 I'm Yasmina Zademan. I'm the Chief Partnership and Development Officer for Acumen. And we are joined today by entrepreneur Ben, as well as two investors to talk about work that we've done together that I'll give a little bit of context for, but just to kind of briefly introduce the panel to my right, Lisa Willems, who's the President and Founder of Alpha Mundi Foundation, and really was the kind of instigator of the G Search Coalition that we'll talk more about, Ben Krins, who is the Founder and CEO of the Nebron, a silly agriculture, who was a part of this research, and Willie Foote, who's the CEO and Founder of Root Capital, who also participated. So we've all had a chance to work pretty closely together, and hopefully can share with you some of our experiences. So the premise for the conversation today is that for a lot of us, gender equity, and I think probably for many of you as well, is not just kind of the right thing to do, but is really the smart thing to do for building high-impact and successful businesses. And whether it's intuitive or justice-based or evidence-based, there is actually a strong case that advancing gender equity in business overall is just the smarter path. We've seen data that shows that female-led companies outperform all male founding teams. We've seen the benefits that accrue from having gender-diverse boards across every kind of business. And there's actually a new study that came out from Arabesque that showed that gender-diverse companies are more likely to align their strategy around a goal of capping global warming. So it seems like gender diversity could have multiple impacts. But despite all of this evidence, the reality is that across large mainstream businesses, and often among startups as well, it is really difficult to see the kind of gender parity and gender equity that we want to see, not only in terms of the companies, but also the ways that they operate, the people they employ, and sometimes the customers that they serve. So we as a community of investors who really see the value of gender equity wanted to find a way to advance gender equity, not just by saying, let's just dedicate all of our capital to female entrepreneurs, but to dig deeper into this question of how do you integrate gender equity across your portfolio and really embed it in the DNA, particularly of early-stage companies, rather than waiting until they've scaled to say, these are some sort of deeper problems that we see. How do we start from the beginning and integrate that into the ways that we support companies? So this is not a conversation about sort of portfolio construction or investment strategy. This is about how we support and accompany the companies that we work with. So we're gonna talk a lot about technical assistance and capacity building. What are we doing with the entrepreneurs that we support to advance gender equity? We have provided some copies for you of an executive summary of the research that we decided to do. Essentially we had a conversation and Lisa will talk more about it, but it was like we're doing this, but what are we learning and are we really leveraging each other as much as we could to understand what's working? And so we joined forces, Alpha Mundi, Acumen and four other impact investors to look at specific TA projects that we could learn from and ended up looking at over 30 projects. So today we'll hear a little bit about the research, but really wanna open it up to a conversation with all of you to see how this issue comes up either for your business, for your fund, or if you're one of those organizations that's really helping to lay the groundwork for gender equity where you've seen successes and challenges. So I'm gonna start with Lisa and I would love for you to just share a little bit more about how this research came to be and some of the key takeaways that you guys came away with. Great, thank you. So for those of you who are like so-cap veterans and have been around at this conference for a while, Suzanne Beagle always used to do a gender thing that started at like seven or eight a.m. like really early. When she first started, there were like nine people in there. And by 2019, or I think that was when we, Yasmeen and I talked, it was this massive tent with like two, 300 people. So our journey started first by, just for background, Alpha Mundi invests predominantly debt as an in financing and early state enterprises in East Africa and Latin America. So most of the pipeline we were seeing was male founders. And basically a lot of this started because the earlier definitions I think of gender lens investing, we just felt were a little bit too narrow. So as Yasmeen just mentioned, it's not just about directing capital to female founders, which of course we want to do and continue, want to encourage everyone to continue doing as well. But we were investing in companies that had 20 employees at the time of our investment and grew to seven, 800, 1,000 employees. And we wanted to come up with a way to embed gender equity and power women in these companies and not ignore 25% of the pipeline companies we were seeing. So how can we, broaden this definition of gender lens investing to include all these companies that might not be started by women but have tremendous potential to impact the local employees, the staff, the clients beneficiaries, et cetera. So we started, I founded Elf Community Foundation in 2016 to raise a dedicated technical assistance facility to support our companies. Gender was one of the issues I really wanted to focus on. And we realized other people, root capital, I think probably longer than anybody else. Yasmeen and I were chatting at Socap at this gender event three years ago and we were like, how can we do more of this? How can we scale this? And I think what investors really want to see is a business case for it. So what are the concrete social and financial benefits of spending money on doing this type of work? And that was how this got started. Cause we were like, all right, we know a lot of people who are doing similar things but no one's ever actually researched what the quantitative benefits are that we can