 I'm Barry, I'm from IID, I'm from Susan Nandudu. Do you want to give yourself a quick introduction? Hi, everyone. Welcome. My name is Susan Nandudu, and I work with the African Center for Trade and Development here in Kampala, Uganda. Happy to have you all. Great, thank you. Thank you. Can you skip on the slide, please? So this is the rolling order for today. We are giving two seconds. First of all, we're going to give a quick introduction. We'll run through some housekeeping, although I'm sure everybody's painfully aware, because we've all been doing these Zoom meetings for quite some time. We're then going to do a quick Mentimeter poll. We have a key question we'd like to pose you, and we'd like you to answer that so we can hopefully get some interesting insights. Thereafter, we're going to move to presentations. We've got three presentations today. The first is from Johnny. He's from the Forest and Farm Facility, and he's going to be talking about the associative commercialization mechanism. Thereafter, we'll have a five-minute Q&A, so there will be a chance to interact and ask some questions on the presentation. After that, we have Moses. Can I have a minute or one more, then? He is from the Fala. Thank you. Please mute your mics. Thanks. Thereafter, we have Moses from Adelso Fala. He's going to be presenting on the accumulating savings and credit methodology, and then we'll have a quick Q&A after that. Thereafter, we have another presentation of 10 minutes from Rebecca, who works with Acumen, and she is going to be presenting on the Acumen Resilient Agricultural Fund, and then there will be a Q&A after that. After that, we will move into group work, which whereby you'll be put into small groups and asked to work through a couple of questions, and then we'll come back into plenary, and then report back on the more interesting findings. So I'm going to hand over to Susan. Susan is going to zoom through the housekeeping, and yes, that pod was intended. So I'll just hand you over to Susan now. OK. Thank you. So if you were flying to CBA 14, the cabin crew would give you some safety tips. Today, we are going to talk about housekeeping in a Zoom meeting. So you may have had them, but would like you to be aware of this. Please note that IID are recording the meeting and may take, may make part of it, available on our website. We have taken security precautions to discourage uninvited participants from joining the meeting and take away inappropriate comments or other comments. If you notice any such content, please notify the host via the chat function, and they will remove any offending participants from the meeting. This is pretty important. Please do not share the link to join this meeting on social media or any uninvited participants via social media, because they are the number one source of Zoom-bombing activity. For the best meeting experience, please close all non-essential applications on your device, particularly messaging apps such as Skype. Next, please. So initially, your microphone will be muted by the host, but during the breakout sessions later in the meeting, you'll be able to unmute your mic by clicking on that icon. Next, you can share your webcam video if you choose. And if you experience connection problems, you should turn your video off so that you can be able to hear and have a better experience. Now, the participant's icon will open the panel on the right of the screen, where you can interact with the host using the icons at the bottom. The chat room will be open. So it will open a panel where you can enter your comments and questions or request technical support. We will respond to as many as time allows, but we'd like to really encourage that you use the chat room function to share your comments and your questions such that at the opportune time, we can read them out to the right or responsible people to give you a response. So the share screen option is disabled for participants in the meeting. But please note that the record function for participants is equally disabled. Next, please. Reactions enables you to share immediate feedback with the presenter. Remember, we are not meeting in person, so should you feel excited about the discussion, do like or share using those icons on your screen. Next. So finally, we'd like to remind you that IID is recording the meeting and may make parts of it available on the website at a later date. If you are experiencing technical difficulties, please inbox me via the chat box and we'll be sure to assist you. Thank you. Over to you, Barry. Thank you. So just having an eye on the chat box, it seems to be everybody saying hello, which is great. Please keep that up. We very much want to have an interactive session. As Susan mentioned, we can meet in person, which is a bit of a shame. However, if we can try and make this as interactive as possible, we're going to move into breakout groups later on. And when we do, I would certainly encourage everyone to put their camera on if you can. And then we can have a little bit more of an interaction. But we're going to move on to the presentations in a moment. But before we get into them, I first want to set the scene for the session. I want to kick things off with the definition of what we're actually meaning by delivery mechanisms. So when we talk about delivery mechanisms, we're talking about transparent and accountable governance management and financial arrangements that are going to facilitate local adaptation, either by helping the local actors prioritize adaptation actions or by channeling flexible finance into the hands of local actors so they can make their own adaptation investments. So their mechanisms are going to be based upon the subsidiarity principle. And this is where local development and adaptation decisions are actually going to be made at the lowest effective level, unless it's going to be more effective to do it at a higher scale. And this allows those with the most knowledge and experience to actually lead the decision making. And the delivery mechanisms, they should strengthen local actors' capabilities to consider climate risks over different time scales. They should also help shift incentives so that local actors can make choices that are going to perform better over longer time horizons and cost-effectively aggregate local adaptation at scale. So I'm going to leave it there. And I'm going to, if you could skip on, we're now going to do a Mentimeter poll. So this is the question that we'd like you to answer. So, Egley, do you want to explain how this is going to run? I believe you just go to menti.com. Oh, no, yep, there. If you just go to menti.com, and then if you use that code, and then if you could just give quite a succinct answer to this question, that would be great. And then we'll put the answers up on screen. Egley, is that correct? Yes, that's correct. If you just use the website and put in the code when it pops in on your screen, and you'll see the question, and you'll be able to submit your answer. So if you could just open that in another browser window or on your device, and then we can have a look where you can see the results. Egley, can you put the code back up just so people can have it? One second, I just want to go to the website, so. Sure, sure, sure. Well, it's already in the chat room, so you can use the code in the chat room. Bro, thank you. Hi Barry, can you see the answers? Yes, I can, I was just typing my own one. Good, we're getting some good interaction here. Can you, Egley, can you scroll through, please? Prioritising at design stage, yep, good, great. Focus on achieving overall outcomes and unite around these. Is that different agencies? Is that different bodies? I'm quite keen to sort of unpack some of these by establishing a transparent platform that makes possible for everyone to access to the information related to the financial support. That's great, yeah, transparency and accountability, that's a big one, absolutely. Partnership with local organisations, is that local governments, is