 join in. So again, welcome everybody. My name is Michael Victor. I'm the head of communications and knowledge management at the International Livestock Research Institute, ILRI. And welcome to this side event for the nutrition for growth summit. And it's on better nutrition, health and wealth, the role of informal markets within future food systems. So I will just take you quickly through some tech tips in the agenda and then hand it over. So just everybody I think has been on a number of zooms and webinars over the last year and a half. Please put your full name and organization into the into your name. So it helps us see where you're from. You can do that by clicking on the three dots and going to rename. We like to use the chat a lot to really generate discussion and to to talk and to really create a conversation. So post comments or question during the present during the presentations, we won't have too many today, but during the dialogue itself, create a conversation. We are recording right now. And so audio, video and the chat are visible to us in the organizers. We will be live tweeting. So please tweet about the session. And also we are going to be using mentee throughout to kind of crowdsource and get comments and thoughts from people. You can see the mentee code below. Maybe Cynthia, you can put that into the chat for everybody as well. So please start to get ready for mentee bees. We'll use that after Sylvia presents. So just to give people a quick overview of the agenda. We will have Dr. Sylvia Lonzo talking, just giving kind of why informal markets and what we want to achieve today, a bit of a background. We'll do again, a participant check in to check how people are thinking and perceive informal markets. Then we'll have a framing presentation by Alejandro Gorin from IAD. And then we'll really get to the heart of the matter, which we want to jump into is the panel discussion. And we have a great group of panelists. I'm not going to go through everyone's name here. And we really want to be able to elicit their responses and also have interaction with the participants here as well. We are then really honored to have the African Union here to give us some comments and some reflections on what they've heard. And then we'll have a wrap up by Sylvia again, another quick mentee. And then closing remarks by Dr. Jimmy Smith, the director general of Ilrie. So with that, I'd like to hand it over to Sylvia Lonzo, who's a senior researcher at Ilrie focused on informal markets and food safety. So over to you, Sylvia. Thank you, Michael. And welcome again to all those who have joined the Decide Event. So I was tasked with giving you the why and the what for this session. So as for the why, why are we having a session on informal markets? Why is so critical to discussing informal markets now? Well, I'm sure there's no news for most of you that informal markets are very widespread and low-income countries. And they are a bit of a double-edged sword. So on the one hand, they provide important services. They sell most of the fresh foods in the market. And they also are the most affordable source of food for the poor. On the other hand, we have to acknowledge that they are also a very difficult beast to deal with by governments. They operate at the sites of legality, they taxes. They have the mental infrastructure definitely not aligned with the latest standards on hygiene. And they are seen as dirty and disorganized. Well, that's a picture. I also like to give a picture of what they are also, dynamic and very organized hubs of innovation. Well, but the reality is that most countries and many governments around the world would rather see these markets disappear in favor of more modern supermarkets, more sophisticated supply chains. But informal markets are reasons why they are there, living there for long. And they are likely to stay for quite a while. So there's no use of us really turning our back against them. So if we really want to tackle hunger and malnutrition and food insecurity, we need to start bringing them on as part of the solution. But in reality, we have no tools. We really don't know very well and governments don't know really well how to engage informal markets in this food system transformation. And this now takes me to the what? What are we trying to achieve with this session? We want to start a global dialogue and discussion and consultation around how do we best engage with informal markets? What are the principles of such engagement, transforming these informal markets? This session is the first step in that process we are going to hear from experts, not only from the panelists, but hopefully also from the audience, from their experiences, what has worked, what actions we can take to engage in informal markets. The learnings from today, we want to develop a draft document that will be then shared online for wider consultation. And once we get input from stakeholders all over the world, we'd like to then transform that into a brief or a document outlining two principles on how to engage with informal markets, so that governments and institutions, as they rethink their food systems and they think on the process of transformation, they can have some principles as to how to base bring informal markets into the discussion. So well, this is what we are trying to do and I look forward to the discussion today. So I'll pass it over to Michael again. Thank you. Excellent. Thanks a lot, Silvia. And I'm going to stop sharing this and we're going to go to the mentee right now. So, sorry, I didn't put the mentee on right now, but the code is the code is 78526. I'll put this in right now. And we'll go to the first questions. Sorry about this. Okay. Thank you, everybody. Okay, so we'll put this into the screen. Sorry about this. Okay, so we have a couple of mentee questions, just really to check people's knowledge, attitudes, and skills. And you can see the mentee code up here at top and we'll put that into the chat as well. So the first question is just really to check people's knowledge, attitudes, and skills towards informal markets because there are a lot of different perceptions and ideas around there. So the first question really quickly is in developing countries, what proportion of all fresh fruit, vegetables, fish, and meat are sold in informal markets? Let's see what people think. Less than 20%, around 50% or more than 80%. Excellent. So getting a couple of people in there. So no one thinks under 20%, but yeah, many, most everyone, 80%, and that is the correct answer, over 80%. So most of the food is sold in informal markets, which really makes it a huge important center for food systems as well. Let's go to the next question. What's your perception of informal markets right now? Informal markets are dirty, unhealthy, and they need to be shut down. Do you agree or do you agree or disagree? It'd be interesting to see where people fall on the spectrum. Interesting. Yeah, a lot of people disagree with that statement that they are dirty, unhealthy, and they need to be shut down. Interesting. Two people still neutral. We don't have anyone yet who agrees or fully agrees with it. Again, interesting to see. Great. Okay, interesting to see. We'll check this back at the end as well, maybe after the discussion, people's ideas might change. Okay, one other one quick, just to get a quick sense of what word best describes informal markets in your own view. And while we're getting that, we'd like to just get kind of one word that you feel kind of best describes informal markets. There we go, dynamic, diverse, challenging, great. So we will come back to this. We're not going to go and sit and look at what comes up, but please put your answers in here, and we're going to come back to that after Alejandro speaks. So let me stop my, let me stop my thing. We'll go back to the presentation. Great. Can people see my screen? Yes, Michael. Okay, great. Thanks, Cynthia. So yeah, I'd like to now have Alejandro Guerin from IID present a quick overview of informal markets and some of the definitions, relevance, and challenges. Over to you, Alejandro. Thank you, Michael. Just judging from the responses, I think I'm speaking to a converted here, so that makes my job much easier. I just want to give you a very, very quick overview of what we mean by informal markets, why we think they're important, and why we think we need to challenge some of the assumptions about what they are. So if you can, you'll move the slides, right? For me, excellent. So I guess my first message is it's diverse, the informal sector, but also difficult to define exactly. And part of the reason is because there's no such thing, I don't think as pure informality or pure formality, but rather businesses, enterprises move in a range that goes from formal to informal. So I think we most of us can recognize what an informal business looks like. It's much harder to pin down a very specific definition. So that's the first thing and I'll go into the definitions in a moment. The second is that even though we're going to be talking about informal markets, and I think the idea that we have of informality is usually a marketplace where people are selling food. In fact, the informal sector and the informal food market spans all the way from production to consumption, and it involves all the linkages between