 Today we are beginning a cycle of conferences which is very interesting, especially for the agricultural sector, rural areas, agri-food sectors and very especially to offer quality services which are timely and provide good coverage for small and medium producers who are the main actors of food production. The rural sector and especially agri-food systems have faced great challenges in the past decades and these have not been solved. We have climate change and the impacts it brings with it, pesticides and other impacts on the agri-food systems. Plus, the latest one, the pandemic and health-related issues that we all know about. This forces us, all of those who work or are related to the sector, to look for ways to produce and provide services so these products can be high quality products that can help support. Apply the world with food. These events such as natural events, hurricanes, like last season we had two hurricanes, big hurricanes coming one after the other and something that's not frequent in nature. Then we have the pandemic, the decreased mobility that came with that, the impossibility of meeting producers face to face has led us all to find new ways to communicate. This includes finding ways to provide services and support them through digital means by using radio, television, apps, internet, etc. The Ministry of Agriculture in Brazil, IECA, FAO, RELACER and ECLA want to bring all these experiences together. Everything that has come up to cover these needs and we'd like to share them so that they can be used by all that are involved in production and in guaranteeing food for our population. Today we are beginning a series of seminars with the main focus of technical assistance and extension services through digital means. We don't want to say the digitalization of agriculture or we don't want to talk just about that that's probably our main goal later on but step by step looking at some of the experiences that have come up in the world and very specifically in Latin America and the Caribbean. So the seminar series will have five different, six different dates of seminars. Today we are going to be talking about policies and strategies to support digitization in the provision of extension services and to help improve agriculture. On April 14th, we have the second event with the same goals open to the whole Latin American region. We have then the third event. The second one is for the Spanish speaking region, the third is for the English speaking Caribbean, and on the 21st and 22nd of April. We have seminars with Brazil and Portuguese speakers. And with this series of seminars, we want to gather all the experiences that have been popping up, looking at lessons learned in the supply of technical assistance and these new conditions and under the new reality with the health related events and climate related events that forces to rethink. Without anything further I'd like to now give the floor to Mr. Federico Villarreal, Director of Technical Cooperation of Aica. He will be giving his welcoming remarks, go ahead Federico. Thank you Maria and good morning everyone. I'd like to first greet our panelists and allied organizations for the first cycle on the provision of technical assistance and rural extension services aimed at rural producers. In Latin American the Caribbean. As Maria was saying, we have real estate like FAO and Mapa from Brazil. And especially our panelists of today Sandra Siegler, Luis Carlos Bedusky, Octavio Sotomayor, Delgirma Chulubanta, Heiner Bauman. E-commerce and technical assistance and rural extension are at the heart of Aica's work and of course part of the family agriculture program led by Mario Leon under technical assistance in an institute. This is still a topic that has not been resolved as many others in our region, and we need much work to improve that. In that sense, we have the seminar to address that there's several institutional models with important economic and human resources from ministries and others. There's also an important topic for agriculture and rural areas, most especially given today's context. The crisis we're living through has led to the creation of platforms and apps that are very innovative, and are transforming our society and rural areas. They're transforming the ways in which we communicate, produce, trade, and even think about technology and think about ourselves using technology. Technological processes that are geared at increasing productivity in our systems should go a step further to ensure compatibility and access to markets, thinking about the demands of consumers and not so much in supply. The crisis in the virtual world we're living in now meant that we had to be cautious and see how to connect to others. It has helped us connect much more, and it has brought supply and demand closer. Although it at the same time has also made us feel farther apart. So we have to think about technologies as process technologies, which will help us find the best end product for agricultural products organization of value chains that are increasingly integrated with a single business plan that helps all the links in the chain coordinate better and more proactively. This series of seminars is complemented to the hemispheric forum on reducing gender, sorry, connectivity gaps in rural Latin America and the Caribbean. There we heard about the digital revolution in agriculture that we're going through. And in that sense, extension services and technology transfer are part of that. And this forum is precisely elaborating in that sense. We should highlight studies related to connectivity that we have been doing in EECA and that Sandra will be sharing with you. These share some of the needs and contributions that we need to provide and how to progress. We are working hard with our strategic alliances, and our partners today help us see that we can do this together. We also wish to share aligned solutions for rural extension such as the one we're working with in the Caribbean. And strategic alliances that we are also going through with pad to help transform extension services in several countries, and in the region overall, without anything further. I wish you much success. And I am sure that this forum will be very productive. And thank you all and greetings from our DJ, Maria Xeladora, back to you. Thank you. Thank you, Federico. Thank you, Federico. And greetings to the Director General as well. We will now begin with our presentations. Just to let each of the panelists know you will have 15 minutes for your presentation. When you have, when you're at the 10 minute mark I will let you know visually I'll raise my hand and when you are at your 15 minutes. I will probably be interrupting you to tell you to close your presentation. I know you all have very interesting presentations. But we do want to keep the time time is our worst enemy so we want to be sure we respect everyone's time. And I will soon give the floor to the first presentation by Sandra Ziegler. Sandra has a PhD in social sciences and a master's degree in social sciences with emphasis in education from the Faculty of Exact and Natural Sciences at Flaxo, Argentina. She also studied education sciences in the University of Buenos Aires and she is currently associate professor in the School of Exact and Natural Sciences and main researcher in the area of education at Flaxo, Argentina, where she leads the master's program in social sciences with an emphasis in education. And she is currently also a consultant of the Inter-American Institute on Cooperation for Agriculture. Sandra, you have the floor. 230 people are expecting you. Thank you. Thank you so much for your kind introduction and it's an honor and a pleasure to be here to submit a synthesis of three studies carried at ICA in cooperation with other institutions. As you can see here are the three different research projects. Digital Gender Divide in Latin America and the Caribbean with ICA, the University of Oxford, the IDB and IFAD, Rural Connectivity in the Americas and Latin America and then finally digital skills in the rural milieu together with the IDB and Microsoft and ICA of course. My presentation will be brief. I will give you an overview of all three documents and to serve as part of the discussion for this forum. To that end, next please. So I will share my screen again and I apologize for that. I will speak to three topics. Basically, first of all, I'll talk about the significant connectivity access gap. Secondly, I will speak about the main problems around rural connectivity and strategies for a solution. And thirdly, it's misnumbered, but number three, digital skills in the rural milieu and options for adoption. As I said, the document and connectivity and rural connectivity has allowed us to put together a host of information about the status of connectivity in the region, specifically focusing on the issue of the rural milieu. We have developed our work based on available data and the purpose has been to measure the level, gauge the level of access and quality of connectivity based on country statistics and draw comparisons between the rural and urban areas. As part of this, we have developed the significant rural connectivity index, which includes several indicators such as regular use of the internet, access to devices, data and speed of connection. Based on the information collected through official sources in each of the countries, this was extrapolated using as a basis the broadband index produced by the IADB and this enabled us to gauge rural connectivity in the region. What you can see here is gap between rural and urban areas. Connectivity is on average two times higher, twice as high in urban areas vis-à-vis rural areas. So you can see on average that 63% of rural dwellers have no access to significant connectivity. If we take out Brazil, which is a major element, we'd say actually without Brazil, over 75% of rural dollars have no significant connectivity. The green line shows the status or the state of rural connectivity and blue is what needs to be done to bridge that gap between urban and rural connectivity. Based on the broadband index of the IADB, we've been able to do an extrapolation for 24 countries in Latin America and the Caribbean. And according to this, 77 million rural dwellers have in these 24 countries have no access to connectivity with the minimum quality standards. We have also divided the countries into three categories, low, intermediate, medium