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Dr Vera Horigue shares how she values the global collaboration and local partnerships that CCRES has built.

Building friendships and business


Building friendships, collaborating and helping to support businesses be part of the solution, are some of the memorable moments shared by two CCRES researchers.

Dr Vera Horigue, CCRES researcher from the Marine Science Institute at the University of the Philippines Diliman, has led the development of Fish SPACE. For her, building global collaborations and working with local partners has both inspired her and extended the value of the CCRES project:

What’s very memorable for me is the people who I have met. New colleagues from all over – the Philippines, Australia and Indonesia. I’ve met new people and I’ve made new friends and potential collaborators.

And, of course, there are our local partners and stakeholders who we work with. It’s nice for me because I get to engage with them a bit more and help them more. That also helps me because it inspires me.

In Australia, CCRES Research Leader Prof Damian Hine at The University of Queensland is excited about the prospect of business to help solve coastal problems:

The most exciting thing for me is to see our tools being used and to see the difference that they make to the participants in our workshops. Participants come from villages and barangays and have never done any business training at all. After three days in our workshops we get almost all of them fully understanding the essential features of running a business.

There is a lot of dependence on government and NGOs. What we need to do is develop enterprise-led solutions, that is, people who start their own business through their own innovations. The more of those that we have, and the more successful they are, then I think a lot more solutions can be achieved because we can’t just depend on government and NGOs.

See more impact stories on CCRES’s YouTube channel.