The Asia Regional Livelihoods workshop brought together participants from a wide range of disciplines working in the region, in order to facilitate a balanced and holistic understanding of the livelihoods realities of the Asian poor. The diversity of their development backgrounds gave participants the chance to share experiences of adopting the SL approach in Asia and to consolidate their learning on cross-cutting livelihoods issues.

One of the workshop's key successes was to generate a holistic understanding of livelihoods realities for the Asian poor. A major theme that emerged was how the livelihoods landscape was expanding to include activities that spanned the rural/urban divide. Alongside this theme, participants engaged in discussions on how the institutional frameworks that impact on people's livelihoods are also shifting and becoming more complex.

The workshop was seen to generate a common understanding of livelihoods issues most critical to the poor, enabling participants to better respond to the new agenda emerging in the region.

The workshop's plenary and small group discussions were centered around five cross-cutting themes, and the key points to emerge from several of these discussions are summarised below. Papers
and presentations given at the worskshop are available to download, as well as a full report on the workshop's proceedings.

Workshop materials are either presentations (indicated as PDF files) or papers given at the workshop (indicated as RTF files), and are grouped under the five themes of the workshop.

Please note that the final titles have changed since the publication of the Workshop report and so may appear here differently.