farmers, processors, transporters, wholesalers and retailers and consumers. It really spans the whole chain. So some common characteristics of informal enterprises, they're usually small scale. They're usually outside or on the margins of regulation. That means that they're don't fully comply with all the laws and regulations or they comply some but not all. They're based on family labor and that's really important because it characterizes a lot of what happens in these markets, including, for example, the lack of salaries and the lack of contracts and these types of things. They're also cash based and as I said, they don't have formal contracts or records and this is one of the big headaches for government is this fact because it's very hard to tax them properly. So if we move on, the reason why they're important is, there's lots of reasons, but I think the main one is that there's really, really crucial for low income consumers because that's where they find affordable, nutritious, convenient and healthy food. And often they're the only source of this type of food. So it's not that they're among the most important but that they're the only source of food. And this is both cooked and uncooked. And they're not just important for low income consumers. They're in most countries as your mentee showed, Michael, they are the dominant sector of trade, of fresh food, but also processed food as well. So even though we've seen super markets coming really strongly in many countries, in most low and middle income countries, the informal sector is a dominant one. And it's also a very important, in addition to the food that it provides, it provides jobs, opportunities, livelihoods for a lot of people, particularly young people and women. We move to the next slide. Despite all these very important provisioning that they're doing from the point of view of policymakers, it's really a problem. And I think that the approach of policymakers can be characterized from also a spectrum from oblivion. So they ignore it, they don't pay any attention to active confrontation, harassment we've heard of police, persecuting informal sectors, clearing them off the street. We'll talk about some of these things in the panel, but just to say that some of the underpinning assumptions, I think, are partly because they're perceived by many to be unsafe and hygienic. So you see the picture here selling the milk in little bags with some people, oh, how can that be? It's dangerous, it's dirty. They're also seen as unmodern and so countries obviously want progress and they want modernity and development. So how can they have this thing kind of stuck in the past? They're chaotic, they block streets. And very importantly, from the point of government, they're illegal and avoid taxes. And if we can move to the last one, the way I segue into our panel is that the reality actually is more nuanced. My timer went off. Just to say the last 30 seconds that, yes, there are problems with health and safety as there is with formal markets actually, but in fact, there's actually a generally low incidence of disease. So we don't see lots of people getting sick from eating in formal markets. This perception that they're stuck in the past actually is betrayed by the fact that they're dynamic, entrepreneurial. They're adopting the technology that they can within their limited resources. They're not chaotic. It's actually highly organized, highly logical and responding to some very clear, if unwritten rules. And finally, this issue of illegal and tax avoiding, it's often very true, but that's because the law itself has put them to the side and has built the walls outside. So hopefully we can get into some of these issues in the panel. So I'll stop there. And I want to thank the panelists for participating. Thank you. Excellent. Thanks Alejandro and really thanks for that good kind of introduction and overview. And that really leads us now to this panel discussion where we have an excellent moderator, Thin Leh Nguyen, who is a journalist and moderator par excellence, and she'll take us through the moderation of this. We'll also be using mentee, so please do use the mentee. We're going to be capturing comments and questions that you have to the panelists and really trying to crowdsource your own issues because we do want to create some principles coming out from this event. So over to you, Thin. Thank you. Thanks so much for the introduction, Michael, and for getting that name right. Good morning. Good afternoon. Good evening, everyone. Like Michael said, my name is Thin and I'm a journalist, specializing in food system issues. And I'm delighted to be moderating this panel discussion today on the role of informal markets in future food systems. And we have six excellent speakers who will be sharing their insights on this topic for about an hour. How this is going to work is that I'm going to be asking our panelists a few rounds of questions and we want to focus the bulk of our discussion on actions and solutions. And this is because often we tend to dwell on what is not working when we have these kind of conversations, but you've already heard from Sylvia and Alejandro on the challenges and the perceptions around the negative perception of informal markets to the lack of policy and research and so on. So we want to use the extensive experience of our panelists to come up with concrete ideas that would lead to the set of principles that Michael and Sylvia had mentioned that can help policymakers to develop policies that reward food safety in informal markets. Like Michael said, again, we will also be checking in regularly on audience response to the discussion as well as answers to the mentee questions. Now without much further ado, let me introduce you to our panelists in alphabetical order. May I request the panelists to switch on their videos? And I apologize in advance if I mangle your names. We have Delia Grace, scientist at the Natural Resource Institute UK and also senior scientist at ILRI in Kenya. Emma Blackmore, research associate at IED UK. Jane Bettersby, senior lecturer in the Department of Environmental and Geographical Science at the University of Cape Town in South Africa. Stella Nord-Hogan, senior technical specialist at the Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition or Gain, as you might know in Switzerland. Utpal Kumar Sharma, director of the Dairy Development Department with the Government of Assam in India. And last but definitely not the least, we have Viviane Madiweke, who is the managing principal at Food Health Systems Advisory in Nigeria. Now we have great speakers with great insights but a bit of a limited time so I would like to request our panelists to limit the answers to two minutes or so, otherwise I am afraid we might have to move on. Now I m going to start off the discussion with one issue that came up time and again when I was talking to panelists about this discussion and it is this lack of trust between informal actors and regulators. Emma, I want to come to you first because you were very involved in the More Milk project and you identified some of these tensions in the countries where this project was implemented at this sort of trust deficit I was just talking about. Could you talk a little bit about that please? Sure, we ll do. Thanks a lot then. Yeah, as you mentioned I d like to draw on the more milk research that we conducted. This involved a survey of 400 informal milk market actors in Kenya, Tanzania and Assam in India and we conducted several key informant interviews with key stakeholders including government agencies and what the research showed and Alejandro hinted at this in his presentation was some clear differences in the approaches of governments to regulating and supporting informal milk sectors ranging from adversarial approaches based on criminalisation to benign neglect as we call it. In Kenya recently the sale of raw milk to consumers has been banned under the dairy industry regulations but even before this happened the relationship between informal actors and regulators was characterised by mutual mistrust and negativity so almost half of the vendors and all the intermediaries these are the kind of middlemen transporting milk that we interviewed thought that the government had a negative view of them and this typically expressed itself as harassment which in reality meant paying bribes to local enforcement officers. And while some policymakers in Kenya do recognise the importance of the informal milk sector for nutrition this isn t really reflected in how relationships between informal actors and government officials play out on the ground. Ultimately I believe that the tensions that I ve described don t really help to lay the foundations for improved food safety or enhance the contribution of these sectors to livelihoods or nutrition. Great thanks so much Emma and you know really interesting insights and particularly the idea of you know them being this is harassment that s really interesting and of course keeping to the time as well. I m now going to turn to Utpal because Assam is the first state in India I understand that started this informal dairy market initiative as a government project and Utpal would love to hear from your perspective on why it was important for that directorate your directorate to engage and communicate with those who trade in