Widely harnessing the potential of ASSET entails a broad-based capacity development and outreach processes toward raising awareness and actions to mobilize diverse stakeholder groups. These groups include farming communities, service and input suppliers and extension agents, as well as consumers and citizens to help shift agricultural and food practices, and demand for changes. They also include researchers, professors and students to revisit agricultural and food research agendas and university curricula. Policy makers are an important group to feed ASSET results into policy development. Finally, development practitioners need to adapt their support to innovation processes. Under this general ambition and with a gender and youth-sensitive approach, the project will implement specific activities, aligned with ALiSEA action plans and project needs, led by APAARI and ITC.

Working closely with all ASSET partners, APAARI’s key role in the project will be the coordination of the design and implementation of the ASSET communication and outreach strategy. This will include the development of various communication tools and processes to ensure wide-scale dissemination to promote exploitation of agroecological practices in Southeast Asia and beyond. With its regional focus, APAARI will facilitate participation of APAARI members in targeted knowledge-sharing and capacity development programmes of ASSET, and also participation of ASSET’s stakeholders in key APAARI-supported regional events of importance to the project.  It will also deliver a number of capacity development focused on development of functional capacities of ASSET partners and ALiSEA members, including face-to-face training and webinars. APAARI is also taking lead in the ASSET project website management and producing ASSET newsletter. Lastly, APAARI will participate in broad-based outreach processes focusing on raising awareness of policy makers to feed into policy development. It is envisioned that the partnership with regional partners, such as FAO and UNESCAP, will strengthen in this respect.