CABANA's kick-off meeting was hosted by Benilton Carvalho in Campinas, Brazil. All our partner institututions participated in two days of discussions, presentations and interactive activities. The goals of the meeting were to... (1) provide an opportunity for the members of the CABANA consortium to get to know each other – vital to the success of the project; (2) learn about each other’s scientific interests, challenges and successes related to bioinformatics capacity building; (3) agree on how we will capture data on our current capacity so that we can monitor our achievements throughout the project; and (4) define a selection process for our activities, to ensure that we have broad scientific, demographic and geographical reach. Some of the outcomes of our discussions will be summarised in our upcoming webinar. Thank you to all our participants for a great start to the project, and especially to Benilton for being a wonderful host.