raw milk those who are in the informal sector. Thank you and first and foremost a priority for us when we started the Assam Agricultural Competitiveness project under World Bank 100 project and we saw that this whole milk market was being dominated by the unorganised sector and at that time it was around 97% of the milk market was dominated by the unorganised sector and the situation was very very grim and looking to the milk production and all over the India average Indian it was 60% to 40% all India average but in my state it was 97 to only 3% and at that time World Bank had given us the mandate of organising the dispersed farmer into organized format so we were given the power of cooperative registration then Ilri also joined us in that project and which set the support of Ilri and from the headquarter as well as from local officials we had planned to identify first the who are the milk market actors like your dispersed producers traders processors Scottish processors so we identified them and we started to this thing develop a pilot project how to go ahead with this kind of who are the real contributors to the overall milk market so 2019-20 census the milk production in Assam is 970 million liter but but that is the being the contributor main real contributors when this thing the informal milk producers. Great thank you so much of all that was really interesting could you just I mean we don't have much time but if you could just really you know focus on why why did you you know do this yeah so that time we felt that the consumers are also affected and the milk production they are also not getting they are also neglected really neglected so that is why we developed a pilot project with the help of Ilri and we started identifying the milk market actors and we started talking around along with the health department department veterinary department municipality and other stakeholders department so that we can develop and identify and we started giving them the awareness building the capacity training etc and how can they improve their economic aspect without without going for the adult vision and this thing and organizing into a regulated format kind of thing then what is quality other things so that was a successful program. Great thank you so much Dilya you know as an implementer and you've heard obviously from Utbah how they did it and why they did it in Assam what's your experience in other countries and how to overcome this trust deficit. Yes I think it's about in sentence and being able for the informal traditional sector whatever we call it to be able to to show that they can produce safe and clean food and often they can it's a matter of relatively simple training and relatively simple technologies you know things like different colored cutting boards so that you can separate the cooked food and uncooked food and if the traditional informal sector starts looking more like a farmer's market and less like some sort of a chaotic unclean environment then I think that will start building trust in the regulators and the consumers at the same time and I must say that in some countries we also see conflict of interests so it goes beyond trust that there are actually vested interests including among governments and political players which would want them to to remove or to be negative to the informal sector and in countries like if I may give the example of India where you have more of a civil service who is trying to you know improve things, deliver services, improve things for the populace and have not necessarily got major financial interests in getting rid of the informal sector we sometimes see better progress than in other countries where there are strong conflicts of interest over. Thank you Julia that's really interesting particularly that comparison with the farmer's market and I guess yeah this whole perception around aesthetics right that's really quite important Vivian I'd like to turn on you now because I'd like to hear the perspective from the private sector I mean you've you know what are your thoughts on what can be done to build this trust? Yeah thank you I must start by saying that one of the issues with trust is an unstable policy environment encourages distrust and harassment and one of the things that can be done is for government to have consistent policies I use an example so one of the markets that I've walked with two years ago the market was demolished and six months later after the demolition they were allowed to come back and then last year there was another demolition now if as a business person I want to invest in improving my standards I wouldn't want to do that in a place that is unstable therefore to build this trust the government has to have consistent policies I think the second one is the informal sector they have to be involved in the development of policies because currently it's mostly the formal sector that are invited into technical working groups I think we assume that the informal sector is very unorganized but they actually have some form of organization within them the question is how do we start involving them in the process to help them understand where the government is coming from but also to see their own perspective I think that's one way to build trust the third point is the government needs to focus on mentoring rather than punitive approaches currently there's a form of over regulation where you have several agencies collecting levies and fines from these people who are mostly in the vulnerable population or some of them are in the vulnerable population so I think the burden is on the government to make sure that mentoring is used to support them rather than punitive actions I think these are the three ways to build trust over great thank you so much those are very you know real concrete tips Stella Jane you haven't gone yet who wants to go first talk about this Jane great thank you Finn and I mean just really support what Vivian's been saying and my understanding is there's this antipathy of the state towards the informal sector and that's really been hardwired into planning and policy if you look through the sort of planning history of the last hundred years it's hardwired in and that has this kind of knowledge effect and governance effect it shapes what the state can do but it also shapes how they see the system and so I think there's a couple of things that really need to be done and really building on what Vivian said I think we actually need to go back and really understand what the regulations are where they come from and to work to amend bylaws to work to amend planning codes etc to enable the state to actually take proactive action but at the same time we also need to recognize how these policies and plans and other structures have fundamentally shaped how the state sees the informal sector and therefore there's this considerable effort to be done in sort of changing the hearts and minds by the use of developing better data by incorporating lived experience work in and by doing things like actively taking the government agents into the markets on learning journeys to actually get them to experience the place because I think a lot of people are using the spaces without really thinking them through so I think there's a role for the market associations for the research entities for civil society organizations all to do that work in undoing this this long-term legacy thanks great thank you thanks for building it up and and we're now already sort of collecting a set of advice and things that can be done Stella I agree with all the remarks from the panelists on finding right fit regulations and listening to the perspective of informal market actors and one thing I wanted to focus on specifically within that is the importance of paying attention to the cost implications of any types of regulations that are requested our work in informal markets in Nigeria has shown that both vendors and consumers are really sensitive to price and cost and oftentimes informal actors are operating on very thin profit margins and they just don't have much flexibility to make any changes that would result in higher costs concerns like food safety it's not it's not that they're not not concerns but rather they're kind of often necessarily subordinate to that very real constraint related to price and cost and from the perspective of somebody coming from the nutrition community this is really important because it can have implications also for consumers consumers who are using informal markets are often those who are you know struggling to afford a healthy diet and by imposing regulations that can increase the cost of hiding nutritious food like fruit and vegetables animal source foods that can have a detrimental effect not only on the informal market actors but also on the consumers who are dependent on them so I do think considering cost constraints is an important thing to keep in mind when trying to build that trust great thank you so much yeah for bringing that aspect into the into the discussion thank you to our panelists for this is the first round of questions I'm now going to take a few minutes to have a look at what's going on at mentee can we have the mentee screen please and we ask our audience what other issues they think are actually important beyond this and let's have a look at you know what they have said