 But what I'll try to share with you today is a bit about the journey that we've been through in ATA over the past eight years or so, reflect on what we've learned, and maybe highlight some of the key themes that I think might be relevant for ILRI as you embark on your kind of institutional planning process and your evolution as well. Clearly ILRI is a much larger, deeper organization than ATA is. We're only about eight years old. And the story of the ATA begins with a conversation that late Prime Minister Mendes had with Bill and Melinda and asked them what can the Gates Foundation do to support Ethiopian transforming its agricultural sector. And I was at the Foundation at the time and I was actually tasked with going, swing for the fences, come up with an idea and a pretty daunting task as you could imagine to have the Prime Minister of a country ask transform our agricultural sector. And clearly I realized this is well beyond my debts as a program officer at the Foundation and I actually reached out to the CGIR and your colleagues at IFPRA and asked them if they could support us in coming up with some ideas. But I also asked McKinsey to partner with us and there was a unique partnership between McKinsey and IFPRA which are completely different organizations that think very differently about how to solve a particular problem. And that itself was a challenge in managing those types of different organizations. But at the end of the day, the recommendation that we provided to Prime Minister Mendes was that you needed a dedicated organization to lead the process of transformation. And that dedicated organization in looking at other countries in such as Korea and Taiwan was something that was an accelerator or a catalyst working on systemic issues. So that's the entity that was formed. And Prime Minister Mendes and his wisdom said Gates Foundation thank you for this recommendation. I have two additional requests. Number one is please can you give me some core funding to get this thing up and running. And number two you said Hanit, since you're the guy who came up with this idea you come and run it so I know who the boy is if it doesn't work. And again I thought to myself what have I gotten myself into. But when we started the ATA it had by regulation three big objectives and mandate areas. The first was to undertake systemic, I'm sorry, to undertake studies to identify what were the critical bottlenecks in the agricultural sector. And in this way it kind of resembled some of the CG centers such as Illry in that we were tasked to come up with ideas as a knowledge-based organization. So that was the first big mandate area. The second one was to support the implementation of these ideas through whatever mechanism existed in the country to implement the ideas that we'd come up with. And then finally it was to create integration and coordination across different institutions that were implementing these ideas. Now these are broad mandate areas and for me again a bit daunting because I said what do I do with this? They're just a series of different things to do. What does the business model look like? And somebody who worked in the private sector for many years that was a bit challenging because we could churn out a whole bunch of studies. We could do a whole lot of capacity building of partners. We could even integrate different partners. But what does the end product look like? So we actually backed up and said what do we want to achieve? At the end of the day generating studies for the sake of studies wasn't going to be enough. So we said what is the prime objective? Let's start there. And then use the mandate areas as tools of achieving that big objective. And we came up with three big objectives. The first was to improve the lives and none of these is going to be very surprising to you and I suspect they'll be very similar to Illry's mandate areas. But the first was to improve the lives materially of the 17 million smallholder farmers that exist in Ethiopia. That was number one informer. The second was to ensure food security in the country. To make sure that Ethiopia always had enough food to eat. And then lastly it was about changing the structure of the agricultural sector in the country. So that it moved from a subsistence based smallholder farmer oriented agriculture sector to one that was much more modern based much more on comparative advantage and economies of scale. So those are the three big themes that we wanted to try to solve. And then we said okay how do we solve these three big things? Because again generating studies and doing capacity building is just going to be a random set of activities. So we came up with kind of a matrix approach to address these three big issues. The first is to try to address the systemic issues at a national level. And the second was to integrate these in specific geographies. So the first part of our business model was what we eventually ended up calling the transformation agenda. And this transformation agenda is a series of interventions that were identified by the Ministry of Agriculture and various stakeholders all around the country which we brought together in a series of different workshops and meetings and said what are the big areas that we should focus on? First is program areas. So things like seed and fertilizer and vaccines for livestock or or new breeds that might need to be developed. So those big program areas were first identified. And there's 25 of them that we said okay here are things that we're going to concentrate on. And then within the 25 we said let's please identify two to three big things. Let's not try to boil the ocean and try to solve every single problem. But let's come up with two or a maximum of three big things that we're going to solve over five years in each of these 25 areas. And then within these two or three big things what are the three to five big interventions? No more than five interventions in each of these two to three big things. So a big part of our work was bringing together stakeholders to prioritize. To say what do you focus on that could make the big systemic changes all around the country. And then once we've identified all of these what we ended up with was 49 big interventions and a hundred and eighty eight different I'm sorry 49 big deliverables and a hundred eighty eight specific interventions that needed to be implemented. And then for these a hundred eighty eight specific interventions there were owners and timelines and a whole bunch of other stuff that we also identified. So that was the first big part of our work. The second one was how do you actually integrate these specific geographies. So we identified specific parts of Ethiopia where we would integrate these solutions with smallholder farmers. And ultimately we landed on 300 waradas or districts 10 commodities and 30 what we called clusters. And within these there were about five million