that CBOs? How would this, how would this, how does partnership come about? I'd be keen to think about that. Who would sort of initiate and sort of ensure that takes place? Powering grassroots and supporting the answers, absolutely. Encouraging PPPs across sectors, avoid working in silos to create synergies, yep, yep, absolutely. By aligning lollacies, I think it's policies, programme institutions and practices, yes, yeah, absolutely. I think the question is, how do we achieve this alignment? It's no easy feat. Someone's asking for the Mentimeter code again, somebody could drop it in the chat, that'd be great. It's just on the top of the question. Super, thank you. Listen to local people, local and indigenous knowledge, great. Can we, sorry, can you scroll back up? Having a joint mechanism, oh, that looks like what you've done. Forming effective management committee and inter-committee discussions, joint plan of actions, great. Yes, I like this one in particular, having a joint mechanism for identification, planning and delivering of climate adaptation interventions. I think that gets to the heart of what we're talking about in terms of collaboration and convergence of mechanisms, but it's just how does this joint mechanism set up? Is that set up at the national government level? I doubt you probably not. Transparency accountability, yeah, absolutely. Great, these are great. Thank you for contributing. I think we are kind of pressed for time. I'm afraid we're gonna have to leave it there, but I think, but these are some of the issues that definitely keep in the back of your mind because we're gonna be discussing these in the group work after the presentations. But I think we're probably just in the interest of time, we've probably moved on. If we could move on to the first presentation, I think. I believe it's Johnny, if you could just move it on for us, that'd be great. Sorry, bear with us. As you know, doing online meetings, everything takes just a little bit longer, but I think we're doing pretty good. Anglia, are we okay to move on? Yes, so can you see the slide? No, we can still see the man to me, sir. There we go. Okay, Johnny, I'm gonna pass over. Do you want to just give yourself a super quick introduction, quicker than I did? Sorry, longer than I did. And then we could just move on. Thank you. Thank you, Barry. Good afternoon and good morning. And everyone participating in this conference is my pleasure to do this presentation and interact with all of you. I am Johnny Zapata. I work in the Forest and Farm Facility based in FAO in Rome. And I will talk about some experience about associative mechanisms for commercialization from forest and farm producer organization. So could we move to the next slide, please? And we work in, so we are a partnership between FAO, IED, IUCN and Agricorps. Now we are in our second phase. We are a multi-donal trust fund funded by Sweden, Germany, Finland, Ikea, EUFLECT, the Netherlands, and we have about 20 million US dollar. And our funds are mainly to strengthen in producer organizations. Our funds goes directly to the bank account of the producer organization. So what we want to do is strengthen in the capacities of the producer organization that they become active agents of change for two things happening at the same time, that climate resilience landscapes where they live and also at the same time improve livelihoods. We focus in four outcomes. One talks about strengthening the governance of the producer organization, strong multi-prosectoral platforms to enabling policies in favor of the producer organizations. And another one is about strengthening the entrepreneurship access to finance on markets from the producer organization through inclusive value change, business incubation and therefore more investment and finance for the producer organization. And our third outcome talks about the increase the delivery on the ground of these activities related to climate change with the producer organizations at the center of this delivery. And our last outcome is about the social and cultural services going to the members of producer organizations, a channel or deliver by the forest and farm producer organization. For doing that, we have three mainstreaming issues. One is gender equality, inclusion of youth and also indigenous people. We actually are working in 10 countries which are in Asia, Nepal, Vietnam in Africa, we work in Ghana, Sambia, Kenya and Madagascar and Togo and Tanzania. And in Latin America, we have Ecuador and Bolivia and we have also network countries. And today I will present briefly our experience about the commercialization mechanisms. Could we move to the next slide please? So all that I have talked about the forest and farm facility is to strengthening producer organizations. Here I will present so on commercialization mechanisms for a basket of products from a union of producers in Kotakachi in Ecuador. So what we have done is strengthening the commercialization mechanism during this COVID or because this COVID, you could see down in the slide we provide the initial support from the forest and farm facility to these mechanisms. So what they have done is they have made and put together a manual for the management of this commercialization fund. So they have a regulation for this community fair trade under this participatory guarantee system that assures that all the products are coming from farm from small holders. And they do all this biosecurity protocol for this COVID. These are the institutional arrangement. So what we have is before this support is a value chain where there were 3,000 producers which are producing many kinds of forest and farm products. So the gathering and distribution and commercialization was done by the middleman. So because of the lack of funding, the liquidity, the middleman paid for the products in the farm to the producers and he or she gather and go to the market. So and then the consumption by the end users. So what this mechanism does is that direct purchase from the farmers in the farm and they part the all agroforestry products that they have for offering at the market. And we have started to work with one producers every week. As I mentioned before, Unolcar has 3,300. It's a big potential to scale up also inside the Unolcar. And these producers, they have an area more or less of 30,000 hectares of landscape. So the Unolcar has realized that each producer more or less for the needs of the family. Each producer family needs $40 per week. What is that they pay in the farm every week to the producers? So and what the Unolcar does and do with this commercialization mechanism, they prepare the basket of products. They consolidate this basket and they offer baskets of five, 10 and 15 US dollar to the end user. So the end users are urban families. So and they do also the delivery and they charge $1 per delivery to the end user. So and the money is paid to the Unolcar by the families. They go to the bank account, to the Unolcar, to the producer organization and they pay the whole money after that to the producer who have provided the products. So and every week more or less the money that they do because of the delivery is $100. $220 is for covering the cost of the delivery and this $80 is just only because of the delivery goes to this commercialization mechanism. So it is something that has been happening in the last three and four months and it is going very well. So and we could go to the next slide. It's about our mechanisms from Kenya again, this is 30,000 producers before there was a middleman who paid directly to the producers and he or she went to the market or to the buyers. Now with these mechanisms, there is an up from payment of 2% of the total value of the stock paid by the producer organizations and every week $108 received the producers and five producers per week sell their products. 