what do you think are issues related to market and why they create competition to the big form retailers distributors that's why government are pressured to food safety need to build trust and confidence between governments yeah belief system in relation to behavioral change okay so these are the issues change related to informal markets and why we have maybe one or two minutes if any of the panelists would like to respond or or or have any thoughts okay there's another thing that just came out on mentee we should hear from the traders what the CS issues and need to be priority in dealing with and with this um Delia Jane Stella any thoughts anything you want to respond to or comment yeah I mean I agree with the first statement because they they're more or less said what I said which is that there there is a inherent conflict of interest you know there are vested interests and if we treat this as purely a technical bureaucratic problem we may not get a solution we need a political economy lens uh on on the informality versus formality uh yeah that was my all I had to say thank you great um actually we are running slightly behind time so I'm going to move on to to the next round of questions and for this one I'd like to hear more specific examples of support and upgrade of informal markets so successes and failures and the specific things that contributed to either the success or the failure so that the set of principles that hopefully will come out of this discussion will have both what to do and what not to do you've already you know gave great examples just now on what are the things to sort of you know build this trust it would also be great to talk about you know examples of of success and failure again if you could limit your answers to about two minutes that would be great and Vivian I am going to come to you first because of your extensive experience advising both the formal and informal sectors some of the examples that you've seen yeah thank you thank you Fin I'm going to use three examples quickly the first one is when supporting the formal sector there are there are principles out there for example HACCP principles that are usually thrown around however when it comes to the informal sector those principles and evidence-based solutions as we'll call them need to be adapted to the various segments a HACCP-based system for example in the food safety community seen as gold standard however it is highly documentation heavy and also can you know cost a lot more so what we did with the market to work with was to support them and train them on the principles not HACCP but the principles of food safety so things like separation that Delia mentioned using different cutting boards things like cooking your food thoroughly things like practicing first in first out so for those who sell frozen meat products teaching them how to pick products that had that were bought previously and selling them first before the new products so these are you know some of the examples of adapting world-class standards and getting it to the level of the informal sector a second example I would give is where we made a compelling business case Stella mentioned that these people are entrepreneurs right and it's all about cost so what one of the things we did in 2015 was to somewhat support some of the women who sold the product we call Ogi so Ogi or Camois is like a consoid meal used for weaning children and that product is nutritionally deficient because it's mostly stacked what we did was to support them to create new products such as consoid blends where they add soya to it now what that did was to improve the nutrition of the people who bought them but also it increased slightly increase the margins of the women who sold it and it made sense for them so at the end of the day any solution that we want to create has to be such that makes a compelling business case for those in the informal sector the third example which is a really brilliant one is one called cold hops as we know food safety cold storage is important so what cold hops did you can google it cold hops what they did was to have cooling rooms where informal traders rent spaces daily they pay a small fee put in their produce and take it out the next morning not only does this help them achieve food safety standards but also it extended the shelf life of their products it was affordable and the cold rooms were kept in the markets with them so these are some of the examples of how we can adapt and bring things to the level of the informal traders over great thanks Vivienne three great examples Jane i'm going to come to you now because you have a lot of experience with urban food systems can you tell us about the different approaches that you've seen you know that's been taken when it comes to dealing with informal sector in terms of urban food systems and the results yeah absolutely so most of our work is in south southern and eastern Africa but we have also worked in west Africa um you know and the overarching story is the story of antithesis towards the sector however there are these pockets of of emergent change and so one of the things that's been happening in Mozambique has been local government re-qualifying markets which often is a process of recognizing where informal markets are and not formalizing them but giving them some kind of formal recognition which then enables the state to intervene in various ways it enables you know donor agencies to provide infrastructure support etc so they're thinking about these kind of small government shifts that can signal a change in attitude and enable change but we know that that's not enough right and so we know that there's various experiments that have taken place that have or haven't worked and so I think one of the things that's really important in the context of these informal markets is to think clearly through who the who the traders are what their needs are and take a particularly strong gendered lens to this so there's an example that was conducted by IDF in Dar es Salaam looking at the outcome of investment in toilet facilities in markets and they found that actually this had a really interesting gendered effect it turned out that the female traders were more commonly using the toilets because you know where else they're going to go but they were paying 18 times more to use the toilets and their market fees and this was having considerable impact on their their trading viability so we need to understand these gender dimensions and then need to think about what are the opportunities that arise and so one very very quick example is in working with directly with the women traders new opportunities emerge that might not have been recognized before so work conducted in a car and Ghana um found that actually what women thought was going to be the most useful thing for them and their livelihoods and their families was developing safe spaces for children in markets and when we start to think about how people actually use those spaces and work with those agents then we can affect positive change thank you great thank you the gender perspective that's really really interesting Stella can I come to you and hear you know all the examples of game projects in many countries yeah sure I wanted to focus in on just one example actually so in response to the COVID-19 pandemic gain implemented a project across several different countries in Africa and Asia to try and keep informal markets open and functioning as a source of food and nutrition security during the pandemic and as part of that we deployed a set of rapid surveys talking to consumers and vendors about their perspectives on what was the situation in the markets and one thing that emerged from that was that um consumers were really worried about the possibility of disease transmission in these kind of crowded markets and as a result of that some of them reduced their shopping frequency or the amount that they that they bought um so with this information he were able to go to some of the market actors and kind of work with them to understand what were some potential ways that they could respond to consumers concerns for example both vendors and consumers saw that the use of masks and hand sanitizer could be something that would reassure them but that they weren't being widely used or widely available within the market so we worked with market authorities to make those available within the market I think this is a nice example because it shows kind of how you can leverage the voice of consumers who are also important stakeholders within markets and who are stakeholders to whom market actors are likely to be very answerable right because that's kind of where where their bottom line comes from is consumer decisions so I think it's a constituency that can be brought more into the conversation about living informal markets forward. Great thank you yeah and it's interesting because one of the things on men teachers now is to you know talk to the traders but I guess the important thing is also to talk to the consumers and and and and and you know making sure that it's a it's a holistic conversation that's going on with all the different actors involved and Utball um could you tell us a bit more about the joint committee you know what it is how it started and how that has allowed you to establish dialogue and to support um you know