The intention of ASTI’s policy outreach initiative is to develop communications strategies that disseminate ASTI’s data and findings in ways that are relevant, meaningful, and accessible to its target audience. This requires a long-term commitment to building trusted relationships with key agencies and actors at national and regional levels.
General objectives include enhancing stakeholders’ understanding of the importance of agricultural research investment and raising their awareness of the critical human resource capacity, financial, and policy issues surrounding national agricultural research systems. The full range of approaches to outreach, communications, and partnerships will include
- identifying channels for gathering information on stakeholders’ needs and the delivery of targeted messages by leveraging existing relationships and forums to build a broader platform around common goals, issues, and challenges related to agricultural research for development;
- creating a dynamic feedback loop of needs and demands on the one hand, and data and analyses on the other, which will require mapping key policy- and decisionmaking stakeholders, existing and potential users of ASTI data, and the pathways through which policy influence will occur; and
- developing a more diverse set of demand-driven products and events, and ensuring easy their accessibility through such strategies as embedding ASTI resources within the websites of its users and within official national systems of data provision.