 And just to give a little bit quick background on the devaluation and learning initiative, as I mentioned before, the biophonic investment fund administrative unit as part of the learning and evaluation initiative, the focus of this specific devaluation and learning initiative is on how to finance for-to-living enterprises, with the aim to help improve the viability and scale of investment with the single force-releasing end crisis by harvesting investment from different types of financing models that SIP has been used under SIP, as well as some of the non-SIP investments and applying some of the learning to ongoing and extended force investment under SIP. So within that, the force-releasing end crisis is broadly defined. It can range from large-scale industrial plantations to family-owned small micro-businesses, income-generating activities, and all the speakers later would speak to this, because it's really related. The reason why we define it so broadly is really related to the context of investment in force sector. And the early learning that comes this year with everyone just after me is really generated to some of the early work that the devaluation and learning team has undertaken that includes while we're in the focus of discussion, steps to research, and at the time also visiting the Kailana and a lot of the states and countries. Although because of the risk of limitation, we were only able to conduct interviews in the learning team, in the sector of the function. So that's the brief background before this initiative and without further delay, I'll hand over to my colleague Tom to give us the first presentation. Thank you very much, Xiaoking. So just to introduce myself, my name's Tom Blomley. I'm working on the learning initiative, principally involved in work around evaluation. And as Xiaoking has said, I actually have a chance to visit both Ghana and Lao PDR to review FIC activities going on there and have a chance to talk to different stakeholders both within and outside FIC programs to try and get a sense of the financing arrangements and early results sort of beginning to flow from those two countries. But as mentioned, there's also been a number of test studies and other sources of information, interviews and so on. So what I'll try to do very briefly is really summarize some of the very, very broad key areas that are coming out from this. They're very early, they're tentative findings, but we're putting them out there really to try and generate some discussion and get your interest. So really the first slide, what I've tried to do is to categorize in a way the principal financing modalities that the FIC has been using across this portfolio. And these are not in any way, you know, complete lists, there are other modalities and so on. But first of all, probably one of the biggest categories of investments are what we're calling enabling investments. These primarily flow through public sector projects to government, through grant arrangements, and they provide support to a whole range of policy processes, capacity processes, financial de-risking as well to some private sector capacity support. So it's those sort of trying to reduce barriers to investment really around a whole range of issues. We've seen in Ghana, for example, the FIC program working a lot on our tree and land tenure, which are significant constraints to investment, and within Laos there's support to timber foundation companies around capacity building, trying to help them engage more with communities. The second model there is also with a large 53% of the portfolio. It really supports to very low level, micro level, family-owned, sometimes informal sector income generating activities. And these are sort of happening within, largely within rural communities around forested areas. In some cases they're supported through village loan or grant funds, which are then used through a community process to identify and select income generating activities and livelihood based activities. I think the key here is that the emphasis is really on the financial support and the process of selection of the IGAs. But in most cases, and this is again a general finding and not in all cases, they are mostly around that aspect of establishing the end of crisis. But there's relatively little support to business incubation or links to market and market support and engagement with private sector. The third cluster there is we're calling business incubation with finance. And this is really where technical assistance through tailored grants or credit to small enterprises is supported with business incubation support. It's a relatively small amount of the portfolio we calculated around 3%, but the work that PIP is doing in Mexico, for example, with community forestry groups and communities there. But also we've seen a spin-off project working in Ghana, which is scaling up and taking the work of the PIP program through another donor, in this case, DIPPID, working on a broader landscape area. And then finally, investment finance, and this is really just a direct financing to usually large-scale companies involved generally in forestry activities. So plantations, this sort of thing, and generally not linked to technical support. So examples of that in Ghana, the support to a Dutch company called Fongana, who are supporting plantation establishment within the forest reserves. So briefly, just turning to some of the strengths, if you like, of the models that we've discussed. I think what comes out really strongly is that the process of developing national investment plans through a sort of pass-by process, which provides a strategic and programmatic flow of investments. I think this is really a unique strength of the support provided by FICT in this area. I think secondly, the anchoring within national government ministries, and high-up within those government ministries, anchored with people who have significant influencing and decision-making authority, provides unique opportunities for particularly these enabling investments we've talked about, linking to policy and regulatory. If you look at other non-fit financing mechanisms, it often goes directly to individual enterprises or companies to the private sector, and this broader policy work is much less than emphasis within the activities. So I think that's a real strength. Thirdly, I think by anchoring it within a single ministry, there is this through the strategic aspect of the investment plan. I think in many countries we're beginning to see these external links to other government agencies, which again provide the enabling aspects in terms of policy, regulation, whether it's to do with legality or taxation or support through other sector ministries. So again, I think these are rather unique aspects of the support provided. Turning to some of the limitations perhaps, I think what we have identified, one of the key areas we've identified where there's perhaps work still to be done, is on the whole aspect of business incubation and development of the small and medium enterprises. We've pointed out the example from Mexico where actually this is happening, but it seems to be more of the exception rather than the normal. So we've seen this strong emphasis on part of the patronage bottom-up identification of income generating activities, which I think is a great strength. But then a limited emphasis on really providing the business development skills, incubation skills, support and market linkages to really enable those micro-activities to become sustainable in the long term. I think the second area is limited support, financial services and so on small and medium producers. So in general, the loans or