and high connectivity, which are color coded in on the slide. During this study, we have surveyed several key respondents who have allowed us to analyze the major infrastructure problems that are impeding connectivity. There are seven major problems, which I will summarize here and in doing so, I believe I dare say that there are obsolete outdated regulatory frameworks which need to be reviewed and revised. Oftentimes regulatory frameworks refer to older legacy technologies. These are problems with the installation or setup because of lack of infrastructure, especially in more remote areas in the countries. Also, there is lack of a infrastructure map with information on telecommunication networks to identify areas that are have gone uncovered and maybe potentially connected to the grid and also high investment costs and less cost effectiveness for lower cost effectiveness for operators for companies. There is lack, there's a lack of stimuli and and all to encourage investment in the rural area and finally, last but not least the lack of affordability of devices and higher cost of mobile telephony and internet services for rural dwellers. Aside from connectivity and infrastructure, the studies that I mentioned have also identified the problem of digital skill development in the rural milieu. First of all, there is the issue of digital skills because we feel that although connectivity is a necessary condition for people to bridge this gap, it is not enough. There is a need also for skills to be acquired by the population to make the maximum use of what connectivity has to use and put them to the service of agri-food systems. So we're also going through a major technological revolution globally and there's a need to acquire these skills in order to re-qualify the labor and so as to make it, so as to prepare it for the current labor market. There is a direct link between digital links, digital skills and the results on productivity in terms of productivity. The OECD in 2020 indicated that an increase in the order of 1% in simple ICT competencies is associated to 2.5% increase in work productivity and a 1% increase in complex ITC skills will lead to a 3.7% increase in productivity in the workplace. We have also carried out a survey and an analysis of studies and research done in the region about the development of digital skills and we have also looked into cases and study cases about development and teaching and training in the area in the region based on the findings that we had for Latin America and the Caribbean in terms of digital skills, there are a few topics that stand out. First of all, studies indicate that the use of the internet in the rural milieu happens more often by those who have more schooling, those who come from higher income homes and who carry out higher skilled rural tasks and who have access to technological tools. Also in the region there is differential access to these according to gender, so access by women to cellular telephony in Latin America and the Caribbean is lower than that of men and this in turn leads to lack of access to production and also in terms of family care and the creation of learning opportunities etc. So the fact that women have less access to mobile telephony is actually restricting their opportunities for development. Also, there is agreement as to the fact that those who most often use technology in the rural milieu are children and youth, they are the door into the rural milieu for these technologies and there's also the role of schools which encourage the use of the internet. We've seen several studies with survey data that indicate that when there are children and youth in rural households, there is more use of the internet and these technologies. They start with being used gradually first for just for entertainment and then they're used more systematically for teaching, learning etc. And the COVID-19 pandemic has sped up the use of technologies for e-commerce in the rural milieu and it has been used even more and more intensively over the last year. As part of this research on digital skills, we have identified several strategies for the adoption of such skills in the rural milieu. We carried out a survey about experiences and research about experiences underway and we put together 14 cases that are explained in detail in our research paper. All I have is five minutes left but I will mention the seven major strategies that we have been able to identify. First of all, initiatives that are bolstering communities to promote technological skills and digitization. We're talking about women-centered and indigenous women-centered and youth-centered initiatives to bolster the use of such skills and develop them. Secondly, there are several initiatives meant to promote e-commerce in agriculture as another way in for digital skills to penetrate and permeate this region. Also, training programs such as the Microsoft initiative and others, Microsoft has free courses online provided to teach technological skills. Number four, smart farming strategies through the use of drone satellites and sensors which allow for information and data to be gathered and conveyed about various practices in agriculture, farming, ranching, etc. Which is on the rise in terms of use. Number five, the development of specialized digital consulting strategies that was mentioned at the beginning of my presentation, such as precision agriculture for development, which is carried out by ICAP-ED and the Ministry of Agriculture of Brazil. And in the future we will be working with Columbia as well to allow for cell phones to be used for extension services to provide information for agriculture and for farmers to have useful and substantive information to improve their work. And number three, seeking solutions to encourage digitization in the rural areas such as hackathons. And the idea is to find specific solutions for the use of technology in agriculture and the rural milieu. And finally, the competitive funds to obtain funding for small and medium sized farmers to use technology in agriculture. Finally, we have a few recommendations and that this will conclude. These are recommendations that summarize what was found in the various documents. There is a need to develop public policy in this area. There is a need to support and encourage states to develop these policies and implement them in cooperation with the various stakeholders involved with states, the private sector, international organizations and co-ops. Also to encourage investment by the public and private sector alike. There is a need to promote connectivity in the rural milieus and the development of digital skills programs for the rural milieu and also bearing in mind the diverse audience that you are aiming at. For example, women are different from the youth from the young or from indigenous women, etc. That needs to be born in mind. There is the issue of cost and act lack of access to services and devices there is a need to have content and digital content and resources that are in keeping with the cultural diversity and linguistic diversity that permeates the region. And finally, the need to develop training programs. And first of all, bearing in mind the generational replacement and children and the young who will be taking over work in agriculture and also currently active urban, the urban population so as to improve productivity and the enhance their digital skills. Thank you for your attention and here's the link for you to be able to read those three documents. Thank you. Thank you Sandra and thank you for having kept it within the 15 minutes. So, right on time. For those of us following the audience any questions you have as them in the chat box. We will be gathering the questions and at the end will answer the ones time allows and the rest of the questions will be analyzed and addressed later with you. Our next panelist is Mr. Luis Carlos Bedusky. He is a policy officer of the FAO regional office for Latin America and the Caribbean. Since 2016, he has worked as such and he coordinates the areas initiative mano a mano hand in hand to ensure we have prosperous and inclusive rural society. Mr. Bedusky is an agricultural engineer with a master's and PhD by the University of Sao Paulo in Brazil, and he's also an associate professor of the school of art sciences and humanities at the Institute of advanced studies of Sao Paulo University, with over 15 years of experience, preparing implementing and evaluating policies, programs and projects for rural development, food security, and environmental management. Mr. Bedusky will be sharing the strategy for the digitization of agriculture and extension services from the perspective of the FAO. Mr. Bedusky, you have the floor, 15 minutes, and everyone is ready to hear you. Thank you, Maria Xiliadora. I have to begin by greeting you and all my colleagues and friends that I see in the panel. Hi everyone, it's truly a pleasure to share with you in this activity. This seminar has a very important symbolic and political dimension. On the one hand, it reinforces the joint work of ECLAG, AICA, and FAO in thinking about the challenges and ways forward to promote sustainable rural development in our region. Also because we also have the Ministry of Agriculture and Livestock from Brazil as a partner in this seminar series, and for FAO it's a long history of collaboration with the ministry in different programs. So for a while we have been partnering with them in rural extension in the region. Through the support to relacer the network of relacer. So I will share my screen. And I have to say that Sandra's presentation and her work helps me a lot to introduce my topic. She showed the challenges we have, especially in terms of connectivity in our region. And it's no surprise to us really because our region is truly marked by this great inequality. That's something that is core characteristic of our region. The difference between different social groups and inequalities. And this was shown very explicitly. And this again is also reflected in the use of digital technologies. So the first thing is that the pandemic COVID-19 did accelerate the use of technology worldwide. And this was no different in the rural world. The agriculture had already started this of innovation and digitization. These changes were accelerated by the pandemic. And we don't truly understand the magnitude of these changes right now as we heard from Sandra, we need to find a way to better