 So in this third day of the risk assessment, risk to resilient assessment training, I'm going to start with module seven, which is assessing risk management options. And then I'll talk you through developing an implementation plan so that you turn this these solutions into actual actions. And finally, designing a sort of reporting process so that if you're working with a forest and farm producer organization over a long period of time, each year you can take stock of things that you you have solved, remaining challenges that you need to solve in years going ahead. And, and, and you can begin to build up the capacity of a forest and farm producer organization to do regular business planning. And that's, that's vital because any business that is staying still is probably going to go out of business. You need constantly to be looking at challenges and taking new opportunities, taking new risks. And finally, at the end of the day, we'll give you a little bit of homework, which is to try and develop a risk management plan. So you've got your three top risks, and we'll, we'll give you an assignment about well what would you plan to do to address those risks at the end of the day. Just as a quote to start the day. It's often I think the case that people become paralyzed because they don't think they have the capacity to do things. And I like this quote because experts are people who are just as stupid as you and me. They've just had more experience in making mistakes, but there are always new mistakes they haven't tried yet. So that was by Hans Rosling as I think we make progress and we learn when we take risks and we try to solve problems so let's let's not be put off. Everyone can do these sorts of analyses and make progress in business. So let's start the day then with a look at assessing risk management options. And if you remember the toolkit I hope you'll have had a chance to download this toolkit and have a look at it. We now come to the heart of the cycle of risk management that you see this is an annual cycle. And if we've gone through the steps of introducing why we want to do this, we've reviewed our objectives identified risks and ranked the risks. And now we're agreeing among the team. What are the risk management options that we need to put in place. So I hope that's clear so this is module five of the toolkit. We've just described in a different way a little bit clearer. So we're at the point of assessing how we can manage some of these challenges that we've identified, and which you've identified yesterday afternoon. Oops. Just see if I can move this forward good. The way to do this in practice. Once you've done a risk ranking exercise with a team of people. And again I mentioned it's good to have a team of people that has some people from management but also some people from the farm or the processing unit, or the sales unit. You can convene a business planning meeting and put up the results of the risk ranking exercise. So you will have ranked your risks into red category risks that really we have to deal with this year, and then maybe some lower categories of risk that we've also noticed some challenges that we've noticed. And we may decide to deal with them or not depending on the time and resources we've got. It's always good to start this discussion by checking that everyone in the group is happy with the highest priority challenges that you've prioritized, because we had an interesting example in our group where somebody presented their homework, and somebody else chipped in and said well, have you thought about this as well surely this is a high risk surely climate is a high risk if you're doing avocado production. It's always useful to check that everyone's happy and that you haven't missed anything. And so start with that process. Then once you've got your list of prioritized risks, you need to brainstorm one or two things that you could do to improve the situation. And this is a very simple process you ask what needs to change for the situation to be improved. So for example, if you were in a dry land region in northern Ghana, and you had suffered from drought, you might think, well what would need to change what we'd need to have in a borehole, or have access to water somehow maybe we'd need to have rainfall catchment and have water storage for dry season irrigation. Or maybe it's just that the crops we're trying to to use in our business are no longer suited because of climate change and so we have to think of a complete shift to a different crop. So you can you can discuss one or two things that you could do to improve the situation. Then think, well how would that change come about what actions might we need to consider. So if for example you want to drill a borehole, and this is a, this is a, an issue that was faced by Zambian. So the Soma district tree nursery business that Vincent will be aware of one of the problems was that in the dry season, the seedlings were dying for lack of water. And so they needed to put in place a borehole to, to, to be able to water the seedlings and watch what change to for that change to come about what actions that they need to do. Well, they've got various links to supporting organizations who might be able to help them pay for the pay for the borehole there then nursery business is cited in the forestry department's land maybe the forestry department could help them. There's the forest farm facility project could we could we approach them for some money. So there, there are actions that you might need to consider to solve your, your risk. And then who is, who are the main actors who would enable that or prevent it from happening. And, and what are some examples, you could think of, of people elsewhere solving their problems so think of, of similar businesses struggling and maybe even go and ask those businesses. How did they solve that particular problem. And by doing that, for each of your risks, you'll have a set of changes that you might be able to put in place to improve the situation, and some idea of who needs to get in contact with who to make that happen. So in the next few minutes, I'm going to try and take you through a whole set of tips for de risking some of the challenges that are faced in each of the six areas. So I'm going to start you remember we had those six areas. We had sort of finance was the first one natural resources business relationships. I can't remember the more. What was it business relationships policies and legislation brand reputation and I've missed one, but I'll cover all of these some tips for de risking. In terms of finance issues, often finance issues come about because the group doesn't have a really well managed account that belongs to the business as a whole. You might need to set up a transparent accounting system, maybe even opening a bank account if you don't have access to a bank account sometimes a savings and loans village savings and loans box can can set up, make sure your treasurer is on top of the finances that you have. It's, it's very rare for people to give you money without any financial track record. So often you have to establish a group saving system at the start to allow you to invest. You might put in membership fees, or you might agree to contribute a percentage of anything you sell into a group saving system that will allow you to invest in what you need to invest in. If you have some sort of money available to you. It's often possible to ask buyers, if they could provide some credit to to you, and the reason a buyer will do that is because they want to make sure that they can get a supply, a reliable supply of high quality. So by talking to your buyers you might be able to get some kind of joint investment, especially if there are slightly bigger things like putting in place processing facilities. The buyer might be willing to go half half with you on that and come to some deal for paying that debt off. If you ask them. Of course you can search out finance organizations or project donors. And if you want to do anything more elaborate and some of the partners in this room are trying to do sort of more elaborate proposals with careful costings and profit forecasts that are submitted to a bank for finance. It's a little longer road because the bank is often very suspicious of of small holder forest and farm producer organizations and their ability to repay debt. So you do need to have a very good financial track record you need to have a bank account that showed a profit for several years, and so on before you can really get a bank to to to play play the investment game with you. And there are other things you need to think about as well make sure you're not paying too much tax. If you're registered as a business thinking through how you register the business so that you pay the least tax you can get away with, essentially. So there are various tips for the risking finance. And just as an example. This is a cooperative and you if you go into the conference report the workshop reports that I've put in the day three shared folder, you'll see the example of this cooperative in Indonesia. Initially they were a community living in a in a forest area. The forest had protected status, but they were allowed because of their indigenous status to grow coffee in the understory of that forest, and they had a number of risks when they did their risk assessment. They had a number of risks to do with staff capability. They had laws and legislation that prevented them from pruning the coffee plants as they would have liked. But one of the issues was that they needed to store the coffee in a better way to get a higher price for it when they sold it. And yet they didn't have the money for a foot for building a store. And so the management team of this cooperative decided to develop a business plan and submit it to a local finance organization to try and get the money for them to be able to to store the coffee. You can see that they've also been investing quite heavily in the packaging of some of their products. So they've got sort of honey, bottled honey and and vacuum packed ground coffee. They've beginning to develop slightly sophisticated production processes, and they've got a bit of a financial record, which is why they're able to solve some of their financial problems by going to a bank and getting a loan. So I hope that's a helpful example. Now, let me move on to the next one. Then there are many problems to do with natural resources. And we'll cover a lot of the natural resource issues to do with climate change and the options for that in the following two days. So I'm not going to dwell on those. So some of the risks that you, you, many of you have mentioned are