see. Like we know anecdotally from talking to our companies that they've seen benefits. But the purpose of G-search was to actually take a subset of projects from like-minded investors and apply a very rigorous analytical approach. So we worked with William Davidson Institute of the University of Michigan and lots of survey data, pre and post project, pre and post intervention. And the result is really two years of this research report that you can find here which was really just scratching the surface but does show that we uncovered a lot of very concrete social and financial benefits of this type of work. Maybe I stop there for now. I think we'll have lots, lots more to explore. So I'm gonna hop over you for a second and come back to you. So Willie, I guess just as Lisa said, you've been doing this longer than anyone and gender I feel like has been in this group. Gender has been integral to your strategy for a really long time. And I wanted to just hear from you sort of why that's the case and how you think about supporting the entrepreneurs and the businesses that you work with with that gender lens. Well, thanks. You guys made it, it's great to be here. So I guess I'd say our work is very much influenced by the kind of capital that we provide and the sector that we're in. And so agriculture, root capitalist clients are farmer cooperatives and farmer associations, village-based processors and millers of local crops and purchase coffee, cocoa, tree nuts, local grains, other crops and really can provide a springboard out of poverty for millions of people. And as you said, this year we are celebrating our 10th anniversary of our Women in Agriculture Initiative whereby we've invested in women led, invested in and providing lots of business support to women led and gender inclusive businesses that are proactively creating economic opportunity for women and also increased opportunities for participation and leadership of women at the enterprise level and also at the farmer level. And so when I think about, so actually this year we are roughly 25% of our portfolio is women led and over 50% is gender inclusive. And so to how the capital, the root capital provides influence of what we're doing, we are, a lot of what we do, not all what we do on the leading side is trade finance, is working capital, short term working capital so farmers get paid well and on time when the harvest sits. This year we're gonna provide roughly $170 million to 200 businesses roughly that aggregate about 750,000 farming families, so three million people if you include family members, household members. So there's, and we will train this year, financing 200 will train, provide business support to about 350 businesses, half of whom are in our current portfolio, half of which are in a one to two year process of entering into our portfolio. Why is that important in terms of how we approach business support is that we have a lot of pattern recognition over the years working with hundreds and hundreds of businesses as to what are those specific needs that we need to customize around capacity building, but they can be very repeatable and scalable across similar profiles of businesses really around the world. And so specifically I'll mention four key things where we focus on business support. First is business management advisor specifically financial fundamentals. So that would be accounting systems, financial reporting, financial analysis, financial planning, it's pricing and profitability, internal controls, financial literacy at the farmer level. So that's thing one, thing two would be data, DBI data, business intelligence, whereby we're digitizing farmer level data across now close to 80 of our clients and building the enterprise level information management systems so that the data at the farmer level can be used as a decision making tool and can inform for instance and monitor and track climate smart agriculture practices or gender bad culture practices. And then last one would be for instance that I mentioned there are others, but a CRAW which is agronomic and climate resilience advisory where we're working with the local extension teams, the agronomic teams within farmer businesses to deepen their expertise around regenerative agricultural practices and build up those teams and provide all sorts of support there. So all of this we deliver and I'll come to where gender equity fits in all of this we deliver through centralized workshops and onsite advisory. So just quickly where gender equity fits in on our business support, I'll just mention a few things. First, we've had a partnership since the very beginning with value for women which is a gender research organization. It's been a very important partnership for us whereby together we have developed and we've established and we've hardwired and we've disseminated kind of the fundamentals of gender inclusive training and also rolled out our commitments in gender equity across our global operations. So that's been really important. The next one is that we've trained and continue to train all of our advisors, our business support advisors around the world in gender inclusive pedagogy that we've developed together with value for women. And so that's making sure that everybody's really up to speed on what our best practices, what are the gender dynamics that would really influence how you are very thoughtful about inclusion of women in the training. A couple more, mainstreaming what we call a gender inclusive checklist where we're trying to be, for instance, very thoughtful about location and timing of say a centralized workshop whereby, for instance, we will make sure and we've learned this the hard way over the years that if we have a three day or four day centralized workshop on cash flow projections in Goma in Eastern Congo, we make sure that we have a session in the morning, session in the afternoon, but there's say a three hour session in the middle so that women, if they need to cook a meal for their family or they have personal responsibilities that they can't get away from, that they can do that. And maybe lastly, I'll mention incentivizing participation of