APAARI, in collaboration with the Asia-Pacific Islands Rural Advisory Services Network (APIRAS) and FAO/Tropical Agriculture Platform (TAP), is organizing a regional webinar on “Women in research and extension: Advancing gender equality in innovation” in mid February 2022. The participants will include both women and men researchers, scientists, and research and extension managers and leaders, working within national agricultural research and extension systems (NARES) in APAARI and APIRAS member institutions.

The webinar aims to inspire and mobilize change to help advance women’s role as innovators in their respective areas of research and extension, to ensure their meaningful and inclusive contribution to the transformation of agri-food systems in the Asia-Pacific region.

In this respect, APAARI and APIRAS are looking for outstanding women in research and extension to listen to their inspirational stories as innovators, how they were empowered to make a difference during their careers, and the challenges they faced along the way as women. In addition to key challenges, the webinar will also explore key opportunities that may empower and strengthen women’s contribution to agricultural innovation through research and extension.

We would like to invite you to identify such outstanding women from your organizations, who stand out in the area of innovation, and have made a difference either in:

• innovative agricultural research that led to scaling and contributed to a positive impact on small farmers or/and rural areas
• working in extension with farmers and local partners in innovative ways that helped build their capacities for innovation in agriculture
• promoting institutional change in own research/extension organizations through introducing innovative processes that led to their institutionalization and/or policy change

We believe that there are many such women working in research and extension in Asia-Pacific that need to be heard to inspire others, talk about their challenges, and how they overcame them. Most importantly, we would like to invite them to share how they got empowered along the way to ensure their meaningful contribution to the strengthening of agricultural innovation systems in their countries.

Please send us maximum one nomination on the form by 31 January 2022.

We will select maximum five nominated women for our panel discussion during the webinar ensuring the regional balance across Asia-Pacific.