comprehend and the advantage of the acceleration of these processes of digitization as they open new opportunities for agriculture, especially family farming in the region. They can help us accelerate processes to increase efficiency and productivity. They can accelerate the whole transformation of the rural sector and food systems. In this video, we have meeting every two years for those who are not aware of it in system to guide our work plans every two years there's a meeting. And so we had already anticipated that one of the main drivers of transformation would be digital innovation. And this means that they can help increase productivity and efficiency and something very important for FAO having a true impact on equality. They also bring great opportunities in terms of sustainability and environmental management. One of the things I truly like is everything that is being done now with forest monitoring using drones and my country and in Paraguay. There's interesting examples of work using drones to monitor deforestation there's also monitoring of water resources soils weather. Everything related to the use of big data machine learning a series of possibilities to build scenarios forecasts and have integrated data networks. There's also, as we heard from Sandra, a big change. Not just because of technology but there's that digital literacy process that goes hand in hand with that and this can stimulate new innovations. Again, having technology, but especially what we're seeing in the countryside in Latin America, where the population is getting older. There's now space to have programs open up, for example in Chile, there's a program called nodo where they find ways to link agriculture digitalization. This is a point which might be obvious but we have to say it is that this leads to access and management of information in real time. It could be access to prices for example I remember in Costa Rica, there's this big game with wholesale markets, where they play with the information they have available and today this is very simple to do because producers have time in their cell phones. There's also other innovations such as facilitating access to insurance with lower premium costs, using photographs also with your cell phone to purchase insurance. There's a series of new applications and initiatives that can help, whether forecast detecting pests and diseases, and even having healthcare evaluations with images, which also is important for rural agriculture so coming back to the point raised by Sandra. The risks of having gaps widen, which we already have as large enough gaps there's differences between territories between countries between population groups men and women. And this is also something we heard from Sandra, we have to face the heterogeneous effects and for that we need public policies that can help minimize these effects and this greater differentiation. This also brings along more uncertainty, the risks are the fact that we don't really know where we are going and these are new realms we have new stakeholders new demands and markets and in society. We're also finding there's new ways to socialize new ways to organize and manage. And again these bring along a sense of uncertainty, a risk that adds to the complexity of the equation. This new world of course requires new labor skills, not just in the labor market that has been very much affected we will probably hear from eclectic in this sense later on. In the shock of the pandemic, we are faced with a very complicated scenario and this means we need new competencies to operate in the new world of agriculture 4.0 as it's being called. And this brings us to the digitization of extension services for family farming. We have significant data. The industrial units in the region about 15 million in the region about 13 million can be considered family farming. And of course they have challenges that make them face these gaps in productivity they may not have enough access to assets services for new ways of organizing themselves and so here is where we have been insisting on that or the technical assistance and rural extension as a key tool to help bring new life to family farming. And in the digitalization, there's a new opportunity also for these types of extension services it can be less costly, more massive and instant, it can be more timely because of this and custom made. And more frequently than previous models in the 80s and 90s. It can also be better adapted technically speaking. And very importantly, it can be customized. It can be more collaborative we see experiences, Octavio Sotomayor led one that I still believe was wonderful when he was working with in depth with a series of with a network sorry, young people that watched the WhatsApp. So this new digitization can help us close these gaps, because we can create adapted content, helping differentiate the tools, strengthening digital education. But of course, with the challenge of access to equipment and digital connectivity. And this means we have to have a process of political construction. In my country's experience, for example, we had a program called light for all those but at those and one of the biggest difficulties we found for family farming was public policies we had to work with public policies. And now we are at a time where access to internet may be as important as having access to electricity or water. At FAO we have been working on this by suggestion of its member countries worldwide and regionally. So we have the commitment to accelerate digitalization of agriculture. So we are very happy to be part of this seminar series because of that. I just call your attention to a few of these for example the International Digital Council. So this is because of demands of member countries. Everything that we have in our digital services portfolio and every time I visit this it's it's more interesting than going to the play store because there's so many apps and new things to play around with. Then we have the FAO data lab database and information. It's important for the world today to help connectivity there's a series of information kits available linked to geospatial data as well in the FAO geospatial platform. So it's important to provide this and make it available for others. That's what I have for you and just to close. This is all linked to a greater process, which is the United Nations work on family farming. We have some more information and the whole process is for those interested in visiting the platforms. We have the platform for family farming. And again we have partners like ICA. I've had and others so we have much information this is a Twitter. On family farming and to close we have a global action plan coordinated by countries and organizations with a rural family farming form where we established seven pillars for an action plan to work towards our goals. Each of these pillars is directly linked to what we will be covering during these seminars on rural extension and family farming so I invite you to join us to the rest of ours and thank you very much for your attention. I'm sure that we will have a very interesting time for discussion. And it will be very productive. Thank you very much. I give you the floor. Thank you so much. It's been a very illustrating presentation with a great deal of innovative factors. I think that digitizing agriculture hinges on reassessing agriculture as a whole and support services in particular, especially innovation in the sector, and within innovation, how we address research to develop new technologies, including digital services, and the provision of extension services. And as you were saying, Luis Carlos has been working for over 10 years together with other stakeholders involved in this forum FAO at clack the Ministry of Agriculture Brazil, IKA, all of us. I am certain that we will come to very promising conclusions at the end of this series of webinars. Next we will hear from Mr. Octavio Soto major. He is the economic officer. He's the economic officer at the natural resources division at a clack. He's an agricultural engineer from the University of Chile, and he has a master's degree in economics at the in the University of Agro Paris in France he has been the director of the agricultural policy and research department and also director of the agricultural and rural development department at in Dapin Chile and he's now the advisor on economic affairs at the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean eclect Octavio will be speaking about the outlook for digitization of agriculture and Latin America from the standpoint of eclect. You have the floor Octavio. Thank you, Mario auxiliary. I wonder whether, while I share my screen and put up my, my presentation, I'll have enough time to thank you all, and say what a pleasure it is to be here with all my friends and I would also like to send my greetings to the extension workers who are watching us today. He works. They work with real estate and they're out there in the field. And this presentation is meant for them from their standpoint, I want to stand in their shoes, as if I were someone in the public sector, working in the area. The main ideas in my presentation and I will be speeding up a little bit are the following we need to actually transform the system the agri-foods agri-food system as the previous speaker said secondly, to apply a low cost strategy to avoid immobility. This is my main message. Third, digitization is a necessary but not sufficient condition. Technical assistance is counseling and is advice, but they need you need to follow up on it with investment so digitized technical assistance is not enough, there's a need for investment. Finally, and going back to the whole idea of transformation, the digitization must be at the service of new paradigms, which in our case means bioeconomics and agri-ecological transition. I said so this is the outline of my presentation, I will be touching upon the fiscal situation the country's low cost food system digitization overall, and then I will talk about the main issue at hand, which is extension and marketing. And finally, my conclusions. Quickly, if I may, I don't think there is a need for us to go into details about this but we're in the midst of a pandemic this has had a major impact on fiscal aspects in our countries in Latin America and the Caribbean. And this in turn has a major impact on the budgets of the ministries of agriculture, and those, the funds