 Hello everyone to this session. My name is Jacob Wynneke. I'm a principal consultant at BFA Global. We're a distributed advisory data analytics and product innovation firm. In this session, we're going to look at climate resilience and adaptation through the lens of farmers and fissure. So just to start, communities everywhere are already really feeling the impact of climate change, whether that's through droughts in Uganda or wildfires in California. And much of the world's attention and focus related to climate change is really on mitigation efforts. So really focus on trying to reduce emissions. And so while that's critically important, in the meantime, we see that this really leaves the most vulnerable people behind. And so what we see is a real critical need to support communities in emerging markets in both building resilience to climate shocks and their ability to adapt to long run climate change. In the global north, we have politicians who push a narrative that climate change is not real, that it's just a myth or that it's not caused by humans. While in the global south, you have millions of people and communities and entire economies that are already being disrupted. And for them, the climate is changing and it's changing rapidly. And the adverse impacts are being felt the most in Africa. As a continent, it's right now the most vulnerable. It's the least prepared to respond. And it's also the least responsible. Since the industrial revolution in the 1800s, Africa has contributed only 3% of total global emissions. And so at my organization at BFA Global, we focus our climate action work on impacting the lives of two personas, farmers and fishers, because they provide the most food, the economic value, and employment on the continent. It's vulnerable because they're highly dependent on the natural environment and often have lower socioeconomic status. We know that solutions exist, whether that's a solar powered micro irrigation kit or its hyper local weather forecast delivered to a farmer's smartphone. So why have resilience and adaptation efforts received insufficient funding and innovation? First, the vast majority of climate finance goes toward large scale mitigation solutions and projects. Even within the impact space, over 70% of climate related startup deals last year went to just nine companies in the off grid solar sector. And if you look at incubators and accelerators, it's a similar story where it's strongly skewed toward mitigation and renewable energy in particular. Another reason we think is that adaptation and resilience, it's not as easy and it's not as sexy as mitigation. Adaptation and resilience is very difficult because there's a complex system of factors that impact a person's ability to adapt to climate change. And this isn't necessarily the case with mitigation where you can target very specific technologies or very specific industries to reduce their emissions. It's also something that's up to now quite difficult to measure in the social impact space. We have dozens of tools and methodologies at our disposal to support enterprises in measuring impact, but it's extremely difficult for adaptation and resilience because the impact itself is something bad not happening or something bad happens, but with lower negative consequences. And so there's a desperate need for action. A large percentage of the global population needs resilience and adaptation strategies more than they need mitigation. And unfortunately that part of the population doesn't have money and influence that typically influences urgent action. And so what do we need to do to address this? We need to focus holistically on vulnerabilities and opportunities around personas that are huge portions of the population. We see the biggest impact potential with smallholder farmers and fishers. We also need to take big innovation risks. We can't wait for solutions to emerge with the potential to scale or with enterprises that fit the typical risk profile of what venture capitalists or most impact investors fund because we will miss opportunities for major impact. And we need new financing models that are flexible and really, really patient. It's not enough that we fund later stage businesses and large-scale mitigation projects. Adaptation and resilience solutions and businesses take time, a lot of time. So as a first approach to tackle this at BFA, we are designing a program that combines a climate solution R&D lab with an accelerator for existing early stage resilience and adaptation startups. And right now what we're looking for is funders who understand the urgency of this problem to join us as well as innovators who can develop solutions that meet the needs of farmer and fisher communities in Africa. I'm really thankful for this opportunity. I'm happy to pass it on to the next two amazing presenters. We have served todaymakers of Abilobi who will speak to us a little bit about the innovator perspective and working with fishing communities. And then Karina Wong of Small Foundation who will bring the investor and Agri perspectives. Before I go, I just wanted to let you know that we will be hosting a SoCAP Next session December 9th from 8 to 9 a.m. Pacific Standard Time where we're going to focus on how the private sector can address resilience and adaptation vulnerabilities of these two populations, farmers and fishers. So with that, I will stop sharing my screen. Let's see if I can stop that and pass it over to you, Serge. One sec. Okay. You should be able to... Oh, you're on mute, I think. Serge. All right, give me a signal when you can see my screen, my presentation. Great stuff. Okay, good evening from Cape Town, South Africa. I'm Serge Raymakers and I run an organization called Abilobi, meaning Fisher in the Izikosa language. Picking up on Jacob's introduction, I'm going to dive into the fishery sector, specifically small-scale fisheries and propose an innovative and intersectional approach to building climate resilience among underserved communities using technology. With the take home being that in building climate resilience, there should be greater emphasis on social resilience, particularly in continents such as Africa. And communities were disproportionately affected by climate change rather than merely short-term mitigations, climate-proofing infrastructure, or the purely environmental that we so often see. There's a lot of hype around the concept of the blue card. It's considered the seventh largest sector, worth about $2.5 trillion, and fisheries play a critical role. Delving into fisheries, it's estimated that the largest component of the global catch originates from small-scale fisheries, most of which are informal. 