you need to make sure that your group is big enough and has enough members with land to get production volumes that it's worth the while of buyers in more distant city markets to to come and buy from you. That's because often local markets are very good starting point, but the prices you get for those low from those local markets are often low to get to the more lucrative markets in cities and urban centers. You need bigger volumes better quality, more processing, and you need members to do that so you need to build the scale of your natural resource area. In many areas, the, there's a question of simply expanding on farm production. So this is an area in Burkina Faso, where they're producing shea butter, and they had to get agreement from the people who are owners of the land to enrichment plant with shea butter trees. So they increase the volume of production that way. They're developing procedures for sustainable management for members so this won't apply equally to all sorts of businesses but for example if you're running a honey business and the way people are collecting honey is to cut down the tree. So you probably need to think of, you know, a more sustainable way of introducing hives or developing procedures for harvesting the honey from trees in ways that don't damage the natural resources. So if you're collecting rat hand or non timber forest products from a from an area of forest, you need to develop procedures to make sure that what you're taking out is not greater than the natural resource can sustain. It's important to be able to share some of the natural resource challenges so getting your product from the field to the market can be a big issue. It's sort of a natural resource issue, but sharing transport, finding ways of sharing is important. And then there are often political issues to do with land tenure or transport or registering community forest management plans that are overly bureaucratic or don't favor smallholder groups. And the way to do that is perhaps to link your group into a farmers federation that can present your challenges to the policymakers and try and change things over time. It's usually not something that happens quickly. So it requires, you know, you need to become associated you need to collect evidence of what the problem is, you need to present your case to policy people who you might know, and gradually build momentum for change that way. And then there are, there are simple tips like protecting your resources. Often, this is something that can be done. So, you know, it's very commonly like putting in fire breaks, introducing live fencing or other fencing to protect from animal damage, where you've got areas where you're particularly prone to violent storms you can introduce sort of tree breaks to protect crops from, from storm damage. Other things like that you can introduce sort of tree crops into your fields to improve the way in which the resources are protected. So, there are many different ways you can you can address these risks. Here is an example from Ecuador of a bamboo business. It used to be a cattle ranch but the owners decided that bamboo was better business. And so they needed to try and supply a construction market for scaffolding and bamboo woven bamboo sort of fencing I think was their main market in Ecuador. They also needed to treat the bamboo for pests and diseases for those markets so they had a legislative issue to deal with as well. But when they started they didn't have enough volume to meet the market demand. So the big buyers were going elsewhere for their products. And that's why they decided to develop a sort of a more plantation type system for bamboo. It's amazing isn't it? It's a really huge bamboo crop this one. And they also got their members to diversify into other bamboo products. You can see some of the crafts and things they were trying to develop so that they could diversify their markets. So expanding the scale, the membership, and the amount of resources that you have to offer the market is often a useful way forward. Now I'm going to talk a little bit about customers. Your customer is king. You have to be meeting, you have to be producing something that somebody wants to buy. And so it's really worth investing in a little bit of market research to find out who's selling the products you're trying to sell in the market and who's buying them. And then develop a bit of a customer pipeline, you know, go and meet people, ask what what what you could supply them, and so on. With customers, often you in if you're in a rural area, you're often dependent on traders who come in, and they often play people off against one another, they make it competitive. So it's really worth buying for you if you meet this price. And if not, we'll go to your neighbor. So it's, it's really worth trying to sell as a group to customers. And to do that you often need to develop working capital, so that you've got a bank account with some money in so that you can buy the product from your members so there's no delay for them in getting their money. You can sell the product, you cover the costs and maybe even make a bit of a profit, which can develop this working capital even more. Customers invariably complain about quality quality is probably alongside price is what they're looking for. So, if you've got many members making a particular thing. That might be but if you were developing baskets for example, and you've got many weavers, it's very important that you develop quality standards, so that any regular customers know that when they come to you, they're going to get the best quality. So that can be as simple as writing down the procedures for, for production, really clearly and agreeing them as a group and pledging to follow them, and so on. And then there's, you know, customer problems, sharing useful equipment and knowledge to ensure good quality surf. If somebody has told you, and you're a farmer and somebody has told you that they don't really like buying honey from the cooperative because it's not very good quality when they come to you a particular farmer that they know has good quality. And will please share that knowledge so have meetings to share knowledge and intelligence, so that you can improve the quality and sell as a group. I'll emphasize one last time sellers a group don't get caught into selling as individuals, because you'll always get a lower price. When people get a deal from a buyer who says I want this product on at this time, and then you think we can do that but you, you fail to get the order to them on time. And that will play absolute havoc with your buyer's business. If your buyer is trying to sell something in a shop like a supermarket, and they need honey on their shelves, but you haven't provided them with the honey. They're selling on shelves and they're losing money. So you have to meet orders on time, and then developing your market contacts you might be able to get your NGO supporters to work with you to do a bit of market research and find people, find tourist outlets who might be wanting to sell honey go to the hotels and so on. So don't be shy about using a partners. I'm from Cameroon of a fish smoking business. And it's a mangrove forest business so the fish are sourced from from mangrove inlets and at the moment each of the producers is smoking their fish because it provides a bit of shelf life. And then selling it by the roadside. So this cooperative was thinking, how can we do better with our customers than that. Perhaps we should develop guidelines for particular stove designs that really give a good flavor and a consistent quality. So maybe we could package our products together and put a logo on it so that if people are buying from a roadside store, they, they come to us again and again because we develop a reputation for good quality. So that was some of the issues they were thinking through about how to improve their customer relationships their business relationships. Now some some quick tips to do with bureaucracy. There are almost always policies that provide a headache for businesses. And sometimes it's just the number of steps you have to jump through in order to register a business or a community forest. Sometimes it's transport regulations. And often, these things are just poorly thought through. When you're trying to deal with policies and legislation with government bureaucracy. They will very rarely listen decision makers very rarely listen to individual farmers. But if you join an association and particularly if you join a federation that represents tens of thousands of farmers. And those farmers are all facing the same problem. You can share information about those problems, collect the evidence and develop an advocacy strategy. It's also really helpful if at the apex level, you have somebody who regularly goes and meets. People who you know are on your side in the policy world. So it doesn't have to be at ministerial level but if you've got an apex level organization it might be. It might be people in in forestry departments or agricultural departments who can help you who can tell you who's in charge of this policy and how, how could we change it. And I think one of the things that people don't do enough of is forest and farm producer organizations don't have a communication plan. They don't show how important their businesses are for the lives of many, many people in rural areas. They don't show how those forest and farm producer organizations are managing forest and farm sustainably how they're contributing to youth employment, how they're helping women and developing a communication plan can be really helpful when you're going to try and get government support for changing a policy. Often, these issues have to do with internal conflicts you can often get internal conflicts within your group that undermine your case and stop people cooperating together so have a have a conflict resolution plan. It's a process for hearing people's complaints, putting them before the management team, and then providing an answer, even if the answer is no, you can't we can't change this, have a conflict resolution plan, so that people know that their grievances are being listened to. Let me give you an example of a policy and legislative challenge. This was faced by a women's group in a community forest area in Nepal. And what they're doing is they're producing juice from the wood apple. It's a particular type of fruit you get in the highlands of Nepal. They were facing several policy and legislative barriers. The first was that the transport regulations for forest products were very ambiguous. So when they got to the checkpoints going towards the main city Kathmandu, sometimes