women. So we will, for instance, ensure that we're paying for childcare so that women who come to a centralized workshop either can bring their children or bring their sister or their mother to help them out or line up childcare alongside. So all of these things just to conclude have allowed us to and I think in the last couple of years we've gone from 30% participation of women in our workshops to 36 last year which was 1,330 women who were participating in these workshops. And it's absolutely been fundamental for the work we're doing. We'll get into more, but that's the overview. Thank you, Rory. One thing I love about the last set of numbers that you gave, going from 30 to 36%, it's not like, well, we're done now, we've solved this. It's that you're seeing the progress and you can learn what did you do that got you from 30 to 36 that might get you to 50. And so that to me is the basis of what we were trying to do here. It wasn't to make the perfect the enemy the good but say, what are we doing that's working? So I wanna turn to you, Ben. You're an entrepreneur, you're building your business. You're also an investor of Alpha Mundi and we're kind of the beneficiary, I guess, of one of these TA projects. So I wanna hear a little bit about how you've worked with investors like Alpha Mundi to support your own efforts around gender equity, how that shows up in your business and kind of what was it like? What worked, what didn't work? If you think about the experience of really intentionally focusing on that gender equity piece of your business. Yeah, sounds good. Thank you so much and good morning, everyone. And thanks for including me in this, Yasmeena and Lisa. So let me just take a quick step back and introduce a silly agriculture as an agri-service and marketplace platform operating in Uganda. We've been operating since 2013. We provide farm management services to both small scale producers as well as large scale landowners who are looking to cultivate their land according to climate smart or regenerative agriculture practices primarily in the staple foods value chains. So maize and soya bean. And then we also have a platform through which we market over 40,000 tons a year that we're sourcing from those small scale producers and from our enterprise producers or the large scale landowners to customers across the region. World Food Program is accounting for about 20% of our customers, large feed and animal feed and food processors in Kenya and in Uganda. And so we've been operating since 2013 working with about 15,000 smallholder farmers and providing intensive land management services on about 8,000 hectares and really pioneering conservation or regenerative agriculture practices in East Africa. So we're an investee of Alfamundi and I just wanna take a step back again and just share that when we started the business my brother and I co-founded the business together both being in Uganda, I think we, I would say we kind of had a, the gender equity was a little bit opportunistic for us in the sense that we just found that the best senior management that we could find were women. And so at a very early stage from the company we had at the senior level of the company a very high lopsided towards our local staff being women. But as we grew and grew to where we employ right now about 250 full-time employees and about 900 temporary employees across our operation that I think intentional or that ethos that we had in the beginning quite quickly slipped and really never evolved into like a core strategy a core unifying strategy on how we can actually mainstream gender and make gender a competitive advantage that it really was kind of naturally for us from the beginning. And so Alfamundi in 20 about a year ago started to work with us and offered a technical assistance opportunity actually to engage value for women where value for women came in and did comprehensive assessment of the current state of our gender within our company. So that included everything from trying to organize across the company all the different sources of data to understand customers, suppliers both farmer suppliers as well as grain trader suppliers casual laborers, where is our business right now touching women and what's kind of a baseline? How do women employees feel working for the company as compared to men employees? And that gave us then an assessment from which we went through a process of developing a commitment statement and really a gender strategy. And that gender strategy started with a commitment statement where we basically set out what's our belief about agriculture or what's our belief about gender equity and really believing that as we pioneer conservation agriculture as we pioneer regenerative agriculture that women play a really important role both as smallholder farmers as well as and also decision makers within our company to making sure that that's really a prioritization of how we operate. Yeah, so from strategy, we basically within the strategy are identified really four key initiatives. The first key initiative was around the workplace and really identifying ways to increase retention of and increased participation of women in the workplace for us, so kind of a workforce focused element. The second piece of the strategy was around increasing participation of women in our farmer base, increasing their access to services. So we found that we had a lot of farmer women who were supplying but weren't getting access to other services that we were providing to the farmers. Then third was around safeguarding. I don't know if that's a term that's used as usual as regularly in the United States, but where we operate safeguarding really refers to everything from anti-sexual harassment to really how our operation is interacting with the community. So as a business with large scale farms with rural extension officers, really creating a standardized process by which sexual harassment issues and other child and gender protection issues could be escalated at the very top of the organization at any moment where there's an issue became not just something that we were doing from a really became something that was central