available for extension this is to be expected. Over the next few years, we will find a fiscal ourselves under a fiscal squeeze, and the question for all of us, the authorities and civil society leaders and companies is, what will we do, how will we respond. During the post pandemic era where we'll have to relaunch the economy, and also avoid a new systemic crisis such as the one we're undergoing now, which that means that we need to operate within the constraints of our planet, and also there's the political, the political power and forces and games are everything is undermined and under a great deal of pressure. And finally, will we leverage this crisis to move towards a more well better balance society which is more dynamic and integrated and digitization is a tool in my view that should enable and help this transition. So I said this in passing but we need to make family farming more dynamic and that calls for investment that needs to be born in mind quite clearly. So for in our profession over the last 20 to 30 years, we have come to accept the idea that public policy needs to be differentiated policy for the young for children for for different territories for older adults. There are so many categories, but what I would like to introduce in this presentation is a new factor category which has to do with cost. And to make it even clearer, I like to say that the challenge is to design low cost policy that will get possible for us to lift ourselves out of the situation we are over the next few years. Sandra spoke to the IKA, IADB and Microsoft papers, and there are some very interesting homegrown solutions in there. And that's a concept that goes back to another concept that we've been working on at CEPA, at ECLAC, which has to do with low cost or autonomous and own resource funded activities or self funded activities. And I'll explain what I mean by that. What I mean is that if we're going to design a public scope program, it's scope, it doesn't have to be launched by the public sector but could be launched by a co-op or a company. But the idea is to make the best of all local leadership available as well as all the resources available to all own resources available to reduce cost, increase quality and also impact. The idea, this is something we should use as a target for the next few years. And that also entails combining cost and local technology, traditional technology with modern technologies, including digital type technologies. And this is very long, but I think that I should at least mention it. I think we need to learn to look at things, to relearn how to look at our territories. This is a guide, just a list, I won't go into detail here, but you'll have it for later reference. But what we need to do is improve the way we assess the situation in rural territories so as to promote family farming support programs. I think that the most emblematic one is one about rainwater in the past, rainwater was just lost, now it's collected and used. And the same goes for biomass, for waste, for unused physical assets and skills, and the technical knowledge of rural dwellers, during the agricultural revolution or the Green Revolution, the farmers were just the subject, so to speak. The farmer just received, it was a top down approach from the experimental station that developed everything and just gave it to the farmers. This is completely outdated now. And this is very important for extension purposes. Farmers have a great deal of very valuable knowledge, and that needs to be tapped into. So, this is the idea we need to learn to work with local resources of course, and, of course, external financing is very important I will waste no time on this but ideally we should have government funded programs and programs funded by international organizations and banks, but that will be hard to do in upcoming years. Now I would like to go into digitization proper this is an interesting picture this was taken in England, this is a half hectare field with no human intervention. This is what is happening now this is fast, it's inescapable, the pandemic has sped it up, it's very heterogeneous it has an impact on employment of course and be mindful of the fact that it may also have an impact on remittances in the northern hemisphere. The pandemic has generated a great deal of stress so that the fields that the countryside in the north and in the south will become more digitized, and this will have an impact on employment this also means the creation of networks, and I will go into that later, but mostly digitization is is in keeping with this whole low cost strategy Sandra talked about gaps, I won't repeat her what is what she said, there are so many gaps everywhere and it's quite obvious to see. Take a look at what the situation is Nicaragua, 38%. And this is just a small sample of the population in the mid development and medium development area only 38% of the farmers have smartphones. It's not a lot but it's something 38% 50 out of 130, but 96% are of them are available to receive training through the social media and through the Internet. Take a look at Brazil 7.5% of farmers receive technical assistance in the Brazilian northeast as compared to the south where the percentages 45.5% in northeast in Brazil. 7.5% they have major coverage problems, and that is true of all almost every single country in Latin America coverage and quality of course. So how do we overcome the divide the guy the gap that Sandra referred to. Well broadband mobile telephony. So what I'm interested in is talking about solutions homegrown solutions, based on the research that was presented by Santa which will put an end to the stalemate that we have the stagnation so that means that maybe we won't have broadband for one two or three years but there are some basic based solutions that some aspects can put an end to the stagnation, which I find quite interesting, and I will will find will conclude by saying that the food system as the whole needs to be digitized, and here are some references papers being worked on by us with the together with the FAO also just by a clack about what is going on with the digital divide so finally about technical support and marketing. And here's some data from Mexico. We carried out a survey last year about the pandemic. And based on that the, what we saw was that 68% of the respondents said that they use platforms they use it platforms for technical support and 33% use it to access market price market pest and disease data technical assistance is a very important aspect of facing the pandemic that's agreed upon by 49.2% and in terms of marketing as well 21.1%. So with that, what I would like to say is that there are two programs which have been underway in the region for a long time, working on horizontal extension networks. One is in Peru, with 100,000 farmers and the mountains and the Peruvian mountain ranges, where more experienced farmers, Council and advise more novice farmers there's another one in Nicaragua, fostered by supported by Fumica, which is the farmer to farmer program. So this is a whole horizontal extension program without engineers without vehicles without a great deal of work and public servants but rather a network of farmers. So I think the challenge is to replicate them using digital tools. Do it online. And that's what we're doing. There is a process, there's a project underway with focus on CRS in Nicaragua and Honduras with a clock, where we are trying to create horizontal farmers to farmer networks using cellular phones. And you can see the proportions there this is of course linked to research linked to our professional extension workers. And to those two components we add advanced farmers at different levels. Here we see the model is from Chapingo, Mexico where they have a network of innovators, and they have different waves of farmers using these and it goes as a cascade downwards. The first wave are those most advanced the second coming later and so forth. There are many formats for this. What's truly relevant here is the work in networks, every territory can adapt the network. So, here we have an experience by in depth with the same concept from Peru and Nicaragua of horizontal extension was interpreted differently and we created a web page. You see a picture there of Ms. Brighida Drudeo and Mr. Claudio Torres they are farmers they have their profiles, and they give information on what they're good for what their expertise is and if anyone wants to contact them they can find them through the web or a cell phone call. The same idea but operating through a webpage. And I also have some examples of. Well, of course, what's up is a great tool we all know. There's the case of Uruguay. Very interesting you see the pictures there. Also in Argentina. They have interesting experiences with a virtual agency of India. I'd also like to mention, I don't have enough time but there's also contests, contests are a very interesting way of bringing visibility and defining technical references. In this case, the well known contest of the cup of excellence in coffee. These are very useful and cheap ways to send messages and transfer information. We heard from Luis and his recent presentation. Another mechanism is virtual networks. We have a series of virtual networks here that are promoted in very interesting experiences there's another one in Chile as well. So more or less 15,000 young people connected every day discussing technology through Facebook, basically. And finally, a very interesting experience from Ecuador where there's strategic coordination of the chain through a WhatsApp group, you have the references there again I don't have the time, but you can see how the group reacted with the pandemic and how they are working on a strategic plan for the cocoa chain to close in marketing. This is the situation we have in Latin America overall it is not structured, and ideally, we have to achieve that structure. There are certain instruments to integrate markets to bring wholesalers, exporters stores, public purchases, and internet. So that's the main idea the concept. This entails a preparation of the supply if we want to market and sell through digital channels the first thing we have to do is look at productivity quality opportunity and design is truly important. There's very low cost experience this was not. There was no price tag on this. It was students using their knowledge to produce labels for farmers. So this is a technical institute that