look forward to working with them and seeing how they perform. BOAT has also run a two-week residential Workshop in the Livestock Training Institute in Tengeru near Arusha in Northern Tanzania. Two of our consultants will visit the Natural Resources College in Malawi this summer to run a one-week workshop on ‘Sustainable Agricultural Management’. This is part of our longer term plan to reach a wider audience by holding workshops in country. We cannot do our work without the hard work of our fundraisers and Friends of BOAT. I thank them for their tremendous efforts and if anyone reading this would like to contribute, please click here. Fred Harper, Chairman BOAT, April 2012