farmers that we work with. So that's our business model right so we have systemic issues that we deal with at a national level and then particular geographies where we try to integrate them. As an organization though we had to define what do we do. What is our role in this. And to do that we ended up going back to our mandate areas. And those first three mandate areas that I mentioned studies implementation support and integration and coordination. And for each of these we also had to develop a way of working. So in the area of studies what we did was we looked at the IT pre-model of researchers and scientists we looked at the McKinsey model and we ended up creating a hybrid between it. So we have a team of 50 people at the ATA that is a combination of experts that come from places like McKinsey or Bain or BCG. As well as young students that we hire directly from Ethiopian University so that they can actually grow through the ranks and become leaders within our analytics team. Married them with technical experts in the different content areas where we're working. So we have an analytics team of about 50 to 60 experts that are constantly generating outputs which seems like the McKinsey types of decks that you normally see. The way it differs from the McKinsey decks is that it just doesn't provide what to do but also how to do it. So that's the first part of what we worked on. The second was on the implementation support. And in this area we had a lot of evolution and changes. How do you support the ministry of agriculture? How do you support the regions of Ethiopia to implement? And we went through a number of different models and eventually ended up with something called a delivery unit approach. And this is something that the Tony Blair Institute and a number of other organizations are now using all across Africa but it's essentially about program management. It's about identifying what are you trying to do, how are you going to do it and really just rigorously managing that process. And then finally this idea of integration and coordination is something that we try to do within the two business models that I talked about. So as we implemented this approach over the first five years of the 80s existence we realized that things weren't getting done as quickly as we'd wanted. And I'll come back to this topic at the end but what we ended up doing was going to the prime minister and saying look you want to see results so do we. But providing support by itself is not going to cut it. We need to do something differently. And at that point we were given a new mandate to directly implement projects. And over the past four years we've been implementing 25 different projects which have now become the biggest part of our organization. So what is what has all this led to. So when I reflect on what we've done at ATA I think there are four big things that I'm most proud of and I think that have contributed to the transformation of Ethiopia's agricultural sector. The first is the introduction of innovative ideas. So those innovative ideas are at the conceptual level such as the transformation agenda as a mechanism to prioritize systemic issues and how do you solve them. Or the commercialization cluster initiative that I talked about which is the integration of those interventions on the ground. Those types of concepts are things that we've introduced to Ethiopia's agricultural sector. But more than that is some of the projects that we've been working on. So some of you might have heard of our Atheist's digital soil mapping project which over the past five years and this is one of our first projects over the past five years we've collected over 150,000 soil samples. Bag them, tag them, GPS coordinates the whole thing and then used wet chemistry and spectrophotometry to analyze the soil the nutrients within the soil so that we can provide targeted fertilizer recommendations to farmers all the way down to the whatever level. This is a big difference from what used to happen in Ethiopia as recently as five years ago where every farmer in the country no matter what they were producing whether it was sesame in the highlands of Tigray or wheat in the moments of Somali region it was 100 kgs of depth and 100 kgs of urea. It didn't matter what you were producing it didn't matter what was in the soil. So for us over five years to change the fertilizer recommendations of the entire country I think is the kind of innovation that we've been able to introduce. So the first big thing for us in terms of a takeaway is the innovations that we've been able to introduce into the sector. The second is the engagement and I think you'll hear this over and over again if you're working in Ethiopia is how do you engage the private sector because in Ethiopia our public sector has been dominant over most of the economy especially in agriculture over the past 25 years. So for us a big part of our work has been how do we broaden the space so that many more actors can engage. And while a lot of people look at our engagement of partners such as OCP the big Moroccan fertilizer company that's investing over or nearly three billion dollars to build a fertilizer factory in Dredewak as a major achievement that's not where I look to and say that's the big change that we've made. Because attracting foreign direct investment can only get you so far. The big thing I'm most proud of in terms of our private sector engagement is a small and medium-sized enterprises Ethiopian companies that we've helped to initiate their engagement in the agricultural sector. So be it seed distributors or well-drillers or even the farmers themselves be it crop farmers or livestock farmers having them think of themselves as private sector as business people has been one of the major achievements that we've had because for too often over the past 25 years we think of farmers as beneficiaries and I think that is one of the biggest problems with development. Farmers are not beneficiaries farmers or business people that need access to markets and access to input so that they can generate a livelihood that is supportive of their families. But too often we think of farmers as beneficiaries that need help. Yes we all need help. Are we all beneficiaries in that context? I would argue not. So one of the big things that we've done is make sure that the narrative around farmers is one around business and one around away from the concept of beneficiaries. The third big thing that I think ATA has been able to achieve and something that is important is the ability to go to scale. In many instances organizations such as ATA are very good at piloting ideas and bringing innovation but they never really go to scale. I think we've been quite fortunate and I'll come to why we've been able to do this that many of our activities and projects have actually done the scale. So the Ethios project that I talked about is a national project that has