grants tend to go either at the very bottom to the very small-scale family, household livelihood activities we talked about through village-level funds or grant schemes, or they tend to go to the large-scale big companies through IFC or through other MDVs in support of large-scale private sector programs. But this middle ground of medium, small and medium enterprises, I think we've seen less emphasis and this might be something that we can discuss later. The third area perhaps where there's limited support is to be this sort of aggregation function. So if you've got many, many individuals or groups working on particular sub-sectors or value chains who are looking to take that up to a national level to aggregate that to, for example, national or producer organizations, co-operatives and so on which helps generate marketing opportunities, economies of scale and potential for influence in advocacy. I think finally, we talked in the previous slide about the strengths of the bit in terms of anchoring within government and that strategic opportunity in terms of engaging on policy and so on. Certainly, one area that does come out is by linking it so strongly with government, the links to private sector, it doesn't come naturally necessarily to a government ministry. The skills and the techniques and tools to engage with, reach out to, engage and enlist the support of private sector is not something which is necessarily the first nature to some of the ministry staff. So I think this is a gap that perhaps could be strengthened. Going to the final slide, as Shaoqing said, we wanted to throw out some questions that perhaps you could keep in mind during the webinar and we can discuss as we go through it and think about as you listen to the other presenters. But building on some of the key findings, I think there are three questions that emerge. One, this aspect of business incubation, in your experience, how do you think it could better support that aspect of business incubation to make this sustainable? Secondly, the excellent work in supporting communities and households developing and generating activities like your support and so on. How can that be really developed further to give that links to market to be taking to scale and so on to be truly sustainable? For example, this work on the apex level organizations, is that something that could be strengthened? And then finally, how and when can KIP provide support to these small scale producers and their organizations in ways that can attract additional financing and funding so that we can once again take that to scale. So these are three general questions which emerge from some of the key findings and I think I've run out of time so I'll move it forward and come back to Shaoqing. Thank you very much. Thanks, Tom. And the next speaker would be Mark from F3 Life. Mark is the CEO and co-founder of F3 Life, a company providing climate smart landings to financial institutions. He's a lawyer and environmental economist, previously Mark who was the co-founder as a led financial product designer at an award-winning mobile phone market of credit provider. He has quite a lot to share with us on the topic of financial resources. Come on over to Mark. Hello everybody, nice to meet you. As Shaoqing said, I run F3 Life which provides tools to traditional and non-traditional credit providers to help them incorporate requirements for climate smart agriculture into loan terms and a system that allows those credit providers to verify visually that those measures are being complied with. And just by way of introduction, I co-founded this company together with a Kenyan colleague Obadi and Gigi. It came out of our experiences negotiating payments for ecosystem services contracts in West Africa where there were two key realizations. The first was that when Small Holder Farmers are under contract for provision of ecosystem services or implementing measures to improve delivery of ecosystem services, they are very responsive to those contracts. Secondly, the transaction costs involved with, I guess, bespoke payments for ecosystem services projects often overwhelm the theoretical good that they do. And really after the experience of those payments for ecosystem services contracts, we were looking for something that was highly replicable and highly scalable. And this sort of solution that we arrived at in F3 Life was where we arrived at, which is the system that we provide. Critical to just point out that F3 Life does not provide credit itself. It works with third-party providers of credit to Small Holder Farmers. And under step one of our methodology, when a farmer signs a loan agreement, they also sign an agreement stating how they will manage their land in a climate smart or environmentally friendly manner. And that can include the planting of trees. Under step two, the farmer repays their loan and also implements the practices that were required under their loan agreement and their land management agreement. So this is where you see farmers begin to respond to the environmental conditionality of their loan terms. Under step three, our systems are used to verify that those practices have been implemented. We use a sort of geotagged smart photograph approach and we're currently augmenting that with the ability to use drone and satellite imagery to undertake those verifications as well where appropriate. Under step four, the information that we collect is then scored and then passed back to the financial institution for inclusion within their credit scoring algorithm or credit score card. And that then affects the farmer's ability to raise debt in the future. And so what the system sort of creates ultimately is a strong incentive for farmers to transition towards more environmentally friendly practice or climate smart practices. Just to sort of point out that what the system also does is it attempts to de-risk from a lender's perspective farming activities such that the farmers are more resilient in the event of climate or weather or environmental shock. It increases the view of the information that the lender has around the farmer and around their farming skill in terms of mitigating that risk. And that's really what our value proposition is. To local lenders, to the users of our system, we're saying use the system to both reduce your credit default risk and also to increase your client's debt service coverage ratio, which means that their ability to raise debt. But there are several other sort of stakeholders in this who we have to sort of, whose incentives we have to align. And that includes funders. And very specifically, what the afterlife system does is create for them an investment proposition with defined financial and environmental returns. And we frequently hear the complaints that there's lots of money but there aren't projects. Well, we think that this gets around that project by creating, I guess, sort of investable propositions, buckets of money to be placed within, which is sort of replicable or highly replicable. And then finally the value proposition for the farmer is using these practices to reduce your vulnerability to environmental weather shock and then also hopefully to boost yields. So that's probably what the afterlife system is and what we're seeking to achieve and how we attempt to subtract users to the system. We were asked to provide you briefly with a theory of change that I guess it informs us of business approach. And it sort of goes a little bit deeper than just the value proposition that I was explaining. Simply put, we understand that environmental degradation is driven largely by economic activity. And that economic activity is again largely underpinned