60 million people are involved and many more when we look at pre- and post-harvest activities, up to 800 million. These fisheries are a major contributor to food and livelihoods. Yet, many small-scale fishers are left out of sustainable development initiatives and are most severely and disproportionately affected by climate change impacts, both ecologically and socially. On the climate change side, understanding and predicting climate change stressors and impacts in our oceans and fisheries is extremely complex. Most research and models are lagging behind work in the terrestrial sector. Yet, we know more about severe storms, their impact on coastal habitats. We know about the rising sea level. We know about temperature increases and their effect on ocean acidity and coral reefs. But we are only now starting to see in research effects on species, species migration and ecosystem shifts. Importantly, there's a paucity of data concerning smaller shifts at coastal fishery level, which is critical given the contribution of small-scale fishers discussed on the previous slides. So in the absence of data and targeted adaptation strategies, we need to experiment with practical, tangible solutions that make sense for small-scale fishers and that build both resilience and adaptive capacity, cute technology. What you see here is an affordable safety at sea device that can be deployed and maintained at community level with a local community emergency response. With increasingly unpredictable seas, these systems can and do save lives, particularly in remote areas. But these systems also have a secondary less expected benefit that allows us to collect valuable traceability and climate change data at ground level. The program we run and there are a few others use simple digital technologies to self-empower fisher women and men to enhance safety at sea as a direct climate change adaptation measure, but also to distract supply chains and connect directly with end markets. Again, these systems allow valuable data collection in the first mile of these value chains at that coastal fishery level. These data are put together and coupled with the fishers' personal narratives and anecdotal accounts of their coastal fisheries and environments as well as changes within these environments is what we term fish with a digital story or simply fish with a story. Traceability, story seafood, in combination with digital transactions and opportunity for financial services, offer these same fishers the opportunity to diversify their market channels for a variety of species or spreading effort across the ecosystem, if you will, and build their community enterprises that can absorb shocks and environmental changes. This innovative and intersectional approach offers a different layer of resolution to climate change data and also taps in the notion of inclusion, both financial and technological, which seeks to social resilience and adaptation. Through the implementation of accessible, affordable, and straightforward but connected tools, we have the opportunity to self-empower the underserved. While we certainly need to think big, we've got to start small and local, explore the environmental and social intersects, experiment and build in a participatory manner and from the ground up. Thank you very much. Thanks, Serge. Maybe before we move on, I can try to ask a couple of questions. One thing that comes to mind to me is you talk about the opportunities that digital technologies open up for fishers. Do you encounter or could you describe some of the constraints or gaps that you typically face in either the technical capacity of small-scale fishing and fishers or uptake of technology in these communities? How do you typically approach thinking about this? Obviously, there's the general challenge of digital literacy and access to smartphone technology or opportunity to be able to purchase data for a smartphone, but there are ways to navigate around that. What we'd find the most effective to gain traction and build in the co-design, in the co-creation of the user interface, what are indicators and why we're collecting this and who earns the data? Who earns the data and how is that data shared in a digital supply chain to access whether it's various financial services, the market, but of course diving again into that data to better understand environmental changes. Great. Thanks so much. I have one other follow-up question, if that's okay. One of the things that I find interesting is that you're designing solutions for this population that's underserved, but you're also a startup. You're early-stage, you know, enterprise. I was curious if you could maybe share some thoughts on what is it really like trying to design products and delivery and chasing product market fit in a situation where you do have these risks. You have the things that you're trying to address with your product offering related to livelihoods and financial services, but then also these external climate related risks. Where do you even start? What do you start with? Look, there's a long answer to this. The short one is that fisheries are extremely complex. This interface of ecological changes, ecological variables, and of course the fishing community and the human dimension to try and come in with a particular product or a particular approach has been very tricky. For us, there's been two things. Again, I'm going to come back to that co-design, but building trust and building relationships and building that groundswell and integrating fisherfolk in organizational structures even has been the only way to really penetrate into this market, if I can say it like that. Then of course, significant runway, significant runway to experiment, to iterate, to plug in various components and build more of a platform or an ecosystem that can touch on various pain points of these same fissures. Just to follow up on that last point, related to runway, that's of course a critical issue when you're trying to move as quickly as you can, you're trying