to what we were trying to do. And then I think the last piece around the gender strategy and commitment was about how do we mainstream data or make all of our data and all the data that we're capturing across the organization, integrating a gender lens in a similar way to how we're integrating an understanding of our GHG emissions and really looking at how we can use that management information to make better decisions around it. You asked me what works or I think recommendations I'd have for entrepreneurs and maybe for investors. I think for investors I would say I'd really recommend as you're suggesting Lisa or as G-search is showing is really make the business case for it. And I would say sometimes the business case can be as simple and maybe as elementary as it's gonna enhance fundraising, which I think that you guys did a good job of kind of initially pitching it as that and became much more for us as we went through that process. And I think my advice for entrepreneurs would be probably less specific to gender technical assistance but to just technical assistance in general. I would say that a lot of the time at least how I used to approach a technical assistance and say the early stages of our company as compared to this value for women project was okay, we got technical assistance. Now let's go give it to maybe our extension team and now that extension team is gonna develop a new protocol on how we're training conservation agriculture to farmers. And I would just recommend for entrepreneurs that really the technical assistance is an incredible resource and sometimes it's not perfect. It often isn't perfect and it comes with a lot of different ways you have to finagle it but if you can really own that from the beginning and make it be something that's a comprehensive piece of your strategic intent really I think that that's gonna be a lot more effective than just kind of handing a technical assistance budget to some fringe part of the organization that then really doesn't mainstream it within how you're managing the company. So yeah, that's kind of where we are what we how we've thought about gender and we're just really now in implementation. And yeah, so that's great. So there'll be more lessons to come. Well, thank you for that. I think the last point that you made is a good kind of jumping off point with this question around, you know, TA or technical assistance in general when we started this project, you know, we each of our organizations was providing this support for entrepreneurs in different ways but we realized as we were embarking on this research that it is not a foregone conclusion that investors need to create pools of funding often grant funding that enables companies to tackle some of their critical business issues. And for something like a gender lens or a climate lens to something like enhancing your ability to tap into social impact metrics. These are things that may have sort of a public good element that may support the business but might also support the broader goals of an investor or of this movement. And it, you know, we feel there's a strong case for TA but to be very honest, I think while we're talking about gender lens TA there is still a bigger conversation about TA and who should be paying for this. So I just wanted to kind of flag that because I think this is a space where we get to surface sort of controversial questions. The other thing that you've probably heard by now is that all of us have worked with value for women. They are currently at the biggest gender lens investing event I think of the year called Gender Smart. It's happening in London. So for folks in the room who really want to dive deep into gender lens investing, that's a community to be aware of. And value for women has been an incredible resource for all of us in really bridging between again the goals of enterprise development and gender equity in ways that have been really powerful for our teams. So I want to come back to this group in a minute but for all of you and for folks who joined to kind of as we've been speaking, the topic of the day is how do we really embed gender equity into the businesses in our portfolio or into our own companies rather than trying to decide who's gender good and who's gender bad. Gender equity is a journey and so we're on that journey. The companies we work with are on that journey and what we've shared in this report are examples of how we are supporting companies to more deeply embed gender into their portfolio and to their business model. So I wanted to just turn to you for a minute if anyone has a burning question before we sort of come back with some comments from the panel. I just have a question around the TA engagements. I'm curious if any of you have come across any TA engagements that exclusively target men and boys around like their role in creating a gender equitable workplace or environment. A lot of times TA engagements are targeted at including women or bringing more women in with but if we don't think about what environment are we bringing them into is it really beneficial for long-term kind of systemic change? So just curious about your perspective on where you see the role of men and boys in this gender equity process. Great, thank you. Maybe I'll jump in quickly and then I'll tell others. Just anecdotally, this is kind of a fun and interesting example you're talking about. Our head of advisory services for Mesoamerica, Mexico, Central America has had a radio show for a long time around talking about with men about machismo in Mexico. And so I think that's a really important question that you ask around specifically gender inclusion that it can't exclude men, of course. And so one of the things that I think we've done a lot of work around is we have kind of moving beyond the traditional technical assistance. We have a program called Gender Equity Grants where we say neither lending nor the traditional business support can address certain obstacles that face women in their journey in the business or in the farm. And some of them have been for their $20,000 grants that have gone toward launching a women's line of coffee and creating