is near some of these farmers and produced labels for the farmers so a low cost solution. If we have marketing down, we can look at other low cost solutions. What you see here are some pictures of farmers markets and agricultural fairs and Chile and Peru. This is extended throughout Latin America. These are affordable tools. And you can truly create physical market spaces that can later take the step towards digitization. Another interesting tool. I'm aware of time. Sorry, we have the virtual round tables business conferences that are done virtually this is for wholesalers and so certain large volumes and then I give you some references there on virtual stores in Brazil. This is work by Antonio Alvain, and he will be sharing in this seminar series so he will certainly give the details of them. In conclusion, we need public policy to face the post pandemic world and as part of these public policies. Very importantly, we have to consider sectoral digital agendas. Here I showed the case of Brazil and Columbus are the two countries that are most advanced in that sense in the region. And some more conclusions. There's a new balance between state companies and civil society. There are new ways of doing public policy. We have to move towards sustainable models to have low cost solutions. The digitalization is an instrument. There's a big role for local organizations to play. And finally, the state should always have its unsubstitutable role it cannot be replaced you have the references and thank you very much for the opportunity. Thank you. Thank you, Octavio. I believe that this idea of looking back and coming back to this and rethinking is very important at this point forced us to look at new ways of building processes and strategies. And finding ways of doing what we've always done differently. This new reality makes us change our perspective, looking at what we have at our local world, so that we can move forward from that. Our next panelist is Dr. Delgerma Chulumbatar. She is known warmly as Delger in Latin America to help it easier for us to pronounce her name. Delger has over 24 years of experience working in agriculture and rural development, nationally, regionally and globally. She is currently extension officer, the Office of Extension at FAO in Rome. Her work is a wide range of areas including institutional reform, public policy and measures of extension. Good practices facilitating innovative processes and capacity building for agricultural innovation. Delger has a PhD in interdisciplinary studies from the University of Saskatchewan in Canada. She studied the distribution of rural extension and adoption of technologies by farmers, as well as a master's degree and I listen to studies in conservation agriculture and agricultural engineering. She has been a member of the World Forum for rural and extension services. Delger is a member of that as well and Delger is currently vice president of the board of the GFRAZ and the World Forum for Rural Advisory Services. Delger will be sharing her experience on digitalization of extension services from the perspective of GFRAZ. We have 15 minutes, Delger, and we have over 300 participants hearing you through our social media and the Zoom platform. Go ahead, you have the floor. Okay, great. Thank you very much, Maria Oxodora for this introduction and thanks to everyone for giving me this opportunity to present in this panel and be part of this very exciting event. Absolutely, I'm unable to, my camera is somehow glitching and not turning on, so I apologize for that, but this is very exciting to be talking about digitalization. This certainly has brought significant changes in our personnel as well as professional lives, the way to farm, the way to buy and sell and engage in industries and policies, etc. In 2011, I went to Canada to do my PhD, and once a month I would buy this calling card, they used to call it international calling card, and I paid $25 Canadian dollars to talk 15 minutes very rough conversation, which I hardly, very poor connection cannot go through. But then in 2020, I spent 15 minutes to buy my parents' seeds and seedlings and fertilizers to start their gardening. Just it took 15 minutes. And of course, the COVID pandemic, we cannot talk about digitalization without talking about COVID. COVID has accelerated this digital innovations significantly to our lives. So, if I can make a slide, unlike Fernando, I don't have personal greetings from my DG, however, I would like to share a quote from our director general. He says digitalization has become an important driving force for all transformation and creating opportunities to farmers. So unprecedented challenges like COVID, natural disasters, climate change, that affect agriculture and food, as well as rural livelihoods so much. I think digitalization has so much to offer and provides a unique opportunity to accelerate agriculture in food systems in a sustainable manner. I will be talking a bit of background, which I will go through very fast. The Sandra Lewis and Octava has covered much of that. And just to touch on what digital promises versus digital realities are like and basic conditions for digitalization. It's not so easy and glorious as we seem to see from surface. And then I focus a bit on extension advisory services, as well as extension advisory systems as a whole, and leave you with few key messages. Okay, so, you know, we have huge pressure to build resilient farmers and resilient communities, resilient systems and countries to face the challenges that rural producers and agriculture and food sector is facing. Those are many, you know, just to name the few, we still need to find a ways to produce more with less. And there is climate change, natural disasters, disasters and resource degradations. And the number of poor and hungry are still continue to grow. Yet, at the same time, access to basic services like health education finance is still very poor. And there is huge difference between rural and urban. Then it comes to agriculture, there is very is still limited access to productive resources and agriculture services, especially those in remote, hard to access areas or vulnerable groups, indigenous groups, women and youth, etc. And we continue to face various numerous crisis. Digital solutions are big and them in broad. They're some of them are transformative and that's some of them are destructive, but they need destructive innovations or disruption provides us challenges as well as hand time opportunities so some of the digital promises are, you know, it's been said already in our previous panelists, but there is great opportunity to use digitalization to collect data evidence and support evidence based involvement policy investment decisions to facilitate farming and marketing, etc. And it will include increased efficiency and inclusiveness and hold on and agriculture services and they do some of this has been mentioned extension refinance and social protection schemes, etc. And more efficient and transparent value chain, and the transparency is very key in this in this context, and to have trust in people and trust in the players and actors in the value chain in the system that system has to be transparent to gain this trust enables and digitalization also enables integrated more holistic policies for all transformation not the challenges faced by world producers and people are not sectoral. They're mostly dimensional and and we need to think about integration and holistic approach to address those things and and that digital platforms and different tools and instruments that hopefully will help facilitate the job creation, entrepreneurship, which has been spoken and empowerment of youth and women and hopefully increased productivity and investment, the better return on our investment. So, at the same time, while there is a lot of promises being made and hopes being put in digitalization. What are the realities that we have today, and Sandra have presented very good data on access to internet. Access to internet is not that's not equal to use of internet. You may have access to it, but you may not be using. So there's two different things. However, you know, majority of people who have access isn't developing world, obviously, and only 20 nearly 20% of the least developed country has access to internet. And Sandra talked about gender gaps. And I must say that Latin America is the region which has least amount of gender gap. I think it was 2%, if I'm not wrong, and network coverage versus use, while 93% of the world population lives in the region of mobile broadband. So there is a broadband available almost everywhere, but only 53% actually uses the internet for various reasons. So mobile phone ownership. Most mobile phone ownership rates are found in Africa and South Asia, and highest found in Europe, and Latin America in between. Increased mobile subscription does not necessarily equal the distribution. You can have higher density of mobile phone subscription in urban areas and much less in rural areas. So, now they're speaking while digitalization is moving forward and the fastest speed and activating there is a still a low level of adoption and, and use of this digital benefits, what are the barriers. Why is that an international telecommunication union identifies few barriers which I listed here. A lot of electricity, especially in rural areas, 15% of the world population live without electricity. So this is a huge barrier in structure. And secondly, the literacy, 13% of the population is incapable of reading and writing. And even when you, if your letter does not necessarily mean you have a capacity to make use of the digital technologies and digital information. Lack of ICT skills, affordability. October talked about the low cost homegrown solutions. I really go for that. And this is a big barrier. It's very expensive still very expensive to have access to broadband and local content, no lack of billing and relevant content. Relevance of information out there in poor network college in rural areas. So this is some of the barriers to the adoption of digital solutions. And this is also just to show no digital technologies also come with risk. It can do great things, innovations, increase efficiency and inclusion, etc. But if it is not managed well and complemented with right policies and right instruments, it can cause, you know, a deal of risks, increase inequalities, concentration control, etc. So what needs to be done. There