government officials would let them pass saying that's fine. Sometimes they'd say, oh, this is a forest product and you haven't obeyed the rules on producing, you know, you haven't got the right permit. So they had that issue. They also had the issue that it was very difficult for them to register their business. The processes were very long and complex. The third issue they had was that they had to meet food health and safety standards for their juice, but the only office to check on the quality of juices was in Kathmandu in the capital city. So they lobbied through their federation of community forest user groups called FECA fund for the government to set up quality assessment stations in more regional locations, and also to develop a one stop shop for for registering businesses belonging belonging to community forest groups. So that's a battle they fought over many years. This was the area I forgot in in my introduction. And this is risks to do with staff capacity. What are some of the things you could do. Well, the very first thing you should do is you should have a clear organizational structure where the people who have responsibility for different things have clear descriptions of their roles. And then you need to ensure that those who know how to do particular things within the business say somebody knows how to filter and purify honey, train all of those who don't know how to do that. If you really don't know how to do something in in a business. It's often useful to visit do a peer to peer exchange with a functioning business that is doing the same thing elsewhere. So that can very quickly stole solve your staff capacity problems. Or if you have some farmers who know how to do stuff and some farmers who don't, then think about a demonstration plot where you can have a teaching centre for people who don't know how to, to, I don't know whatever it is, cultivate crops or mix crops and trees or process the, the product in some way. It's really helpful when you're dealing with staff capacity. If you deliberately rotate the leadership positions and roles. The business managers doesn't remain as the business manager forever and keep all that experience to themselves. But actually you have a limited time period for which they can be the leader and then you put somebody else in the role. And that is that the business, the old business leader or the old treasure or the old secretary will then provide a sort of a source of advice and information, and, and, and so on, to build experience within the group as a whole, so that if one person and gets sick and dies, the whole business doesn't collapse you've got other people who've already done that role and can step in again. And when you've got equipment and processing equipment, and don't wait for things to break, but get the people who know how to run the equipment to make sure that there's a spare store with the most the most likely things that are break and have an inventory in that store. And that can keep a business running and make sure that new people understand how to run the equipment and machinery. So this is a cooperative in, in Brazil, and it's very remote and it's trying to sell Brazil nuts and timber and a fish called out of Pima, which is the biggest freshwater fish you can see the man, carrying one out of the water there. And they had all sorts of issues, disputes and internal tensions and capacity gaps. And, and mainly that was because people didn't trust the leadership that the leadership weren't really being very clear about how the business was being run. And so that when they did a risk assessment they identified that capacity problem and set up a process of developing organizational goals, and then staff roles and responsibilities, and a list of business objectives, and so on, so that they could deal with their staff capacity issue. And in that case they got the local NGO to provide business leadership training as well. Finally, some tips to do with branding. So here is the candle nuts branding that I showed you in an example on a previous day. Some tips to do with branding, how do you distinguish your product from other similar products, how do you make buyers buy from you, rather than from other people. Well, it's essentially a brand is about telling a story. And in order to tell a story you have to say not only that the product is good and the product is high quality, but also that the production process is beneficial. So you might want to develop a strong environmental and social commitment in your business, and processes that include attention to sustainability, maybe even participatory guarantee schemes for sustainability. So that when you label your products you tell a story not only is this a high quality product, but also the production process is benefiting the environment and benefiting the communities. It's always good to assign someone as a market researcher to go and look at similar products what else are people selling, and then come back and see how you can compete with with the other things people are selling. This is often a role that works really well for young people. I don't know about you but as I get old I'm completely increasingly flummoxed or bamboozled by technology, whereas my daughters are experts at it so get them to do the computer design for a new label or the internet marketing. And try and use a strong logo and imagery that communicates the values of your of your business. Trying to have meetings and action plans to do with branding and marketing is also useful so that you don't get stuck you can you can change your branding and change your image. If you think that'll help you. So here is an example from Indonesia, where we see a native bee species it's a Stingler species bee species being used to produce honey. And so they did a risk assessment and they looked at the problems they were, they had to design special beehives to accommodate this particular bee. And they had to share knowledge with their different members so that everyone was producing high quality honey, and they had to do filtration so they developed a filtration process for each of their members to make sure the quality was good. But then they came to the issue of branding. And, and they wanted to be able to sell their honey in a supermarket. So they got some of the young people to investigate who produces bottles and jars and which would suit us in terms of volume and size. What about price. And they developed a printing a printed label, and they managed to find a business that printed labels exactly as they want it. And you can see on the label there are various certification marks to do with honey quality, local origin and so on. So, there are various solutions there for branding and and customer reputation. So, when we're developing risk management plans. You've seen some of the options. What we have to do is we have to take our risks. So do you remember when we looked at the that teak business yesterday, there was a challenge the customers will not pay enough for our timber. Maybe that's been ranked highly. And so you then have come up with an action that will form part of risk management actions. So we could improve our quality standards by buying a high quality sawmill, try to get certified and find new buyers who will pay more for our timber. Or we can't pay our staff enough to keep them in our business. We can improve the salary but only if the members agree to meet these quality standards. So we were going to develop quality standards for timber production. If you're a member you have to abide by them, and then we're going to invest together to have a quality sawmill and try and get certified, so that we can get better price, and then we can pay our members more for their timber. So you're developing an integrated action plan that is tackling your top ranked risks. And I think I've gone on for a little bit too long but the other sessions will be a bit shorter. So please do now let's stop for 10 minutes and just have any questions on developing a risk management plan. So please do raise your hand if you have a question. While we're waiting for people to do that cat or are there any questions coming. Not questions but two comments one from Mark on the issue of or challenges related to access to resources. So you're saying in the area of land and land use the local and or specific cultural context and arrangements around land acquisition or ownership is a very important area to consider usually building relationships with local community leaders and land owners is a good entry point. Yeah. And then kind of man. It's also making a point here and how branding needs to go along with getting the brand listed with the property rights units and the Justice Department in the Gambian case. So that's a very important point canning man and thanks for raising that and and this is another area where if you are thinking like a business incubator. How can we support our groups that a group in a rural area is probably not going to be aware of where the brands are listed within the property rights unit of the Justice Department. If you're an incubator you can make that useful comment that sorry that you can make that useful link on their behalf and support them to get their brand formally registered and listed so that other people can't copy it and steal your all your good reputation so thanks canning man that's great comment. I have a couple of questions about any of the options that I put up of some of the things you can do to respond to some of the risks that you might be facing. I obviously haven't had time to cover all of the ways in which you can solve challenges, but I was just trying to give you some some ideas for thought. Just chip in with either a question or a comment, or have I reduced you to silence on the third day of the training. Yes, Mark, thank you. I think that's all I think we're just taking in all what we've heard but I think there's a risk that I think you touch on related to technology and how technology can be applied to support. I think throughout the three days you've mentioned issues around how, for instance, equipment can become a response to some of the risks that are identified. Similarly, also one of the things to do with technology is the fact that it is constantly evolving. And so maybe an equipment probably you buy today, maybe in the next three years, it's probably not the best equipment to be able to support the business. How do you plan and have this in mind so we should respond into this fast changing space in the technology sector. Yes, that's a really good question. And yes, equipment is evolving over all the time in almost all areas of business, perhaps less fast in