 Okay, thank you ladies and gentlemen, we'll continue with the second panel of the day which is on water access and I'm delighted to see as was mentioned in the first panel that so many of you have shown up despite the wintery conditions that just do not seem to go away although somewhere in the future I'm sure they will. So the importance of water resources is undisputed of course and as you know you can even stay in this country to get good examples of what water stress really means, go to western Texas or California and you'll get great examples. And as you all know Africa is no different, in fact water stress in sub-Saharan Africa is larger than in most places on this planet and the number of people that is affected by this continues to rise. Estimates suggest that by 2030 anywhere between 75 and 250 million people in Africa will live in areas of high water stress and most likely this will lead to the displacement of millions of people that has all sorts of consequences as you know. So unfortunately the problem of access to water has been reasonably well documented but solutions to the problem are not always easy and therefore I'm very delighted to have the three panelists that we have here today who will all give their own views from their own experiences on these matters. They will focus predominantly on what you know possible solutions to the problems of water access can be. Each of them will talk for roughly five minutes, we don't have to be too strict because we are one panelist short so that's good and you can read their biographies of course in the programs that you have, I will not read them out to you. We'll start with Tuma Wright, Maya Harris who works at the US Energy Department and she'll talk about industrial water usage and how to do that more efficiently. Thank you very much. So I just want to start off with the simple fact if we use less water there's more to go around. So according to UNESCO's World Water Assessment Program in 20 years the quantity of water for the world's population will decrease 30% per capita. That's due to straight population increases and the finite amount of water available in the world. So when you look at 27 developing countries in Africa and Asia, currently it's about 900 million people that don't have access to clean, avail, fresh water resources. But by 2025 the water initiative says that 2.4 billion people will be living without water access. So this is a huge problem. What I've been asked today to focus on is the solutions. So what I'd like to talk about today is opportunities that lie in using less water in industrial uses, particularly in energy extraction and electricity generation. And since I'm talking about water energy in women I want to talk about the opportunities for women studying in the science, technology, engineering and mathematics fields that they can access working in this area. So I'd like to conclude by talking about programs and policies that women can access that have currently been launched by governments and multilateral bodies. So to begin I think that what we'll need to do is to discuss the total amount of water in the world to frame the scope of the discussion. So we have a graphic that shows how much water is on earth. And this is actually from the US Geographical Survey's online water school. It's from their photo gallery. So what we have are three marbles. OK, and what we have is the largest marble that's 332.5 million cubic miles. OK, it stretches from about Topeka, Kansas to Salt Lake City, Utah. And that represents all of the water on earth. So when you look at that marble, two things come out. You see that when we say, OK, 70% of the world is covered by water. What we really see is that it's actually a very, very thin film of water. And that includes all the water in the oceans, the ice caps, water in living beings and plants, the atmosphere, rivers and lakes. So let's look at the second marble. OK, and you can really see how much smaller it is. And that actually represents 3% of the water available on earth. OK, and that is all of the fresh water. So that's water in the lakes and rivers, but it also includes groundwater. And the problem with that is only 99% of that water is accessible to humans, is not accessible to humans. OK, so now down to the smallest marble, which is actually a little pinprick. And that's over at Atlanta, Georgia. And that's 22.4,000 cubic miles of fresh water, mostly in our lakes and rivers. And that's all the water that we have for every purpose, for every living being on earth, for all of our industrial, agricultural, domestic and municipal purposes. So breaking it down even further, 8% of that little 0.5% of all the water that is available on earth that's represented by the marble over Atlanta, Georgia, that's all the water that is available on earth for domestic and municipal purposes, meaning drinking water and sanitation. 22% is available for industrial uses and 70% is available for agricultural uses. So if we make water use more efficient with industrial and agricultural purposes, we'll have more for drinking and sanitation as population increases. So I wanna look at the water energy life cycle. So energy is required for all fuels production and electricity generation. It's needed in extraction, refining and processing, transportation and storage and actually generating power. So there are opportunities for women in this area to reduce the amount of water used in electricity generation and fuels extraction. And if they are able to participate in the creation of research and development and technological deployment, then that's an area that we should focus on and looking specifically, let's take oil and gas extraction. So for oil and gas extraction, 30% of global production of fuels is derived from oil and gas extraction. But it only takes 10% of the water that's needed for fuels production. So, but we need to look at the way the world is moving towards non-traditional oil and gas resources. For example, non-conventional fuels development is becoming more and more important in North and South America. And for hydraulic fracturing, it requires 2.5 to 4 times more water than conventional hydrocarbons extraction. So to put it in real terms, for every well that you have for hydraulic fracturing, you have 2.5 million gallons of water used a day for one well. Okay, so if you have a lot of those wells together in an arid environment, what you have is a strain on the water resources. So we need women to focus more on the use of recycling the water. A lot of those hydraulic fracturing wells, they actually are just once through systems. So the University of Texas A&M is working on using saline for hydraulic fracturing as well as recycling waste water. Conventional natural gas is the fossil fuel not only with the lowest carbon footprint, but also the lowest water consumption rate. It only takes 0.5% of the amount of total water needed for energy production and extraction. But as mentioned before, when you talk about the enabling environment, there's space for women in both the government and the private sector to work towards creating that enabling environment that discourages governments from flaring gas in Sub-Saharan Africa. This is especially important and frames the argument against flaring gas in the scope of it being a very water efficient way to create energy. But to do that, as mentioned in the previous panel, the infrastructure has to be created. So government and private sector have to work together to make that a reality. Biofuels, okay? One of the primary energy sources in Sub-Saharan Africa, it actually takes 90% of all the fresh water available for energy production and it only produces about 10% of the energy that is produced worldwide. So if we could replace the amount of countries that are using biofuels for energy, primary energy production by encouraging governments to use conventional natural gas, I mean, that way we free up some of that 22% of water that's available for industrial purposes for domestic and municipal uses as the population increases. So turning to electricity generation. Most utilities now can't measure how much water they're using in their functions. But what the Department of Energy wants to do is to extrapolate from information we have from Sandia National Laboratories. And so according to the World Energy Council, 43% of the plants in the US are once through cooling systems. So what that means is that in all the coal plants, fossil fuels, nuclear plants that have once through cooling systems, that's 190 billion gallons of water a day that's used just to create electricity. So let's say you have a coal plant and there's 52% of plants in the United States that supply thermoelectric generation are coal. For each kilowatt hour, it takes 25 gallons of water to cool the plant. So if you think about it, every time you use a light bulb, every time you turn on the TV, you're using more water than you would if you took a shower or if you watered your lawn. So just thinking about water in these terms makes it more important for women to get involved in this space now. And in developing countries in Africa and across the world, when you have fewer plants spread out over a further distance, a less efficient and underperforming grid, there has to be some consideration of water efficiency as they make their energy master plants. 