2% of the total value sold is paid by the buyer. It is called the producer buyer linkages and more or less each producer sell $5,000 US dollar a total of $25,000. At the end the organization receive $500 per week because of this week of this fee and this is for the mechanism. I would say to finalize this is that investment in strengthening the capacities of local producer organizations can deliver sustained improvements or rural livelihoods. Also boost recovery from COVID and also build long-term resilience. And also as you can see that local stronger producer organization businesses can leverage further finance and also funding their own operations and with their own profit. And this is a big potential to be at the same time transformational and also sustainable. Thank you for your attention. Thank you. Thank you so much Joanie for that presentation. You do emphasize the aggregation at different levels. I like that you speak that the farmer for us that speaks about multi donor partnerships. So at that level you have aggregation of donor funding but you focus on partnership that helps build capacities at the local levels. I think that is also important and it came out very critically yesterday during the opening ceremony that we need to focus at the same time. At the local level we need to listen to the local people and build their capacity. So it is impressive that the project does pay a lot of attention in building the capacity especially in aggregating the producers at this level and cutting out the middleman. I think we need that to see a lot more scale. So everyone it's time for questions and I will request that if you have any questions for Joanie please put it in the chat room. We do have a question already for you Joanie. It says how do you get the right price for the produce? Can you speak to that? And in terms of numbers, when you speak about the farmers, the producers that are aggregated, is it for example the 3,000 in Kenya and if you do an aggregate for all the 10 countries, how many are we speaking about? Let's start with that. How about you Joanie? Thank you. The aggregation is done by the producer organization. In the case of Kenya is the three growers association of Nyandarwa. The price is done by the market and the producer organization is just the aggregator of the products and the market has a price and before the difference between the price paid by the market and the price that paid to the producer organization was for the middleman. Now it's for the producer organization. And on the top of that, because the buyers know that they are small holders, they are ready to pay 2% for these linkages from small holder producers to the buyers and they pay for each on the top of the price, they pay 2%. So again, we don't put the prices, the prices are from the market and the producers are able to meet these prices. Okay. Joshi from Nepal is asking what products are produced and marketed in Nepal? Okay. Want to speak to that, Joanie? Sorry, I didn't get the question. So Joshi is asking from Nepal which particular products are produced in Nepal through this project? Well, our producers in Nepal because we work with a big organization in Nepal is the biggest producer organization in Nepal. They produce many things in their farm but this kind of commercialization mechanism we have not yet established in Nepal. It's a fake fund in Nepal, the producer organization. Okay. And we have a question from Neela. She's not speaking off, I don't know if it's a sheet. What are the key activities under local people capacity building? Can you break down the capacity building that you offer? Yeah. Well, first is the building the self-steam of the people that they believe that they could do, that not necessary and intermediary and middleman is needed, that they could do themselves, that the strength is in the numbers that they have. Other thing is this bargain power because they are a lot of people. In the case of Ecuador, these producers are the 3,000 producers from products coming for 30,000 hectares. There's a lot of area before they were isolated, scattered and weak, but now with self-steam and the figures. Other thing that I forgot to mention in Kenya is that now they are selling wood products because this is done with the inventory that they have sales done. So we have done a training of trainers for producers, 22 young people were trained and these were training in a cascade until the 3,000 members of the three growers on association of Nandawa could have their own sensors of the products that they have in their farm. So at that point is of the product, but also the association. And that is a big power in the hand of the producer organization. Before the information was done by drones or by computers, by programs and by the government which are good, but now the information is in the hands of the producer organization. They know what they have and also they know the market. So that is a big, big difference. So it is the start of the of the sustainability. It looks like, I'm afraid Susan looks like she's been kicked out of the meeting, but in the interest of time, I'm afraid we're gonna have to move on. But what I would say is please do, I know there's additional questions and my apologies that you didn't get to them, but seek out Johnny on the HOVA app and that's probably the best way to engage there. And then you can sort of, you can continue the discussion. Egley, can we get the slides back up? And then I'm going to ask Moses if you are ready to go and then we will have your presentation. And then similarly, we'll have a five minute moderated Q and A afterwards. I'm pleased to, as any questions occur to you, please do type them in the chat box and we'll try and get through as many as we can. Okay, thank you. Just bear with us while we get the slides. Okay. Good morning. And then somewhere, regions you left and Moses Kakan working at the Addere Sofala. Addere Sofala is a national NGO in Mozambique. It's a agency that is a local economy in Portuguese. But in English, it's a local economic development agency. We spearhead local economic development in its, its real sense. And Addere is a development approach of the United Nations. It's a school of thought how a local community can be developed. So for the purpose of today's presentation, we take it from one of our main thematic themes, but so, so cross cutting, that's microfinance. And in this case, we are looking at accumulating savings and credit associations methodology, which is called ASCA. ASCA is a financial inclusion approach for the poor people. Because normally they are included, excluded from the former financial services. And therefore the approach of village saving and loans associations helps them a lot to get on board also to tap into the benefits of access to finance. When we go to the next slide, the objective of ASCA is to promote the creation and development of local economic activities, allowing the generation of incomes and self employment in families, but also in communities. And also contribute to inclusive and sustainable local development in the rural areas. I've already hinted right on that. So these are the two principal objectives that we work along or we work on. Can we go to another slide? Yeah, these are some of the steps we go through to mobilize and create a village saving group. They may not be in order, but roughly they are the steps. The first step is to mobilize the local communities through their local structures, their local leaders to form groups. And then after that, we have a training package that includes working in a group which we call Assistivism, Leadership, Conflict Resolution, Small Business Management, and then Savings and Credit. At the end of this training, it is normally a three day training. That's when the group, the participants come into a group. And at that point, they give themselves a name for their group and they start to work on internal regulations, how they would be governed. They have a small statute. They start to save. And until now, save our credit rate or what is called the interest, 10% per month. And then we also have an approach for sustainability or to attach promoter is a local person