agricultural processing, but very fast in internet sales areas like that. So, I mean, I guess an important start point is to have somebody in your group who is interested in and capable in sort of either heavy equipment or in information technology. And as I mentioned, that's often younger people among us who are interested in, you know, new ways of doing things and it can bring a bit of excitement into the business group if you suddenly reduce everyone's workload by installing some new equipment or if you find a new way of selling product online or something like that. Because of planning for it. People often treat equipment as a, as a one off cost. So they save up for the equipment, and then they buy it, and then they don't think about the future. So I think it's better to think of equipment as something with a depreciation, so that you set aside in your group finances every year a little bit of money for investment in equipment, so that when the old equipment either becomes outdated or breaks, you've got a fund that has been specifically set up based on membership fees annual membership fees or deducting a percentage of the product from each thing that sold. And some of that money is used to cope for the depreciation in equipment and the need to keep updating with new technology. That's a good question and we'll cover that a little bit on the last day when we talk a little bit more on accessing finance. Yeah, I'll try and cover that point a little bit more. But thank you Mark. I've got any other questions. Does, does any of the, do any of the tactics or tips that I offered jump out at you as particularly important. Yes, can a man, please do. Thank you so much Duncan related to capacity issues capacity risk, especially if some of the members some of the executive members stay very long in their positions. These issues are very relevant for FFFPOs. So I think one of the issues to address capacity issues in terms of governance is to use that model which was developed during phase one called organizational capacity assessment tool. It's very, it's a very good tool for FFFP to look at their own capacity in terms of technical capacities, group governance issues. So that toolkit is very important of course to support that process. Thank you very much. Good. Now, can a man, can I just ask is that was that a short checklist, the ox act checklist, or was that a slightly more developed tool. No, it is. Actually, so it's also related to the Oscar checklist where normally for us we apply that Oscar tool if FFFPOs are going for not before they go for national conferences. So that they assess internally their own capacity related to some of those parameters on Oscar tool. Yes. Okay. Well, listen, I will, I will try and dig out the ox act checklist tool. It's a sort of a, like Kenny man says it's a really good way of quickly looking through the various capacities and systems that a good business organization has to have in place, and then assessing well where we got gaps and that can help people think oh yes we haven't got a system in place for staff recruitment or we haven't got a system in place for, you know, regular labor consultations with our labor force. So you go through and you tick the ones you've already, you've already got in your organization, and then you think how to improve in the future. I'll see if we can get hold of that and I'll put it on the shared drive or get Ali to email it to everyone later on. Thanks. Thank you, Kenny man. Any questions or points at this stage. There was a comment by Nila on the importance of research for any business to stay viable in a sort of changing environment. Yes. Thank you, Nila. I think that is that is an absolutely fundamental point that unless you know what your customers are buying, and what other products similar products exist in the market with which you're competing. It's very difficult to survive in business. So you have to try and be ahead of the game. You have to be trying to do things better than your competitors always. So introducing new designs for baskets, or using different color schemes, or putting things in. If, if, if customers are worried they don't want to buy a big one liter jar of honey, because it's too expensive, you produce your honey in 500 millilitre bottles. And then the, the people who are not so well off can afford to buy the honey on a, on a more sporadic basis. So doing customer research is, is a really important fact. It's a really important part of business and having somebody in your organization who's given the role, you're responsible for market research. Go and talk to our customers find out what it is they like about what we're selling, find out how they would like to see it changed. Come back with ideas about other products that we could sell. That's a really important role so thank you Nila. And good morning Ysifu. Money, bank account, money to everybody, sorry for my being late, okay. That's absolutely fine. We're aware that everyone is, is, is busy busy. Oh yes, and Mark has just mentioned the point that when we're doing research is to get customer feedback. So if you've sold something to somebody, go and ask them, did you like, did you like our product? Or did it break? Did you, when you tasted our food, was it good or, you know, and they may say actually, you know, really, you need to wash the pesticide off or something, something simple that you can then change in what you're doing to increase the way customers think, oh yeah they're really taking care of us I'll go back and I'll buy my product from them, because they're reliable and they are they're interested in in in what I think. So very good point Mark. Good. Well in that case, let me push on Donald's did you want to say something. Yes, I wanted to say something. Thank you again for the nice presentation but I was just wondering concerning the, maybe you did not mention but I was just trying to thinking about the health risk. For instance, now we have the pandemic like the issue of COVID and all that. If I remember very well on on the face when you try to explain when you want to develop the plan you have to brainstorm but my understanding this issues comes for instance the issue of COVID or something any other pandemic. I find that already they have a regulatory authority which actually gives out like what are the action you need to take. Now when you are developing a plan do you need to, to just take as the way they recommended the recommendation made by the authority in place or you can also try to see how you can develop more in order to make it fit for the current situation. Thank you. Yes, that's a very difficult question because I don't, I don't obviously know what the COVID regulations are in all the different countries. I know that forest and farm producer organizations have really been struggling with this. Getting product to market, selling it in, in ways that are socially distanced has been a real, has been a real challenge and different country groups have come up with different solutions. Also, I remember in, in several countries I think in both Nepal and Ecuador, people had developed home delivery systems. So they had people able to try and buy vegetables or something, and have them delivered to their home so that they didn't need to go to the market. And then you have a sort of a box which is brought and left on the doorstep and some way of paying. I don't know the details of it. But I guess you do have to abide by the rules the government sets. And it's a question of, well, can we think of innovative ways of delivering our products in ways that that meet that those those restrictions. So that's not very helpful, because I'm not aware of all the situations but I'd be interested, you know, to hear, perhaps from others, if they've got particular solutions to COVID. If people could put in the chat, anything that they've found really is helpful as a strategy for, for the challenge of the risk of COVID. Thank you, Donald. That's really good. And just to remind us of that major, major risk that's affecting us all at the moment. Let me move on then. And I will try and get back to the sharing. Can you all see this. We're now going to take you through two slightly smaller sessions, one on developing an implementation plan for your risk management. And then how do you monitor what progress you're making and making that monitoring of progress part of the risk management process. So, we're, we're here in the, in the cycle of risk assessment and management, we're in module six. And we're really, we've, we've got our risks. So we've, we've ranked them. We've come up with some actions that we think would be a good response to get us ahead of the competition. And now we have to assign responsibilities for taking those actions. And it's really important that, that within a group, everyone knows who is tasked with who's tasked with the solution, so that there's somebody, somebody is going to make something happen differently. So this is where we are in the, in the process we're getting towards the end of the assessment and risk management process, and we're going to talk about risk management plans and assigning responsibility. Now, before I talk about that, I just wanted to step back and say that business organizations always develop over time, and they often go through a set of phases they don't all go through these phases but but they often do. So, the first step at the bottom is, is the business is formed the business organization is formed, and people don't really know whether to trust one another. And, and sometimes the business is set up by a particular leader, and that leader is, is, you know, there's no process of election, or decision making on the roles who's going to do what. So the other members think it's an interesting idea, but they don't really own the business, or, or its activities, and sometimes women or minority groups are excluded. It's, it's the people with the land and the resources who tend to dominate the establishment of group businesses. So, this is the forming phase and then there's quite often what we call a storming phase, where a storm blows in, and trust breaks down for whatever reason, usually because the accounts nobody understands how much money the business is making, or the leadership has, has, has put some of use some of the money to buy a new motorbike. And so, at that stage trust breaks down and the leadership adjusts people, people say we need to do something differently, all the activities stop and you lose a few members. But if the business is a really good idea. It's possible to, to kind of save a business like this by going through the next phase which is norming, which is introducing