affected farmers all over the country. Another one of our projects called the 8028 farmer hot line is a mobile based extension service that includes both crop and livestock commodities that provides toll-free services to farmers. Any farmer can call anybody can call 8028 right now on your mobile phone and you'll have access to four different languages Ethiopian languages that will allow you to get information on everything from nutrition to fertilizer to even climate. And we have over four million farmers signed up and that are using this system over the past four years. So that ability to go to scale I think is one of the major achievements that we've had. Now what does this mean and why am I bringing these things up? Because I think there are four key lessons for us that might be interesting and useful for Illry. The first is we've had to change our business model from what we began as an organization to what we do now because initially the idea of ATA as a think tank as a knowledge based organization by itself was not delivering results as quickly as we wanted. So in Ethiopia most of you will know when you work with the government there is an appetite for data and evidence. They will listen. Policymakers here in Ethiopia will listen if you give them evidence and data. Unfortunately the translation of that data and evidence into action on the ground is where things fall apart. There are tons of strategies and policies and ideas that have been generated over the years that just literally sit on the shelf. So we had to actually think about how do you execute? How do you take these ideas to the ground? So that was one big learning for us. But the way in which we did that is also second learning because most people and even ATA initially our initial translation of how do we translate or how do we move from evidence and policy advice to execution was related to capacity building. So we did a ton of capacity building. We trained people here, there and everywhere. But still we didn't see results. So we had to think about this differently and say why aren't changes happening? And we came to two conclusions. Number one the people that you train walk out the door the next day especially in the public sector where they're not being paid very much. So the capacity building that we did shifted from human capacity building to institutional capacity building. So what we try to do now is build systems and process within institutions so that anybody in that institution can benefit from them and can execute. And the second thing that we did was change the type of capacity building that we were trying to do. Because as scientists I think you will automatically gravitate towards capacity building that's more focused towards technical capacity building. And while that's necessary I would argue that that's not what is missing. What is missing at least in our context has been capacity building and problem solving and an execution in project management. And what we've seen is a great breeder or a great soil scientist does not make a great project manager. Those are two totally different skill sets. So we had so we've had to actually think about how do you teach people how to execute projects because those are different skills. How do you teach people how to manage and lead because that's very different than working in a lab. So those are additional concepts that we've now had to build into the work that we do and the way we engage with partners. Which brings me to my third point which is all about going to scale can never be done by one organization by itself. We tried that and frankly that doesn't work. So this concept of partnerships is something that always comes up but you've got to make sure that when you're building partnerships you understand the business model of the organizations that you're working with so that you leverage their best capabilities rather than looking at it purely from your own lens. And that's what we've had to do better and better over time. So we're always asking what can you bring to the table. What are you good at rather than I need this. So change the conversation from one of what do we need to execute to how do we partner with others to get to scale. Which brings me to my final point which is that ATA has grown from an initial idea that we were only going to be a 50 person organization 65 maximum to now nearly 600 people purely because we've had to evolve and change. So that concept of change and evolution is part of our DNA. And for a lot of people change and evolution is very difficult. Even within the organization itself within ATA itself most of our colleagues and employees were not ready to change and evolve. But we've made that part of our DNA by putting in systems and processes that dictate change. So for example all of our projects get launched at 80 percent design. We never tried to launch a project that is 100 percent perfectly designed because that doesn't exist. It's a fallacy. Just like Napoleon said you know the best strategy is only as good as the first contact with the enemy. That's the same thing with any project designed. It's only as good as the first time that you engage with your partners on the ground and realize this is not going to work or we've got to change this. So that realization from the start has been one of the founding features of the ATA is anything that we do is only 80 percent design from the beginning. That gives us that 20 percent from the beginning to evolve and change. Sometimes the things that you change or the 80 percent that you've designed rather than the things that you kept open because you weren't really taking context into consideration. So while project design has been one part of our evolving nature the organization itself has had to also evolve. And that has been the most difficult part of our journey because when you set up teams and then all of a sudden ask those teams to do something different six months later or a year later that is a very uncomfortable position for people to be in. So it takes a different type of leadership a different type of approach to make people comfortable with that change and some of it is really just about recognizing that you're never going to get it right from the start and recognizing that it is a journey that it is part of the process. And then eventually you'll get something right but even that is right for that context in that right time and that will change as well. So getting people comfortable with that sense of change and evolution is something that we've had to do. We're not a hundred percent there but I would suggest that every organization especially in the development space has to do that in order to remain relevant. So these are at least some of the learnings or some of the observations that that I've made over our journey over the past eight nine years in ATA. I hope some of them are useful to you and thank you for your time and attention.