a carve out women's association within a larger cooperative. And a lot of the work is working with men and other farmers around why this is a beneficial thing for everyone to have more income for women, but that there's no organ rejection. And there's a lot of togetherness talking through the importance of gender inclusion so that you can leverage this important asset, which is 50% of your population in your workforce, et cetera. But it goes back to maybe to conclude, it goes back to being able to really course whisper your way into what are really thoughtful gender inclusive strategies to not have perverse consequences that you didn't expect if you're not including, for instance, very deliberately men and boys in the conversation. Well, I mean, I think this is what we are doing by definition because we're targeting companies that were founded by men and then bringing that TA to them. And Ben, actually the way you described your journey, it's very classic to what we've heard a lot. Oh, yeah, we're mindful of gender. And I had a CEO of one of our solar companies a couple of years ago on a panel, we're 50-50 in management with women. And then that's where it ends. They're like, hey, we've hired some women and check, we're done. But I'm sure as you can attest to now, once you go through this whole exercise and you look at gender equity across the business operations in total, by definition that is we are working predominantly with men at that point to then build a strategy that works for everyone in the business, both men and women. And when we were talking to the CEO of our solar company, we were asking about the customers and who predominantly buys these and like, do you have any women on your marketing team? So your marketing team, oh no, we don't really, like we haven't thought about that. What about on your design team? Like, you know, so it's when you start, I mean, how we start and what Ben mentioned, and we work with Value for Women, Supervaluable Partner, they can't do everything. So I definitely think there's a need for more organizations like them. And I think there's a need for standardizing some of these projects or packages that we do. So they can be scaled up and we can talk more about scaling later. I lost my dream of thought. I totally lost my dream of thought. But bottom line, we are working with men. Yeah, I mean, the project came about to work with men because we felt that the gender lines was too focused towards women and supporting just women entrepreneurs as opposed to working with men to be inclusive. Yeah, and I think one thing that is a really interesting piece of the research is that there really is a very broad array of interventions. So we didn't think like what everybody needs is this policy or everybody has to run through this training. It was actually very bottom up. And I think there's a resource, I think, in addition to the final research, which was conducted at the very beginning of the process to just look at these six impact investors and say, how do you approach this? What are the tools that you're using? What are the frameworks that you use as you're thinking about providing TA? And one of the themes that came through was that we're really listening to entrepreneurs about the issues that are really material to their business and aligned with their mission. So again, when we work with an entrepreneur at Acumen, there's one who works in Sierra Leone and then took his model into a different country. They were really excited about the level of participation of women farmers in Sierra Leone. When they transitioned into a different country, which I can't remember, the number dropped precipitously and suddenly only like 15% of the participating farmers were women. So they said, okay, this wasn't an issue because we were seeing organically this high level of participation from women, but now it is an issue because we're in a different context. So we really have to understand what are the barriers for participation of women? And that to me is sort of like, I think rather than saying, we're gonna target women or target men, it's to say, this is a time of learning. So let's actually work with entrepreneurs with groups like Value for Women, do the innovation thing that we've all been doing for so long and learn through that what is really working, what is really material. My question is for Ben. Ben mentioned something called safeguarding. Can you elaborate a little bit more about that? And if you have protocols you can share with me, I would be happy to appreciate that. Yeah, super. So safeguarding is I guess the principle of trying to create mechanisms by which inherent power structures are can't be exploited to hurt people who are vulnerable in your operation. So that obviously involves the women employees that work within our company or women casual laborers who would be, characterize as vulnerable working for say, a man who's responsible for verifying if she's done her work. So how do you make sure that that woman has a way of raising an alarm or whistle blowing or raising that grievance that maybe the individual is seeking to like force her into some kind of sexual behavior or something like that. That's kind of what I guess we all kind of immediately think about when we think about safeguarding, but then for us it went beyond that where we have a network of rural aggregation officers that we call village transformation entrepreneurs that today are agents who earn a commission as they sell inputs on our behalf and buy grain from us where kind of long term vision is that they can become true and if entrepreneurs franchises to provide the service. So how do we embed within the services that they're provided or embed within the structures that they're operating through ways that sexual harassment issues, any exploitation can be immediately escalated to the company and be managed in a transparent and legitimate manner. And so we do that through what we call our grievance mechanism, which is basically a- but I may have to cut you off because we have about five minutes and I wanna make sure we get to wrap up, but the point there is that there are going to be