75% of Africa's generation comes from South Africa, Morocco, Egypt, Libya, and Algeria in thermoelectric generation. So there and all of these countries have experienced water shortages at some time. So the question is very crucial now about how we can decrease the amount of water used. The balance has to be considered in the water energy nexus. So looking at opportunities for women, when you think about opportunities for women and freeing up some of that water for domestic and municipal purposes, whether it's in research and development, prediction and design, science and technological innovation or deploying and transferring those innovations, just clean energy going after that sphere is going to promote water efficiency. And this is an example that I'll give you is that solar PV uses no water. Okay, so as more mid and small sized solar PV systems come online, then more thermoelectric plants are taken offline. We become more water efficient and we have more water again for growing population. So these are some of the opportunities that we see in the actual production of fuels extraction and electricity generation. But there are already programs that women can access that really will support water efficiency. So I'd like to bring up the Department of Energy launched the Clean Energy Ministerial. That's an annual meeting that's held this year. It will be in Seoul, Korea. This is the fifth generation of the Clean Energy Ministerial. And it's a year round process even though it has annual meeting of ministers and they share technological advances in the deployment of clean energy technologies. But under the CEM as it's called, we have the Clean Energy Education and Empowerment Initiative. And that is actually a human capital initiative that is actively recruiting women for the STEM fields. It creates a pipeline for women into clean energy, into focusing on clean energy areas. So, you know, the data is hard to come by in various countries. We heard Paula earlier say that in Africa, Sub-Saharan Africa, only 13% of women are represented in energy jobs. And as far as out of that 13%, those that are in clean energy, not just the energy sector writ large, there's only 27% of women. So, you know, that's an even smaller percentage. And so South Africa, I'd say, is a real exception in Sub-Saharan Africa because it is part of the clean energy ministerial process and their programs to increase the amount of women working in the clean energy sector, especially under the clean energy ministerial process, dovetails with their employment equity programs. I just, in closing, I just want to mention another program that's really important. We talked about earlier women in energy and the micro level, the State Department's W Power Program. That's the Partnership on Women's Entrepreneurship and Renewables. That was launched in January 2013. It aims to empower 8,000 women in East Africa, Nigeria and India. And these are women that are clean energy entrepreneurs and they, who want to start businesses, who want to work in the energy sphere. And over the next three years, it's expected to deliver clean energy to 3.5 million people. So, you know, these are just a few examples. We've heard about programs that the World Bank has launched. I've talked a little bit about what the Department of Energy is doing. So combined with, you know, having the private sector and government work together to create the enabling environment to use water more efficiently in the fuels extraction and electricity generation process, we also want to be able to empower women to access some of these programs. Thank you. Thank you. We'll move straight on to the second speaker, who is Rachel Ischafsky, who's the managing director at Innovation Africa. She'll talk about solar water pumping systems. Go ahead. Sure. So I'd like to thank the conference organizers, first and foremost, for a small typo in my title. Because the name of the organization is Innovation Africa, but Eno Africa is our Twitter handle. So for those of you who are tweeting and Facebooking, please feel free to use what's written in front of you. But really, I'd like to thank the organizers for putting together a panel on energy and its link to water. The two are often siloed, and I think they're so inextricably linked. So, you know, Maya, you just mentioned the link between solar and water. I'd like to really move on with that and present a quick case study. I just got back from a month on the ground in Malawi, Tanzania, and Uganda. And if you'll allow me, I'll show you some quick photos from my trip. So this is a village in Uganda. It's called Nisenye village in the eastern region. And I would imagine that at this point, photos like these are quite familiar to all of you. And we all know the statistics. We've all heard the quote from the secretary general saying that unclean water kills more people each year than all forms of violence and war. We've heard statistics like the fact that Sub-Saharan women spend on average 40 billion hours each year searching for water to drink. And so I'd like to share with you our solution on the next slide. We drilled in this community. We only had to drill about 25 meters deep. But our drills can go up to 600 feet, 200 meters below ground. And you can see in the next slide our solar-powered water pumping system. It's very simple. It's a solar panel about 720 watts. The drill can, as I mentioned, go up to 600 feet below ground. And then we can install taps, like those in the next slide, throughout the village. We can spread those taps across two kilometers. And one system can have eight, 10, 12 taps. Now this, to me, is critical. I think that in many instances, the conversations around rural water access in Sub-Saharan Africa has begun and ended with hand pumps. That's been a solution that many governments have resorted to. And I don't think it's our best option. I'd like to share with you on the next slide just a quick sense of scale and cost. To power one of these pumping systems, and 1,000 people is a conservative estimate of the number of people served by one of our water pumps cost about $30,000. Now, depending on where you're working, what materials you're using, how deep the water source is, a hand pump can cost anywhere from $3,000 to $10,000 to install. Here's the challenge with that. You install it, and there's maintenance costs over time. Hand pumps are perpetually breaking down. Anyone who's working in rural water will tell you this. You can expect hundreds and hundreds of dollars of repairs every single year in perpetuity. You can also expect periods of time in which the hand pumps won't be working until people can be mobilized to fix it. And you can also expect lines. This, to me, is the greatest challenge. You may have brought in clean water to these communities, but what about the women who are now, instead of searching for dirty water, waiting in line for clean water, spending two hours, three hours of their morning, and then the same amount of time in the afternoon? What about those women? On the previous panel, we were talking about women's empowerment and small-scale enterprise. How are these women going to engage in