in the community, to the groups that they are saving, they are doing proper records and so on. And then as the group starts to save, there is money at their disposal. So those who are doing business, they improve their business, they increase their capital. Those who are not yet, they start doing business. And then the next step is to support them. In most cases, people in rural communities in Mozambique, they don't have the necessary documentation to have a bank account, but to have a mobile money account, their documents that are required. So the agency supports them because the agency already works with authorities like the tributaria, which is the revenue services or the revenue authority to issue the annuity and also other authorities to issue the national ID, which then facilitates them to open accounts. And then we have good relationships with a number of agencies like I've already mentioned, the revenue services, the revenue authority, banks and authorities that issue national IDs just to facilitate them to be documented and then open accounts. Can we go to the next slide? Until now, we as the agency, we have supported over 340 groups that benefits over 10,000 people and all these groups have been linked to banks, they have accounts. Outside of that, they are also individuals, individuals that have also been assisted and they also have accounts, they are doing their business, they move money, they use money, they deposit money, they use the account in this sense. On a minimum, we are saying that between the groups, there is movement for over 410,000 USD in the movement in these rural-saving groups. So it is quite a reasonable amount of money that is available, that is moving around, that is facilitating rural people and also to be part of the national economy and also to feel that, yes, they are part of the Mozambique economy. Next slide. Yeah, okay. The last slide is just about our context as an agency and also to show some of our activities that we do to improve the stops for energy-saving among other activities. So thank you. Maybe we can go into questions but briefly that is what we have to present. Thank you. Thank you very much, Moses. It was great. So we have a question from Ibrahim from WWF Uganda. He is asking, how is credit handled in the group to limit cases of members defaulting on loans? Thank you. As I hinted on, there is an internal regulation. Small laws. Small laws where if there is a time agreed to return money with interest, if a member falls on that, there are remedies in place also to minimize. But on average, we think that out of a group of 30 people, you'll find the fourth file or third file failing to return the group funds. Okay, thank you. So a question from Anne from WWF Netherlands. How do the activities undertaken in the small businesses contribute to climate adaptation, deal with climate impact and environmental sustainability? Thank you. Thank you. At the beginning, we never mentioned our partnerships, but we are happy that we are into this project with the IID, WWF, IUCN, which has been supporting us to document what we do for most part of this year. Thank you very much, IID, WWF and IUCN. So what happened is that the loans or the staffing groups, the manner variable helps a lot, these families. For example, if there is any shock, last year, at the passing of Cyclone Edine, the forward case in St. Thomas Ambi, and then the later floods, so there is a fallback. There is a cushion in terms of these disasters. The groups have something to start, instead of being starting from zero. They have a saving which is stored away in a bank or in a mobile-man account. And when there is need, they fall back, they use that to push on, to go in front, instead of being in their state. We have seen this in the past disasters. And our groups that are in the saving and loans were really different, coped better than people or families that were not in the groups, for example. Great, we've got a heap of questions coming through. I'm going to read out two more and then we can move on. But again, please do engage on the HOVA app, on the community boards, arrange a virtual meet-up, and then we'll be recording the questions here so we can pass them on. Another question is, how are such initiatives helping to face the COVID crisis as well as climate change? Thank you. Of course, at the start of COVID, it was very difficult because of the restrictions from government. The government reduced the number of people to come together. We had the state of emergency in other ones. And they reduced the number of people that come together in a meeting to attend. So it affected, you know, these are people who sit every week and they are 15, 20 to 30 people. So if you are telling them that they should only meet 10, they already affected. But either way, they have been able to cope through us. We have supported them through our promoters. The promoters have supported them to continue. We have not had a lot of dropouts, even during this time of COVID. The serving has continued and also the to borrow has continued. But of course, they were affected because of the numbers being allowed to come together attending even city. Okay. One final question, and I think this gets right to the heart of the matter for this session, is how can these approaches reach greater scale? Do the small groups have any services and support to manage risk, for example, economic risk or COVID risk or such like? Yeah. First and foremost, how they can reach greater scale. One, it's a committed based approach through local promoters. So it is low cost. The promoter will, from time to time, create more serving groups. Okay. So it is a low cost kind of approach. It requires little investment. The promoters are there. They are trained. They have the capacity and they can replicate. They can create more groups. That's one. Two, the groups at maturity, we link them to banks, to micro and as institutions. So they become small micro enterprises. And we are seeing some of them even becoming having enough money, which they can, even enough funds, which they can also start to lend out to others, apart from providing credit to the members. So it is a, it is, it's low cost. It is replicated. It can be replicated in any kind of, in any kind of, any kind of, any kind of situation, kind of condition. It's a global, a global financial inclusion approach. Great. I know I said that was the last question, but I just spotted one, which I quite like. And then we'll move on because we are, so very quick Moses, because we are a little bit behind. What is the composition in terms of gender of the different groups? We are 70% female, the rest being, being male. And that has also helped a lot in terms of devolution. People borrowing and then returning because normally we have, from experience, we have seen that women see, yes, they take the, the, the loans, but they are very willing and very concerned return the group, the group man. So we have, we have, on average, we have 70, 70% women. Great, great. Okay. We need to move on now in the interest of time. So I'm giving you a virtual clap and I'm going to invite Rebecca from Acumen to present. Egley, if you could get our slides up, please. Thank you. Hi everyone, just a quick audio check. Can you hear me okay, Barry? Yes, yeah. Great. Well, thank you everyone for joining. My name is Rebecca Menci and I am the investment director for Acumen. I sit in Nairobi and I bring you greetings from Nairobi from wherever you are in the world. I will do my best to, to keep time. But I wanted to just start by telling you a little bit about Acumen and then transitioning to the partnership that we have with the Green Climate Fund. Next slide. So Acumen is a nonprofit organization that uses investing as a means to catalyze efficient and sustainable ways of solving poverty. We are looking to develop the right type of capital, the right type of company and the right entrepreneurs needed to tackle the world's biggest problems. When we first started Acumen in 2001, we