those selling raw milk in Assam. Yeah thank you uh when we saw that we started the pilot project with the help of Ellery we and first we identified the informal milk market producers and traders and we started then we did the training analysis of those factors and then we started giving them the capacity building uh we didn't there defined the time and their destination because uh so as per their their convenience we had uh giving we had to give them the training to them at their doorstep and we formed a working group it is called a joint coordination and monitoring committee comprising of your health department for safety then Assam Agricultural University in the veterinary department state municipal authority and their development and we had to have had this team con continuous sitting for the review of the development in our sector and we formed some some groups for monitoring after training how they have adopted the improved practices whether they have improved in real real time or not so we had formed a group among themselves the trained actors themselves and suddenly we we we also visited from the JCMC we visited to check their their groups and other things whether in the real field they are actually practicing it or not and ultimately we found that it was a great success for us because some economical parameters on disease control then the clean and hygienic milk and their market access and their economic benefit from the training after adoption of the improved practices uh they had uh this thing uh been uh profited from improved practices they had adopted and that that was a successful project and after that based on that successful uh this thing outcome of the project in the current uh project of world bank uh called HEPR we have developed further because it's a market market oriented project called HEPR project uh so under informal sector we we have we already as a knowledge partner and we have developed the same thing uh with a larger uh upscaling of this thing upscaling of the earlier activities thank you great thank you that's yeah another very very concrete example great um Delia and Emma I'm aware that I haven't come to you yet um Emma would you like to go next and Delia no no pressure at all to just go last to interrupt it all up with all the examples thanks then yeah I really just want to make the point that I I don't think criminalization of informal market actors is going to work to upgrade any of these markets and could in fact have a kind of negative impact on on livelihoods and food security so our more milk research showed that regardless of the regulatory environment um informal milk markets are persisting with up to 90 percent of raw milk uh rural unpackaged milk being traded in these three countries consumers ultimately prefer raw milk um they it's physically accessible to them it's affordable they like the taste and they perceive it as as fresher than packaged milk and there are some misperceptions around um pasteurized milk having chemicals in it which allows it to have a longer shelf life um we found that in Kenya informal actors can find ways to comply with with new regulations that are in fact um counterproductive for milk safety so in Kenya we had some backstreet pasteurization plants that started to emerge um to allow actors to comply with the new dairy industry regulations and these the emergence of these are driven by a need to maintain the affordability of milk for low-income consumers and keeps keep the cost of businesses down for informal intermediaries and vendors but the safety of the the milk coming from these pasteurization plants is ultimately unclear there were some issues around machinery breakdown electricity failure etc and other research in Brazil, India and Nigeria has shown that where informal market actors are classified as illegal and treated as such they actually tend to invest less in infrastructure or the equipment that they need um or take fewer measures to actually enhance quality and safety in comparison um there's some approaches that social promise in relation to upgrading informal sectors um such as in Assam including capacity building by training and those work much better obviously in sectors or in contexts where governments are communicating with and collaborating with informal actors rather than criminalizing them. Great thanks so much for that Elma Dilya. Thank you, yes I'd like to give just a quick example about um uh bringing defeat out of the out of the um jaws of victory um which comes from a country in West Africa that shall be nameless I would say that this has been documented in papers and I think this is peer-reviewed impact factor journals I think this is quite important when we're uh politicians won't read them but it gives credibility uh to whatever statements and claims especially when we're making things which are counter-intuitive and you know might not make sense to people it's always good to have it written up and published. So to my example we worked in this very low quality abattoir and where something like 99% of meat was failing to meet standards and we got it down to 80% of meat failing to meet standards uh may not sound great but it cost $20 and it generated benefits of $200 just in terms of reduced uh medical costs so part of that is what we call the you know the salami principle you're not necessarily going to get from pretty bad conditions to excellent conditions to Denmark but but you could improve things for low costs and then keep on improving things for also low costs and eventually we'll get there so the next bit of the the the defeat from from the jewels of victory was when uh they closed down this abattoir and moved it to an improved abattoir you know built an improved abattoir where all butchers were supposed to go to and it cost them a lot more because they had to pay a lot more fees and it was a lot more inconvenient for the customers because it was you know not in the middle of town where they like to to buy their beef it was outside town and so the butchers rioted and we ended up with nine dead people uh in the streets as a matter of a riot and then um the people who were annoyed at being shot on the streets burned the local police station to the ground and then because they did not like the modern abattoir where they had no customers and had to pay more money they moved back to the old abattoir but the government had removed their meat inspection services because they wanted people to be in the new abattoir and um when we went back to check the food safety it was much worse than even before we started so it's just an example of what we sometimes say you know that the best is the enemy of the good and if the informal sector is managing okay try and help it manage a bit better don't try and get rid of us or replace it with something else completely different because that might not be very effective over. Thank you um that's definitely I guess a very specific example of what not to do um let's have a quick look again at the mentee because we asked our audience a similar question we asked them to tell us about a successful project or a good practice as well as stuff that has failed ah there's already a fair bit of uh responses on on on the mentee on this uh bringing government and decision makers into informal market no one-size-fits-all solution to improving it absolutely um taking up talking about the informal market I've been involved in training farmers um so training seems to be one thing that seems to make a difference like with both example as well um regulatory issues that seems to be a reason for for for failures sometimes um looking at um actually this is interesting COVID prevention measures may provide positive influence hygiene practices like I guess what Stella was saying as well um yeah Jane or Stella or Vivian any of you have any you know quick thoughts that you want to respond to what these comments that you were seeing on mentee yeah Stella yeah just to come in quickly on the points in COVID um I mean that brings true very much uh for me I think there's a the same never let a good crisis be erased um and COVID has been an opportunity to spark change across many different areas of life and I think sanitation and hygiene is one where there's a lot of new habits being formed and there are probably opportunities to leverage that um for better safety in informal markets in the long term too so great comment thank you um Jane Vivian any thoughts we still have one more round of mentee questions where I will probably come to you uh to comment so if you want to if you want to refrain this time that's fine any no okay no takers and I was just gonna I was just gonna say I was really impressed um at the coast in Kenya when all the informal kind of vegetable vendors the dookers on the side of the road how quickly they had hand washing stations in place and COVID signs and were wearing masks and often reacted much more quickly than actually some of the the formal retailers and supermarkets did that's a great example of of showing that informal actors are organized right and they have and they have the motivation as well last round of questions um and this is actually going to be um um I'm asking all the panelists the three key things that they would say that national policymakers should consider when coming up with policies like what would you like to see