written norms that that govern how the forest and farm producer organization will function in the future. And these adjustments restore trust. So there's a written process for selecting and removing leaders, how you take decisions within the, within the business organization, who's, who's has what roles. So the, the members who used to be a little bit feeling a little bit isolated they now have regular meetings, and they begin to own the activities and feel like they belong to this cooperative or this association. And because it's, it's, it's, it's growing it's a trusted thing. The membership then grows, and it matures. And, and finally, as we go through the risk assessment and management process and solve some of the problems. We gradually improve the business step by step each year, identifying challenges that we need to solve and improving the business. And finally you get to this performing stage, where there's strong trust between the members. There are routine changes in leadership and staff that happen without any conflicts. We're eager to kind of belong and to meet the quality standards and they're making good profits and there are the women and minority groups are included so the community as a whole is represented and is happy. And at that stage you've got a mature business organization. And I don't know what stage you find yourself at. Persevering and risk management is a way of, of helping to move from a very weak organization to one which is much stronger. Let me give you an example of that. And this is a business I was trying to help in Belize, and it's run by a Mayan community who have a community forest area, and it's a very beautiful area there's a valley that the community is based in between two sets of very steep cliffs and limestone cliffs, and they have a community forest and some farmland. They wanted to add to their farming activities by running an ecotourism business. So they decided that the business was going to sell just the tours they weren't going to try and build accommodation. They were relatively close to the coast, where tourists are visiting the beaches. So they were going to run tours, and they had two ideas two main ideas the first was that they had a cave system which I've explored, which was more than five kilometers long, had beautiful stalactites and stalagmites. And secondly, they had a river that was running down through the valley through the forest, and they thought wouldn't it be wonderful if we put tourists on rubber tubes, and got them to pay for a tubing experience. And they can also see some beautiful flowers and wildlife as they go. And so they named their business adventures in the Lost Corridor, and everything seemed fine. And the problem was that the leaders who set up the business were mostly men, you can see them in the foreground, and they belong to one of two main plans within the community. And what they hadn't realized is that they hadn't discussed the river tubing experience with the local community, and where they had proposed for the tourists to float through included the women's bathing area in the river. So the, the other clan and the heads of the community shut down the business so they had formed the business, and then there was the storm, storming phase. But they didn't give up, they decided that they would reconstitute the leadership of this business because it was in the community's interest and this time they had half half women and half half men, and they introduced the idea of also selling traditional meals, Mayan meals to the tourists halfway through the day. And that was a thing that the women could contribute to and earn money from. And so you went through a process of developing procedures for the for the business. They also had a lot of permits to get so they needed a permit to be a tour guide you need a permit. So during a caving expedition, you have to have proper health and safety equipment and, and health and safety guidelines. So they were still in the process of, of developing their business when I left, but at least we'd reestablished trust, and we got to the stage. I don't think it's fair to say that we were yet at the performing stage with that business. I hope that that helps. So managing risks and having a risk management plan is part of developing your business. Now any business should have clear staff roles. You should always have somebody who's a who's the manager. You should have somebody who is responsible for all the supplies you need to run the business. You should have somebody who's controlling any production process if you're processing anything. And you should have somebody who's responsible for marketing. You should have somebody of course who is responsible for financial records. You may have many other roles and each of these, if you have a very large forest and farm producer organization, each of these roles may have a whole department of people underneath it. I think in your head, if we're going to assign risk management tasks we need to know who best to ask to put those things in place. So if you're trying to deal with financial risks, maybe the person to deal with that is the finance manager. If you're dealing with staff capacity to grow a new crop, you maybe it's the production coordinator. If you have something to do with policy and legislation maybe it's the business manager who needs to take responsibility for the actions. So when you're developing a risk management plan, you know it doesn't all have to be done by one person you can assign different tasks to different people. When I'm running this training I sometimes ask people to identify who the business manager is who the supply coordinator is who the accountant is and so on. So the accountant is the person on the left that's in a business in Ghana and the marketing manager. That's the second person. The business manager is the person in the center, and then you have the supply coordinator on the right and the lady there is the production manager for a Brazil not collecting business in Bolivia. So just, you know different people have different skills. So when you're assigning people to solve problems make sure you assign the right people. So to do this is really, again, if you're having a risk management process you've ranked your risks together, you've brainstormed what your solutions and actions might be. And then you've got a sort of central management group linked to the core roles, and they're going to put some time and energy into this process, and perhaps help to secure resources for the process. You need to have a commitment to repeat this whole process, if it, if it proves positive and decisive. So, when you are assigning tasks think of doing it in an open way, think of having a group that is responsible for following up and chasing each activity, and think of a commit making a commitment to do this on a regular basis. And that's because keeping the members trust is key to any forest and farm producer organization business. You can see in the picture. This is one of the ladies in Belize, who is now running the adventures in the Lost Corridor. And at the start she didn't trust the business at all she thought they weren't listening to them and weren't taking into consideration their concerns, but now she's, she's in the management team itself. So you need to have an in the integrity of the management group is really important and a risk management process can be seen as a way of building that integrity, listening to people's risks and challenges their concerns what's giving them a headache. Honest, being honest about what we're going to solve this year, what we can't solve this year, when you have an action actually following up on the action, trying to make it fair and develop these good relationships that make a forest and farm producer organization run well. So it's worth if you've developed a risk management plan with a set of actions, each an action for each of your priority risks that you have fairly regular meetings and follow up. And this is something being done about this. Why, why has this not been addressed yet. Have you visited the city to ask whether there's an expert in coffee processing we could, we could talk to. You might want to have some kind of regular meetings to follow up. And yeah, you, you, you might, you might want to formally register your business, and, and part of formal registration is having a business management plan, which will require you to have a risk management process within it. That may be a legal requirement. If it isn't a legal requirement, then sometimes it's worth building risk management into the bylaws that govern the running of the forest and farm producer organization. So we're going to annually we're going to have a meeting where we look at the challenges for the year ahead, and we're going to assign people who are responsible, and so on and you can write that into the bylaws. So having transparency, so that any costs associated with this, these actions are are clearly presented to the board of or management committee of the business. So clarity builds trust in risk management. You have to, often when you're thinking about risk management, you can think in terms of who has what rights, who's responsible for making any change, what relationships are there that need to be adjusted, and what what do people get out of making those decisions, what rewards are there for doing these things. So if you're assigning somebody with a task, how are you going to reward them if they do that task and improve your business as a result. If you're not trying to change something, does it affect the rights of the members. Have they been involved in the decision making to say yes we want to put in place this new machine, or whatever. So going through when you're doing risk management, those four hours rights responsibilities relationships and rewards can help you avoid some of the pitfalls that you might face. So here's an example of another ecotourism business. That's the second of two ecotourism businesses that I'm going to just give you. I wanted to describe what they were before before this ecotourism business. They were a very small community forest group, a relatively small area, I think it was something between 25 and 50 hectares. And their community forest was high in the mountains, overlooking a city, and on one side and a very beautiful view on the other side. And when they started their business they were going to sell chickens, a little bit of pine timber that they planted and some agricultural crops. When they had a process of management meetings, one of the young people in that business said he'd noticed that lovers, sort of young couples from the local city used to