to serve these populations with great products. Are there any nuggets of takeaways or lessons that you've learned in terms of the right mix of capital or the right mix and the profile of investors that you try to look for? What's worked for you guys? Okay, what's worked for us is to approach this very much from a blended finance angle and also from a hybrid structure. We are a startup, we have a social enterprise, we run the technology through the for-profit component, but the for-profit component is completely connected to a non-profit component that is able to raise significant funding for community development, for that groundwork in fishing communities. There's no way we can build that whole incubation program, if I can say it like that, in the cost of sales of our product. Really diving deep and embedding ourselves in these fishing communities through a non-profit arm has been absolutely critical. Great, so thanks so much, Serge. We may come back to you at the end if some questions come in in the chat, but I'll hand it over to Karina Wong, we have a small foundation. Karina, would you like me to share my screen to show your slides? Yeah, sure, I just have the two slides, so that people knew who I am and they can reach me. But hello everyone, my name is Karina Wong, and while Jacob's getting the slides up, because they don't have any content, it's just my name in my email. I wanted to introduce small foundation, so small foundation is a private family foundation based in Ireland, and our goal is to catalyze in congenerating opportunities for the rural poor in sub-Saharan Africa, and we support a lot of initiatives that improve the business ecosystems for rural, what we're calling micro, small, and medium enterprises, MSMEs. And we provide a range of financial instruments from grants to capital investments and for a range of organizations from non-profits to for-profit companies that work with rural MSMEs and provide them with access to finance, technical assistance, and skilled human resources. So we work with everyone from folks like Serge and Ablobi, who are directly working with enterprises, and then folks like BFA and the Catalyst Fund, who are kind of accelerators and intermediaries in supporting the whole ecosystem. And I'll talk a little bit about what we're seeing in the market and kind of as a funder, what do we see as a challenge for funding this space, because it is incredibly difficult to fund the space and find the right types of organizations and types of initiatives to fund. And I'll take a step back and talk about why we think it's important for climate, to have climate adaptation for farmers. And the critical thing is that farming is the future for Africa. It is over 70% of Africa's employment. And the majority of the people there are heavily impacted by climate change. They are reliant on rain-fed agriculture. And the extreme kind of climate events that are happening are impacting them more and more. And you have more frequency in those type of extreme climate events happening more and more. And they end up being the least prepared, as Jacob had said, because they're the lowest income. They are the most difficult to reach and often overlooked by more commercial service providers who kind of ignore them because it's not profitable to go that far out into those rural communities. And so for Small Foundation, when we're looking at, well, how do we support these types of farmers? How do you get to them? And the big piece is around building an ecosystem. And I think Serge had mentioned this. I mean, when you're out there for these companies where there's no hold of farmers, there are no services. The ecosystem is so underdeveloped. There are so many pieces that you need to put together in order for things to work and for different things to happen. And what we've observed as a funder is that you need so many different types of capital. And the capital continuum from being a very early startup until you're kind of gross stages and then later maturing stages. And within that, the capital providers are not talking to each other. And so the ones that are going to try to do the early stage capital are not really talking to the ones who have the bigger pools of capital available to do the larger ticket size. So as you go on your journey as an entrepreneur, it becomes incredibly difficult. And so there's, I think, a challenge around who funds what part? Who should be playing what role in that capital continuum? And then there's another piece around, well, who coordinates? How do these capital providers talk to each other and kind of hand off to each other, especially in these very early stages or what we call the valley of death as you're dipping through and kind of, you know, burning through your runway before you get to that next big gap. And I think the reality is when you're looking at farming and fishing in Africa, you have such long time horizons. This is not an overnight kind of J curve. This is going to happen in the two to three year timeframe. You're talking about five, seven, even 10 year timeframes in which you're trying to build an entire ecosystem, build the business, and allow for any businesses to kind of get to that more commercial attractiveness to your bigger players. And I think there's also a challenge around the financial returns. And those kind of early years, you're not going to see much coming back. So for investors, you have to take the view that at least initially your financial returns are not going to be reflective of kind of what you might see in other markets. But that's not to say for Africa, like I think there are incredible amounts of returns you can get if you can stay in there for a little bit longer. And I think what happens is there's a very short term kind of nature in thinking about, well, I need to get my in money in and then my money out. Whereas if you're thinking about farming fisheries, it's a very different time horizon, but also thinking about the financial types of financial returns you're going to get at different timeframes. And Small Foundation has worked with quite a range of organizations. I will give you a few examples from our current portfolio. We're supporting a business in Sierra Leone in Ghana called work that's using regenerative agriculture to work with smaller farmers. We're also working with KFW, the German government, to