GFAR Regional interactions are meant to reengage with Members and to hear from them to better understand their goals/needs and support them accordingly. The interactions also aim at spurring discussion and increasing engagement between Members to establish common ground and facilitate/foster collaboration. They represented a great opportunity for Members to share their points of view, their thoughts and ideas but also address potential challenges they may face in their work, identify synergies among themselves, understand how they are intertwined with each other and GFAR, and contribute to defining GFAR’s role to better support them overall. This is key when promoting and contributing to Collective Actions and other initiatives/projects on which GFAR is leading on. 

A total of six Regional Interactions were held virtually between January and September 2022 for the Asia-Pacific region (28 January); Sub-Saharan Africa (28 April); Near East and North Africa (26 May); Latin America and the Caribbean (30 June); Central Asia and the Caucasus and Europe (30 September). The total number of participants was 107. Each Regional Interaction was recorded and facilitated by GFAR moderator Nathalie Dore. Participants’ feedback, ideas and comments were gathered through lively discussions as well as by several polls that were launched during the Interaction that asked thought provoking questions aimed at spurring engagement and participation as well as measuring satisfaction. The results of each Regional Interaction were shared with all participants through the minutes. Attendees were then asked to review, edit, add comments as they deemed fit and give their final approval.   

In this document one can find the main takeaways of all the Regional Interactions grouped by topic – it is meant to extrapolate key information, summarizing it and presenting it in a well-structured and clear way. For this reason, the paper follows a schematic, straightforward and simple format by using bullet points that encapsulate what was discussed during the Regional Interactions and mentions, in some cases, through quotations, participants’ exact words/comments.