protocols and policies and I don't think every startup needs to invent them. So one of the things that we can think about is how are we making those more widely available? So for example, a company that's structured in a similar way in a similar context and that's I think going to our last comments what are some things that you would recommend that investors do to really support this process? What is the first step or a starting point that you think investors can take away? And then likewise for entrepreneurs in the room what can they do to really partner with investors or stakeholders that are supporting them to really accompany them in this process? So it doesn't feel like the entire burden of advancing gender equity sits with an early stage social enterprise which just doesn't seem right to me. So any advice that you'd have for folks as they start on this journey? Yeah, I'll start with both since we've done it. I think you can't start on the journey without knowing where you are. So I think the first point, whether you're an investor or an entrepreneur is to assess where you are and we did that internally at Elphamundi as well as just looking at our portfolio companies to see where are we? And when we work with Value for Women I think one of the most valuable things in the feedback we got from all of the companies we worked with and not just us but everyone who worked with Value for Women is they do this incredibly thorough diagnostic survey of all the employees where they really ask a lot of questions that uncover the perceptions of the culture of the company across operations. So so much like the companies told us and then can test this too just how much value they've been got from doing this initial survey. And this is something that I think Value for Women is making public on their website or something similar. So start with taking stock of where you are and then as a management team whether you're an investor or an entrepreneur think about where you wanna go and what resources you have to dedicate to this and what resources you might be able to get to support from others. I mean we went and raised money to do this just to subsidize it but I think where we would ultimately like to see this going to is that the financial and social benefits of doing this work actually exceed the payment. So we believe businesses should be willing to start investing in this as a core part of their business strategy which is kind of the first step of what this research is trying to prove. But I would say like look at where you are and data because one of the biggest things that the challenges that we had with this research was getting that secondary data like sex to segregated. So a lot of companies are collecting basic data around their employees and their clients and whatnot but it's not always sex to segregated. So understanding where you are and then having that data I think are probably two of the most important steps and then with that you have the power to shape where you wanna go. Sure. Yeah. So quickly two pieces of advice first would be to really look at it in a comprehensive format and not to keep on preaching for value for women here but I would say what was so interesting about the way that they structure their work is it's in gender commitment, leadership and staffing and then value chain. And I think it's really important as you approach this is to kind of look at it from that type of integrated perspective rather than just leadership or just value chain or just what's your gender commitment. The second piece I would say is maybe as an advice to both larger companies that can afford it as well as maybe smaller companies and maybe to investors is the importance of actually having someone within the organization own a lot of these initiatives and so as an output of this project we hired a gender youth and safeguarding officer who became a really responsible across the organization for tracking the strategy, holding HR accountable on the leadership components, holding the agricultural side on other components. So in small enterprises I would imagine that that's not as easy to just hire someone like that and so I would say a recommendation in the context of technical assistance and one of the problems I think is exist in technical assistance is it's always like you hire a firm and then a firm comes and works for you and then they've got some deliverables and they leave versus seconding a resource or something that can really be within the organization to drive that forward. So yeah, that's for me to integrate it approach and then really don't underestimate like the resources required to actually implement whatever you're advising. I guess I'll make one comment on the entrepreneur side and then another one on the investor side. When you describe the four buckets, the four different areas that you're doing gender inclusion, gender equity in the organization, it made me think a lot about in the past year or so we've launched something called Gender Equity Advisory Services where it's basically saying, okay, a lot of training has happened over in business support to individual women actors in agriculture in our portfolio. So at the farmer level, agri-processing level, middle managers, head accountants, heads of sales, agronomists and of course leaders and entrepreneurs, et cetera. But really, and I think what you've done with the business so well is you need to really deeply embed gender inclusion into the policies and the employment contracts and the systems and the processes and everything of the business itself. So the business itself becomes the agent for the gender inclusion versus wonderful things that individual women leaders can get more participation, more economic opportunity but you have to do both of those things. So like total integration within the business as an entrepreneur is important. From an investor perspective, I suppose this also applies at the entrepreneur level as well. I think we think a lot about when you have a platform as we do, certainly Acumen Alpha Mundi where you have in our case hundreds of businesses that we work with across Africa, Latin America, Southeast