any of that if they're spending their days still sitting in line just waiting for clean water? That's why we believe that energy has to be linked to water, because we can do better with one of these water pumping systems, which is, in fact, comparable in terms of price. What we can do is install these 12 taps, and there's no need to wait in line ever again. You have 12 taps in a single village. It takes minutes to go get your water. It's right near your home. We spread it out strategically in key points throughout the village. And what happens is that, as a result, people come out, they get their water, and they bring it right home. And again, it's comparable in price. We sat down with the Ugandan government. We sat down with their district offices, with the Ministry of Water. And we shared with them the pricing, and they were shocked. They had no idea how affordable it would be to use renewable energy to pump water at this scale. And so we're actually embarking on a partnership now with the Ugandan government to work on projects like these in rural communities as a pilot instead of the hand pumping systems. And so I think we have a really tremendous opportunity here to change the lives of women through leveraging renewable energy to pump clean water. And I'd like for us to consider that, because I've driven through rural communities that actually are on the electrical grid and still use hand pumps. I think there's an inextricable link that has not yet been fully leveraged and explored. And I'd like to see that happen a great deal more in the future. Thank you. Thank you very much, Rachel. That was a great example of how on the ground applications can make a difference. That was great. I want to turn to the last speaker of this panel, Mr. Bill Carter, who is an Africa Diamond Leader at Ashoka. He will tell a little bit more about, I'm sure. Go ahead, Bill. So the sharing I'll do and the perspectives I bring really are from social entrepreneurs on the ground in Africa from those countries. And I was really, I'm just going to pick up, if you don't mind, Rachel. One of the things, the implications of what Rachel is talking about here. Just taking women away from having to spend as much time go accessing water. And we recently elected a fellow in Ghana attacking this issue in a different way because he essentially created off-road motorized motorcycle with hand carts that he could basically move around. One of the things he found in terms of because he could basically move agricultural produce to gathering points. But one of the things he found was that the women were very happy to pay him to go fetch the water and bring it back. But would it under, whether Rachel's example or this fellow that we recently elected in Ghana, which is working in a kind of remote rural area, underscores is that the, if you think about access to water, if you reframe it as access to knowledge. What's happened, what we're seeing now in this field, the big trend that Ashoka is seeing, is that women who have historically in most parts of Africa have the custodial role, which is rated with all sorts of cultural significance in different ways, depending on where you are in Africa. Rather than be focusing on the access to water and as that place where they can gather, what we're finding is that they're gathering more around finding innovative ways to provide more nutritious food for their families. And we're seeing this in some cases in rural Uganda. So it'd be really interesting to pair your project up with Mualimu Musheshi, who runs a rural women's university. I think it'd be really wonderful opportunity. So we're seeing these opportunities on a village level. We're seeing these opportunities on a scale like Komako and Zambia, where Ashoka fellow Dale Lewis has 83,000 farm families. Farming water effectively, because effectively, whatever they're growing, they're farming water. They have to either get the excess out of the way so they don't destroy the nutrients in the soil, or if they're not getting enough, they have to be able to deliver the water to those seeds so that the water works. And they have to have the organic content in the soil so that their nutrients in the food they're producing so their families can be nourished with. Because without that organic content, that ability to conduct the nutrients into the produce fails and you have, and what we have in a lot of Africa and India is malnutrition. So what we're seeing is a shift from simply focusing on access to boreholes or using that as an access to doorstep health, which is a step. The interesting thing we're beginning to see now is we're beginning to see the access to water move both into the field of nutrition. And nutrition really, in the broadest sense of the word, nutrition in terms of improving the quality of the produce that's coming out of the farms to begin to attack this hunger and this both hidden hunger, micronutrients and more obvious, just access to carbohydrate. Carbohydrates are a sort of classic malnutrition. As well as thinking about that access to water in terms of stewardship of the ecosystem, which is, and in both Mualima's case, in rural Uganda and in Dale Lewis's case where he's working with, I think, approximately slightly over 10% of the population of the country, a million, more than a million people. I think that percentage is right, it could be off by a few points. But what you're having is the effect, if you can manage the access to water properly, what it opens up for women. And this is the big shift. I think the big shift in Africa right now, I'm not sure about the at the nexus of water and energy, but I really clearly see in the work of a lot of fellows and W'shoka has documents and I'm happy to share the knowledge about this. But the big shift is into the whole process of women stepping into the role of driving communities that nourish, that nourish the people in those communities and nourish the other communities that they trade with. And that looks to us like the big trend. And I think it's, and we see it in different parts of Africa, we see it growing out of the work of access to water. A number of these areas that have been sort of the traditional purview of a number of the programs you've talked about, but what's happened is that the social entrepreneurs are beginning to look at the food supply chain as, for lack of a better phrase, a nutrient value chain that links the nutrients and the ecosystems to the soils into the farming practices and finally into the cooking practices in terms of what people eat and it's having effect. So I think that that's the major trend just in terms of these introductory remarks that I see reflected in the work of our fellows in Africa. It's great, thank you. Thank you, Bill. Those were all very interesting remarks and topics and I'll see, I want to touch upon a few issues and I guess pick your brain and feel free to comment on them. I'd like to hear your views before we open it up for discussion. The one thing that Maya I guess raised my interest is whether at the US Department of Energy there is you do any work or you look at what recent findings of hydrocarbons in Africa mean in terms of water access. Does that mean there's huge findings all around the African continent and it's sort of one of the places where there's an enormous scramble going on or starting to go on for not just natural gas but also oil and coal and others. What does that mean in terms of putting extra pressure on water resources and access to water? That'd be one issue that I'd be interested to hear your thoughts on. I would also very much from the other two panelists like to hear their thoughts on what continued urbanization means. So we've heard great examples of how on the ground solutions can make a big difference. We also know that increasing numbers of people move to urban areas and I can imagine that one may think that that may make the problems more containable, it may also create new problems I could imagine. I'd like to hear your thoughts and views and what you find in your work and how ongoing urbanization may create new stress both in water access and electricity access if you will but let's focus on water mostly. I'd like to hear your thoughts in arbitrary sequence please. So the