Strategic Partnership with Local Institutions

Many people living in the rural areas in the Philippines, as in other developing countries in Southeast Asia, depend on aquatic resources for their food and livelihood. For the past two decades, the Aquaculture Department of the Southeast Asian Fisheries Development Center (SEAFDEC-AQD) has been working with fishing communities and people’s organi-zations, business sector, local government units, national government agencies, non-gov-ernment organizations (NGOs) and academic and other research institutions to promote the efficient conservation, management and sustainable development of the country’s fisheries and aquatic resources so that these may continue to serve the needs of the people today and tomorrow. Using the lessons learned from those two decades of multi-sectoral and inter-discipli-nary collaborations, SEAFDEC-AQD launched in late 2006 a project called Institutional Capacity Development for Sustainable Aquaculture (ICDSA) to hasten the transfer to and adoption by coastal villagers of appropriate technologies that would enhance the produc-tivity of aquatic resources and at the same time safeguard the fragile balance of the aquatic ecology