understood the power of capital for good. And that it would require a different type of investor who aligned values with objectives and for whom financial returns were not the ultimate or the only measure of success. And over the last 18 years, we've seen incredible growth in what is now called the impact investing sector with new funds emerging and traditional players raising impact capital. For this, we follow two strategies. We have an early stage capital allocation strategy where we use philanthropy to invest in and refine business models. And we also have a commercially backed early growth strategy that brings more mature startups to companies that help the poor to scale and companies that want to do it profitably. Since we first started, Acumen has invested more than $125 million across 14 companies. We've impacted over a quarter of a million lives and half of which those lives fall below the poverty line. Next slide. Specifically, as it relates to agriculture, which is why we're here, we've been working to promote, to develop and promote a sustainable way of tackling poverty. This has not been easy. We have learned a lot across all of the sectors in which we invest. And just for clarification, we invest in agriculture, housing, energy, health, water and sanitation, as well as education. Our approach aims to take the core principles of capitalism, customer centricity, innovation, financial sustainability and scalability. And we combine that with the moral motives of philanthropy. We believe that this is one of the most effective ways to approach scale and sustainability for these initiatives. So today's conversation will be about Acumen's work in agriculture and specifically our partnership with the Green Cross. But prior to this partnership, we had a multi-regional focus for agriculture that included supporting a wide range of business models. And that included Act Tech. It included financial services. It included input companies and aggregator companies. And as you might have guessed, we learned a lot of lessons along the way that deeply informed our strategy for the Acumen Resilient Agriculture Initiative. And we also learned a lot of lessons about the Acumen Resilient Agriculture Initiative with the Green Climate Fund. Next slide. We started investing in inputs and soon realized that just investing in inputs like high quality seeds or perhaps irrigation pumps really did not alleviate the challenges that farmers were facing. And it actually did very little to improve incomes. Farmers still faced expensive credit, no training and little access to market. So these issues required our attention as investors. And so then we moved towards a strategy to better integrate farmers into local and global supply chains. And so through these early investments, what we've learned is the importance of working, of supporting companies that provide farmers with a bundle set of solutions. So think not just inputs, but inputs and credit or not just market access, but hyper local weather information as well as market access. And we believe and we've learned that these platform models actually provide a holistic set of services while also serving as a commercially viable service delivery mechanism that reduces customer acquisition costs for the companies that we invest in. Next slide. And so for the collaboration that we have with the Green Climate Fund, we focus on investing in companies that help smallholder farmers adapt to climate change in both East and West Africa. And we expect to impact the lives of 10 million people. With absolutely catalytic support from the Green Climate Fund, we have been able to leverage values aligned commercial investors to support startups that are on their path to scale. As early stage impact investors, we are aware of the tensions that exist between achieving impact as well as financial returns. And we manage these tensions through careful portfolio construction, but also through innovative incentive structures that consider social and environmental performance standards. Just for a bit of context, our investment time horizon is usually seven to 10 years and our entry, entry investments amounts, investment amounts are usually between one and $3 million. Our strategy for the Acumen Resilient Agriculture Initiative builds upon our learnings of investing in platform businesses and we categorize them with three pillars. We invest in ag tech platforms that provide supply chain solutions, information services and online marketplaces. We also invest in ag finance companies that provide agriculture insurance and savings products and broad digital financial platforms. And then finally, we invest in what we call aggregator platforms, but you can think of them as supply chain platforms that seek to make an entire supply chain more resilient to changes in climate. We also want those platforms, those supply chain platforms to include a clear market linkage strategy to premium markets for high value crops. In addition to this investment work that I've laid out, we are also measuring the impact of our work and the climate resilience of farmers over time. And we will share those best practices within our portfolio as well as to the larger climate adaptation community. Today we've made three investments. We just got started at the end of 2019. So today we've made three investments in the horticulture, dairy and water sectors in both East and West Africa and we expect these companies to scale and serve millions of customers over the next seven to 10 years while also delivering a financial return to investors and improving the adaptive ability of farmers to withstand and even thrive during changes in climate. So those are my remarks and I'm very, very happy to answer any questions that you may have. Great, fantastic. Thank you very much. Okay, let's move to the discussion. So, first question comes from Sundip and the question is, what alternative entrepreneurship models can be adopted in South Asia for developing producers, centre supply chains and linkages with market places? So alternatives. I would say that some of the alternatives that we are looking at, particularly in our Latin America portfolio are business models that actually, we call them inclusive business models and what that means for us is that we're looking at companies that are working very closely with cooperatives, for example, who actually give the farmers and ownership stake in the business so that they can see income growth so that they can see asset and wealth accumulation over time alongside of Acumen's investment in that particular company. And so we're seeing more and more of these pop-up because cooperatives are essentially really a standard in a lot of countries in order to aggregate small-holder farmer demand as well as use these larger numbers of farmers to be able to leverage stronger and more, I would say, equitable relationships with off-takers as well as input suppliers. So I would say models that could work outside of East and West Africa, what we're learning is that some of those that really deeply leverage the cooperative model are quite interesting, innovative and have the sustainability component that we're always looking for. And what happens in the case where a venture is not performing as expected? So it happens all the time, first of all, Barry, let me just say that there is no investment that's perfect. When we make an investment decision, we are well aware of the risks and we make certain assumptions about the market and the entrepreneurs, et cetera, but inevitably things go wrong. Look, we tend to take a very active role in the company, so we tend to sit on the board either as a voting board member and we also tend to be very active with providing, and I didn't mention this, technical assistance. And technical assistance can take the shape of everything from additional farmer training, providing right now for a company. We are actually working with them to fund an experiment to increase outgrower yields relative to their model farm yields. So we do