like coming up to the community at the weekend because there was quite a good road, and they would hang around at the top of the mountain and take photos. And because they had that regular set of meetings, the management team said, Okay, well we'll assign you with responsibility for seeing whether we can turn that into an into a moneymaking opportunity. The young people thought, Well, wouldn't it be great if instead of just taking a photo through the trees, we created some platforms where people could take photos so the platform in the center where people could take photos and we could charge them a small fee, like half a dollar or a dollar for every photo they take and we could get a photographer to do the digital photos for them in case they wanted somebody to take their photo. So this was the the start of what turned out to be a very lucrative business. They developed five platforms, they developed stunt photos so that the photo on the right is using a bungee cord in case you fall out of the tree. You could do these action photographs with you and your girlfriend and people would pay maybe $10 for all of the different photo opportunities. Now they were, they were, I think they were getting an average people were spending an average of about $10 or $20 per visit, and they were getting 20,000 visitors per year when I saw them. So you can quickly see that by having a risk management process, a regular risk management process, assigning responsibility for somebody to investigate how we could do something different. You can completely change the fortunes of your business. And that's, I hope that's an interesting example it's not something you can do everywhere, but it's worth doing. So make sure that your risk management process is clear to everyone. Don't let a risk management process just be part of the management team alone. Make sure that you communicate your findings to the members. So that you have it approved by the members. Make sure that the board know that this is what you're going to do and make sure that the management staff who've been assigned with the roles for implementing any solutions are clear on what they should do. And getting much more practical. You can, you can simply enlarge the table that I showed you before so you've got your risk, the challenge you're facing. You've decided to an action that you're going to take so you're going to try and buy a high quality sawmill, or try to get certified to find new buyers, maybe the first step this year is to improve the quality standards. So the people growing teak will all be doing planting at the right spacing doing weeding doing pruning so that the quality of the timber is uniform. And you've assigned somebody on the management team to develop a quality standard by 2020 this this slide was from a few years ago. So for each of these challenges, you've, you've, you've assigned somebody so somebody is going to provide training in the quality standards for members of the cooperative by a particular date. Okay. So stop there and take any questions that you have on how do you develop a management plan, and some of the issues of how do you manage a risk management process. I've been trying to communicate to you that risk management can form part of your regular business processes, and it can enhance the trust, and it can help to solve problems in a way that allows your business to flourish going forward. And do we have any, any questions let me stop the sharing and see where the people. So, and I'm very happy to welcome me, I don't know if I'm pronouncing your name right, who's joined us from from Ghana. So welcome to the training and I hope you can get access to the training materials online or through emailing Ali Logan Pang who's on this call. Got one another comment from, oh, Niajia do you want to say hello. Hi. I've been trying to join since Monday we have not been successful but hopefully I'm here with you and I'm enjoying every bit of it. Great. Well, very much welcome. And I hope you'll be able to see the, the presentations from the last couple of days, and so be able to catch up. I hope to have you. And I know that technology issues are always a problem with these sorts of trainings, somebody indeed dealer from has mentioned that online marketing is one of the methods used in these hard times I guess coven in particular, but it remains a technology gap to some groups. And that's, that is a real, a really good observation is, if one of our challenges is is market access and getting our product to our customers. How do we do that when coven is restricting transport and, and there are rules on all sorts of things. And indeed some groups within the forest and farm facility support have been developing online marketing, but it does depend on you having sufficient money and resources to make that possible so a group in before, developed a website where all of their farm products were advertised, and then you had a click, you, you, you ordered you did your order and payment online to the cooperative, and then they had a little delivery van that traveled around the city near where the farm or organization was based, and delivered product to all the people who'd ordered and paid for it. But that obviously depends on you having that sort of technology. It would be interesting to know if anybody here is experimenting with online marketing as a solution. Does anybody have any experience with online marketing in the groups they're working with here. Does anybody even use the internet to advertise their products here. Is that still something that's not being developed and used widely. I'm sure some of the Ghana and must be using the internet. Elvis or any of your groups using the internet to market products. Hi, I'm Mark. Yes. I can speak for one of them. One of the things that I already working in that area. That's to do with combo. They have an existing relationship, even up there with Aduna. Aduna is a British business that is working closely with small holders with combo in the bar above value chain. So there's a lot of things being done online and Aduna is a major off liquor and they use a lot of online market. I think I'm going to teach you some other to come in. Thank you. Yes, come in. Do you want to come in and add to that. We are also using the internet in various platforms. We have one ecotourism center in our village that we are trying to develop. And most of the event that happens around it is posted on the internet and we've already mapped the whole site also on the on the net. And we are also into Mongo, the largest producer company in the Obono East region. Most of the farmers are into Mongo. So we are also working with this company called HPW and most of the events trainings are also available on the internet that you can have access to. Thank you very much. Brilliant. Thank you, Kwame. That's really helpful to know. And I also saw Vincent, your hand was up as well. Yeah. Actually, I wanted to check for the Petalke District Farmers Association because they've got so many products and they've been using WhatsApp, messaging to share what they, but I didn't see Hosea speak, but maybe he expected the other definition of marketing online. But even WhatsApp messaging, which they've been doing, I think it's part of similar kinds of things. And Facebook, but we'll see. I can't see you anymore here because they have a Facebook page for Petalke DFM, they advertise their products a lot around that. Great. Thank you. Yes, and it's, it's, it is, it is something really to consider. Yeah, Niajia, you've put your hand up. Yes, I, I mean, I'm sorry, I'm sorry if I'm asking a question that may already have been asked in the previous training sessions. I think that's relevant today. I'm just wondering, is there, are there guidelines for helping forest and farm produce organizations to always find the silver lining in every dark cloud. That's a, that's a really, it's a good question. It's a very broad question. I mean, I think what we're trying to do with our support program at the forest and farm facility is to provide long term support to forest and farm industrial organizations to develop both their production systems and their businesses and link them to policy makers. And so I don't think they always we always provide silver linings, but our intention is to to give confidence to people that they can do this that farmer groups, forest and farm producer groups all over the world are developing accountable, well managed groups that do good business for for their members. And, and this training I hope is is is one element the risk management process that we're outlining here. If you do it regularly, you'll see, you'll be able to see yourself solving problems and improving in an incremental way, step by step the business will grow from something that isn't very professional and very well run to something where you've solved a lot of the problems within it, and is functioning very well. But it's not a silver lining and some of the challenges that people are mentioning to do with climate change and drought, political barriers and so on, their long term issues that we have to work on so yeah. Thank you for your point. Duncan there was. Sheila also mentioned that the groups he's working with. Also share product information through what's up. Yes. And Mark asked the question on what you would suggest would be a good way to. What are the requirements of these various responsibilities assigned. Okay well that that question is will be answered in the next session, when we talk about monitoring and assessing the, the, the risk management plans that a business might develop so I'll come back to that one. So if you're seeing a question from a nanny does the website created for advertisement is it is really relevant in our context looking at its costs, where most of the small ffpo members to which no one of the members literate and haven't got a technician that has an internet site. So some ffpo is do selling in the code with context via what's that platform and advertisement through rural radio. That's really interesting so I agree that if you haven't got a young person who's been to college and understands how to develop an internet site, I don't know how to develop an internet site. Is it really relevant, and more relevant might be to use what everybody seems to have these days a mobile phone WhatsApp group, and then to advertise the products by radio. So thank you, and that's a really useful suggestion and just keeping it real for some of the context we're dealing with. And Nixon has said some of the ffpo's in Tanzania have market information systems using mobile phones and also sharing product information on the internet. And, and