by systems of credit, which are blind to natural resource overuse. And what we mean by that is that when a farmer takes a credit, they're obviously compelled to repay the credit with financial interest, with little sort of concern given to how that financial interest is repaid and the effect on the environment of that. So what we see it effectively is that it's a systematic problem, or a systemic problem, whereby environmental degradation is sort of baked into the credit and money system. And in response to that, what we're providing is a system which allows, I guess, the negative externalities associated with credit issues to be overcome and to pair financial interest with environmental interest in loan terms. And what we see is that this creates a financially sustainable incentive for environmental restoration. In terms of results, we started with a very limited pilot in 2013-2014, which ended in 2015, with 75 farmers, small farmers in Kenya, whereby they were issued with credits with environmental conditions attached. And over the course of sort of many loan cycles, they repaid loans and progressively built out soil and water conservation systems on their land, systems designed to reduce soil erosion on their land, soil erosion in that area being associated with increased rainfall, increased heavy episodic rainfall under climate change projections. In May 2016, we won the Global Innovation Lab for Climate Change Finance, which threw us into a, I guess, a cooperation with a number of the members of the lab, which includes big donors, big development banks, and some investment banks and funds. And together with those, we are slowly now developing three country pilots, Ghana Rwanda and probably Kenya, for 45,000 farmers to receive the agricultural credit that they would have received anyway, as either working capital loans or input credits with environmental conditions attached. Key barriers and risks. Financial institutions move at a very slow pace, and that's often difficult to sort of manage as a small institution or small business with a limited runway, essentially. Those financial institutions often have a love-hate relationship with funding agriculture, and probably forestry as well anyway. Often, their stakeholders are putting pressure on them to fund agriculture, but the difficulties inherent in that sector, you often don't want to do it. And that is only exacerbated by, I guess, the solution that we're providing, the challenge that our solution addresses, which is that there are growing concerns about the effect of climate change on the credit worthiness of farmers. Some key lessons learned, and this slide, I guess, presents what we thought would happen coming into this space, and then what has actually happened. We thought there would be a large amount of funding for innovation, and in reality there wasn't, but that is very, very constrained. There is a lot of growth stage capital. Social impact investors who we thought would be interested in this space have only really begun to turn their eyes to sort of climate and environmental issues, and in any event don't really provide innovation capital. They provide growth stage capital. They want to provide funds to organizations that are already showing or that are already revenue positive. The third thing that we thought would happen is that we could raise funds from our original base in Kenya, and despite the heavy, the high number of financing institutions there, we struggled a little bit because we felt that sort of resource allocation decisions or funding decisions were being made elsewhere. And what happened eventually was that we self-funded limited pilots, and through that sort of initial sort of proof of concept, we won a few prizes, very limited sums, $35,000 in total from Morgan Stanley in Switzerland, but that was kind of necessary to sort of allow us to conclude our pilots. At that point, the fund raising process was so sort of arduous that we sort of nearly gave up, and we didn't think the funds were out there, but then we won one of four spots within the Global Innovation Lab for Climate Finance, which then pushed us into I guess the orbit of other funders and large banks who are kind of looking for these types of, I guess sort of, as I mentioned earlier, defined financial and environmental investment propositions, and sort of some promise in what we were doing in that respect. That is the final slide. Thank you very much. And we will just now go on to the next four presentations if we could. And the next week is four, and the fund unique forestry and the land use. Four have been working in forestry for 30 years, and have deep understanding of what value change. I think in 2016 four initiated and that's the Uganda follow-up production grant scheme, which we will share now. Hello everyone, wherever you are, I'm in Bergen, southern Germany, and I have a project in Uganda. It's all a scheme where I work for 10 years until 2012. I've just got my questions for time, so I have to go first to give you a flavour of how the project works. And please ask questions later and I can also point you in the direction for more information should you need it. Right, the background to SPGS. You see those two photos there. The top one is a three-year-old hybrid eucalypt plantation growing for transmission poles in Uganda. The interesting thing there is the entrepreneur knew nothing about forestry when he started before we supported him. The bottom slide is a community association that the project supported growing pines, pines caribbean there, about 2.5 years old, a rotation of about 15 to 20 years. Right, the background is that it won't be a surprise to those familiar working in Africa the rampant deforestation and timber shortage is predicted and there's been heavy reliance on fuel of course, fast growing economy all needs timber so there was a huge shortage predicted and this project was looking, seeking to encourage the private sector to invest in new planting and it assumed that there was small growers would need technical assistance. The project's been funded by the European Union since it started in 2004 and it's invested $24 million to date, with a further $16 million pledged in the next four years. The project supports as you can tell from its name longer rotations of timber and poles. Right, very quickly how does the project work? It's a combination of establishment grants and technical and business support. The establishment grants on the first side the project pays 50% of the establishment costs which at the time was about $425 so the full establishment cost was $800 but the key thing really is that the grants came in performance based and the standards were clearly written into the contracts. For example, you had to have 80% survival when the programme start visited after three months. The payment was split into three tranches so we held back some to second checks until a few months to make sure to encourage the people to maintain their crops so quality is the key. No funds paid up front the grants were only paid in better respect so the entrepreneurs had to start with their own money and we set a minimum of 25 hectares for application but you could join together to get to that minimum. On the technical side the business side we had a very strong extension team which we developed the first two years with Key and Young graduates to come down to South Africa and Swaziland showed them the best practices and also we took some of the tools to give them the vision of how a commercial forest sector looks. We ran some very practical training courses ourselves and the team as it was very difficult to find that support outside. We published some very