our best along the way to support the company from a governance standpoint, from a strategy standpoint, as well as from a technical assistance standpoint to assume that to support its growth. If it doesn't happen, we have a lot of learnings and we apply those learnings to the rest of our portfolio and of course we share our hits and our misses with the larger community. And a question from Lalmani, is could you please elaborate on the insurance? What types of risks are covered and what is the mechanism to cover the risk? Yeah, so what type of risks are covered? It really depends on the company. We certainly look at whether, so typically there's two broadly speaking types of insurance, both of which we are interested in investing in. The first one is where you are, if the reins don't come and you have taken out inputs on credit, then you no longer are responsible for that loan. Or if you've purchased inputs and those inputs have an insurance mechanism attached to it, then you'll get the money back that you spent on those inputs. One thing that we really like are basically insurance mechanisms that provide a recourse. If you, for all of the anticipated income that you would have expected but actually didn't materialize. So those covers are super exciting but a bit more expensive than what some farmers are interested in paying. But those are roughly speaking the models and they cover everything from weather, certainly pestilence. I haven't seen any COVID covers yet but they usually tend to be pretty exhaustive when it comes to climate related issues. And then the second one, what is the mechanism of covering it? I'm not sure that I understand that question. It's a typical insurance mechanism. The pricing is done in advance, the farmers pay the premium and more often than not, what we're seeing across East and West Africa is that governments are subsidizing smallholder farmer insurance not only because it de-risks farming but what it also does is that it helps even from an aid standpoint, a lot of money tends to be routed for food security and what many governments are thinking that an advice can provide additional support in the way of insurance then less aid will be required to address food security concerns on a long-term basis and more aid if necessary can be directed towards perhaps other initiatives of government like education, for example. And a question from Linda on process regarding measuring resilience, how do you do it? Do you also baseline to measure change of what framework there is and what proxies are you using for measuring? Thank you for that. So we are working with a company called 60 decibels and what 60 decibels has done is that they've created a climate resilient toolkit and basically that toolkit outlines the metrics and the exact questions that we will be quite asking and those questions are calibrated to a score and that score ranges from vulnerable all the way to buoyant as a measure of resilience and so as soon as we make an investment within the first hundred days of having made that investment we collect baseline data and then we'll be collecting that baseline data on climate resilience every 18 to 24 months in order to see if, to establish, do our best to establish this causality if this particular company or farmers working with this particular company helping to improve the resilience of small holder farmers over time and these are the metrics. So this was a bespoke internally, I guess contracted toolkit that was specifically created for the Acumen Resilient Agriculture Initiative to measure changes in climate resilience over time. Great. Final question, super simple. Are you able to share that toolkit? No, not yet. Maybe after we kind of worked through it a bit but it was a proprietary toolkit that was created just for us. Okay, great. Susan, are you in the call and know that you have been having difficulties? If you're not, I will move us on. You there? Okay, great. Thank you so much Barry for picking it up. Please. Post Aigli, post the slides. Okay. Thank you for very insightful discussion so far. We'd like now to take it to groups and we have set up a few questions as ignite questions or guiding questions. Okay, Aigli. Okay. I'll just move on. So we are really running out of time but would like to have you engage around these questions. There are three and looking at the number of participants we have. We have about 50 people on the call and we will be splitting you into five groups and we're going to start and we request that you as soon as you start you find a facilitator in the breakout room please nominate a person who will report back on your conversation. Consider each question. Get as far as you can into the question but given the time constraints we recommend that you have a few to the plenary so that we start teasing out our key messages for this session. So I'm not going to read this question. They are going to be posted in each of your breakout groups and Aigli is going to set us up into the groups just so you know once the time is about to end you will get a notice of one minute and either you click on it on the prompt that comes to your screen to get back to plenary or it will automatically bring you back. Okay. Aigli are we ready to launch into the groups please? Yes. Okay. Excellent. Take us in. We have a maximum of 22 minutes to go so we are going to be in the groups for 20 minutes and we will return and try to wrap up within 10 minutes thereafter. Okay. Here we go. Support on the mainstreaming of community based adaptation initiatives and the national policies the this needs to be a respect from the post level to the plans and the local plans and also I think also the other issue I think is we need to ensure the accessibility of financial support to ensure that the community based adaptation are well implemented and that was the need of the local people and also we also focus on how we can build on the capacity of local organizations in the communities and if possible so we know that the community based adaptation at the community level and the creating a learning points where community will be able to have access to for learnings and they use the lesson to to upscale the CBA initiative. Thank you. Thank you so much. Okay. So yes this is very important what we were talking about that the communities definitely need to be integrated more of the mechanisms that can actually help to deliver this finance at the community level whether we talk about this local adaptation or CBA. Okay. So now we have Adi Khatibi you want to talk with us? Hello. Yes. I would like to talk about the number three question and I think one of the most important barriers regarding to scaling up financial climate finance for adaptation at local level is related to monitoring and evaluation of the of the delivering financial support. So we need a national system for tracking and monitoring financial resources especially in the recipients countries because the lack of available data related to the financial resources would be I think would be a most important barrier and if we have great and valuable data related to financial resources so the government can invest more on the local level and the other action which is really important in this regard is related to youth inclusion and women inclusion especially in the local level we need to to realize the needs of vulnerable people we have to include youth people and women group and we can ask them to for example go through the local community and ask the other people about their needs related to climate adaptation by providing questionary or interviewing with local people and then we can to scale up financial support in future. Yes, yes I think that's a very important point which you just raised like we need to include this female women groups and the youth in the mechanism and definitely the monitoring and evaluation is very important like from the perspective of Bangladesh if I want to share like yes there is a big lack in terms of this monitoring the climate funds has been one