Lessons from Building the Ecosystem
Since CAN APAC launched in 2024, its experience has reinforced that ecosystem building rarely follows a linear path. Programs evolve, partners bring new possibilities, implementation generates learning, and opportunities emerge that could not have been anticipated at the outset. Looking across this experience, four lessons stand out.
1. Build a direction, not a fixed blueprint
CAN APAC began with a small group of core partners and an initial emphasis on purpose-driven data talent. The ecosystem that exists today took shape as partners brought their own expertise, aspirations, networks, and opportunities to the work. Making room for those contributions has required flexibility and trust: a clear enough direction to recognize which opportunities advance the larger purpose, combined with the agility to act on them.
The hackathons illustrate this evolution. The first iteration in 2025 established a model that informed the 2026 edition, while new partners, organizational challenge statements, structured learning, and post-program pathways extended it further. The objective was to carry forward what worked while adapting the model to new opportunities and needs.
Adaptation can also mean changing course as implementation generates new information. In SIDSA, iDE’s project evolved when the application around which it had initially been designed became unavailable, while RSPO’s eventual solution became a spreadsheet-based tool that staff could maintain without specialist software.
These experiences reflect the realities of working with institutions. Responsiveness can mean expanding a program, changing its scope, simplifying an intervention, or sequencing support differently.
For ecosystem builders, strategy can therefore provide direction without prescribing every step. The ecosystem—and the realities encountered within it—can help determine what comes next.
2. The connective work is the hard work
Courses, hackathons, tools, fellowships, and convenings are the visible parts of an ecosystem. Much of the work that turns them into something larger than a collection of projects happens between them.
For CAN APAC, this has meant harmonizing different institutional priorities, connecting initiatives to a larger mission, navigating regional and sectoral diversity, and recognizing when a relationship or resource developed through one activity could strengthen another. It has also meant maintaining a consistent presence across partner networks, regional conversations, and institutional spaces so that relationships can deepen and new opportunities can emerge over time. Sometimes this means creating new connections; at other times, it means closing loops between existing relationships or bringing them into new cross-sector settings.
SIDSA demonstrated the same principle at the project level. University–organization collaborations depended not only on analytical work but also on coordination, communication, translation, and repeated negotiation between different institutional realities.
This connective work requires deliberate investment of time and resources. It is part of the intervention itself: the connective tissue that allows programs, partners, and resources to reinforce one another.
3. Invest in partnerships that expand the possibilities
The partnerships that have created the greatest value for CAN APAC have often extended beyond the activity around which they began. Mission-aligned partners bring expertise, networks, perspectives, and opportunities that can help shape what becomes possible next.
This invites a question beyond what can we accomplish through this project? There is also value in asking: what else might we be able to build together?
Dr. Kamolpun Punpuing’s engagement—from the Government of Thailand partnership to mentoring hackathon teams and contributing to a regional CANversation—is one example. APRU’s role has similarly extended across hackathons, a case competition, SIDSA, course development, and convening. Relationships formed or strengthened through one activity can therefore create value elsewhere in the network.
Every partner’s appetite, bandwidth, and opportunity for continued engagement will differ. Ecosystem building therefore requires understanding what form of partnership creates mutual value—whether a focused collaboration around one initiative or a relationship that evolves across multiple parts of the network.
Over time, this allows relationship-building effort to follow the possibilities that partners themselves help reveal.
4. Scale what works—but don’t define scale too narrowly
Scale can take different forms. It may mean reaching more people or replicating a model, but it can also mean deeper implementation, institutional adoption, or enabling another institution to localize, maintain, and extend an existing resource.
The APAC experience already illustrates these different pathways. An open course can reach individual learners and then become part of a government-supported certificate program. Learning resources can be translated and adapted through a national institution. A hackathon model can be repeated while evolving its problem statements, learning journey, and partnerships. A technical output can be simplified so that organizational staff can maintain it themselves.
In a region as diverse as APAC, scale and adaptation therefore go together. Standardization can create common foundations, while adaptation allows models and resources to respond to different institutional, linguistic, sectoral, and country contexts. The practical question is which elements should remain common and which should change.
Durability is another dimension of scale. Capacity building creates lasting value when skills remain with practitioners, practices become embedded within organizations, resources can be reused, institutions take ownership, and relationships continue to generate opportunities.
As CAN APAC’s network grows, this creates an expanding set of possibilities for connecting an organization’s real problem with expertise, talent, partners, or resources that already exist elsewhere in the ecosystem.
The useful question is therefore not only how do we make this bigger? It is also: what form of scale creates the most value here—and what can continue and travel further over time?
Looking Ahead
The experience so far suggests that CAN APAC’s next phase can build on a portfolio of approaches rather than a single program model. APAC’s diversity—and the pace of change around data, AI, and financial health—makes the ability to adapt these approaches to different contexts particularly valuable.
The priority is to remain close to the ecosystem: to show up, listen, sustain relationships, learn from what has already been built, and mobilize when needs, opportunities, partners, and resources align.
There is now a growing foundation on which to build. Models that work can be adapted. Resources can be localized and reused. Partners can contribute across initiatives. Connections created in one part of the network can open opportunities in another. As a globally connected CAN hub, APAC can continue to draw on approaches and resources developed elsewhere while contributing its own experience back to the wider network.
The next phase is therefore about making what has already been built more connected, reusable, locally adaptable, and responsive to what the ecosystem needs next.
It is also about strengthening the evidence connecting these efforts. The Hub is beginning to see changes in participant pathways, organizational practice, institutional relationships, and the movement of knowledge and resources across the network. Over time, an important question will be how these forms of capacity translate into more effective and responsible uses of data and AI—and, ultimately, into better financial-health outcomes for the people, communities, entrepreneurs, and MSMEs these institutions serve.
That is the longer arc of the work: an ecosystem increasingly able to put data and AI to purposeful use.