practical guidelines after a number of years which had lots of illustrations of good and bad practices that went down very well and interesting we developed an accreditation system for nurseries and contractors that came from the demand came from the growers themselves interestingly so that's been rather successful in building SMEs in the country. And then finally we supported the development of a timber growers association knowing that it was going to be important in the future beyond the project and then lastly the land many people started on government land getting permits for planting increasingly they came on private land. Right theory of change theory of change we had identified three key areas, three key assumptions first of all the right incentives will attract the private sector to invest. Secondly rural livelihoods will be improved and thirdly the degraded land will be restored. Now on the basis of those three the results are over 30,000 hectares established to date and the scheme 50,000 hectares that's about 450 contracted clients. It's been oversubscribed and the key thing is that beyond the grant there's another 30,000 hectares being planted people often coming for technical advice not just the finance. On the rural livelihoods I think another success story really 5,000 over 5,000 rural jobs created 400 people trained on the courses that's benefitted a lot of the villages with the corporate social responsibility of the bigger companies and in terms of capacity building of SMEs we've seen we've got 42 certified nurseries in Uganda now and 36 small contracting companies going and then the third one the degraded land well forest reserves which were degraded have been replanted and the trees because their quality and fast growing are obviously storing lots of carbon. So I think very positive results there and in addition the solo scheme has raised the profile of forestry people talking about investing in trees there's a pension for their children it shows you it's really getting the message across and it's attracting interest from other African countries we've been last year advising the World Bank setting a scheme up in Mozambique there's interest in Ghana and in other countries in Africa too on this. Right barriers and risks number one was a challenge for the institutional buy-in it's been mentioned already a few times it's been a challenge getting the buy-in despite the pro-private sector policies we see in these countries often there is a resistance to change number two sustainability is an issue because it's grant led to projects obviously it depends on overseas development assistant donors to maintain it and thirdly is the forestry's big bone of contention which is the long rotations but what we've strongly believed is that these risks can be managed by good planning and management and these risks I think we're going to talk a bit later while just growing the trees but in particular the markets for those crops right working with unique in many countries for years we're finding that there's a very poor understanding of the value chain particularly amongst the small growers I mean here knowledge of product specification knowledge of quality for instance knowing the markets knowing the supply demand forecast for products is so important and we here we preach this site species market approach where it's not just planting trees but it's getting the market intelligence before you plant the trees and you can then apply the models that now exist in many growth and economic models to see if your returns are acceptable for a particular product so a much more business like approach to planting even for small medium growers financing SPGS obviously proves that conditional grants supporting small medium growers can work you might say it's unsustainable because the grant focus but it's actually could be considered very cost effective from the government's point of view given that it's attracted 50% of the input is coming from the private sector so it's a cost effective way of a country getting a core plantation establishment which is needed to support the economy concessional finance in particular soft loans have been were considered right at the beginning but the financial institutions didn't want to touch it so eventually we decided to go down the grant route and just interesting those of you who might not know there is a study underway in Kenya looking at a revolving tree fund for small medium growers funded by DFID and the Nature Conservancy so that's going to be interesting to follow and those of you who might not know the problem obviously with forestry is that banks have little experience quite often and they consider it high risk particularly for the long term nature even though we think the trees go very fast in the tropics right the conclusions last slide Solox scheme has achieved good results on the ground it's proved a sort of very strong PPP public private partnership it can work if it's carefully planned and well managed and the sort of lessons from SPGS for others I think is it took this commercial approach which was somewhat unusual for small medium growers but it certainly worked and it focused on the best practices best practices for growth and quality so even though we preach in for communities small growers this is very important we believe that the approach will have long term benefits for the sector but only if there is more support on the value chains and market side we've seen this in many countries and finally the role of the timber growers association are very important I think we will discuss that a bit later right thank you that's me finished and I think in time and there is an applause icon on the list of icons so I see thank you and if I may just go back to the original questions key questions that we want to explore with you is how can this better support business incubation function in a way that's sustainable and effective we heard from all the speakers that the aggregation of those businesses is very important and we just heard from Juan Carlos that there is a cooperative that we work with instrumental to make the model of serious working with working really well so how do we also how can SIPP also provide support in organizing community group level income generating and analysis of the product which is taking to scale means two business incubation skills and a market so for example in our previous case SIPP supports some of the development of vital impact level organization for small scale producers and the last question many of the speakers also spoke to that is about the so how can SIPP provide more support for the risk team investment in small scale producers so that's those organizations can attract the finance and we heard is a good example actually like with the contract and the the innovation way to monitor some of the activities really help the risk for the financial providers but also help build up the credit for small scale producers so that they can actually be able to attract more finance and so the all three questions are quite amazing and I hope that you can also think about coming up with our questions for the speakers but I know some of the audience here also have quite a lot of experience to share with those questions so do feel free to use that questions for the speakers and box to make comments and share your experiences and box on how SIPP can tackle some of the three areas and now if I can go back to some of the questions that are already on the screen first and mark if I can just ask you to address the two of the questions when is on the S3 system would also work with the conditionality based on poor restoration not just time and smart agriculture