Dear Friends, Comrades and Co-travelers,



We appreciate you all for your efforts in making APACHA a success. We have successfully completed the year 2008 and we have more challenges ahead for the year 2009. As we know, APACHA is growing as one of the leading advocacy agencies and it is the only multi-sectoral regional network of Asia. Over the period, we have raised people’s expectations and we feel we have greater responsibilities to address them.

Building ground is the most legitimate strength of any network. Therefore, our focus needs to be grounded deeper and we should remain well in touch with the communities. In this sense, we feel proud that we are one of the networks with this strength in the region. However, we need to accept that this is not just enough.

No network in the world has emerged in a day or two and it demands commitments, passion, collective dreams and a political will to make change happen. It also demands some organic process as well. In this sense, all our initiatives are moving towards the right direction. However, we always need to reflect on our own actions and then take further strategies learning from our success and failures.

For some time, we were focused to build our constituencies at the ground, which for us is the most legitimate ground. Then, we focused to project ourselves regionally and now we are at a balanced state in alliance building process. We strongly believe that we have gained the visibility at the country, regional and international levels. We are developing ourselves as the "Watch Dog" in the region.

Our country chapters, besides their regular activities and campaigns, are preparing for their next phase journey. Country chapters such as Cambodia are leading many innovative researches, Pakistan is growing as one of the largest networks in Pakistan, Bangladesh is coming up as watch dog along with its policy dialogues, press conference and reality check reports, Vietnam is preparing to develop its well organized systems, India is preparing for national consultation for wider coverage, Nepal is restructuring its systems to cope up with new challenges for the next phase journey; and Thailand, Sri Lanka and Indonesia are beginning their dialogues with other stakeholders to ground their initiatives. We are proud of Afghanistan process which is successfully moving ahead.

In the mean time, we are in a process of expanding our constituencies in other countries as well. We must feel great that all our country chapters are also engaged in various on-going broader social movements and campaigns to ensure rights, justice and dignity of people.

We are also happy to share with you all that some new national, regional and global organizations and institutions have been expressing their interest to work together with us. AHF, one of the largest global community- based advocacy agencies on treatment, care and support is in process to join hands with us. Similarly, we have been in progressive dialogues with the Oxfam International, Save the Children, UN agencies, Amnesty International, UNICEF and other credible institutions. However, we are cautious in our partnership. We already have good and credible global and regional institutions such as Actionaid International, CARE International, Concern World Wide, Lutheran World Federation etc. with us as our core team, which is a big moral strength for us.

Let’s feel happy that together we have been able to establish the mission and now the challenge is to sustain them and take it forward with combined actions in the region. We have been able to show that things can be changed even within limited resources and yes the success of well-grounded, multi-sectoral approach is the reality now and we are coming up with the tangible evidence from the ground.

We thank all the partners, well-wishers and other contributors for making this happen.

In solidarity,
On behalf of APACHA Team,

Prabodh Devkota
Asia Coordinator
www.apachanet.org