in the set of principles and I'm actually going to start first with Udbal because he's coming from the public sector Udbal based on your experience with the dairy sector in Assam what would you suggest or recommend to other policymakers either in India or in other countries about how to engage positively with the informal sector thank you first thing is you're identifying mapping the informal milk market then making their database then giving their training from production to the marketing then you're working with a working group properly with the synergy with the stackholder groups and the penal action is not the right thing the educative and the surveillance part is also very very important to bring these informal milk market actors into the end of the formal distinct route so that the in the the organized sector improves an informal sector goes down the percentage of informal sector goes down so three things one is your capacity building of these actors uh working in synergy with the relevant distinct policymakers and other authorities no penal action initially and the lab the establishment of lab the existing lab strengthening for creating the evidence based proven distinct database otherwise how can you will motivate what was the the standard of their milk and make for that before training and after training whether they have these are the three things that helps the system thanks great thanks so much for those very concrete and concise um dillya you've lived and worked in many parts of the world and these issues what would be your suggestion and if you don't mind if I can tag on an extra question that has come in from the audience um that I think would be good for you it um says how do we maintain the safety and quality of high risk commodities from informal markets so if you no pressure just two questions in a little bit over two minutes okay so we've actually come up with um after working for 15 years in informal markets we've come up with what we call the three labored still are the three pillars of the essentials to get safe food in informal markets and they are what first of all incentives motivations nudges so these are reasons to change behavior uh there's been too much emphasis on training and awareness raising and social marketing and really there's very little evidence that that works in the absence of uh motivation and that motivation it's occasionally financial in the case of a sam it was actually having this joint committee which allowed the milk vendors to work together with the government and then they had peer-to-peer monitoring that's motivation uh so the first thing the essential thing is motivation and consumer demand we think can be a powerful incentive the second thing though is vendors have to be able to respond to that those incentives that demand that pull for food safety and that requires training basic training uh and uh simple technologies like we mentioned you know cleaning having dirty a bowl a plastic bucket for dirty items a plastic bowl for clean items and then the third thing is the enabling environment and that means that the authorities be they you know government municipal they must buy into this that they must want to support this they want must want to promote this so if we have these three things the incentives for behavior change the capacity to respond to incentives and the enabling environment we think we have a good opportunity to improve food safety and informal markets um sorry i i missed the second question was what was that um very briefly because the two minutes up but i think it's it's important to answer this how do we maintain the quality and safety of high risk commodities i think this take goes back to risk-based surveillance which is is still very rare uh which means that we identify what are the high risk products and those are the ones where we target our surveillance and inspection so risk targeted surveillance in in three words over thank you Vivian i see you've put up your hand yeah so i think in addition to what others have said one thing that the government should consider is sustainable policies because what i see a lot of times is knee-jerk policies that are not based on risk but based on hazard so when new thing comes up and they bring up a policy because that's what's sensational right so one of the considerations is should be sustainable and not based on knee-jerk reactions um that's that's i think that's that's one thing i would say and then the second one which delia has has said is to create public infrastructure at the end of the day these informal sectors have lack the lack capital they have the lack credit so they need the basics to help them thrive thank you that's great um Stella Jane Emma would you like to go last and i'm going to call on Stella and Jane to to go next Stella yeah sure um so as mentioned a few times already in this session informal markets are really essential for nutrition and i think there are three ways that policymakers can leverage that link to better support informal markets the first is that when aiming to support informal markets policymakers can engage in the nutrition sector um oftentimes we're used to working with market development authorities or commerce or trade safety not necessarily nutrition but nutrition actors are already constituency that should care about informal markets and might not come with some of the same negative biases that other sectors have um so it's a great constituency to to leverage to support markets more second i'd say it's really essential to consider the nutrition implications of any policies that are aiming to address other aspects of informal markets any policy regulation that you put in place that limits access or increases the price of fresh minimally processed foods like dairy is likely to have negative implications for nutrition particularly for the most vulnerable so it's really important to think about those linkages when putting in place any policy regulations and then finally i think it's important to consider any potential win-wins for nutrition as well as food safety livelihoods and other aspects for example i think the example that vivian brought up earlier about the kind of cold rooms in markets is a great one because that's something that can increase the quality reduce the loss of a highly perishable likely highly nutritious product like fresh vegetables so probably it will have positive implications for access to and affordability of those products with positive implications for nutrition as well as for livelihoods food safety and all the other things we care about so i think there's some some great points so which we can leverage the nutrition and full importance of informal markets to better support them great thank you Stadette Jane three things one thing five yeah thanks then yeah so when you started you said national government but i think actually most of the levers are sitting at the local government or subnational level and you know so things like environmental health things like canning all those are local government competencies and i think there needs to be a lot of capacity development done at the local government scale in order to enable those sectors to to be more responsive to to create a more enabling environment but i do want to finish off with with an example of something that we're just starting to get going in k-town but i think it's perhaps instructive of the way we can think about process going forward so we've completed a piece of research working with with women consumers and they themselves have developed a set of nutrition ambassadors at the at the community level and one of the things they've identified is they're concerned about safety of street foods and markets but when they talk to the traders the traders say they experience kind of governance from on high the environmental health people come they check the permits they shut them down they move they don't quite know what's what's going on so these ambassadors have now approached the city through their environmental health officers to arrange for the environmental health officers to come and speak to the to the nutrition ambassadors to help them understand what the requirements are help them understand what leverage they might have for those people to then go and speak to the traders in a language they understand in a time frame they understand and help them to then be responsive and so i think it is about new ways of thinking about governance new ways of thinking about connecting state and civil society and private sector actors to to to enhance the the safety and viability of these businesses thank you great thank you and yeah great point about talking about local governments not just the national level ah yeah so three points i'll be brief i think a lot of them being reflected by the panelists already but really creating opportunities for dialogue and communication between policymakers and informal actors so making sure that governments are giving space and voice to informal actors and decision making spaces for example in dairy boards making efforts to understand and build on what informal actors are actually already doing to manage health and safety and so in our more milk research we found lots of examples of what informal actors are already doing to try and ensure quality and safety they're washing their hands they're