Department of Energy is of course very interested and is monitoring new energy resources that are coming online. Many of you are aware of the recent fines off the coast of Mozambique in East Africa and Tanzania and we're working with the governments to talk about the reforms that they will need to implement in order to use those resources wisely but with regard to water access domestically one of the things that I thought that was very interesting that Paula mentioned in the earlier panel is that those resources are actually not being used in Africa. They're being sold on a global market and they're being sent to the people who can pay market prices. So it's not that it's changing it's not changing necessarily the amount of water that's used in fuels extraction or energy production in Africa. So this is a global issue because we have a global market but with regard to as I said flaring that's the thing that is really of interest to us right now at the Department of Energy governments like Nigeria, Angola, many of the big oil and gas producers in Sub-Saharan Africa. We wanna engage with them so that they can recognize that using those resources that are just flared into the air like waste it actually can it's a water efficient resource that needs to be harnessed. So we need to change the discussion. It's not just about let's okay gas pricing maybe you'll be interested as a government in getting into actually using natural gas instead of flaring it if you think about how much money could come in but also think about how much more water you'll free up for your people. So that's where the sphere that we wanna work in. I got my start in this field working as a freelance journalist in West Africa in Ghana and I remember I was living in the capital and there were days when there was just no electricity. There was load shedding, the government would literally shut off the power and on those days we couldn't turn on our tap. I couldn't turn on the sink because there was no power to fuel the pump and therefore I couldn't brush my teeth in the morning with clean water running from my tap. So I certainly acknowledge the challenges of urbanization because I think there's already a stress being placed on urban areas when it comes to water as it relates to energy. I would say that that's not my current area of expertise and I'll tell you why because I think that there's still a tremendous concentration of people living in rural communities who are not heading towards the cities. They will never live in the cities, many of their children will never live in the cities and so finding sustainable solutions for them is incredibly important and I want to address Bill's point because I think he said something really beautiful about nutrition. There's one story I didn't share from the picture with the women at the tap. There was a woman that I met named Annette and I asked her because I was curious, we always talk about saving women time and what that'll do for them and I was curious what Annette's perspective was. So I said Annette, what are you gonna do with these extra six hours in your day? And her answer was I will become a better mother. And what she meant by that was she understands what proper nutrition looks like. She understands what a balanced diet is for her children but she can't grow those crops and therefore she can't feed her children the food that she knows that they need. She also can't be a good example because she can't run her own business and therefore she can't teach her daughter to do the same. She can't help her daughter to do homework and so I think that there's a phenomenal link and Bill, thank you for pointing it out. I do think that energy in these rural areas will cause tremendous new opportunities. People leaving, there's gonna be a huge population in rural Africa but the demographics that trends it in analysis that I see suggests that it probably isn't gonna grow, right? And that most of the demographic push that's coming over the next 50 years which is gonna leave Africa as the most populous continent in the world by the end of the century is gonna all be in the urban areas, right? And we have already pretty dramatic data that suggests that people leaving African rural areas and moving into the cities at a pretty rapid rate. I think that what that does is it puts a spotlight and it's not there yet. I don't have social entrepreneurs at the system changing level addressing the issues of asymmetric utility production whether it's water or electricity. We don't have, we're starting to see it in India. We have, there's a very interesting person who's not in Shoka Fellow at the moment but works with an organization called Nextdrop and Nextdrop is doing something very simple with the Indian utilities which is having them just as a starter for developing a relationship with the citizen sector that is, you know, just rather than just treating them as this arbitrary mass of people that you turn the water on and off for, she's sending out SMS's an hour before the water's turned on in a particular area. And what that led to, people said, whew, you know, the first time the utilities talked to me in India, this was in India. And the second thing they said was, well, maybe we can talk to them about where it's broken. And now, and then she got the cruise to go. And so now this conversation is starting and I think in Africa that's gonna, you have these core cities where you've got water supply systems that actually function. They may not be, and they typically, like the Indian cities are often, their main issue is can they pressurize the whole system at a time? They can't, they don't have the energy to do it. That's probably not gonna change anytime soon. But then the growth in Africa is coming in the arrival cities that ring these cities. You know, cities like Ngong and outside Nairobi. But I mean, a lot, I mean, they're just, and they're proliferating so quickly. There aren't any integrated supply systems there. And so I think, and they're not tied into, they're just growing so fast, there's no, there's no water supply system, there's no electrical supply system. And from a, so they're having fan for themselves, right? In terms of, so you have people creating, building private, essentially water distribution systems to meet the needs of these communities. So there's a lot of entrepreneurship going on in that area. And I think that the, for women, for women, the challenge in the arrival city is the same as it is in the rural area. You go into a school, I was just in a school in the Eastlands just outside of Nairobi. I walked into the class, 65 kids, all bunched in little, three or four to a group, sitting straight back, 65 kids to a class. You look out over that, and I know just from my, from recent training, what, just at a eye sight, what the diameter of an upper arm is when you see malnutrition, right? Cause there's some, and you could look out across that classroom of 65 children, ages seven to nine, and they were malnourished, right? And so you, the families that are bringing their children to these arrival cities are bringing the problem with them. And so the challenge now for those schools is to how do you create a demand? How do you create a demand in that community that says, hey, you're malnourished, your children are malnourished, there's a chronic condition, you brought it from the rural areas into the cities, how do we change that, right? And so you have the same challenge that you would have had in the rural area, but you've got to use a different set of tools. And so that's an area I think where there's gonna, I think there'll be a lot of innovation on, and I think it'll, along with the growing realization in Africa that the primary use of electricity when you can get it in a distributed sense is for education and not for entertainment. I think that, because in the early stages of looking at this in India and Africa, it seemed big difference, and in India it was very clear to those families, it was education in Africa that way, what the data didn't suggest that. But to the extent that that shifts, and you can get people to focus, because nutrition is important, because it's a function of a child's ability to concentrate. One of our fellows in South Africa, Pat Palay