that question is from Stanton and the fourth question on that is that then in that case could the trees then be used as collateral with your vendors in the event of people and then there's another question from Archele about how were the farming practices adapted and are they based in local practices or simply include practices and to link that question probably back to the finance industry thinking about Mark can you probably elaborate a bit on how you can use the finance system that you are developing on the S3 life to incentivize some of the farmers to adopt batch of practices on their land that can be induces for a sustainable business model Mark I had to use to answer that two questions so I'll take those questions in order so the question from Duncan yes our system would work on the basis of forest restoration I think I guess there's always a question around what is forest restoration but sort of skirting around that just a sort of caveat the limits to the S3 life system are that it's only suitable for farmers who are sufficiently sophisticated to take and repay commercial debt and this wouldn't work with smallholder farmers who are conventionally on the jargon and that's actually the majority for smallholder farmers so the S3 life system is only going to work within areas where farmers are considered credit worthy to get around that problem we've actually launched a sister business called Greenfy and you can look at the website for that and that allows NGOs or similar to place funds within a community managed revolving fund and the community to manage the loans themselves and for environmental condition to be placed on those loans and then our system allows for a community managed monitoring system as well and that is applicable to the larger number of smallholder farmers or small scale producers who are not conventionally bankable so we've deployed these two different systems the second Greenfyre is in partnership with two organizations, IUCN and PACT absolutely a big part of my agriculture is only one of the ways in which the system can be used to adjust small scale producer behavior and actually the language of climate culture is very much there because that's where the funding opportunities are or were at the time when we were getting there and the question from Akile or how are farming practices developed local best practices or scientific practices, well actually a little bit of both and we sort of take the off the shelf I guess practices and then through participatory discussions with farmer focus groups we adjust the requirements to suit what they're used to and capable of doing and as an example in Kenya the requirement was for gross control strips in the first instance as loan sizes increased for the planting of trees to reinforce those gross strips and the farmers themselves were allowed to choose both the gross type and the tree seeding according to what they knew best and wanted to use and we just got informed that greenhouse unfortunately would need to leave us a bit early and we were the probably the warm house what is the actual question about the recommendation for fit on upscaling investment with more median enterprises in Mexico is it a question from company Zelda and it's because of Zelda to know that Akile is engaged in some of the activities in Mexico could you probably explore a little bit on that question yes of course we we don't have right now currently an investment in Mexico mainly because we didn't have a project developer we know for a long time and it seems like to be too risky for us if there is a jurisdiction for fit it will be interested to promote investment we can for example agree into a co-financing initiative keep having a catalyzer role for us in terms of let's say first loss of co-financing under a grant base to the project which can reduce the cost and also the risk a little bit our position in that case the investment decision will be faster but I think it's very important representing a fund is why a private fund a specialized private fund can do a lot of things in short periods of time just an example we deployed 100 million euro or committed in just four years which you know many many funds institutional funds are not able to do is because we have a specialized team we have boots on the ground and we can spend a lot time on co-building the opportunity so I think that fit you know probably as a recommendation we could have a conversation or fit could do it with other funds as well as the moringa fund for example how to agree in a jurisdiction the impact both fit and investor are looking at and then create an element at the top level that then will allow the fund manager to deploy the investment I think it's very important to overcome sometimes these barriers of communication in Peru we know the door of the fit that has been managed by IDB at the moment we couldn't co-invest in this project because I think the area of eligibility what we didn't match of course we would be more than happy to collaborate with fit and this is the risk or co-financing initiative could be catalytic May I just ask probably a follow-up question on this when you mentioned that it's being considered a truly risky and it will be useful to help you risk could you just explain what are some of the specific risks that you consider you obviously mentioned that you want to rely or trust your local partner and what are some of those risks that are really and your investors will consider when they look at some of the finance which are most related and precious yes of course first we love the risk and this is why we are what we are designed to be additional not to be like other financial institutions this is our mission so we are really not risk at best but really we have a big appetite for risk but we need to know how to manage that risk which is different to avoid risk the way we manage the risk in terms of project implementation in Peru to be madridios far away with a lot of trolleys to the project developer product developer grassroots well established 30 year old operations very reputable that's how we manage the risk of let's say performance of the project the market risk in terms of the cacao what happened if the cacao didn't work well and also what about the fluctuations or things related to that we actually manage that risk through a hedge or let's say a coverage through a USA warranty the loan we provide for the comparative the operations of the project was under actually was warranted by USA through a 50% loss warranty by the development trade authority of USA so that supports a lot if it can do things like that will be great for us to catalyze for example investment in Mexico we couldn't make it for on the first fund we had but we can do it so the question is not if there's a risky place we go to risky places the deforestation are in these risky places deep on the forest different land use different land use types we just need to know how to manage it the implementation risk you can manage quite well a good project implementator and then things related to market could be implemented through these market enhancement instruments price warranties, off-takes first loss as well and I think we would be more than happy to do that with them and so having said that as Sherkeen said I would really need to run but I was very happy to participate in this webinar and please you have my contacts which Sherkeen can share as well and let's keep in touch and thank you very much thank you so much Juan Carlos and the audience feel free to send a question directly or you can keep in comments and questions in the question chat box and we will have to ask it to Juan Carlos as well and while