keeping their premises clean they're wearing hair nets and they're cleaning the equipment that they use to serve milk or to store milk and several vendors retailers also using fridges but they're challenged by kind of unreliable electricity supply so that was a business challenge for them but in addition all consumers are boiling milk before they're drinking it and that's a really effective way to ensure that milk is is safe before drinking it so my second point would be build on what's already being done and understand what's already been done and then thirdly and i think this has been touched on a number of times but policymakers should facilitate access to finance so that informal actors can upgrade their premises or their equipment and upgrade infrastructure so that they can access regular supplies of electricity or clean water great thanks so much for insights and yes and can see some commonalities between some of the things that you've mentioned as you know key and i'm hoping that that also means that you know some of the principles that come out of this discussion you know those will be reflected there i wish we had another half an hour so that i can mine your brains on how you know to get more out of this but we're going to have to end the panel discussion soon but before i pass the floor back to michael let's have one last mentee check in and this time we asked the audience what is the one priority action which could be done in the next one year to make informal markets healthier and safer so pretty time-bound and pretty straight action oriented as well investment in technologies political and financial solutions so yep tech finance public investment yeah so investment again and entry points international donors need to be taught about informal markets they can't continue with the prejudice many still have i'm sure all of our panellists will agree i see vivian nodding improve policy makers awareness and recognition of the importance of informal markets so vivian jane at part you haven't had a chance to respond to some of these mentee things very briefly i'd like to give three of the three of you opportunity to either for this particular you know mentee questions that you're seeing on the screen or just in general you know just summary from from from the last hour very briefly vivian i'll ask you to go first yeah i smiled because that was one of the points i noted the international engineers and philanthropy need to be taught about informal sector or maybe even if not taught they need to factor them into their nutrition food safety food system strategy right and also not just factoring them beyond capacity building i think a lot of work needs to be done with consumers because at the end of the day the informal sector are entrepreneurs they are businesses and there has to be a business case for any improvement so the more we can create demand from consumers then the better so in summary NGOs philanthropies specifically as they think about technical support to countries they should focus on consumer education thank you great thank you any reflections any thoughts from either the mentee or from the discussion yeah that international cooperation from the big NGOs and other international institutions they should come up with and take the issues with local government or national government to have the policy framing and other things because being the highest producer of milk in around the world the USA doesn't procure milk from India because the informal market is the main cause of the initial microbial load is so high that USA cannot go for this thing risking their milk business so that is why the trust between the formal sector formal processor and the unorganized sector or informal milk market that should be created through some international bondings so that a so that a initial trust is developed the informal sector is not neglected and they are more encouraged to have more milk production to adopt the improved practices so that they can be suddenly they can be brought to the higher standards and the percentage of the informal sector can be brought down third thing is your the creation of the database of these produce informal milk market vendors because right now we do not have the actual database and that are for easy traceability of these important groups they are also the real contributors even to the real computer they might the state may not have the real database which are the whole the states or in the country so they are to be there to be brought into the main line love line love they like they are there because they are the states we should keep the social recognition that is social recognition and not no neglect neglect this thing issue for them that is what that only that is what they will come up to join them formal group in group themselves so that is the thing yeah great thank you so much for jade i'm giving you the last word thank you yeah i mean i think what we need to also be quite cognizant of is that most of the decisions that are shaping our informal markets our informal food markets are taken without any thought about food and so you know they're being shaped by economic policy they're being shaped by urban development policy those fundamentally shape these sectors but but the decision makers are not cognizant of that so i think obviously there's work to be done within the nutrition sector and i think these conversations we're having today are really crucial but i think it's important that these conversations go out into the into the wider planning and development communities to make to bring that awareness of the impacts of some of these macroeconomic microeconomic um spatial planning policies on this sector and i think that's probably where the challenge goes next thank you great thank you so much jane that was a great great ending to the panel discussion as well like you know we've been talking about the informal markets we've been talking about all the things around it without actually talking about the food as final which is the you know key so no thanks for thanks for bringing that um we have come to the end of the panel discussion can we give a virtual round of applause to our excellent speakers for the inside fleet um and of course thank you also to the audience um for your comments and and the mentee notes i'm going to now pass the floor back to michael um who will be introducing the wrap up and the the the summary and other other presentations michael thanks a lot then that was really really great to everybody thank you then for really you know moderating a great panel asking the insightful questions and really thank you to the panelists for some really great great ideas i think jane said it best and actually we have that right here so jane said how do we get out to the to the development you know world and how do we get down to the practitioners and we're really honored right now to have uh uh someone from uh the african union netpad to give us uh some ideas and some reflections from what she's heard over the last hour so i'd like to welcome uh miss uh keffel a way roba molasi uh who is the project manager for the new for nutrition for the african union development agency netpad and again huge apologies for uh uh not pronouncing your name perfectly but uh keffel away could you uh please uh put on your camera and unmute as well and we look forward to hearing your comments can you hear me yeah we can hear you perfect you look great it's perfect okay so i'm sorry you know there's so many things happen i had to answer the agency call if you can put the question again please victor yeah so keffel we just you know it was you know we heard a lot here and from your perspective you know at the development agency of the african union what do you see as some key issues that you can take forward uh some key principles or what do you see as the next steps here and how how can you guys how can you take this forward at the african union thank you so much any reflections you have yes that was actually very interesting discussions from the past um previous um um speakers and for us as adnpad we really support the informal sector because that's where our economy in africa comes from it's a big business it's a huge employer and we continue to play a key role in the future development of africa so within the african union for example we have developed some programs and initiatives that boost the social development sector for example one of the programs that we are doing that is quite doing very well now is on the home gospel feeding program whereby we actually work with the local work with the local producers you know by creating a stable market for them through the schools and the issue of food safety was also raised we do also work in bed for safety and part of the food supply chain to the school we show that our cooks also they understand has no hygiene for example they cook food from the home and they have to cook the food uh to the school so we show that the food safety also it's part of the the school feeding program we do have also farmers associations for smallholder farmers we do work with them closely we have the different programs such as the comprehensive africa agriculture movement program it's a big program that most of the african member states here do you compare to our by two so ensure that in there we boost the the the