Despite rapid progress on the reduction of poverty, particularly in China and India, the Asia Pacific region is still home to two-thirds of the developing world’s poor. Development invariably means change, and that involves compromises between traditional and contemporary ideas. Therefore, achieving positive and broad-based development results in any country involves a slow process of social change that is both multi-faceted and multi-dimensional. The world is changing rapidly with increasing trends of urbanization, aging populations, a changing international political and economic order and globalization amongst many other transformative processes.

ISDP assists partners to access knowledge, resources and experience in order to strengthen their development plans and policies so as to improve the lives of their people. As such, ISDP is engaged in research on development issues (poverty, human rights and internally displaced people), government-to-government policy dialogue, holds and organizes capacity building programs for key sectors (such as land reform, crisis prevention and recovery, resource and agricultural development) within developing countries, acts as a hub for South-South and North-South dialogue on development issues and enables inter-cultural exchanges to promote change.