we are on the risky topic may I probably go to Paul now and Paul in your presentation you did talk about the importance and in the Uganda page where you actually work with those small houses managing reduce the risk and generate better returns could you help elaborate on some of the risks that we do be working with people on the ground and how you manage to do risk to them and then we can go to some of the questions that other audience have posed for you thank you, talk about risk I listed ways of reducing the risks for small growers I mean they apply to all growers but particularly for small growers and what happened was they fell into two categories one is the actual growth of the trees the silvy culture which you see this has just come up now basically what we are saying is quite often growers, small medium growers in particular have poor growth and poor quality but there are ways of improving that so following the best practices not just nominally but making sure the extension staff are well trained contractors if they used must also be trained in these practices sometimes you have to bring these in from outside whether it's from Southern Africa or Brazil the countries with the big plantation history secondly fire protection is a big issue again for small farmers in particular your investment can disappear in an hour or so simple protection measures measures can be taken as you get bigger you have to certainly plan and invest in infrastructure train the people and get some equipment you can reduce these risks substantially and the pest and diseases is becoming increasingly important particularly in exotic plantations a lot of pests coming into Africa into the eucalypts we've got to keep abreast we don't need to panic but good silver culture can reduce that risk by having for instance good weeding reduce the stress in your crop but longer term it needs investment in research particularly tree breeding and this is really important and then the second batch of risk is the markets and utilization categorize them and the fourth point there you see a lot of small farmers have isolated small plantations not realizing the implications of transporting their product to market so it's very really important we realized within a year or two how important in the saw log scheme about the location of growers and we stopped supporting people in isolated places and started this aggregation that everyone's talking about that also brings about the fifth on the lack of scale when you have a few isolated growers you have very weak negotiation powers and in theory the clustering can help you but I have a sort of rider attached to the timber grower associations because what I'm seeing particularly in East Africa is you know some good and bad things really their expectations can be very high on these timber grower associations or they can be more like maybe the Uganda one is now developing into a more business-like approach but it tends to happen as if the donors fund these TGAs the grower associations they can sometimes have expectations of far too high so if you let it come from the growers themselves and support it then they're much more likely to succeed number six low value markets for trees this is really to do with as we said before checking your market before you plant getting the intelligence a lot of things can happen between planting and harvesting in forestry but still you can reduce the risk by going for markets which look good so 10-15 years time there will be a good market for transmission poles or saw logs whatever and the seventh point is inefficient processing is a big issue particularly we see it in East Africa a lot you get these little mills running around paying peanuts to some of the farmers and the reason is they have very low recovery if you have this sort of equipment and you're getting low recovery you can't afford to pay the grower very much for his log so this whole area of the sort of primary processing in particular certainly needs technical and possibly financial support this series also have a question about the timber export restriction and there's more decreased or marketed means that some of your growers can't get even the lot price and is that something that the project could have foreseen and if so do you think it could have been a drastic in tandem with spending the market area and if so how a good question Darius and if you know the answer please let me know we are dumbfounded it's a mystery why the prices in Uganda for saw logs are depressed we've tracked the prices of them over the years and used to publish it every three months in the newsletter and certainly at the moment the last number of years they haven't gone up anything like you would have expected from the demand projections so it really is and I don't think the export restrictions is the answer it's quite a strange phenomenon there we don't know how much timber really is coming in say from the Congo but it is a strange really I think we sort of accept in SPGS that when we started we didn't do this market intelligence enough but I think we realised it after a few years and started to do that and in a more general comment to this question I think it highlights the importance of doing these sort of sector studies in a country looking at the main products the supply and demand and the forecast in each country we did one last year in Tanzania and it really does show you a surprising thing sometimes with markets which farmers think they're going to grow for instance the transmission pole market in Kenya everybody's growing for this and of course at some stage it's going to be saturated and there are going to be a lot of disappointed farmers who won't probably replant their crops so these things you need these sort of fundamental studies I think to back up whatever project, whatever financial support is going to be given to the sector Thanks and Darian feel free to comment further comment in that question Bob and I think the key one off it would come back to focusing on some of the three key questions we've told about SPGS and I really have used for a race the one off the comment issue that I think are probably all the speakers including we found a speak to is about the theory of what more producers one of them is obviously the collateral as some of the sequence both to and I guess the monitoring of some of the more whole activities by financial institutions so in your understanding of this activities and your experience how can this issue be resolved so should I probably hand over probably three questions at first Yeah I agree I think there's some really interesting discussion around this certainly in Ghana we had some useful discussion with small and medium tree growers who were very keen to get engaged in producing trees there was land available but they lacked two key things one was technical effective technical support which Paul has talked about very clearly and the second thing was financing the two things were just not available it was effectively people financing it from their own savings from families borrowing from within their family but they were unable to go to formal financial institutions and leverage financing because banks just weren't ready to look at small scale timber production it was too risky it was too long term questions of land tenure uncertainties fire risk as well it just was impossible to get started now I'm aware that in Ghana the FIP program house is very aware of this and the in discussions with the national ministry they are exploring opportunities through additional financing to see how some support could be provided but I'm not entirely sure how far that discussion has come so I think that's