is working in a township school, and he said literally if you cannot get your point across in 30 seconds, that's the attention span of a chronically malnourished child, and most of the kids who come into those schools are chronically malnourished. So you have huge cognitive function issues. So you have to, I think that the solutions that are gonna come now are gonna, particularly in those urbanizing areas, you're gonna have to deal with a nourishment issue because you've got to restore cognitive function. And then you come in with the energy that gives, as the speaker in the previous panel suggested that additional three hours a day that allows them to have access to learning. So I think it's kind of a one-two, kind of a set of interventions that the social entrepreneur, and I think it's gonna be the social entrepreneurs who will have to bring those solutions because I just don't see government really getting to a point where it can deal with those issues, because the issues are multiplying so rapidly because the arrival cities are growing so rapidly. Thanks. If I may, I would like to pick up on that and just ask one final question for your consideration, which relates to the role of governments, I guess, and national policy, but also maybe regional cooperation. So one of the issue areas that I've done some work on is the Nile River Basin, and as was mentioned in the previous panel as well. Increasingly, you see that downstream decisions to use water for electricity, for instance, mostly, I guess, in Ethiopia, have consequences more upstream, mostly for, in this case, Sudan and Egypt, countries that, certainly, in the case of Egypt, would maybe not even exist if they didn't have the Nile. It would just be a desert, probably. And what you, it seems to me that at least in this case, but maybe different in others, that a lack of regional cooperation, water sharing, agreements and such, further exaggerates some of these problems that could maybe be better addressed. Do you find in your work, do you find other experiences, there's experiences where this goes well where National Party Bill, you just said, governments may not be part of the solution, but can they be in some of your experiences? I mean, can national policy makers help? Right, I don't mean, do you want to? So I'd like to bring up the point that, yes, governments definitely have a role, but one of the things that I've found in the Department of Energy in my work is that I think that a lot of sub-Saharan African governments are working off of old scripts. For example, when I speak to researchers at the University of Cape Town, for example, we have something at DOE, we work with the Department of Treasury, the Infrastructure Consortium for Africa at the African Development Bank, USAID and state on something called the Virtual Working Group on Power Sector Reform, during which we talk to governments in sub-Saharan Africa and the private sector to discuss various issues. And this is just a small working level outreach, but it happens at all levels, like DOE will have, our Secretary of Energy will host an energy ministerial in June in Ethiopia. And then you have things at my level that discuss how governments are going to make reforms. So when I approach these governments and I say during, at the staff level, and I say, well, you haven't factored in climate change and the change of water patterns when you think about how you're gonna use hydroelectricity. A lot of sub-Saharan African governments are thinking that hydroelectricity is going to be the definitive way to go, but they haven't factored in climate change into these energy master plans. So if you're basing the water that you need to create energy at a hydro plant off of the way a particular river is flowing 30 years ago and you look towards the future, that river is going to be flowing with a lot less force. So they have to be involved. And I think that, but it's up to, it can't just be up to Western governments to push that forward. That's why we're very happy with the South African government for its participation and the clean energy ministerial. We're very happy with the participation of the focused countries under power Africa. And we're having these discussions with governments. Sure, I'll go back to the example in Ghana, the power was hydroelectric and even the assumption of hydroelectric as an efficient energy source in regions of the world that suffer from water scarcity is a challenging assumption. I mean, I think it is greatly flawed. I think that we need to move past that. I think that it's unacceptable that the governments have to shut off electricity for 12 hours at a time and 24 hours at a time and 36 hours at a time, even in the capitals. We've spent so much time talking about rural areas. So I do think that governments have a huge role to play in that transition, but I also think it's up to the social entrepreneurs. I also think it's up to the private enterprise. I think that a lot of decisions that are made are financial as they should be. So for example, innovation Africa doesn't just do solar powered water pumps in rural areas. We also power schools and medical clinics. And I was just sitting down with the Ministry of Health recently in Uganda. And I presented them with the financials and I shared with them what the upfront costs would be for solar energy and what the maintenance costs would be. And they were floored because here they are paying for kerosene and they have to keep their refrigerators stocked with diesel to keep vaccines cold. And it just didn't make financial sense and they said, you know what, solar is a great option. And so I think there are a lot of decisions being made right now based on financials that have changed over the last decade and two decades. So I think there's a phenomenal opportunity again to revisit the financial models behind the energy that's supplying the water, behind the energy that's powering healthcare and education and to look at that from a different perspective, integrating renewables, integrating power Africa strategies and really thinking more creatively and encouraging the government to do so, showing them positive examples of how it can be done. I think that the single most important thing, actually this is, I've come to feel this way, is that governments could do particularly and for the arrival cities, which are really, the future of Africa is gonna be decided on the success of the economic vitality of the rival cities that are forming up around its major cities now. It's just that's, it is where the citizen sector will ultimately, we'll look at the end of the century and we'll know whether it will be written there as to whether the economic and social vitality of those cities was sufficient to essentially carry Africa into the 21st century effectively. And I think that the most simply important investment right now there is no money going into making sure that those chronically malnourished children, which are probably in a lot of these cases, the majority of the students in those schools have an adequate amount of nutrition so they can have a cognitive function so that you can design schools in ways that promote individual learning because you've got low cognitive function. All you can do is herd kids together and kind of keep them repeating the same sorts of things. The practice of the education you see in those schools is a function of the lack of nutrition. You raise that nutrition level and you've got lots of options. You can make those children just as competitive as American children and children all over the world, but there is no money going into it. There's money in for workforce wellness, there's no money going into this. And this is, and it is, it's a blind spot. So that's my little hobby horse. I think that, I think where government policy can be most effective is in giving the arrival, the people in those arrival cities, particularly the women, the ability to form small companies. I mean, the whole, to grow the food, there's a whole new field growing, it's a whole new field in the social entrepreneurs working with how do you cultivate fairly intensively nutrient-rich food in small areas? And how can you use those same small areas to grow things that you can then trade for the