is about to be done to make the make the digitalization reach for potential. Now, and first, most of all that basic conditions that needs to be met. And those basic conditions above soft infrastructure as well as hard infrastructure. And the world, huge amount of development needed in soft side of the digitalization, and it's very critical to, to have soft side of the structure in place to make use of make a full benefit of the hard side of. So, just to name this few establishing inclusive, so the digital ecosystem, no creation of inclusive digital ecosystem and enabling environment, October also talked about this and capacity development. For example, digital literacy, scale development of everybody not only users in the rural areas or clients of extension services but in all levels producers service providers, policymakers, and every level of the organization. The framework standards, interoperability, and innovative and effective partnership, product partnership, partnership, creating incentives, inclusive this and sustainability product, product, public partnership is going to be a very, very big, big importance in this and hard infrastructure I will not talk it's been already mentioned by others, just trying to move fast with time. So, you know, only when we have the basic conditions. are met in the capacities to implement the building blocks here in gray are in place, we will be able to harvest the full potential of digitalization in a good system. So it's very important to be mindful. Now, what does it mean in agriculture extension and advisory services know. So extension and advisory services play a role in both two sides. There are two, two things I want to talk about one is the digitalization in agriculture know that is. all the precision agriculture practices, smart farming and, and e marketing e commerce or all those things, and then the digitalization and extension itself. So, extension advisory services play a role in supporting producers to use the benefit from digital technologies and link them to input and output markets, as well as access and interpret digital data and information to the specific context and needs. Some of us seem to believe that you know once we transfer the information to producers digitally, they get it in their cell phone, it fixes things. It doesn't actually there is a flow of information or load of information. And the farmers need to have an capacity to understand the filter through the information they receive and understand and contextualize that information and interpreted in their own context and needs so they're actually take benefit of this information who does that and also this is where extension advisory services may have to play a role and farmers in this in this process. Second part digitalization and extension has also two parts. Okay. One is digitalization in service delivery. That is to adopt adopt and adopt digital tools and technologies to include their outreach and services to producers and other clients, you know now in another culture innovation system context replay much more than just the disseminating information to producers know. So this is one. The second part is to enhance extension advisory service system as a whole. So, to use digital tools to strengthen their capacity monitoring system governance coordination, etc. So as a system extension advisory system and that in its close the context, how can we take advantage of this digitalization and the strength of our system to be more resilient to shocks now. This is the first part digitalization and service delivery. So this is in the middle. The information comes in a digital means to producers mostly or to others. But before that information gets to your tablet to your to your cell phone. There is various activities needs to be done in the back end. Collection of data and information documentation analysis of those data and contextualization interpretation and operating the, the, the software or the, or the technology. And then, only then, the farmers or producers have access to, or be able to use that information in a meaningful way. And so far, there have been various ways this is being used. All centers community radio is immense voice reported messaging systems e-commerce marketing and logistics, whether price information, patient disease identification and control information exchange mainly through social media and, and through to all of those some empowerment. And this is being, many of those activities have emerged during COVID pandemic in response to the challenges we face in relation to market access and input inputs and information, but the state of art technologies are generally used by private sectors, companies, but public extension angels or producer organizations tend to have ICT tools, use ICT tools using social media like rural radio more conventional, let's say tools. Now this is in the service delivery. On, on the other side, the digitalization in the extension system. I think so far, we are reacting to this evolution, reacting to this innovation disruption, and Maria I saw your fingers. And, and responding to the, responding to the challenges that we are facing. And I think now we need to change our gear to be more strategic and more practically use this digital is opportunities within digitalization in strengthening our extension system as a whole. Now, there are many things we can do, which we have started doing, for example, documentation and integration of local know how, you know, in the past we used to use to be a seldom books written and documentation of local knowledge, indigenous knowledge, etc, being back. And it is hard to get that out. Now it's our opportunity. And we've been talking about lack of impact of extension, lack of evidence of extension to demonstrate return on investment. Shall we have done something that's worth getting investment. And this is not our opportunity, we can use digital tools means to collect data and develop, create evidence for data driven decision making policy processes and investment decisions also. And October shop about the budget allocation for extension and the tendency to be continue to be declining. And so, you know, we need to use this opportunities to demonstrate the impact cost learning and exchange and capacity development. And the mail is been important issue that's been neglected all this years in extension advisory services performance measurements. This is where we can do and impact with Rella said, if you are is testing a tool to measure performance and outcome of extension advisory services in four countries in Latin America. And so there is lots of this is an example of how we can use digitalization to do the gaps that we have not been able to feel so far. This is the most coordination collaboration governments know the extension advisory services are pluralistic, and now coordinating the pluralism country for us. The governments is important. Now, other important things feedback mechanism and quality assurance responsiveness of the services. This is the game. Now this is our opportunity to do so. Demand mobilization we talk about making extension and advisory services demands driven. And it has been very hard to do. And now digitalization and digital tools will enable us to do it. This is the facilitation of cooperation of innovation know instead just going information dissemination technology transfer. Maybe now we can work together and digital using digital platforms to to facilitate innovation processes. So, if we do that, the extension and advisory service systems will be more resilient more efficient transparent relevant inclusive and well coordinated with synergies among pluralistic factors. Now, this is a five key functions. We have extension services, and in my opinion, not everything can be or should be digitalized. And now I would like my dear participants to look at this five functions, and you can put in the chat. ABCDE, which of this five functions should be digitalized should be or can be digitalized. Okay. So we have three difficulties to scale up and go beyond just a minute. Sorry, I, I have a little mistake here. A is a knowledge and technology information sharing. Knowledge and technology and information sharing is capacity, no decision support or advisory on farm know, more like personal advisory and organizational and business, agribusiness management on farm solutions. A is a strengthening of farm based on collective action, the human capacity development. E facilitation, linking, brokering by chance. Okay, so I move on. Sorry, I have a little bit of fun. I have one slide left. There are many challenges of digitalization. And there. This is the switch difficulties to scale up and beyond going beyond project face. According to a studies, many studies, about 80% of digital, digital innovations or digital solutions failed digital projects, promoting digital fair, because it's so difficult to scale it. And it seems to go beyond private case. Secondly, has it to pay for both by both producers and extension service providers is still very comments of data, quality assurance of the data, and have to make knowledge management of this digital information that is just too much out there. And it is very hard for the farmers to digest lack of incentives and policy framework for PPP. The human capacity at all levels. Okay, those are some of the challenges, but this, this is my key messages that I want to leave you with. And this is my last slide. This is in three answers. So, the main one see one capacity development, all levels horizontally and vertically is the key. Content, co creation customization adaptation use of relevance. Using them by smaller and local appropriation is very important the content has to be relevant. And context matters always know no one size fits all as simple, keep it simple. Simple. It's like was less is more not keep it simple if you have a simple it will be more inclusive, easy to scale and more impactful. And sustainability, of course, you know, positive impacts and social economic environmental do no harm and systems approach integrated holistic approach cross all disciplines and sectors. I'm the sector and the coach. Thank you very much. Here are some cases but I can share my presentation. Thank you. Thank you so much. For your excellent presentation. You gave us an overview of all of those trigger messages that you showed us towards the end. I think that that will provide us with a great deal of food for thought for us to reassess our strategies and revise them in a way so as to utilize the rural milieu extension services and agriculture as a whole. Our last speaker is Mr. Heiner Baumann. Mr Baumann is the co founder and managing director of and board member of the precision agriculture for development foundation PAD. He has over 20 years experience in advising and managing high growth social change organizations. We're the focus on climate smart sustainable agriculture clean energy community health education and mobile service mobile phone based services in Africa Haiti the United States Europe through the PAD foundation, which he leads. Currently, he's especially interested in solutions and organizations meant to have a impact at scale at scale to fight rural poverty environmental degradation climate change and the fundamental elements that are needed to respond to these challenges that agriculture faced with around the world at this juncture. Mr Baumann will be speaking about the PAD experience and digital extension from Africa and Asia. With that, I will yield to Mr Baumann. You have the forester. Well, many thanks to Maria Federico and all at ECA for organizing this event and bringing us together today with me is Claudia Carpahall and she is PADs regional director for Latin America. I will first give a brief overview then Claudia will present three examples of our specific work. And finally, we will share some takeaways. That was founded six years ago by three professors and myself. One of the professors is Michael Kramer. