 This is the speaker that I am honestly most excited to hear from in all of SoCAP this year. I had a call with him earlier this year. He's the first Skoll awardee that is a for-profit enterprise, but that's not really the thing. This story is an amazing story, and it was really fun actually to hear that when this effort first started, the first conference that this amazing entrepreneur came to was SoCAP. So please welcome to the stage Kola Masha. Good morning everyone. Good morning. My friends, we have a problem in Africa. That problem is rising in security. Since 1997, researchers at the University of Sussex have monitored global trends in armed conflict, and their research clearly shows that from 2007 to 2017, the number of armed conflicts in Africa went up sevenfold. Let's think about that. Sevenfold in a single decade. Why is this? Well, we believe as oxygen is to fire, so are unemployed youth to insecurity. And we have a lot of unemployed youth in Africa. Youth like Sandra, who on the morning of March 14, 2014, woke up excited at the prospects of getting a coveted job at the Nigerian Immigration Services. Thank you. At the Nigerian Immigration Services, she left her home, kissed her daughter goodbye, never to return. Sandra and 15 other young Nigerians died that day, trampled to death in the ensuing stampede as tens of thousands of people applied for a few thousand open opportunities. In Nigeria alone in the last 20 years, roughly 20 million youth have entered an oversaturated workforce, causing youth unemployment to skyrocket, triggering not one, not two, but three insurgencies. Today, with a median age of 18, half of Nigeria's population, about 80 million people will be entering this workforce. My friends, we have no time. I ask you, if 20 million youth entering an oversaturated workforce triggered Boko Haram, the Niger Delta Insurgency and the Falani-Hertzman crisis, what will four times that number do? Most people that hear this statistic say, wow, this is a ticking time bomb. I think not. The bomb has already exploded. To do my part to solve this crisis, in 2012 I moved to a small village in northern Nigeria to the center of the area most recently impacted with the spread of insurgency, brutal bombings, and searing poverty with an idea. Could we halt the spread of insecurity by creating an economic buffer, by unlocking the power of agriculture as a job creation engine? We knew this had been done before in countries like Thailand, where in 1980 they suffered from similar economic challenges to us. But today Thailand produces two million cars a year, more than the United Kingdom, with more than 30% of their population as profitable commercial small farmers with an unemployment rate of less than 1%. How did they do this? Thailand accomplished this by investing in the 80s in dramatically improving the productivity of their small farmers, coupled with the devaluation of their currency to enable them to start to dominate export markets for agricultural produce. Leveraging on this strength, Thailand began to attract investments to backward, forward integrate into manufacturing, being able to export higher value products like starch from cassava. Finally, with investment in education, they were able to further expand into higher value manufacturing. We knew to make our dream a reality and enable millions of farmers to be lifted out of poverty. We had to make youth interested in farming. A young man from northern Nigeria for today's purposes will call Samino, made it very clear to me that this would not be easy. Samino grew up in a beautiful village in northern Nigeria. He tells wondrous stories of playing for hours with his friends running up and down the beautiful rock formations that dot the countryside around his home. Despite this beauty, Samino knew at the first chance he got he would leave. He never wanted to be a farmer. He grew up seeing his parents work so hard as farmers unable to get by. As he says, they had babu, nothing. Small farmers like Samino's family do not have access to the cash to pair with their hard work to become successful. When their harvest comes in, under significant cash pressure, they sell most of it at fire sale prices. If they could just wait six to nine months, they could get up to 50% better pricing. So Samino left, moved to the city where he soon realized that life was not easy. He borrowed a tattered old motorcycle with tires that were more patches than tires and became a motorcycle taxi driver. He lived every day in fear that his precious tattered motorcycle would be ripped away from him as it once had. Thankfully, he got it back. But he knew of other youth who were not so lucky. Youth that once they lost their precious motorcycles became destitute. Samino told me they joined insurgencies, often becoming getaway drivers in bombings and kidnappings. To end this cycle of insecurity, we must make small farmers successful, enabling them to make a life for themselves and a future. The question now is how. 100 years ago, my grandfather was a small farmer in South Dakota with similar challenges to Samino. Yet he was able to chart a path out of poverty for himself and my mother through the power of farmer cooperatives. Inspired by my grandfather, I set out to study farmer cooperatives around the world and recognize that a strong farmer cooperative needs three things. Grass root level leadership, fellow farmers leading fellow farmers, professional management and investment to scale. Recognizing that this grass root level leadership existed in Africa, we simply developed a model to bring the two missing pieces to these grass root level leaders. We called it babangona, which means great farm in Hausa. So in 2012, to launch our model, I went to this small village and literally went community to community trying to convince other farmers to join us. We failed woefully, that year barely recruiting 100 brave souls. But we persevered. We kept doing what we promised. Slowly, we built people's trust and more farmers joined us. Over the last six years, with the tremendous support of our many partners and a passionate and committed team, we have grown to now serve close to 20,000 small farmers, enabling them to double their yields and nearly triple their net income relative to the average farmer in Nigeria. What we are most proud of is the fact that nearly half of our members are youth. Young farmers like Saminu, who left the cities to come home to join us along the way, returning his tattered, borrowed motorcycle. As a member, Saminu got access to an exceptionally comprehensive package of inputs and services, ten times the size of the typical agricultural development program. He got access to soil testing, field mapping, farm analysis, incredible seeds. A person that visits his farm every couple weeks to give him advice and guidance, all the way down to harvesting where he gets the thresher, the empty bag, even the needle and the thread to sew up his harvest. In addition, he got access to labor-saving services that often scare many youth away from agriculture, all on credit. When his harvest came in, he deposited it at our warehouses, we collateralized it for him, get him a loan against it, and then he's excited every quarter as we sell his produce for him. He gets profits. Fast forward three years, Saminu has made enough money to buy three goats for his mother to start a goat-rearing business, owns his own retail shop, and bought not one but two motorcycles with vanity plates but Banguna. My friends, in the next 20 years, 400 million Saminus are entering the African workforce. Nearly half of them will have opportunities in agriculture. To unlock these opportunities, they would require about $150 billion in financing. It's a big number. But if we can tap into commercial debt, it is a small number. Only 0.1% of all the debt in the world today, that's 10 cents out of every $100. It's for this reason that we designed our models to be very different from traditional agricultural development efforts. In a few short years, we proved that our model works, is high impact and can turn a profit. Attracting commercial investors that don't typically invest in small farmers in Africa. We accomplished this by leveraging social investors to invest debt in us to de-risk us, catalyzing in three to four times more debt from commercial investors. Now, let me be very clear, our model is not perfect. As we march towards serving a million farmers by 2025, we will face a million challenges, which we will have to solve one at a time. Now, we all have a role to play in raising this $150 billion. As an individual, go to crowdfunding sites like Giva today, and you can invest as little as $25 to support a small farmer in Africa. As a financing institution, the risks you see can be mitigated. We've operated for six years and operating at a 99.99% repayment rate, leveraging technology such as satellites to help develop models to monitor our farmers' fields. As a company that sells inputs to farmers, give your products on credit. You can mitigate the risks by partnering with grassroots organizations. As an organization that buys products from farmers, offer them forward contracts, empowering them to go out and mobilize capital. As a philanthropy, think beyond giving grants. Look at non-traditional partners and think about how you can leverage your investment to crowd in commercial capital to enable impact at scale. In closing, let's close our eyes for a moment. And imagine a world where a young man or young woman does not live in fear that if their precious motorcycle is ripped away from them, their only option is a life of crime or terror. Imagine a world where these young men and women have other options. I know these ambitious, dedicated youth will make the right choice as long as they have a choice. Thank you.