Page 5 - Annual Repost 2021

A new service, which will become increasingly strategic in
the years to come, has been introduced in 2021, IIAS
afliated research centres. We have established the rst
such centre in partnership with the National
Interdisciplinary Institute on Aging at Southwest Jiaotong
University in Chengdu, China on “Governance for
sustainable aging .” We are already working on a second
centre, which we will announce soon. Our plan is to
transform some of our working groups in the different
entities into research centres with their own governance,
resources , and consistent scientic production. This will
create a steady ow of knowledge into IIAS dissemination
channels.
Overall, the perspectives for 2022 are very promising. We
already have partners for the three main conferences of
IIAS (Rome), IASIA (Rabat) and EGPA (Lisbon). All of our
dialogues will restart: TED, TAD and EUROMENA. The IIAS
Academy will be offered anew, and the IASIA e-learning
platform will hopefully see the day of light this year. We are
aiming for a similar performance as in 2019 when we
posted a record nancial result and a full roster of
programmes, activities, and services.
In terms of support activities, we have redesigned our visual
identity and improved our communication. We are in the
process of re-evaluating some of our long-standing service
contracts such as for accounting and IT in an effort to
further rationalise our overhead.
Our personnel count remains steady with ve full-time staff
and one part-time, but we have utilised internship
resources heavily. We enrolled ve interns during the year
who have contributed signicantly to our enterprise. We
will continue with this strategy as it allows us to hire the
required resources just in time and for specic duties for
which they are fully qualied. Moreover, as our budgetary
situation does not allow us to hire full-time staff in Brussels,
especially for administrative support, we will continue to
rely on temporary interns to full our needs for the year to
come. This also allows us to involve people from our global
network. This has become easier to do as telework is
gradually becoming the norm.
IIAS, like most other organisations, has adapted well to the
new normal. We are now able to operate remotely.
Though we continue to go to the ofce whenever it is
allowed, we had no problem adjusting to the requirement
of telework mandated by the Belgian government. We are
currently in the process of reviewing our work regulations to
make telework an integral part to our modus-operandi.
On the nancial side and as the report shows, we have
been able to post positive results for the last four years. The
Covid-19 crisis has impacted us by bringing down our
margins to the minimum, but we have proven resilient
enough to undergo the most severe of conditions yet keep
aoat.
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