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for economics in 2019. Today, we're operating in these nine countries, serving more than three million farmers. Our mission is to reduce information poverty by providing actionable customized information through mobile phones. For farmers we focus on increasing yields, net incomes and environmental sustainability. We are a nonprofit organization and generally prefer to work with partners who already have trusted relationships with farmers. We are very excited to now start working with government and other partners in Latin America. We are adjusting to regional, national and local contexts and circumstances. Two projects have already been awarded last month. One in Colombia with Rare and the Nature Conservancy to promote sustainable livelihoods in the Meta Department. And one in Ecuador to support the Inter-American Development Bank and Promozonia on a digital intervention and evaluation with palm tree farmers. Two more projects are in advanced discussions. They're both important with eco and respective ministries of agriculture. One is in northeast of Brazil and one is in Colombia and both are focused on increasing productivity in smallholder farmers through digital extension. I'm going to skip this next slide because my previous speakers have amply covered the why we are doing this. The sectoral challenge for us is that useful information and productive technologies exist but small farmers lack access. Most of current extension is provided in person through traditional in-person channels with the following limitations. It is expensive to run in person extension system and it is hard to train, deploy, monitor and retain extension officers and agents. Secondly, extension agents have issues reaching farmers. In India, for instance, only 6% of farmers, their reports that they have benefited from advice from government extension officers and 70% of farmers say they have little or no trust in what government officials are recommending. Existing systems are often just one way. And finally, as we have just seen, it is difficult to implement in-person system in crisis times, be that COVID or be that a conflict. So our solution is to provide customized agricultural advice over mobile phones and we do this by combining farmer specific information that you see there what I mean and public data such as on soil, whether past outbreaks and to come up with customized content. And that content is then delivered through an appropriate channel. Across our countries, only about 25% of farmers have smartphones and substantially fewer have data plans and internet connectivity. The majority of our advice is delivered over feature phones. In East Africa, we mostly use SMS and in South Asia, we mostly use voice and IBR. These are some of the characteristics of our solution here as you see on the right. So, as you can see here, digital ag solutions are growing very rapidly. In fact, over the last five years, every year, another 100 digital ag platforms have been added. This is from a very recent report about ag platforms worthwhile to read. The question of course is, are they actually working? Solid scientific evidence is limited, but looking at multiple studies from randomized controlled trials, here is what we find. A meta analysis of results of seven rise controlled trials in Africa and India demonstrates a 4% average yield gain associated with digital agricultural programs. This increase and this is important is an average effect among all farmers to whom messages were sent, including those farmers who never opened or engaged with the content, and farmers who actually adopted recommendations saw a significantly higher impact. Another meta analysis of six studies, four of which were undertaken by PAD, found that on average farmers in the program showed 22% higher increase in adoption of farming practices. And this again with the same preamble that we measured across all farmers who had access to the information irrespective if they used it or not. For a unit cost of less than $2 per year performer at scale, we see a very high social return on investment. I'm passing over to Claudia to give you some very specific examples of our work. Claudia please. Now that I know describe the big picture, I will talk about some of our projects. These projects are from different countries and reflect different implementation strategies. I'm going to start with Odisha with the Amma Cruci program. Odisha is our largest program and is currently reaching more than 1 million farmers. This project comes from a partnership between the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Government of Odisha. Since it is inception, the goal of the project was to reach 1 million farmers and then transfer it to the government as part of our bill-operate transfer model. Just to talk a bit about the features of the service, it's a two-way service in which farmers receive a weekly push call with agricultural recommendations that is customized, but can also call back into the toll-free line, record questions that will be answered by experts, and then there's additional features like, for example, they can access previous advisory messages. This program started with rice and is now providing content on over 20 crops and we have added additional initiatives that provide a more comprehensive support to farmers. Some of those are gender components that I will discuss later. And I just want to touch on the component that Hiner already mentioned, research that is a key component of our program. We use research in this program and in all of our programs to evaluate and make programmatic decisions and learning and innovating allows us to provide better services to farmers. This service, the Amacrish service in Odisha, India, engages with farmers at different stages in the process to maximize the relevance of the information and the impact of our services. Farmers are first called by the call center to collect what we call profiling information that will be used to customize messages. Content is then prepared by our ACT team in coordination with partners and reviewed by a content review meeting with government experts and research organizations. That allows us to make sure that the content is relevant for the specific context and that we are providing the information that the experts on the topic recommend. Farmers can interact with the service to two ways. The first one is through the push calls, but then as I said, they can also call into the hotline and ask questions. Something about the frequent feedback surveys is that we use this information to inform content design but also to inform profiling registration and the way farmers interact with the service. One key feature of our model that is slightly different from a lot of other models is that we iterate and refine our interventions as we scale and not exclusively at the beginning. That allows us to deliver the best possible service to farmers. And then I want to talk about how we make the content relevant or how we adjust to different settings or needs. Each country has its own challenges. It can be gender, it can be youth, but in India it was gender. So we want to make sure that these work for all groups and not only the most visible male farmers. In India we spent a lot of time thinking about gender dynamics and strategies to leverage our service for gender engagement. We conducted detailed analysis of the context through desk and field research and identified three main challenges for women. These are probably just a sub-sample, but those are the ones that were more relevant for our context. The first one was women had limited decision-making power on staple and cash crops. They had however decision-making power in other crops. They had limited access to mobile phones and they had low levels of mobile phone literacy. With this information we identify solutions targeted to each challenge and we are now, for example, implementing strategies on content tailored to women like horticulture, life stock and fisheries. We are also partnering with NGOs that have programs focused on women. The final point is that we are also disseminating content through other platforms that are more widely used and by literacy constraints. One of them is community radio. I am now going to move towards our program in Kenya. This is our program labeled MOA info. The development of this program offers another rich example of how PAD is capable of deepening a service over time. This program started as a pest control advisory service in response to the fall armyworm crisis that at the time was new to the region and was imaging the fields of May that are the regional staple crop. In response to farmer feedback and growing capacity, the service has been iterated to provide farmers and agro dealers with information on 11 crops and optimal input use. In addition to its foundational pest management service, we have been able to