Asia, there's a lot of cross-pollination that can happen. So I feel like folks kind of call to action at a community like SoCAP to be able to really, if you are developing with value for women and establishing and hardwiring and disseminating what you're learning through all the different businesses, how do you actually get that out there so that you don't have to reinvent the wheel if you're in another part of Uganda? How do we actually create totally open book, open source lessons and learn, lessons learned? Lastly, about a year and a half ago I think, maybe a year, we got funding from the Walmart Foundation in Central America to work together with once again, Value for Women, to train all of the, or to provide workshops and training for all the members of our industry alliance called the Council on Smaller Agriculture, Finance or CSAF that are maybe not quite as far along in how they think about gender equity, gender inclusion. So we've had this wonderful example where we're kind of pathologically collaborating with all the peer institutions in our place within our space through the cross-pollination. So having the platform allows you to do that. And then as I said, like total integration, deeply embedding gender inclusion, not just doing the training itself which is an important individual level I'd say would sell I conclude. Yeah, I think if there's one big takeaway from this conversation is integration. I think none of our organizations you'll find have created a gender portfolio. Gender integration to me is the key. It is embedded in our strategies whether we're investing in agriculture, energy access. It's just, it's there. And one thing I would suggest for folks that are trying to pursue this question of where am I now? The 2x challenge criteria that were developed by a group of DFIs and have now extended into the private sector is a really simple framework to look at the five questions that Lisa has outlined is like you look at ownership, you look at management, you look at employees, you look at customers, and you look at policies. And you look at where you are, the thresholds are defined within the 2x challenge criteria which you can find on their website. And they're relatively forgiving and it's a very inclusive approach because in order to qualify as 2x challenge compliant, you need to meet one of the criteria and it recognizes that people may have strengths in their business. Maybe they've said, wow, we built this amazing very equal management team. And then you look around and say, wait a minute, all our line workers are men. Could we do better there? And so you can celebrate where you're doing well and you can work on the places that you could do better. And it also I think creates a huge space for conversation and dialogue about what's happening in the field, what are the patterns and the trends based on this data. So again, I encourage people to take a look at that. I think for Acumen, this has been an incredible learning process and very humbling. It's actually difficult sometimes to do these projects. So I encourage people to stay the course, not to expect immediate results. We started a lot of these TA projects before the pandemic and found that things were dramatically slowed and shifted. But it's this journey that we're on and also to be willing to be transparent about what's working and what's not working. And again, I think you've seen that here today. We've just looked at our portfolio, we're 56% 2x challenge criteria. I'm really proud of that number and I wanna go all the way to 100% because I don't see why not. And Acumen developed a tool that we use actually, which they don't even use. But it's this Acumen ICRW tool, if you just Google Acumen ICRW gender report and it's a list of questions for entrepreneurs. It takes maybe 15 minutes to fill out maybe. And that was like before we did the longer intensive studies with Ali Fruman, that was our door opener. And we still give this to all our companies at the diligence stage. Just like, so when we're doing diligence, we kind of get a sense of where they are. And we're not gonna say, oh, as Alpha Moondi, we're not gonna invest in you if you don't have X% as women. But we would say if you're not even open to having these conversations with us, we're probably not the right investor for you. So that's really the criteria. Take the survey, look at it, look at the results, kind of see where you stand. And if you're willing to just even have these conversations with us and start to think about this, then we can partner with you on it. But it's a good tool. One quick build, ICRW is the International Center for Research on Women. And I just wanna put in a plug for them. Our former board member, Peggy Clark, who was with Aspen Institute for many years, runs the ICRW now. And at CGI Clinton Goal Initiative a couple of weeks, three weeks ago, they made a big global commitment. This is maybe a teaser for the next panel that we have, which is about saying there's a lot of anecdote, but there's very little data, very concrete data and deep research on the nexus of women in climate. It feels like all of this work we're talking about is preparing for that conversation about how do we actually, with lots of data, inform transformative action around women and climate action. And there is a fantastic report on the nexus of gender and climate that was published by Gender Smart. So the tools are out there. There's a QR code on the back of this too, which has, I mean, we have a lot of deliverables. Every one of the six consortium members of Gsearch has a two to three pager on how they're doing this. So if you want examples of how other investors are doing it, there's two to three pagers from six investors on how they're doing it, what they're applying. There's tools, there's data, there's criteria. There's a lot of products online. And don't be daunted, just start. And certainly feel free to reach out to any of us if you are kind of looking for a little support on that journey, because I think this is, we did this Gsearch effort for this movement. And so really excited that you guys took the time to be here today. Thank you so much.