launch a new fund focused exclusively on social enterprises. So trying to get folks like Serge to that after get their initial seed stage funding, that next valley of death funding that they need to give them a little bit more runway, but that's more entrepreneur friendly. And this is one of the challenges is that oftentimes the instruments aren't appropriate, the timeframes aren't appropriate, and the types of conditions that are put on these entrepreneurs aren't appropriate. So we're looking to drive as much local currency, multi-instrument, multi-round investments into these type of entrepreneurs with an open-ended structure with investors that are a little bit longer term. So hopefully we'll be watching that in Q2 of next year. And then another one is that we work a lot with networks. As I said, ecosystem of farming and fishery, you need a whole range of players from the intermediaries, to the entrepreneurs, to the government, all of these different folks who are working together. So we're working with a network called the Agri-Business Market Agri-Business Markets Ecosystem Alliance. So just a range of stakeholders, investors, TA providers, entrepreneurs who are trying to come together and say, well, how do we make this system work better? So we have quite a range. And I think the slide there just is kind of my provocation that Jacob asked me to put out is, I think what we need in the sector is more people to connect, collaborate, and think long term, kind of going outside of our box and really working with each other to find the solutions that will help folks like Serge really become successful and take off. Thank you so much. That was amazing. A couple of questions and Serge, please jump in if you want to ask questions as well. So one question that comes to mind for me is we've been talking to a decent number of sort of philanthropic sources of capital, impact investors, other investors that sort of look at climate change and or green technology. And I've been trying to get a sense of like, what are some of the challenges that investors might be facing in thinking about pursuing investing in resilience and adaptation in particular. And I mentioned this in my presentation, that sort of skew toward mitigation and things that are a little bit more immediate in terms of the impact and easier to measure. Are there any sort of things that you've been coming across or thinking about that might make it easier for us as an emerging space to communicate, not just the urgency, which I think we've been trying to do here, but also the opportunity in resilience and adaptation. Yeah, any thoughts there? I guess the big one would be that you'd have to target the right type of investor. And what we've seen, it's very hard to convince more commercial investors to take such early stage risks. So you just, the risk appetite question is a huge one. And unless you start moving folks who are willing to have that risk appetite, and it might be bringing in more of this philanthropic and large donor funding, like bilateral donor funding into these spaces, because I think there needs to be a link between that and the commercial piece. There is a connection but I think there's a broken gap in that capital continuum in which you need to make that bridge happen. And so I think finding the right type of capital and talking to the right type of investors is important to start building those bridges. Yeah, so I had a question and maybe this is one of our last ones. It's actually to both of you. What are some of the types of organizations that you think we need to be pulling into this that maybe aren't as present right now, either to scale some of the flexible financing that you're talking about, Karina, or to scale some of the solutions that an enterprise like Abilobi is trying to deploy? So who are we missing from these conversations? I don't think they're necessarily missing. I feel like it's a very fragmented segment at the moment. So people are having conversations over here, they're talking about climate, and then they go, oh, they're talking about climate. If I'm not interested in climate right now, I'm going to just ignore that. And then there's folks who's talking about, oh, well, we need to support early stage businesses. So there's all these different conversations, and I think there's a little bit to be done around connecting the dots of folks who are already in the space because there's a tremendous amount of work being done. So I think for me, it's less about who's missing, but connecting the dots to all of the really incredible work that's already happening on the ground. From my side, Jacob, I mean, I work in fisheries. They're very fishery space, at least from an impact investment space. Most of them are philanthropic foundation, and very often they come from the angle of conservation, looking at ecosystem restoration, habitat preservation, and not looking at more that intersectional environmentalism, where we look at social justice and environmental conservation together through a startup lens. So it does feel a bit lonely. So you just want more, more people looking at fisheries. We'll all come down and visit you in South Africa. Great, we have one other couple of questions here in the chat. So one is from Tracy, who's asking Karina, what are the organizations that are funding small-scale agriculture and fisheries businesses in sub-Saharan Africa, and what's your view of grants versus equity? I think we may be running out of time, but maybe if you have like one, maybe not that one. Yeah, so I couldn't name off the top of my head. There aren't very many. So there are funders, so they're either in the grant camp or for profit kind of more commercial funding, much less. But in terms of grant versus equity, I think there needs to be a combination. Small foundation is very strong believer in commercial capital to help incentivize. Yeah, but yeah, so for us, you need both. But the more that you can dip into the commercial capital earlier, the more pool, the larger pool of capital you can access. Perfect. Thanks everyone. Thank you both, Karina and Sturridge. I really appreciate you taking the time. Hopefully this has been really useful for everyone who's out there and hopefully it's enticed a few people to come and join you working in fisheries and agriculture. Thanks everyone. Thank you. Bye.