learn a great deal of our farmers and these are some of the key characteristics of what we see. And just to dive into the details of the platform, this platform is also two-way communication. It allows farmers to build pool content. They are looking for information about the crop, but they also receive push messages about farming practices. One key component that I would like to highlight are the decision support tools that help farmers optimize their decision making. These tools, for example, I'm going to talk about the seed selector tool that uses information on farmers' plot location and preference for maturity duration and then provides recommendations on the most suitable varieties of maize and beans. There's a few other examples on this slide. I'm going to go through this slide very quickly. It's just to talk about how learning from farmers has allowed those to inform our decisions and how also we see a high levels of adoption relatively to other interventions. And these adoption and knowledge numbers are pretty high, particularly when you consider that the service costs less than $2 per farmer per year at scale. And then I want to dive into the implementation and AV testing that are core to our mission. So we conduct AV testing that is basically comparing two or more service design options to assess which is preferred or more effective, and this informs programmatic decisions and service delivery. To date, we have conducted over 60 AV tests across geographies. I'm going to talk about a very quick example in Kenya. The two research questions are about what is the type of message that it has the biggest impact and what is the best time to send these messages. So these experiments were randomized and first aim, half of farmers receive message A, half of them receive message B, and we saw that farmers engage better with message B. And then we did something similar with timing. We randomized this in four groups, 7am, midday, 3pm, and 6pm. And then we randomly assigned farmers to receive the messages at these times. And what we saw is that midday was the best option. So what we did is we started sending the message B at midday as a way of impact. And the last point that I want to talk about is I would like to talk about the SYNC experiment in Punjab, Pakistan. So a SYNC deficiency diet can weaken the development of immune system triggers something and contribute to pregnancy complications among others. So SYNC biofortified varieties can tackle this public health issue. And these seeds also have benefits for farmers as they have been beyond health, as they have been developed to be disease resistant and are associated with higher yields. So in Pakistan, we tested our system to focus exclusively on bioforticide with by highlighting both the health and economic benefits of these seeds. The intervention was done over 17 days because that was a window in which farmers were going to buy seeds. So that was like the only time that we had. And the results are still preliminary. But what we see is an increase, a significant decrease in adoption of these biofortified seeds. These are still preliminary results, as I said. And, Heiner, do you want to take the last few slides? Sure. Thank you, Claudia. So just in the interest of time, I'm going to skip the COVID response that had implemented. Okay, but I do definitely want to talk about the takeaways here that might be relevant for you or your projects. The first one is customer centric and data driven approach is really critical. We at PAD use behavioral sciences to design services, using the experiments to test and iterate and improve just as Claudia has shown us right now. And lastly, irrespective of how you are funding your digital platform, the fact is that cost really matters. Low costs per farmer means that it is much more likely that a service will scale. I'm not talking about scaling to 10 or 50,000 farmers, I'm talking about millions. At PAD we started with an average cost of above $40 per farmer per year and we're currently below $2 per farmer per year. The beauty about digital communication is that the marginal costs are very small. So it's mostly about fixed costs being distributed over users and we keep those fixed costs low by partnering with and leveraging existing infrastructure of organizations. Third, if we want programs to stick, we need to think about the end game from the very start. So who will be doing the work at scale? Who will be paying for it? For us, we like the build, operate transfer model where we help our partner organizations get to an extension model that has more impact on farmers, the environment, and that is much more cost effective than the status quo. Anticipating and effectively responding to change is key. Be it that the political landscape is shifting, a pandemic hits, but there is unrest, the services and organizations behind it need to be willing and able to adapt. And lastly, we feel that digital ag is still in its early years and that there is an opportunity for any digital ag project out there to contribute to the learning of the sector. That also means to not only be transparent about what is working, but also about what isn't. We look forward to engaging with you through questions either here or then offline after this session. We are relatively new to Latin America. We greatly look forward to getting to know many of you and working hopefully with several of you. Thank you, Maria for and everyone else for organizing. I'm giving the floor back to you. Thank you so much. Hey, Ned. Thank you, Claudia. We will continue. I believe that experiences from the pad foundation and what you've done in Africa, Asia and even what you're starting in Latin America are vital in this new effort to bring digitization to agriculture. I believe we have many questions from our audience. You can see some of them in the chat box. Because of time constraints, we will ask panelists to refer to the questions that they can answer themselves and the question and answers chat box so that we can help clarify any questions. I will give the floor to Mr Mario Leon from Ica. He will be giving our closing remarks for today's seminar and after these wonderful presentations on the world. Digitalization in agriculture perspectives challenges and the issues that have been brought up by different panelists. Mario, you have the floor. Thank you, Mario. Once again, I greet each of our speakers. Thank you for joining us and thank you to all the attendees as well. We have just two minutes to close. I'll try and be as concise as possible after having heard from each of our speakers they have been excellent presentations today. This is the first seminar and it has truly been very productive. I'd like to share with all of you after hearing our panelists is that first we have work to do it requires an effort from all of us so we should all partner together to incorporate the multiple sectors into economic development. This means we have to allocate resources and energy to improve productive human capital. We should support the growth of family farming and this entails certain productivity conditions, one of which is the use of digital tools or solutions such as remote extension platforms and electronic commerce platforms. And even the combination of these and the incorporation of other elements to improve competitiveness of our family farmers and their organizations. To understand a text we need to analyze the context as the same goes and we've been able to see an overview and the state of the art of rural connectivity and the needs and requirements, the new skills and competencies in this digital world. We've also heard from the digital divide and the gaps we see in different territories. And ways to build bridges to close these gaps with digital tools and solutions. I know that these solutions are a means, but they're not an end in themselves, and they have to be covered in public policies that should respond to dialogue with the private sector and public private partnerships. They truly have a digital inclusion of these families that are contributing to food production and food security. So we have to join our efforts to avoid leading to societies with groups that are excluded or marginalized, the, whether they're not because they're not digitally literate, or they don't have rural connectivity. So thank you very much for the opportunity Maria Siladora the floor is yours. Thank you Mario. And thank you to all our speakers. And as well as all our attendees on behalf of a CLAC FAO Aica Relacer and the Ministry of Agriculture from Brazil. We thank you very much, and we welcome you to this seminar series this is just the first of several seminars, and just to let you know you will have the presentations available at the website for this event. We will be informing you about this we have all your information so we are connected until the end of the seminar series. And we wish to ensure there's added value to all of you so that we may contribute to the digitization of agriculture thank you all have a good day a good evening some of you. Hope to see you soon. Bye bye. To close. We will give the opportunity to participants to have an evaluation of the event so please I invite you to go to this address that your code or the URL you see on screen just to help us with survey. And then have a communication channel for you to share your thoughts. The first question is described in one word what you have learned in today's seminar, and then just add what you, what comes to mind. Maybe some contributions already innovation and dodgeness opportunities. Thank you. Durante la jornada de hoy tuvimos más de 300 participante entre los. Over 300 participants counting people that are here at the zoom meeting but also following us through social media so we see lots of lessons learned. Thank you all. And lastly, just a short survey of today's activity. Well I see things are moving fast there's lots of lessons learned. That's wonderful innovation is definitely at the very center, and it shows the trend. So, as I said, we'd like to ask your opinion on the talks you heard today. There's a clarity of presentations. Second the methodology and third a general assessment or evaluation. There's a scale of one to 10. And thank you very much for joining us today. This information is very important for us to improve future seminars. Thank you Fernando. So with that we close the event. Thanks everyone and we hope to see you soon. Bye bye. Thank you.