really key if I may I might also just add there's some really interesting discussion as well about the degree to which there's two very contrasting models here one where you really adopt the value chain approach the kind of model that we saw certainly in Uganda actually in all of us because where there's a very well defined sub-sector or value chain that's being supported which is well known the barriers the incentives around that are well researched and support is provided around that and then there's this more sort of open-ended community bottom up type income generating activities and support and financing to that we've seen in a number of the projects and obviously both have strengths and weaknesses but I think perhaps one of the challenges with the highly bottom up community identified initiatives is that you effectively have a huge number of value chains which start to emerge could be small-scale livestock could be agriculture could be tree planting a whole range of things so any particular project's ability to provide the needed technical support around that sort of wealth of emerging income generating areas is extremely difficult so I think there's a really important trade-off there about the degree to which projects support specific value chains and sectors and effectively say that this is what we're going to do this is where we have expertise and this is where we can support you and those that adopt this more bottom up community driven approaches which have a huge number of strengths and also provide huge opportunities to build goodwill and so on but making less focus in terms of business integration and market support Great, that's time. For the rest of the speakers you can address two questions now one is about how can fit, how can we do that natural challenge that is more wholly safe and then at the same time an interesting question Tom has also posed about how do you manage that balance and a trade-off between the well-designed sub-sector, the managing approach and the bottom up with the community and again, all audience please feel free to comment and share experiences in the chat box as well Paul, maybe can you start and then we can test Martin's question OK, Mike, well looking at or listening to Tom's questions there a little bit I think for me, the thing is you've heard about the background of the saw log scheme in Uganda of course it's not the model that you talk about on the model for the other projects it's very, sometimes they're very country specific and I think from what I'm seeing there's some basic information you need on land the situation the forest sector, the agricultural sector and you apply these to a particular country and I think this is what we're finding that you can take lessons learned I think this is really important the lessons are starting to come out now across the board of things that work and yet still many projects start and fail for the same reasons they have for many years somehow sound very cynical Tom maybe if you're still online can you sort of address or let me know what you'd like my input on beyond that I think one of the really interesting things that you've touched on Paul is this whole question of the Tree Grows Association the APEX organization this is something that's really come out in actually quite a number of the discussions and the presentations that through that and I noticed Duncan has put a question into the mix here about support to Tree Grows Associations in terms of providing ongoing market intelligence and business advice and as well as this sort of broad question of incubation services to grow so I suppose it's a question about you touched on it in your presentation I think a little bit about the degree to which we can we shouldn't put too much into these organizations we should let them develop their own support and define their own objectives but I suppose you know it would be interesting to know what do you think would be the long term objective of the Tree Grows Association what sorts of services do you think well do they currently provide and what do they provide in the new I frequently turn to as a vision is the South African one, the Forestry South Africa which is a Grows organization that represents growers from the huge companies Mondi and Sapi right down to small growers now you look at what they do they're involved in forest policy very strong lobbying government on land issues whatever support to the sector they organize training committees that decide training and even research fund research of course they give advice to growers now to get to that level of course takes many years mature commercial forest sector in South Africa so rather different I think to what we're seeing in certainly East Africa and West Africa but it's a vision and I think it's always important to have a vision you look at my Uganda example it was always the we were always asked of course by the donors what's the plan for the future the exit strategy for SPGS and of course the sustainability of it to build capacity in the Uganda Timber Grows Association I think sort of looking back that's really not happening quick enough and again it comes back there's a reluctance I think to let go and SPGS seen as a successful project and seems to be a reluctance to build up the capacity of this private organization I think it really should happen if they want it to stand on its feet so and then what I see you know elsewhere where you force TGA's Timber Grower Associations we really do just raise expectations too much sometimes I think you know it's not easy making a profit on a low quality timber and it needs to be said I think to growers but you know we've got to do what we can to make it profitable for growers if they've got the right quality and assist them in building up some of these value chains Thanks and now we can probably move on to Mark and Danton I think in the response to questions for also I can address some part of your questions in terms of how they can found some of the treasurer's observations and if you have any follow-up or specific questions please do put it into the chat box and now we move on to Mark to address some of the two questions So your first question as I was saying is how can FIP contribute to resolve the issue of absence collateral amongst small scale producers but I think it kind of needs to sort of look over the fence what's happening in the sort of the smallholder credit financing world where there seems to have been a lot of innovation over the last four or five years particularly in the direction of some unsecured credit through value chain financing through USC lending through the creation of credit reference bureaus through the improvements made in the credit scoring of low income borrowers I think what the FIP will have to do is start to sort of collaborate more closely with that world. It's almost as though they operate in two different silos but actually they're often talking about the same things and the same problems Second question is how to manage the trade-offs between a value chain approach of financing and community-based bottom-up approaches sort of I wonder whether the two are mutually exclusive sometimes concerning reality that small scale producers live their lives in debt actually from what we see from our research have many obligations to many different sort of lenders both foreign and foreign banks something a little bit local loan sharks something it's they're only ever sort of underwater to sort of more or less an extent over time and so within that reality I think you can actually have two approaches to financing one is through the sort of the value chain and through I guess the commercialization of