Damian also says yes we have that as well. Damian do you want to just add anything there. Yes, we have a market information system to organization we call it. Where we have not only market information system but also farm inputs, this information also share. So we have like four components one is is information sharing, but also farmer can actually get market information where they can actually interact with the system and ask what price of maybe maize in which region. And, but another, another thing is where we, we as an organization if we saw an opportunity somewhere where farmers they can maybe sell like honey, we just share straight away to the farmers, and then they get and that is market linkage. And another component in this is about the farm inputs, we can also give information on how and where to get farm inputs because we have also challenges with the, with the genuinity of the farming. They are counterfeit, counterfeit farm inputs so we give information such kind of things. So you can also make some other things. Yeah. Another important to the system is the system is also can be also used with a normal mobile phone, not necessarily smart phone, because we consider most of the farmers during the villages they cannot even have mobile. I mean the smart phone mobile phone. So the interaction is also with the normal cell cell phones. That's really helpful, Damien, thank you so much. And again, thinking with a business incubation hat on that we talked in the first day about how useful it is to think, well if one group is developing business, then it's, it's probably able to help other groups develop business and if you're an apex level organization, providing market information ideas about who to sell to in ways that local farmers can access is a really useful service that you can provide as an incubator of business for people so thank you very much for, for that contribution. So I'm going to, I'm going to move on now because I'm aware of time. So we'll just cover the last thing that responds to Mark's question about do other useful ways of assessing the performance of a risk management process. And, and indeed there are so let me share my screen, one last time for today. And so this last session is, if you want to make risk management assessment and management, a core part of your business incubation, and a core part of your business. Then you probably need to do it on a regular basis maybe once a year, run a process with the members of your organization, and you need to have assigned tasks for people to try and solve some of your priority challenges. How do you then check up on what's been done and what's been achieved. So that's the, the final module of the securing forest business toolkit is about how do we monitor a progress, how do we assess performance using Mark's term. So, this is getting us to the end of an assessment and risk management process that would happen once a year. But most of the activity will happen between assigning the responsibilities to different staff members, and then the next year when you start the cycle again. So how do you monitor progress. The first again stepping back a little bit. Any business should be keeping records, because keeping records is is probably the first and best way of improving a business. You might have a business plan that describes what the business is aiming to do, who the management team is, what the production processes are has some sort of financial information. And it's important that whoever is managing that business plan, usually the manager of the business itself, regularly reports to people on on what is happening within the business, and what changes are being made. And that might include changes to do with risks that have been identified and actions that have been agreed to be taken. Obviously, you should also have some kind of finance records, and these should involve at the very least some sort of balance sheet that shows what money was put into the business, what money has gone out of the business. And so you've got a balance of which allows you to see where all the money lies, and it should have at least a profit and loss account, which tops up how much income you had how much cost you you incurred. And so whether the profits are more than the costs. And also, you need to have at least at the start some sort of cash flow analysis, which shows when money is flowing into the business and when you have to pay for things in time, so that you know that you've got enough money to pay for the things you need to pay for like salaries or like equipment. And the treasurer is usually responsible for that. Sometimes businesses keep a record of their customers who paid for what, what are the contacts for the customers, any feedback, and probably the marketing manager is somebody who could do that and keep a record of those in Microsoft Word or some other computer product or just written on sheets of paper. And somebody should be taking records of the decisions that a business takes planning meetings, including the risk management meeting. So the secretary should keep a record of what was agreed in the risk management meeting. Finally, perhaps the production manager would be keeping a record of any inputs, any stock that's held in a store. And so you can only measure progress if you're keeping records and a business should be keeping a number of different sorts of records. And that will be important when we consider how we monitor progress. So for example, the, I want to give you a negative example for once this is a rubber tapping cooperative in Bolivia, and it was set up by the men in the bottom left. And they established a business based on a natural forest reserve, where they were going around the forest and certain trees produce latex rubber latex. And they were taking it and processing it you can see some of the equipment on the right which has all gone into rack and ruin. What they didn't realize is that they in their business was that they hadn't got any financial record keeping. So they'd agreed with the rubber tappers a certain price per volume of rubber. But actually, that price that they were going to pay to the rubber tappers wasn't enough to cover the sales, the income from from the sales sorry it was too much so the costs were too high, and the sales price was too low. And so after a few months this business just collapsed. So that just gives you an example of the fact that you do need to have some basic records over time that help you to manage a business and to manage the risks within it. And if you see the costs creeping up, then you need to think well either we need to sell our product more expensively, or we need to find a way of reducing the costs, you can only do that if you're keeping financial records. So, how do we, how do we monitor progress well again in general groups forest and farm organizations tend to have a big annual general meeting. And that usually is about to report any progress to show the accounts to vote on any leadership positions, and to propose or change any, any systems within the business. And that can be a useful place where you present a risk management plan. So you could say well we we looked at all our challenges and these are the four things we're going to do this year to, to, to make a change and that way everybody in the farmer organization knows what's happening they knows what you've prioritized as the main challenges, what you're proposing to fix, and, and what you've agreed to do in the year ahead. And so having the risk management process just before the big annual general meeting is quite useful. You should also be having probably the business management team should be having regular weekly management meetings, and that can look at the challenges you've identified, and any progress that is being, being made on a more smaller level like have you found the right person, did you find out the price for this yet. Did you contact the Federation to see whether we can join the Federation. Did you get the rules on COVID from government. Those little decisions can happen at a weekly basis. So here is another example of a business it's a share butter cooperative a woman's cooperative in Bikina Faso, and it has 5000 members now so it's quite a substantial undertaking. And because they had such a large membership group. They were able to offer quite large volumes of a sheer butter to the market. And you can see the sheer butter nuts and the traditional way of pounding those nuts on the right it's a very labor intensive process. The process for separating the the sheer from the from the waste products in it's a done by hand and it has to be done over many hours. And so when they looked at their risks they decided that their challenges they decided that they needed some equipment, because there were so many women doing this and the quality was so variable. It was it was such a time consuming process. They decided to invest in new equipment and two types of equipment they wanted to invest in. One was a grinding machine to grind up the nuts rather than doing it by hand. And the other was a machine, which was like a big stirring machine that separated the oil from the from the waste. And, and that challenge was was presented at an annual general meeting and an agreement was reached that. Yes, they were going to invest in this. So the membership, because they had a large membership, the members could put in enough money to pay for those machines and they got a matching grant from a non government organization. And to that they've also developed other products so they recognize that just selling raw shea butter was not very lucrative, but they could develop other products like soaps. You can see different types of shea butter soap and nice packaging on the left and then on the far left they've got various body skin creams and massage oils and various other products. So, what they did is they had a risk management process, a regular process of looking at their challenges. They come up with some solutions. They present those solutions in an annual general meeting, and then they action them over the next year to support back in the next year. And that's hopefully the way this should function. And with that, I'm going to just stop again for any last discussion. Maybe on the particular thing of how do you monitor progress, and perhaps more generally on the use of this tool, how you might use this and repeat this training with your groups. Let me stop the sharing there and see if we have any quick questions or comments, either about what is the best way of checking up on and monitoring the performance of the risk management system, and, or otherwise. I think you could go and