 Hi everyone, wherever you are, I'm Paul Jacob-Elly speaking to you from Freiburg in southern Germany, but I'm going to talk to you about the project in Uganda at the Solok Scheme where I worked for 10 years until 2012. I've just got the instructions for time, so I have to go fast to give you a flavour of how the project works and please ask questions later and I can also point you in the direction for more information should you need it. Right, the background to SPGS. You see those two photos there? The top one is a three-year-old hybrid eucalypt plantation growing for transmission poles in Uganda. The interesting thing there is the entrepreneur knew nothing about forestry when he started before we supported him. The bottom slide is a community association that the project supported growing pines, pines-carabia there, about 2.5 years old, in rotation of course about 15 to 20 years. Right, the background is that it won't be a surprise to those familiar working in Africa. The rampant deforestation, timber shortage is predicted and there's been heavy reliance on one field of course. The first growing economy all needs timber, so there was a huge shortage predicted and this project was looking and seeking to encourage the private sector to invest in new planting. And it assumed there was small growers who would need financial and technical assistance. Now the project has been funded by the European Union since it started in 2004. It's invested $24 million to date with a further $16 million pledged in the next four years. The project supports, as you can tell from its name, longer rotations of timber and poles. Right, very quickly how does the project work? It's a combination of establishment grants and technical and business support. The establishment grants on the first side, the project pays 50% of the establishment costs, which at the time was about $425, so the full establishment cost then was $800 a day. But the key thing really is that the grants came in performance based and the standards were clearly written into the contracts. For example you had to have 80% survival when the programme staff visited after three months. The payment was split into three tranches, so we held back the second checks until a few months to make sure to encourage the people to maintain their crops, so quality is the key. But no funds paid up front, the grants were only paid in retrospect, so the entrepreneurs had to start with their own money. We set a minimum of 25 hectares for application, but you could join together to get to that minimum. On the technical side, the business side, we had a very strong extension team, which we developed the first two years with keen young graduates to come down to South Africa and Swaziland, showed them the best practices, and also we took some of the entrepreneurs down there too to give them the vision of how a commercial forest sector looks. We ran some very practical training courses ourselves and the team, because it was very difficult to find that support outside. We published some very practical guidelines after a number of years, which had lots of illustrations of good and bad practices that went down very well. And interesting, we developed an accreditation system for nurseries and contractors. The demand came from the growers themselves, interestingly, so that's been rather successful in building SMEs in the country. And then finally, we supported the development of a timber growers association, knowing that it was going to be important in the future beyond the project. And then lastly, the land. Many people started on government land, getting permits for planting, but increasingly they came on private land. Right, theory of change. Here we are, theory of change. We had identified three key areas, three key assumptions. First of all, that the right incentives will attract the private sector to invest. Secondly, rural livelihoods will be improved. And thirdly, that degraded land will be restored. Now on the basis of those three, the results of 50,000 hectares established to date. In the scheme, 50,000 hectares, that's about 450 contracted clients. It's been oversubscribed, and the key thing is that beyond the grant, there's another 30,000 hectares being planted, people often coming for technical advice, not just the finance. On the rural livelihoods, I think another success story, really 5,000 over 5,000 rural jobs created, more than 1,400 people trained on the courses. There's benefits to the lot of the villages with the corporate, social responsibility of the bigger companies. And in terms of capacity building of SMEs, we've seen we've got 42 certified nurseries in Uganda now, and 36 small contracting companies going. And then the third one, the degraded land, well, forest reserves which were degraded have been replanted, and the trees because their quality and fast growing are obviously storing lots of carbon. So I think very positive results there. And in addition, the Solow scheme has raised the profile of forestry people talking about investing in trees as a pension for their children. It shows you it's really getting the message across. And it's attracting interest from other African countries. We've been last year advising the World Bank, setting a scheme up in Mozambique. There's interest in Ghana and in other countries in Africa too on this. Right, barriers and risks. Number one was a challenge for the institutional buy-in. It's been mentioned already a few times. It's been a challenge getting the buy-in despite the pro-private sector policies we've seen in these countries. Often there is a resistance to change. Number two, sustainability is an issue because it's grant led to projects. Obviously it depends on overseas development assistant, the donors to maintain it. Thirdly is the forestry's big bone of contention, which is the long rotations. But what we've strongly believed is that these risks can be managed by good planning and management. And these risks, I think we're going to talk a bit later, are just growing the trees, but in particular the markets for those crops. Right, working with Unique in many countries in the last couple of years, we're seeing that there's a very poor understanding of the value chain, particularly amongst the small growers. I mean here knowledge of product specification, knowledge of quality. For instance, knowing the markets, knowing the supply and demand forecasts for products is so important. We preach this site species market approach where it's not just planting trees, but it's getting the market intelligence before you plant the trees. And you can then apply the models that now exist in many growth and economic models to see if your returns are acceptable for a particular product. So a much more business-like approach to planting even for small, medium growers. Financing, SPGS obviously proves that conditional grants supporting small, medium growers can work. You might say it's unsustainable because of the grant focus, but it actually could be considered very cost-effective from the government's point of view given that it's attracted 50% of the input is coming from the private sector. So it's a cost-effective way of a country getting a core plantation establishment which is needed to support the economy. Concessional financing, particularly soft loans, have been well considered right at the beginning, but the financial institutions didn't want to touch it. So eventually we decided to go down the ground route. And just interesting, those of you who might not know, there is a study underway in Kenya looking at a revolving tree fund for small, medium growers funded by DFID and the Nature Conservancy. So that's going to be interesting to follow. And those of you who might not know, the problem obviously with forestry is that banks have little experience quite often, and they consider it high-risk, particularly for the long-term nature. So we think the trees go very fast in the tropics. Right, conclusions last slide. Solox scheme has achieved good results on the ground. It's proved a sort of very strong PPP, public-private partnership. It can work if it's carefully planned and well managed. And the sort of lessons from SPGS for others, I think, is it took this commercial approach, which was somewhat unusual for small, medium growers, but it certainly worked. And it focused on the best practices, best practices for growth and quality. So even for, you know, we preach in for communities, small growers, this is very important. We believe that the approach will have long-term benefits for the sector, but only if there is more support on the value chains and market side. We've seen this in many countries. And finally, the role of the Timbergrowers Association are very important. I think we will discuss that a bit later. Right, thank you. That's me finished. I think in time, and there is an applause icon on the list of icons I've seen. Thank you.