of the major issue in our country as well to reach to the local level so yes I guess that's a very important point we should take into account okay so who wants to share something next can I request Sally if you want to share something from your experience or your country what's the condition in your place hi hi it's been really interesting hearing what everyone's thinking but and I'm not sure exactly from my side I've been trying to think of just one main action and I think there are so many different things that will need to be done and so I guess from my perspective I work mainly on the sort of international policy process international level and so I was thinking about sort of enabling conditions at that level and I think there's something around how we think about risk and the sort of how we address kind of financial risk and I think perhaps a sort of change regulations around risks when for example it's I guess the amount of funding that is required at that local level is much smaller than those kind of really huge funding pots that are given out by the GCF for example and maybe when they're given out at such smaller amounts of money the level of risk needs to be much smaller and the level of regulation around it needs to be greatly reduced but I'm not sure exactly how to create that change Well I guess your thought really counts that that's a lot right of course based on that Hi Linda we can see you Hi Just a short intervention before I have to leave to another meeting I just wanted to reflect just generally about adaptation funding so I I sit and work now in Finland normally I'm out and about in the world but now due to corona I'm sitting here in my home base and I think financial institutions that are part of their mandate is to finance adaptation just in general they're really challenged because of the fact that adaptation is always place and context specific so it's much more complicated than mitigation where you have the same proxies across the world that you're always looking at and tracking so suddenly you you know proxies there's so many different proxies you have to look at their changes so I think just I'm reflecting just in general it's if you want to know that you're actually creating change you will need to do some sort of baseline and normally donors are a bit well their baseline costs money so yes I guess it's also we can't really get around that we will have to do baseline assessments and they're expensive so I guess that's part of number two of the constraints I think perhaps an action point then related to point three is that we I think and I guess that would be interested to hear your opinions among the rest of the group what do you think do we need baselines I guess I think we need and I think it's going to be more expensive than mitigation support because because of partly because of that baseline need and because we always need to adjust it adjust that the activities so I guess one one point to address that is that there needs to be a general recognition of the needs of the specific needs of adaptation finance that it needs to be tailored and it's you can't just have a blueprint and it will cost money and that's just it yeah I just would like to add something here like we always talk about the bottom of approach we can hear so much about this everywhere but in practical how much bottom of action actually are we taking that's that's kind of that's also a very big question from my side I often find it very yes very difficult so yes but thank you so much Linda can we hear from Mr. Naveen what's your opinion in terms of these three questions would you like to add something okay so I guess it's time to leave the breakout room but okay so let's get back to the plenary within one minute and we will hear more about from the other groups so for the last few seconds Seval do you want to share something I know you were already busy by taking the notes but if you would like to say something about these queries or questions I'm not sure I haven't really had a chance to no problem okay so when we get into the plenary maybe you just share one or two points that would be great sure or would anyone else like to share from the notes document if anyone wants to feedback please do so we had a great discussion looking forward to all of you awesome now that we have 50 participants I think that's kick off I'm going to request that the people that are going to report back you kindly raise your hand so I will know who to invite to report back raise my hand because I'm a co-host but I'm happy to report back excellent now you go first okay so I was with group facilitated by Johnny so enabling conditions to support the scale up we talked about Brack talked about having relationships with donors that enabled to give them more flexibility so that they were not limited by conditionality but we also had an interesting comment that indigenous knowledge and local knowledge was really important to scaling up effectively and having mechanisms that bridge the local knowledge into an institutionalized mechanism and other enabling conditions involved being well networked so the example of community forest user groups networked into a national central community with regular meetings to coordinate and having joint action plans between them was also really important and we also moving on to constraining factors we noted that one of the things to be aware of is that local cohesion and social cohesion is really important for resilience building and if you have a mechanism that focuses only on maximizing profit or maximizing income then you're going to miss the requirements for collective responsibility that are absolutely necessary for resilience and that has to be so overcoming that constraining factor is not forgetting the social side that the social cohesion is really important for the whole society and somebody also mentioned the lack of capacity and knowledge in identifying climate change impacts and a weak documentation of traditional indigenous solutions that we've done so far moving on to one main action unfortunately we didn't assess along well we had quite a few so we noted good policy particularly delivering climate finance at scale to the local level and again the importance of local collective organizations are working with existing systems that are there but working to enhance the role of local collective organizations and now these might be different for different types of cooperatives you might be talking about associations but trying to network with those was seen I think came up quite strongly as a good key action and whoever is the rapporteur I've got more notes that I can share with you Thanks I'll not recap on any because of time that I think so many issues that we discussed as well so let me invite Anne from WWF to share from Anne a few thoughts from our group work it was facilitated by yourself so on the enabling conditions what we're seeing is crucial is the organization of communities but also the backup of national governments as in the insurance example of Akemen where it's a big deal for all of us the policies and conditions the challenges are also in the long-term view that is of climate change and the decision to be made there it's not matching short-term decisions that small or middle with a local act are dealing with so there needs to be a translation of what it means in short-term and what the challenge of the whole society But when you look at solutions, you can talk about an organization at local level use the term collectivization or trading cooperatives where people organize and jointly are able to access finance and solutions in creating a mechanism that is transparent. And it also might mean sometimes just a ring fence for donors for financiers to ring fence money. So this is for the most vulnerable that would otherwise be left out. Those think those are a couple of the main topics that came out of our discussion. Thank you. Thank you so much. And may I now request sake sake back to also share your thoughts from the