smallholder farmers role and we ensure that we provide training we do collaborate with different uh partners you and family uh do and do us as well to train them for example FAO is has been training some of these farmers on the importance of food safety and we're also developing food safety guidelines that we also try to maintain uh the safety of this informal market uh if you may be aware also we have established the african-concentral free trade area which is based in Ghana in akra to ensure that we also boost the international trade and we want to show that the informal sector and not uh left behind and all this is the effort of building towards the africa that we want uh which is the agenda 2633 over to you thank you excellent uh great thank you so much uh kefeleway that was really good and again we look forward to working with you in the african union in developing these next steps and these principles further and really getting them onto the ground so thank you very much uh and uh with that i'd really like to uh i'd like to now bring on uh sylvia who's going to provide a quick wrap up uh and then the next steps as well so over to you Cynthia thank you sorry okay thank you um michael thank you everyone in doubles a very rich discussion um yeah i was i wanted to provide a little bit on a summary obviously won't be a it won't be a full summary of all the things that have been said um but as people were speaking i was reflecting upon what are these learnings that we are taking away um on these principles of engagement uh first of all i think the what i know this is how the panelists have really provided a very positive image of the informal markets which is not what we often would are used to seeing really um so thanks for that i mean we haven't shined away from speaking about the challenges for safety and governance um but yeah all in all i think we are all positive that that there's a lot that could be done with them and in terms of principles there are a few ideas that resonate with me from what the panelists have presented and also the audience the importance to engage and to bring informal markets to the discussion table and to the policymaking table uh we need um new ways of thinking about governance of informal markets we need to give them a voice and create policies that are relevant and this is Vivian spoke a lot um to this um the importance to bring to the table the the right set of actors including all the departments in government the nutrition groups and in all other sectors that are making decisions that are shaping the systems so yeah engaging bringing them to the table participation and inclusion so making sure that we hear from them on solutions so that other solutions that we propose um will actually be suitable in tailored to the needs of the informal markets and more than anything um as Stella pointed out they have to make a business case they have to be a business case otherwise they won't be implemented the importance to have always on this agenda lens to avoid um affecting or affecting the qualities and this is what Jane reminded us um a third point is the need for investments investments on technological and financial solutions nothing and innovations nothing of this will happen without the right set of um investments because nothing of this will be done for free and then more down to the the informal sector actors themselves the importance of capacity building and training and kind of giving them the skills not only the technologies but actually the skills um to be able to to operate um in in a in a better way um but as they reminded us capacity building by itself and knowledge is not enough those that capacity building needs to also be linked up with incentives incentives that drive behavior change so whether that comes through um leveraging consumer demand or other forms of incentives that um that's very important on our engagement with informal markets especially when it comes to addressing issues like food safety that was brought up as one of the main issues and finally uh the importance to bring the international community involved I think often we just try to think on local solutions well probably in this case we actually need a change of narrative a change of narrative um internationally on what is informal markets are and how we should actually respond to their needs so this is a lot of rich ideas is not there's many more that have come up will actually um take all the notes um together and try to draft a more consolidated document that will go out for um consultation so all of you that have registered will will receive information with that time comes and we really look forward to continue and um having your input and and your your ideas into the process so that's will be all from me Michael thanks so much for facilitating this and over to you okay uh thanks a lot Sylvia not Cynthia this time uh and uh really great great synthesis and really do please join us in the next steps because this is not just ending with this webinar but we really wanted to take this forward there are some questions on the mentee and you can please go to the mentee and put in your responses really what what did you learn about this session and then another question about what you commit to so we'd like to see that but we're also running uh close on time so we'd like to keep the time so I'd like to uh hand it over to uh Dr. Jimmy Smith who's the director general of uh Illry to to give us kind of some final closing remarks for this session so over to you Jimmy thank you Michael and thank you Cynthia I hope you can hear me yeah we can hear you okay good um Cynthia provided a summary she described it as not exhaustive but a rich summary I found that panel session extremely rich meaningful insightful punchy I could add many more adjectives to that it raises several points in my mind one is if this is so important why doesn't it get more traction and we know it's important because the figures I have says that more than 80 percent of the food is produced and consumed in the same country and most of that food is sold in informal markets or traditional markets or wet markets whatever you want to call them so so many people most people and particularly the rural poor get their food from these markets they're incredibly important but they're always on the siege why why is that the case well perhaps policy biases and we hear we heard many reasons why that might be the case but perhaps also that some of the bad things which have happened globally more recently such as pandemics have often been blamed on these markets so just as the time when they were emerging uh gaining traction and becoming a a recognized part of the food economy they have been these setbacks nonetheless I think what this panel discussed under many dimensions of the issues need to be addressed because these markets will continue to be very important for the vast majority of consults consumers into the foreseeable future it is paradoxical that we regard these markets so negatively in developing countries when in developed ones a particularly great pastime is to go to the farmers market well these markets these informal markets rural markets are for all practical purposes the farmers markets of the developed world that are cherished and are seen as a place for getting your most fresh wholesome foods so can we can we manage to change the narrative to make these informal markets be seen in the future as we see the so-called farmers markets in the developed countries and we learned a lot about what we can do about that its first thing is to make them make more people understand particularly policy makers how important they are to food and nutritional security the livelihoods and so on and then we must work with a political economy of this and many talked about that building trust stable policies and so on there lots were offered today about what we can do to make these markets more wholesome to deal with the issue of risk-based rather than hazard-based approaches training and certification and so on and so on so I am leaving this conversation in a very positive mood today at Ilri and in the CGI we have been working in this area for a long time Delia and and others have been at the forefront of this at Ilri certainly with our partners around the world such as Apal and others so I think we need to redouble our efforts with all the partners who we've had here today to change the narrative about these markets and to put them more squarely in the forefront of sustainable food systems and of course food and nutritional security not only for the rural poor but for the vast majority of the people in most developing countries Michael I am delighted to be invited to this this was really a good hour and a few minutes spent so let me thank the panel again Jane, Opal, Delia, Vivian, Emma and Stella and Kelefiwe from the African Union for their participation I hope we can take this forward continue to drive this agenda and count on Ilri as a very important partner to work with you in this endeavor Michael thanks very much. Excellent thank you very much Jimmy and again thanks thanks to all the participants and all the panelists that was a great session and again we'll have some we'll have a blog out of this and we'll also have the principles which we'll share to get feedback from everybody so thank you very much