certain of their growing activities was you know that doesn't preclude community-oriented financing schemes such as that's provided by Greenfy and ICN and ECRA and we're doing some things in there as well so I think that would be the answer to that I think we're running out of time now so the last round I'll just let everyone have a final remark and especially feel like you have a specific last word that goes towards that great few questions presented on the slide and again the audience needs to worry also to put some of your feedback on thinking of all the two questions in the chat box to tell the presenters for sharing different interesting experiences and it's for me was instructing to learn of the different initiatives and efforts that are being made to support the small holders but just a general comment I know we don't have much time to have a discussion this initiative is about breaking or looking at how to overcome barriers to financing as a means and in our framework of analysis includes looking at what are the investments in enabling the creating enabling conditions like capacity building except that you have talked about both in terms of the technical capacity securing tenure and also enabling them to access finance for active investment and it does attract me and I would like to have a further discussion as we go along with this study on how do we use this notion of supporting sophisticated producers because they are credit worthy to bring other small holders and by using these sophisticated producers perhaps as the lead producers that can bring the relatively smaller ones who can be managing revolving funds or other means of producing that could increase not only the scale of getting the finance but perhaps addressing the objectives that the city is pursuing I know that those initiatives were started with the different context and objectives but we want to harvest the lessons to see how synergies and the leveraging of financing can be brought in by collaboration between these different initiatives with the field. I think also it's worth reflecting going forward on the issue of aggregation and clustering and what I'm hearing is working with Apex organization it's good but also not so good because of the unreasonable demand but I think perhaps here there has to be an investment on the negotiation because the small holders with one actor each they often because they like the knowledge on markets and even on the cultural aspects in the case of plantations but also like knowledge on processing other products that they can harvest from natural forest they really need to work in some sort of grouping and to have institutions that can strengthen their voice so how do we address the challenges that can come for organization and perhaps strong views on certain aspects to making sure that negotiation is in place that can allow win-win situations in terms of channeling financing but also getting the results in terms of putting good products of quality to market at a price that is acceptable to all institutions that are engaged and I think maybe I'll just stop here just because of time but I think we we should pursue further discussion and also understanding how the low risk of institutions like Altaria are operating and working with cooperatives and how these can be the lessons from these initiatives can form the potential partnerships between financing to private sector by with those ongoing initiatives so I thought I should just make that general comment not expecting an answer now but something that we should pursue with either at least the what goes on. Thank you so much for highlighting all those scenes in negotiations, in modern negotiations of past two-centers all the other things that are reminding us that the webinar is not really the end of the discussion and then we are only starting to explore a number of questions so if you also don't really want to directly respond to that three questions if you have some further thoughts are done on the key issues that you think that the learning and evaluation initiatives should investigate further focusing on some of the obvious mistakes and mistakes you know in financing still have financing for course related and questions please also feel free to share and then keep your brand-new shots and then we'll go to Tom and Paul in a minute. Yeah thanks for shouting I really don't want to use up more time other than to say I think this has been an excellent set of presentations and for me it's really highlighted the need to balance these two extremely complex areas of investment one there's financial tailoring the financial packages to meet the specific requirements of the end-users in ways that is usable and friendly and appropriate but secondly this enabling instead of enabling investments that's very clearly as well and whether it's extension support in the case of the work in Uganda or market assistance as well you know linking people to markets and providing all these enabling investments of course also including broader regulatory and policy aspects getting that mix in a way that provides opens up opportunities for private sector activities clearly a complex task and getting that mix right for me is a really critical aspect so I'll leave it there and see if others have any final wrap up comments. Paul can we move to Rio for some of the final thoughts. Thank you and I think it's been valuable some interesting lessons coming and particularly you know this interface between agriculture and forestry now as well which is going to be more important and particularly as we all know the small growers small tree growers are going to be the future supply particularly in Africa given the land situation so I think we really need to maybe do a little bit more of this lessons learned from these and share them it's quite the one of the issues of course is that we have to publish bad results let's say but there are times where it's really good to lessons learned positive and bad and negative so we can drive these initiatives forward and I think particularly we need to think more carefully on these timber grower associations because I see approaches that are not working in East Africa and some that are working and a lot of different people competing for this as well which is crazy so I think you know the more that we can sort of address this issue the better it will be for the small farmers Just to say thank you very much and maybe to just conclude by saying I saw there was a a base of conservation finance and conference in New York hosted by Credit Suisse a couple weeks ago one of the conclusions of that was the importance of replicability and scalability Now on scalability that's fine on replicability there's a big question about how replicable investments at the local level in the different sort of agro-ecological and cultural contexts are and so just searching for these replicable business models is going to be sort of vital and that's what sort of fit has to look for and the tools that can de-risk those I think few but possible investment models Thank you all for being here and thanks to all the speakers they spent quite a lot time preparing the presentation to ensure that we can maximize our learning and again this is not really the end of this learning journey we will send you the presentation not including including our failures and then the audio recording of this by the end of this week who are early next week and then that will include the contact information for all the speakers for you to follow up and if you have any further comments or thoughts about this webinar please feel free to contact us as well and with that I'll just close the webinar and thank you