group. Hi, thank you Susan. Hopefully my internet will last up but otherwise Barry can sort of back up for me. So we mainly talked a little bit about sort of two structures sort of at addressing getting a whole of society approach. Mainly from the information systems of how local communities might be lacking in terms of getting the right knowledge and the right information in terms of accessing funds or even the technical skills of what these sorts of funds are requiring and how they can engage with them. As well as looking at sort of the policy and other systemic structures that exist. And a lot of those ones are not conducive for local communities to be able to engage in these processes. And in terms of the solutions we were looking at perhaps having a little bit more thorough sort of policy reforms looking at taxes and land reforms market systems that we could be sort of looking into which aren't right now geared towards local communities. But then how can we sort of reform them so that local communities are able to be providing value to these sorts of systems and processes. And again in terms of sort of information gathering and sharing it. A lot of the times what one of the discussions we had was how they're not really linked up or being able to be put in touch with other institutions and entities specifically government institutions. In terms of the information that they need to be getting involved with and how we could be coordinating those sorts of messages better and getting them down to the local level so that they're able to integrate themselves more into the processes and be a bit more effective in sort of getting access to funding. If I've missed anything out glaringly Barry please feel free to jump in. Thanks. Thanks a lot. Barry, did you want to No, no, that was I wouldn't allow you anyway. Your time is used up. But I really like the fact that you speak to some specific policy measures like tax reform that is really, really critical. Okay, so I do not see any hands up and we have two more groups to report back. I won't call you out by name but kindly unmute and I'm Robin here is facilitating one of the groups I think Chris is going to feedback time for our group with some of the notes you taken. Sure. Thanks. Thank you. I think first of all, an observation I had was it was hard to be specific. I felt the conversation was very high level. So I mean things like the lack of political will to prioritize small holders is real and there's priority given to big investments so small holders are neglected. Having a nap for example a plan is not enough. There was a sort of thing saying look, we need to carry out climate change vulnerability assessments but I think working at how was a challenge. That said, there was we definitely identified a contrast and a change like in Uganda suggesting that the current new climate bill has got much improved consultation compared to the past. And Nepal. I mean there's been a lot of work for developing a plans at local level. A lot of that's facilitated by NGOs through projects and the bad news is when the funding stops the consultation stops. And then there is a little bit of a huge challenge about where's the commitment by government to funding the implementation. In terms of the main actions with this is where we got to. I mean is recognized as a need to strengthen civil society and is recognized is good for governments to use NGO CSO sort of coalitions to sort of harmonize participation. But there was a discussion we need to attract more private sector financing through things like impact investment. I think we needed longer to really get into the substance. I agree. I agree we need more time for this, but the good thing about this community is that we are saying that the conversation continue. So, the last, the last presenter please. Yes. Yeah, I can feedback from our group fire was facilitating and anyone from our group please feel free to jump in with any points to add. But for the first part we were talking about enabling conditions like broader acceptance of change in culture for something's like gender bias changing. As we are seeing at the moment for delivering climate finance at local level and increasing that finance. So, things being built up for example with the momentum from the GCA locally that action track. Another point was around ensuring that we support the mainstreaming of community based adaptation conditions international policies and local local plans and strategies. We're talking about ensuring how financial support can get to the local people, how monitoring evaluation learning supports this kind of momentum and just integrating communities and making sure they're getting resources. Under the main constraining factors, we spoke about just having an awareness of these issues can help ensure that being sort of resource and addressed. We're talking about other public private partnerships, having, we talked about the role of NGOs is facilitating and mediating between government bodies funding partners, local partners. We're talking about how many things are still being repackaged in different terms but they're the same issues. And we defined a way to really tackle the power relations between things to address them, not just change how they are spoken about. And also a mismatch between rhetoric and practice. So some projects are still being done at community scale rather than actually working with communities. So this is kind of mismatch between needs and what's being delivered. And then another point we talked about was financial institutions are still in terms of adaptation financing, it's quite challenging because it's so different from mitigation financing. It's very context specific and place specific. So it's a lot more complicated to deliver. And so coming on to the third question that drew on from that it was around creating some sort of baseline and baseline assessments might be expensive but they will help monitor change, monitor how things are build a recognition, build that sort of tailored approach for adaptation delivery. And there was a couple of other things we talked about in terms of actions. One was around improving monitoring and evaluation of resources or tracking system, youth and women inclusion at the local level, and really listening to the local communities about addressing risk and specifically like financial risk and changing mindset and policy regulations around these kind of risks. And finally, needing a system to reflect the impact of climate fire adaptation finance at the local level, which will help increase the motivation both at the local level for local communities to engage more as well as national at the national level, to engage and take action and cooperate with the international community to sort of support the whole system. Excellent. Excellent. Thank you so much. All of you for reporting back on such exciting conversation. I want to hand over to Barry to wrap this up. Thank you for saying the cost. We are too late. So yes, big massive thank you for the contributions. The conversation doesn't stop here. Please do take this over to Hova. The Community Boards. The Community Boards. Sam has instructed me to plug the Community Boards. Please keep it active. We've also captured all the questions to the ones which weren't answered. We will be passing on to the presenters and the contributors and hopefully we'll be able to get back to you. Again, please go over to Hova. It's a good place to interact and you should be able to engage with the contributors there. Myself and Susan are active in there as well. So please do feel free to engage with us. We've managed, we've run astonishingly over time. However, we've retained practically all the participants, which I am going to take as a glowing endorsement of the session and your dedication to this. So thank you very much. I'm going to close this now. But again, please get over to Hova and if there's anything else, let us know. Thank you very much for contributing. Cheers guys. I'm going to close this now.