implement this toolkit with a group that you're familiar with and help them to work through, identify their challenges, and come up with some actions to solve in the year ahead. And I'm aware I've been talking for a long time. Thank you for being patient. Any, any questions or comments in the chat. Not that I can see Duncan. Okay, Mark, can I ask you, did that, did that short presentation help answer your questions. Yes, very helpful and also very structured in a very detailed analysis of how we can respond to the various experts. And just to also add that one one area that for instance we probably would focus on is the leadership and how the leadership also is building on its capacity to be able to respond further to these key areas, obviously there will be some capacity gaps that as the business is moving on to scale, the leadership, especially the management would require so understanding same and planning against how to respond to same or would be very useful process to think around. Thank you. Yes. Yes, thank you, Mark. Yeah, I mean all of, as, as a business evolves it always needs new skills and new capacities and some of those capacities are in leadership. Danny man's just very helpfully written a comment, you know, if you want to track something, you need to keep simple monitoring form sheets, and I probably didn't make clear enough that that that table I was, I was showing you just a few lines of a table where you can see the risk you've identified. What your proposed management solution is, and who's responsible for that for what time that can be a simple monitoring checklist, so that the management team can say at the end of the day okay. Mark or can you man you've not yet done this activity that you promised to do. Johnny's asked a question, who is responsible and how is, is, is done this monitoring is it a person or is it done by a team. And I guess, once you've, you have a broader team to do the risk assessment, come up with the solutions and propose actions. But then it's up to the management team of the business to monitor what progress is being made whether the people who've been assigned responsibility have done it. And I think, you know, different management teams will have slightly different composition, but that should be part of regular business planning from then on. A business usually has a meeting once a week I would say at least. So, once, once you've agreed those actions you can check your little sheet, your simple monitoring sheet on risk management and say okay, have you made progress in this area have you made progress in this area, because there'll be many different risks you face and many different people assigned to do something better. And in dealer you've said backstopping is very helpful by those who are assigned to monitor progress. Absolutely. So, you know, especially in smaller forest and farm producer organizations, having the business manager help you to find the right contacts and implement the solutions can be really helpful. Nixon I can see your hand. Mr Duncan, what I want to share is that your presentation, you mentioned that in the management, the marketing managers and the treasures, who can take part in the risk management, but on the experience, most of the groups you are dealing with are at the level where they have no managers in the treasurers, but they have, you know, people in their groups who are well experienced, who are taking those role as you know managers as treasurers, though they're not professional managers. So maybe our role will be leap equip those people to take now the role of risk management, though my professional they're not treasurers or not managers. Thank you. Thanks, and and that's a really valuable point because I think you're absolutely right in a farmer context. Of course, the local people won't be professionally trained managers or professionally trained treasurers. So it may be quite difficult to find people who can play those roles the manager is usually the easy one because somebody will have a natural authority or a customary position that makes them in charge. There's no risk because if you don't have rules for changing those regularly that customary leader might then abuse their position of power, but finding the other roles the marketing person the, the, the input coordinator, the treasurer the secretary. Usually those are people just maybe one or two people who are literate, and so can take notes, or somebody who's been to school and done well at maths, who can become the treasurer. And it's absolutely right that there's just because they haven't got a formal qualification doesn't mean they can't play those roles. So we need to equip them, both with the clear understanding of what that role involves, and also give them the status that they, they deserve for playing that role so we can, we can, you know, once you're called a treasurer, then you're the person who will receive training on financial accounting and so on, and so on so we can help build up the organizational structures, even without all of the formal qualifications. And that's a very important point. I think Meng has also made another point that using visualization and translation of those form sheets in the local language helps a lot. So yes, so maybe when you've decided to take some actions to improve your business. And then somebody to draw something to describe visually what the changes that you're going to make, and then describe it in the local language so that if you have a general meeting of all the farmers in the group. Everyone can see, oh yes I understand why we're going to do that. And I can hear what's being done in my own language. So thank you very much can you man that's very helpful. So Johnny has asked a difficult question which is the more staff, the more funds that the FFPO needs for human resources. How many staff at a minimum should an FFPO have to run all these business incubation service systems. Could it be done by only one business manager. And I think most of the processes which we've described in this training aren't costly in terms of paying experts or paying staff. They do require people to put a little bit of time into going through a process. I think if you're thinking larger FFPs often pay staff to take up particular positions so when you are running a very big business, you're often making a lot of profit and you decide, well one of the challenges is that our current business manager isn't really capable of doing the job. So we're going to pay for a professional business manager to run the business part of our, our organizations work. And you may pay business manager may pay people to manage the technology may pay people to market the products. So when you've got very big then you can afford to staff. But I think many of these roles can take place, even if they're unpaid roles in an in the early stages of a forest and farm producer organization. And the risk management process that I've described I think can be done at any level, even if the staff are just voluntarily doing the exercise, and the only income they have is when they sell their own farm products through the group. Yeah, so that's a very good question. Well listen we're almost at the end of time. So I've got a little bit of homework for you. You've been very good at doing your homework so I hope, I hope this is also being useful for you in helping to, to go back over the materials and to make them practical so that they can actually be used when you get home. So let me share my screen one last time and set the homework for today. So what I'd like you to do today is to take the three main risks that you are prioritized through your risk ranking exercise yesterday and brainstorm yourself think up what are one or two things that we could do to manage this risk or to solve this problem. So when you think about that if you've got a particular forest and farm organization in mind, think, Well, who should, who should be responsible for doing that in that organization, and then think how long would it take. Could we set a deadline is this something that we can do within a few days, or is it going to take a whole year. Finally, answer that question that was raised in the chat, who is responsible for monitoring progress and what they should look for. Okay. Let me be clear about the homework so the homework is going to be using the three risks. How are you going to what do you propose as a solution for that challenge. How are you going to manage that risk, who is going to be assigned responsibility for it. How long should it take put in a deadline. So if you think of today's date in January 2022. When is the deadline for solving that problem, and then who who in your group would be best placed and manage to monitor the progress, and what should they look for is that is everyone clear on that. So let's stop the sharing and maybe Ali if you can just put the homework into the chat. Can you do that. Is that something as possible to do. Yeah, I've been emailing it after each session as well. So you've got those questions. For those of you who didn't haven't been able to take part so far, I think. Was it Miller, I can't remember Professor Miller or somebody from Ghana, and if you haven't been able to join us so far. What we did was we tried to get you to identify risks in the area of in six areas yesterday. Financial risks, natural resource risks, a customer transport and customer risks, staff capacity risks, legislation risks, and brand and reputation risks. And then we asked you to say which of these is a real problem for us a big impact if we don't solve this problem, and how likely, how much do we need to solve that problem this year. So the scale of consequences and the necessary that the need to solve it in this year and we use that to rank the risks, so that we had a list of three priority risks this morning. So if you go through that exercise and then use your three risks to develop a risk management plan. That's what we're doing, but we're just doing it with three risks, three challenges, and, and to get you to understand the process. So I have a couple of questions. In which case, I'm so pleased to have been able to share this time with you. I thank you all for participating so actively, especially in the morning session and then throughout asking interesting questions and making interesting comments and giving feedback. So thank you all for your participation. Tomorrow, we're going to stop the general thinking about risk and focus in on climate risk. And what are some options that we can think about putting in place with our producer organizations to become more resilient to climate change. Risk to resilience, and that starts tomorrow.