"To enhance biological innovative capabilities,  policies, and institutions  to support just, equitable  and sustainable social  and economic development  in developing countries”

In November 2006, the Asian Institute of Technology (AIT), with support from the Canada's International Development Research Centre (IDRC) and the Rockefeller Foundation (Southeast Asia Regional Office), organized the workshop on “Integrated Policy for Bio-innovations in Agriculture and Health in Asia” in Bangkok, Thailand. The workshop brought together researchers, NGOs, and policy-makers from countries in South, Southeast and East Asia, to critically examine existing policies on bio-innovations in the region, identify existing knowledge gaps, recommend policy-relevant focuses for research and a strategy for information sharing, learning across borders and partnering in the region. Among the chief recommendations of this workshop was the need to conduct more thorough research on policy and governance systems that stimulate, enable and/or constrain bio-innovation for poverty reduction, and to examine the social, economic and ethical implications of bio-innovation.

To address the workshop’s recommendations, AIT has launched a grants awards project entitled “Enabling Bio-Innovation for Poverty Alleviation in Asia” that would organize region-wide competition of research proposals on forward-looking policy and social-related themes around bio-innovation in Asia.

The overarching perspective that this grants awarding project adopts is that bio-innovation is largely a social process, where the pathways of technological adoption and alterations are influenced and shaped by culture and power relations between groups, individuals and institutions in different domains of the system. Technology adoption and innovation are also embedded in social cleavages based on class, ethnic and gender lines permeating these domains, thus potentially bringing benefits to only some more than others. Research is then needed to understand bio-innovation in these terms in order to explore ways and conditions that would tend to reduce poverty and social inequities.

The project coordinators intend to adopt a cross-learning and iterative approach that will enable all researchers to learn from each other across different types of bio-innovation throughout the region. As a projected outcome, it is hoped that a learning and support network of researchers on bio-innovation for poverty alleviation develops from this project. One of the main activities of the project is to organize, conduct and manage a competitive grants selection process for potential researchers on bio-innovation and its social and policy implications for poverty alleviation in the Asian region.