A look back on the policy impacts we've made with our research, over 15 years of work in the Asia Pacific 
A look back on the policy impacts we've made with our research, over 15 years of work in the Asia Pacific
LIRNEasia is the administrative partner of CPRsouth, an entity that seeks to build ICT policy intellectuals in the South. As with most of the administrative activities we undertake, we treat CPRsouth as a research project too. The heavy lifting is done by LIRNEasia’s Human Capital Research Program headed by Sujata Gamage. The slideset that was prepared based on her research and presented to the Board at its meeting on September 7, 2012 showed that for an inter-disciplinary group, CPRsouth was making rapid progress in the transition to a real network. One of the most important slides showed that the average ages of paper-presenters and young scholars were 34 years and 29 years respectively.
A clinic on Communication for Policy Impact was conducted by Dr. Rohan Samarajiva, Helani Galpaya and Nilusha Kapugama of LIRNEasia at the recently concluded IDRC PAN-All conference in Penang, Malaysia. The necessity of communicating or disseminating good research results to stakeholders such as the policymakers, private sector and media was one of the underlying themes of the conference. The clinic focused on giving participants the necessary tools to formulate a communications strategy for a given project. Some of the key aspects identified were: identification of relevant audience/s and appropriate method/s of communication, importance of story telling timing of the release of results recognition of policy windows The importance of developing a communications strategy at the proposal stage of the project was highlighted.