food that you wanna prepare that is nutrient-rich, because you can't grow it all for yourself? And so I think that encouraging people to do those types of things, giving the arrival cities the flexibility to make choices about how they get their energy and how they get their water and how they get their energy and encourage them in providing incentives for that. And in most of all, making, I think that if every African government had a baseline for every child that said this is your nutrient baseline right now and had a nourishment report card that followed that child right along with it, because families come in many parts of Africa to get that report card, right? If they saw that nourishment report card right along with their grades, I think, and there was an investment made in essentially raising, just raising the child's nutrient levels from out-of-chronic malnutrition to just base-level nutrition, the potential then for innovating on your educational outcomes is greater. And once you give the parents in those, and particularly in those arrival cities where this is a big chronic issue in addition to rural areas, but particularly in these growing arrival city areas, if there was a policy of innovation, with respect to them, that essentially unhooks you from some of the systems that exist in the inner cities of those large cities. I think it'll be that that's where the entrepreneurial innovation needs to come. Great, thank you. I'd like to welcome you to ask questions at this stage, and please state your name and affiliation, and I'd like to remind you that there's a lot of questions as we, as I can see, so please keep it short and ask a question. Thank you. Please, lady here in the front. Hi, there's a microphone coming. I'm sorry. Thank you. Joan, Michelson, Green Connections, thank you. We apologize for being late, we're at another big event. I can't believe that nutrition is not getting the money that it needs. I mean, this is so user-friendly and there's so many NGOs and nonprofits and save the children, and I mean, I could list the goes on for a hundred years and governments. I mean, I can't believe that the Gates Foundation that not enough money is going into nourishing these kids, they're putting the money into the vaccines but not into nutrition. It just, it doesn't make sense to me. Can you explain that a little further about what the problem is, what's not getting, why are they not investing in what are the obstacles? We'll take a couple more. Thank you, young lady here. Hi, my name is Joanne Oport, I'm a Kenyan, and I just had a question on access to water and informal water trade. I grew up in Kenya and, you know, when they cut down the water and now the village that you set up a well in there, how is it that you're addressing those challenges where they are power dynamics, the next village doesn't have water and people are selling that water, how do you account for that? Thank you, and could you pass your microphone to your neighbor, that'd be great. Thanks, that'll be the final. Hi, my name is Rose Matiso. I work for Senator Chris Coons on energy, science, technology, environment issues. So I think this question is from Maya. I'm really curious about more water supply. So as you said, there's almost no water on the planet and as population grows, climate change, energy, water, and excess issues become bigger. And as Tim hinted, this is potentially explosive geopolitically, the water issue. So how much is being invested, maybe better DOE or just, I would like to hear your comment on how much is being done to invest in kind of game-changing water capture innovations. I mean, I just think that the supply, where are we gonna get more water? We need it. I just wonder what's out there, what's feasible? How can we make more water? How can we leverage technology to do that? Okay, thank you. We'll start with those three. Maya, you wanna go first, is it? So thank you very much for your question. So actually, the US Geological Survey would say that you can't make more water. The amount of water that's on earth is about the same amount that was here for two billion years. What's different is the amount that's accessible, okay? So when you have more climate, when you have climate change effects, the water comes back to earth. It's actually a renewable resource, but it becomes that inaccessible groundwater or water in the atmosphere. And it becomes, and we can't access it. So at the Department of Energy, I mean, this is something that we've begun to look into. And I guess that I could say that I'm here today to demonstrate that we are interested and we are looking. But when I asked the office that runs the Clean Energy Ministerial, they said, well, we don't focus on it yet. It's something that could be raised. But just clean energy resources in general by promoting the research and development and the technological deployment of clean energy technologies, you are in fact pursuing water efficient energy generation. Because with systems like PV, solar photovoltaic systems, you're actually using no water. It's the move and domestically, Sandia National Labs actually puts a lot of money towards us and you can find information about that online. They're main laboratories in Albuquerque, New Mexico. And they're the ones that gave us the statistics for my engagement with you today with regards to how much water is being used in thermoelectric generation, 190 million gallons a day. So how can we, so what we have to do, our challenge with the Department of Energy is the more that we learn about our water use domestically, we can then engage foreign governments on it. But we have to get our facts straight about what's going on here first. We have to have a better understanding of the issue before we engage governments. So that's how we've been proceeding thus far. Thanks Rachel, do you wanna? Sure, thank you for the question because I think and to remind everyone the question was about the rural landscape and what do you do when there's a neighboring village that also needs water and how do you deal with the local water market? You have to actually address the local water market. You can't create solutions in a vacuum here in an office in New York or DC that you just think are gonna work on the ground. You have to partner with local governments, you have to partner with local groups. There's so much infrastructure on the ground. Every village has a woman's group. The theme of today is women and women in energy and women in water. They have their own infrastructure on the ground and their voice must be heard. And so what we do is when we go into a community, we sit down with the local women's group and we ask them what does the local water market look like? Is anyone selling water? How many people are dependent on any given water source? We map out the water resources in the community and we figure out what the best solution is for that community and we work with them on implementing it. You cannot put one water pumping system in an area where there are many different villages that don't have access to water. The village that I showed you earlier, Nassani, we powered their neighboring village, Kaloni, and we gave them a water pumping system as well and we worked with them in the same way and you really need to work at the local level on the local landscape and address all those issues. On the issue of water technology, I ran into a really interesting social entrepreneur working in Ghana. It's an organization, she's Swedish and it put together a team, an organization that's called Ignisha. But basically what she did, the elephant in the room around climate forecasting for the tropical region, is that weather forecasters, like we knew the snow was coming, right? We've actually known the snow was coming here for like two or three days. But there's no way to predict, because of an issue in the climate forecasting called convexity, there was no way for a farmer in the cell to know whether it was gonna rain today or tomorrow or even in his country or region or never mind what time. And what Ignisha thinks they've done is essentially come up with a fix for that. They think they've cracked that and they've got a, their first project is in Ghana where they're working with, and they have