Under its Asia-Pacific Agricultural Research Information System (APARIS) initiative, APAARI proposed to GFAR to host the third inter-regional workshop on Information & Communication Management for Agricultural Research for Development (ICM4ARD) in the Asia-Pacific Region. The first such inter-regional workshop in 2004 at FAO-Rome identified the framework for ICM4ARD. The second workshop in 2005 at Cairo, Egypt came up with four themes or action areas under which the activities of ICM4ARD should be carried out, namely, advocacy, capacity building, content management (integration of information resources/systems) and governance