Patancheru, Hyderabad, India | 28 August 2026
On 28 August 2026, the Water and Land Resource Centre (WLRC) and the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT) formalized a new strategic partnership through the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) and an accompanying Memorandum of Action (MoA) at ICRISAT’s headquarters in Patancheru, Hyderabad.
The agreement establishes a framework for collaboration in integrated landscape management, watershed restoration and data-driven decision support in Ethiopia and the Greater Horn of Africa. More importantly, it moves the partnership beyond broad institutional understanding by linking the agreement to an initial programme of practical collaboration between WLRC and ICRISAT. The signing marked a fitting conclusion to an intensive knowledge-exchange and learning journey by the WLRC delegation in India.
A partnership built around complementary strengths
The collaboration brings together two institutions with complementary experience. ICRISAT brings extensive expertise in resilient farming systems, watershed management, regenerative landscapes, soil and water conservation, geospatial technologies, remote sensing, digital agriculture and the application of artificial intelligence to agricultural and natural-resource systems.
WLRC brings a long-standing evidence base on Ethiopia’s water and land resources, a network of learning landscapes-socioecological labs and long-term observatories, digital knowledge and information systems, basin-level engagement, and strong connections between research, policy and implementation. The MoU explicitly recognizes this complementarity as a foundation for the partnership. The partnership creates space for joint learning, co-creation and adaptation.
Dr. Himanshu Pathak, Director General of ICRISAT, placed the partnership within the wider challenge of managing land and water under a changing climate. He emphasized that responding to land degradation and desertification requires more than infrastructure and engineering solutions, and pointed to the similarities between India and Ethiopia as a strong basis for working together. “The signing of the MoU is not just ceremonial. Today, we start important action on the ground,” he said, noting that what makes the partnership distinctive is the decision to move directly from agreement to implementation.
Five pathways from evidence to resilient landscapes
The MoU organizes the collaboration around five interconnected areas of action, creating a pathway from understanding landscapes to managing them more sustainably.
- Strengthening landscape data and decision-support systems: The partnership will connect ICRISAT’s capabilities in geospatial analysis, remote sensing and artificial intelligence with WLRC’s information systems and long-term datasets. The intention is to strengthen the evidence base for landscape characterization, planning, monitoring and decision-making.
- Scaling water-smart landscapes: The agreement goes beyond individual structures and promotes a broader watershed approach connecting soil and water conservation, water retention, groundwater recharge, revegetation, water-budget-based cropping systems and landscape monitoring. The ambition is clear: landscapes where rainfall is better retained, erosion is reduced, groundwater recharge is improved and agricultural production becomes more resilient to rainfall variability and drought.
- Restoring land productivity: Farmer-centred approaches, including agroforestry, climate-adapted cropping systems, integrated soil fertility management and soil-health improvement, will be connected with wider landscape restoration and sustainable land-management efforts.
- Sustained landscapes: The partnership therefore includes community-based natural-resource governance and the development of digital tools and advisory products capable of transforming data into useful information for farmers, practitioners and policymakers.
- Capacity sharing and experience exchange: bringing together researchers and practitioners through training, technical exchange and South–South learning between Ethiopia and India.
Together, these areas reflect an important shift: from projects built around individual interventions toward landscapes managed as interconnected systems.
Hare Catchment: where the partnership moves from agreement to practice
Dr. Ramesh Singh, Global Research Program Director at ICRISAT, reflected on how the collaboration had grown from discussions around the Hare Catchment into a broader institutional partnership. He noted the strong alignment between ICRISAT and WLRC, particularly their shared identity as research-for-development institutions. Recalling Dr. Gete Zeleke’s words at the outset of the visit, “I came to India for a purpose”, Dr. Ramesh observed that this purpose had now translated into not only a Memorandum of Understanding, but a Memorandum of Action.
The two institutions have already agreed on an initial collaborative activity centered on one of WLRC hotspot catchments-Hare Catchment in Rift Valley Lakes Basin, Ethiopia, while also creating opportunities for reciprocal learning and capacity development in selected landscapes in India. The activity will run from September 2026 to February 2029 and will focus on landscape saturation, integrated land and water management, evidence-based decision-making and institutional capacity development.
WLRC will share its experience with ICRISAT in areas including Basin Information Systems, water-resource information management, basin-management planning, sustainable landscape-management principles, knowledge-management systems, digital information platforms, modeling, and decision-support tools.
This reciprocity gives the partnership particular significance. It is not a conventional model in which solutions developed in one setting are simply transferred to another. Instead, Indian and Ethiopian landscapes become learning spaces for one another, allowing approaches to be tested, adapted and strengthened within different ecological, institutional and development contexts.
Science that serves people and landscapes
For Dr. Gete Zeleke, Director General of WLRC, the partnership ultimately comes back to a fundamental question: what should science-research achieve?
“Doing science just for the sake of science is of no use. Science should serve the community,” he said. “We want to do research for development without compromising ecosystem health.”
His message captured a central philosophy behind WLRC’s evolving research-for-development approach. Working through living socio-ecological laboratories, he explained, the aim is to connect healthier environments and improved ecosystem services with better livelihoods and, ultimately, more resilient households and communities.
Dr. Gete also highlighted some of the practical capacities that WLRC brings into the partnership while emphasizing the considerable opportunity for mutual learning. Reflecting on what the delegation had observed in India, he particularly noted the value of approaches that improve the landscape’s capacity to retain and store water in the soil.
Partnership as part of WLRC’s institutional evolution
This vision also reflects an important moment in WLRC’s institutional evolution. As WLRC moves toward a more integrated and programmatic research-for-development model, partnerships are increasingly being approached not simply as mechanisms for project delivery, but as strategic alliances that bring together complementary knowledge, technologies, institutional capacities and networks to achieve greater impact.
The partnership with ICRISAT closely reflects this direction. It connects research with application, national experience with international expertise, landscape-level experimentation with policy engagement, and data generation with decision support. It also expands the role of collaboration from occasional institutional exchange toward co-creation, joint innovation, capacity sharing and the scaling of approaches that have demonstrated value.
In this sense, the signing is significant not only because WLRC and ICRISAT have agreed to work together. It also represents the kind of partnership through which WLRC increasingly seeks to position itself, working at the interface between research, policy and implementation, while building strategic alliances capable of translating knowledge into measurable change on the ground.
From landscapes to wider impact
The partnership extends well beyond the first activity. The MoU provides opportunities for linking the institutions’ research sites, learning watersheds and observatories; undertaking joint research and priority-setting; strengthening capacity in landscape and watershed management, digital technologies and artificial intelligence; developing interoperable data and decision-support tools; preparing joint publications and policy products; developing collaborative proposals; and expanding mutual learning through exchanges and international knowledge platforms.
The longer-term opportunity is therefore much larger than one catchment. Lessons generated through the Hare catchment can contribute to a broader process of testing, demonstrating and scaling integrated approaches in Ethiopia, while experiences from Ethiopia can in turn enrich learning in India and elsewhere.
That is where the wider promise of the partnership lies: connecting landscapes, institutions and knowledge across countries while ensuring that collaboration eventually produces something tangible for the people and ecosystems those institutions exist to serve.
The signing in Hyderabad therefore marks both an achievement and a beginning. After a week in which the WLRC delegation travelled to India to learn from ICRISAT’s experience, the two institutions ended the journey not simply with observations and lessons, but with a shared framework for what comes next.
The knowledge exchange has opened the door. The partnership now turns that learning into joint action.
To read the full story visit the link below:
http://wlrc-eth.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/Feature-Story_ICRISAT_From-Landscape-to-Livelihoods.docx