Alliance for African Partnership (AAP) wishes our members, partners, and colleagues a very happy New Year! As we welcome the new year, we also want to reflect on accomplishments and achievements over the last year. Here are some of our 2021 highlights:

• We celebrated the fifth anniversary of our founding
• We welcomed the Regional Network for Agricultural Policy Research Institutes (ReNAPRI) as our 12th member of the AAP consortium
• We held our highly competitive Partnerships for Innovative Research in Africa (PIRA) competition and awarded 11 grants focused on youth transformation, Africa-Asia transregional partnerships, early career researchers, and the global African diaspora
• We welcomed our second cohort of 10 African Futures scholars from nine different countries and celebrated the successes of our first cohort including major publications, presenting their research findings to diverse sets of stakeholders, and awarding of external research funding
• We launched our African Youth Transformation Platform (AYTP)
• AAP member ReNAPRI was selected together with AAP management and the International Fertilizer Development Center (IFDC) to develop a concept note and governance structure to support plans for the Africa Fertilizer and Soil Health Summit. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and USAID have committed to support this effort which falls under AAP's soil health and agricultural resilience platform
• We launched an update to our AAP Bridge digital platform to allow all stakeholders to join
• Three AAP members--MSU College of Education, Egerton University, and USIU--partnered with the National Cooperative Business Association Cooperative League of the United States of America (NCBA CLUSA) and the National Youth Bunge were awarded the USAID-funded $15 million Kenya Empowered Youth project. This project aligns directly with AAP's African Youth Transformation platform

Looking forward to 2022, we are excited to welcome the third cohort of the African Futures scholars as we continue to support our second cohort, who are currently halfway through the program. We are also delighted to continue our AAP Public Dialogues Series with new conversations on climate change, global health, and arts and culture, kicking off in February. In addition, we will continue to support our PIRA grantees to ensure the cultivation of multidirectional and transregional research partnerships. We also plan on updating AAP Bridge to include features like events, suggestions, and file sharing. AAP will continue and expand discussions begun last year with the Southern African Development Community (SADC) about collaboration on key priorities in addressing the regional integration agenda through higher learning institutions. Finally, we are thrilled to launch the Diverse Black Africa program, a pilot program to foster new collaborations and strengthen existing ties between Black African Diaspora faculty and academic staff at Michigan State University with Black colleagues based at African universities in the AAP consortium.

With the new year underway, we are eager to build on our past successes and continue to co-create solutions to global challenges with our consortium members and stakeholders.