some field stations that are basically working with weather satellites that have a lot of the data that couldn't be cracked before. And they've got I think 100,000 farmers now on mobile systems that are getting and their first casting capability is up to three days. So in a sense, if that proves out, then what we're beginning to do is change the framework, right? We're saying, oh, there's a lot more water. There isn't any more water available, but there's more available water in the sense that you can predict when it's gonna come and when it's gonna rain in your village. And so that for women is huge, right? I mean, that just because, I mean, increasingly for a whole variety of different reasons, you know, I mean, partially the custodian region, partially because men are leaving for the cities that, you know, this farming, I mean, particularly in a country like Ghana, it's women, you know, you look at TV in Ghana and it's all the stories about these women and they're not young who are out there doing a lot of the farming. So that's one. So there are, I think the potential for big data to ultimately actually provide some rather supply-side solutions here is there. I think over the next 10 or 20 years, that'll play out. On the nutrition side, I mean, this is not my field, yeah? I mean, I didn't start out working, didn't start out with this work thinking that this was gonna be the sweet spot, but it turns out that nutrition actually is a field that's been rather siloed to be put it as kindly as I possibly can for quite a number of years and that's produced a series of policy decisions about kind of what the characteristic is of emergency food aid that gets given out that is less than ideal and has been proven to be perhaps not so, not is not helpful. And there have been a whole series of articles in places like the Lancet where they've done follow-up studies on emergency food aid and the tendency is for, the basic problem is you start with something that's supposed to be a quick fix for a population for a short period of time that it becomes a long-term prescription and then political interests get behind food programs that's continued to drive those products into a solution that shouldn't be taking place at all. So, and we are unfortunately part of the problem, not part of the solution. That's part of the problem and the second part of this problem on the nutrition side is that if you think about the full nutrient spectrum that you absorb every day, that's more than a hundred. There are more than a hundred different nutrients and elements, micronutrients and macronutrients. The field has been focused on five that it's done long-term studies on and so it's fortification of strategies are always aimed at those five. Unfortunately, people need more than a hundred and so a lot of the innovation you've seen around social entrepreneurship and just people who haven't known the science well but have just been following their instincts to what were the foods that worked? What were the foods that gave them what we call full spectrum nourishment? So you're finding people popping up like Sylvia Bonda and Zambia who's essentially basically doing that. She's basically coming to the full spectrum nourishment solutions not only what you plant but what you prepare and it's become quite, it's not just for rural women, it actually came potentially to the rural women because people in cities were demanding it because they were struggling with malnutrition, they were struggling with suboptimal nutrition solutions and then there are new products on the market now that for a very relatively small investment can actually make children and adults then take somebody who's chronically malnourished, somebody suffering from HIV, AIDS, compromised digestive system and like that and return them to sort of full function within. Operative function, it's a little more complicated. I'm gonna describe right here but within four to six weeks they're operating their back at work. So there's a tremendous amount of ferment in this area and the food companies are looking at this because they realize that nutrient form and the extent because the other change that's coming in the market is that many mass spectroscopy is becoming so cheap that you can get a full spectrum nutrient signature on people and that works in labs right now but you're even starting to see early stages devices like this show up on Kickstarter in places like that is basically being able to take a spectroscopic signature of all the nutrients in your spectrum, right? And so once you've got that, once consumers are armed with that information when they're sitting in an arrival city in the Eastlands and Nairobi you're sitting right here making decision about what they're gonna buy at Whole Foods, you're armed with knowledge and that we think that's the big tip. We think it's coming really fast and we think there are obviously a number of entrepreneurs, companies that have already bet there and doing quite well in that business but we think it'll go mainstream now and that is bigger than the field of nutrition that is traditionally defined. Great, thanks Bill. I'm gonna take a look at the time and see if we can, can we take one or two more? Excuse me. We can take two more. All right, there's a gentleman there. I'm Edmund Zeze from the Associations of Liberian Engineers. I'm a firm believer that a hungry child cannot learn and the issue of water and energy is a science and one of the problems being from Liberia or a country that have seen 15 years of civil war damage infrastructure, the problems in Liberia is connected to other parts of Africa and the solutions being presented many organizations, especially the non for profit of organizations is that they're going install system but they are not training the people for the maintenance and sustainability of these systems and what we do at Alusa is we try to promote STEM programs among women. So how do you propose the sustainability of the installation of what Maya talked about pump system so that our organization will not have to return in two, three years to go through the process of reinstalling it instead empowering women to maintain and move the system forward. Thank you. And there was a lady all the way there in the back that's been very patient. Can you? Yeah. I'm Rebecca Regan Zaks from AM Global in DC and when we talk about sustainable policy solutions and working with governments which have sort of a bird's eye view of what needs to happen in particular countries, it's hard often for governments to have a clear perspective when for instance, large extractive companies are pumping so much money into the economy and sort of distorting the economy and doing good work too but how would you propose we work with large multinational corporations like that which are sort of skewing the landscape of energy and water in so many of these countries in Africa? Thank you. We'll start, we'll take these two questions and I'll ask the panelists to give their brief thoughts and then we are going to take a break. Thanks. So I think actually that I can touch a little bit on both of the questions at the same time. So during our, and I'll use a kind of a study or a case study of our engagement with one particular country, we had an energy dialogue with Angola in 2011 and one of the things that the energy minister, Minister Borges particularly raised was, we want to get more into solar, we want to create and this year President Dos Santos announced Angola's intent to create a solar village and part of the creation of that will of course depend on the maintenance. So one of the things that they specifically asked for and this is the purpose of these bilateral dialogues, they do have people working in the government who can sometimes see the problem and talk to us about it and they specifically asked for PV maintenance programs for technicians. So when a government like that gives a request to the US government, whether it's Liberia or any country in Sub-Saharan Africa or around the world, what the Department of Energy can do is we have something called a work for others contract where we deploy the expertise of our national laboratories. In this case, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory put together a program for solar PV maintenance technicians for Angola. The government in Sonegal, the Angolan Peristatal was actually asked to do this as part of their Social Corporate Responsibility Initiative. So the large companies, and Rachel talked a little bit about doing things in the country's financial interests, whether it's Exxon or a Sonegal, I mean, they have an eye to, there is a future in working on with solar technology to reach, to extend electricity and power where it's not. If you look at Nigeria, for example, where you have a lot of violence along the Niger Delta, increasing electricity access in those areas will greatly decrease a lot of the attacks because the people feel disenfranchised, they don't have access to power. So the corporations do recognize that they need to address these issues and specifically, the Department of Energy is looking to help work with those governments to make it a reality. So when it comes to something like solar PV, we can create programs specifically for the governments that ask so that they have this, again, it's back to technological deployment and sharing, information sharing. Thanks, I'll show you one of those. Sure, thank you so much for the question on sustainability, because I haven't addressed it at all and I think it's a very fitting place to end. We have very specific thoughts on how to make our projects sustainable and we're using two tools that I think are applicable. I'll speak specifically about how we're using them, but I think they can be used outside of the context of our organization and in many of the other areas that Maya and Bill are speaking about and that I'm sure you're all working on. First and foremost, we found a remote monitoring technology that comes from Israel that actually allows us to monitor energy production and consumption coming out of our rural solar projects. So it sends the data via SMS to an online server that we can access from any computer anywhere in the world and we can actually see how our projects are doing. Now that's incredibly important in terms of transparency. It's incredibly important in terms of maintenance. Not only does it help in theft prevention because you can actually see if people have been tampering with your systems, but you can predict problems before they start. If energy production starts dropping, we can actually call up the local head of our solar committee because we have solar committees in every one of our projects. We can call them up and say, have you cleaned off your panel recently? Usually the answer is no. They go, they clean off the panel and the production level goes up again. Sometimes we can actually spot a problem before it starts and we send out technicians into the field. So that kind of technology is really available today. There's no longer an excuse to say, well, my projects are far away and I can't monitor them. There are all kinds of high tech solutions out there and if we as a development community get smarter about leveraging them, I think our projects will be a lot better for it. So that's number one. And number two is I think we all need to be thinking about business solutions as well. In the example of innovation Africa, every one of our solar powered schools, medical clinics and water pumping systems has a business and the business is mobile charging because everyone these days in sub-Saharan Africa has a cell phone. They have a Nokia that usually they can't charge and so they have to travel to the nearest village, pay to charge their phone and then come back to the village. Now, if we give them a place to charge their phone in their own village, we're providing them with a tremendous service, one that they're usually already paying for elsewhere. And so what happens is that they pay to charge their phone in our communities, whether it's at the water pump or at the school or the medical clinic and the revenue from that business is used to maintain our solar systems. And so by doing that, from the moment that we set up that business, each of our projects becomes 100% sustainable because they now have the funding that they need to replace batteries and light bulbs in clinics, to replace broken taps in our water pumps. And so we've completed 75 solar installations to date impacting over half a million people and every single one of those projects, if we closed our door tomorrow would be able to maintain their own systems. And I think that's critical as we think about these issues and think about scalability and replicability. Sure, just quickly. So the question about Mully Nationals is just gonna limit to resource extraction for the moment. So if it's offshore, then you're really talking about your immediate touch point then is the cities that grow up near the offshore platforms where people are basically ferried, people in the trailer are ferried out like in Ghana, for example, where the city just literally grew up in a very, very short period of time as a result of offshore oil exploration. So there the question is, but if you want to create a stable, you want that community to be stable and not transitory, which, and you want it to be peaceful, it needs to be, this is gonna sound corny, but it's that you just need to create a stable agricultural civilization around it and there's no reason you can't do it. The tools are all there, it's not rocket science here. You need to be able to create, secure supplies of food, you need the schools to work, you need for the kids to be able to go to school, you need for the lights, you know, this is pretty basic stuff, right? It is meat and potatoes stuff and it can be done. It just takes in light and it takes a government that looks at that and makes that trade off as opposed to the trade off that was made in the Niger Delta where you have onshore exploration. You have, I mean, our experience and we had a long conversation with some of the firms that worked there. In place like the Niger Delta, if you look at the populations, if you do a quick health profile of those resident populations of people that live on those oil production sites, right? They're not exploring anymore, they're producing for the most part in the Delta. You look at the health profile of the populations in those areas, very, very high incidence of AIDS, right? You're looking at levels of chronic disease that are very, very high and so you have to basically move your community health systems forward. You have to be able to stabilize their nutrition levels so they can take their ARVs. You need to get their children into schools. You need to be able to get them once they are well enough because they've been doing nothing. They've been basically living on subsidy and handouts. They've been living very poorly. Then you basically have to move them into a situation where they can farm. So you grade through therapeutic farms and you graduate from therapeutic farms to real farms. The solutions are pretty obvious. And then you have to get kids into school and you have to make sure that they're nourished. And it was the same story that I told you before. It isn't a hugely different story but because in the end, after that oil exploration ends or the mining that's going on in the Sahel or wherever you are ends, what you really want to have is a stable functioning agricultural civilization there. And you need to build the foundation rather than just sort of reacting. The intelligent thing, what the social entrepreneurs try to do is say, how do we create the, because they're thinking 10 years ahead. They're not thinking about the boil coming out of the ground. They're thinking, what is this, how can we create a community that nourishes the people who are gonna be living here and how can we get the ecosystems and the soils and the farms and everything else to work together. So I think it's just government policy that embraces that and companies that embrace that vision. I think it's basically in their long-term interest because there's a direct correlation I think between those kinds of policies and social stability in those areas. Thanks very much on that note. I'd like to invite you all to lunch, I think. We'll be back here when would that be? 12.30. 12.30, good. Please join me in thanking the panelists for their comments. Thank you. Thanks.