 Why don't we start? And then people are still coming in, but we'll keep going. So who wants to go first with their bio? Rachel might have frozen, so she might have to come back in. So Adam, do you want to start? Sure. Hey everyone, my name is Adam White. I graduated from Tufts in 2009, I guess for the short bio. So after Tufts actually went straight to grad school in London, and I did a masters in cities and urbanization, and I started working in Nairobi, working with a bunch of the technology, sort of community in Nairobi, and in a few other places. Actually, I think what really got me into it was the earthquake in Haiti, which happened in 2010 when I was in grad school, which I ended up doing my master's, focusing on the technology response to the earthquake in Haiti. And I actually ended up launching a technology research and design firm. So I did a bunch of different research projects on technology predominantly in East Africa, a little bit in India, and still have some projects that are ongoing. My biggest project was in public transit in Nairobi and Cairo, which is still ongoing now, dealing with how sort of technology and routing and urban planning issues. And I'm happy to explain more about that. That's called Digital Matatus. Nowadays, I actually run an educational travel company. So that's most of my time, but I still get to do some of this work. And I actually have sort of an overlap where we take students to different parts of the world, and we end up talking about technology issues pretty often. So yeah, that's my short bio. Heather, I'm happy to add anything specific if you were thinking of something I forgot. I don't know. We'll come back to all that. Great. Thanks. Mark, do you want to go? Of course. Hey guys, a pleasure to meet you. I was born and raised in Mexico, so sorry for my accent beforehand. I went to Tufts and I graduated from Econ International Relations in 2015. And I took a little bit more of the ugly path of going into banking. So I joined Goldman Sachs Investment Banking out of the New York office, and I was covering Latin, merger and acquisitions. After a couple of, I was pretty much focusing on infrastructure projects and also in financial institutions. And stemming from that, after three years, and I was pretty much pumped out, I decided to go into the tech world and I joined a startup called Arcus, which basically, it's a payment processor in Latin America, which is based in New York. And there I joined as a chief of staff to the CEO. So that meant I was doing everything and anything at the same time, at the time when we were only seven people. Today, we are over 70 people, both in Mexico, Brazil, and New York. And now I'm heading business operations and strategies. So basically means that I run everything from fundraising, also to talk to potential investors, partnerships, going to new countries, et cetera. Great. Great. And Rachel? Hi, everyone. My name is Rachel Aldean and I graduated from Tufts in 2012 with a degree in international relations and anthropology. I'm currently calling in from Kampala, Uganda, where I work for a mobile tech startup called Vyama, where we focus on the use of mobile technology to either collect data or improve behavior outcomes. I started out actually working in education in Boston and moved on to working in international law after that, before I found my place at a small startup then called Human Network International, which became Vyama. I'm our director of program operations and global projects lead. And in that role, I oversee our improvements and efficiencies for our new business development and program implementation team, as well as providing direct support to some of our country programs to make sure that we're able to implement and grow our programs in our smaller countries, in this case, currently overseeing our projects in a bad way. Great. Great. All right. So, Adam, do you want to talk about kind of looking at technology and development in the project you worked on, Nairobi and Cairo? Sure, yeah. So, I'll use digital metaches as the main sort of case study, but if based on the questions, I've also done work in a bunch of different sectors, but digital metaches is sort of in the transport, urban mobility, sort of overlapping world. So, the projects, it kind of emerged out of my design firm, but we worked in partnership with the University of Nairobi, MIT and Columbia. And so, my design firm, we got really interested in how informal systems around the world are able to organize in the ability of technology to work with informal systems without trying to formalize them. I'm happy to talk about development more generally, but I think that there's a bigger question about, you know, what is development? And I think historically, development has very often been formalization, which gets into some deeper theories about what development and growth and economics and all that looks like. And we were really interested in new technology, so about, let's say, eight years ago, how new technology can enable development without requiring the same rigidity that happened in development in the West. And you hear this described as like leapfrogging, or you hear this described as like, you know, we don't need to lay the wider when we're using mobile phones. And then about eight years ago is when mobile phones were growing really rapidly in East Africa. And it was the beginning of Android sort of uptake. And so, we did a bunch of research on how people were using mobile phones, particularly in, like, slum areas in Nairobi and how it was being used in urban planning. And we got sort of sucked into the transit sector and saw tons of opportunity, but also a lot of challenges. And so, we decided to my friends here and he's going to go to check on something. So, we got really interested in how technology was able to improve public transit and add more transparency to the public transit system in Kenya without crushing what was already working about the Matatu system, so the informal minibuses in the city. And so, that was where the project stemmed from. And what we ended up doing over the last sort of eight years now, seven years, was actually creating the first digital map of any public transit system that combined all the informal and all the formal transit, although Nairobi was predominantly informal, and became the first city in Africa and the first sort of developing world city to have its entire transit system on Google Maps. So, we did that in partnership with a bunch of foundations, in partnership with Google, in partnership with a lot of other big organizations, and then we now maintain that data. And then we got additional funding to work with some Egyptians and expand in Cairo. So, I'm happy to answer questions about digital Matatu's, I'm happy to answer questions about technically how we've executed it. But then there's also a range of questions that we got early on that the answer has evolved over time about, you know, like, is it actually useful to have this map digitized? And the sort of things that we would talk about with that are, one, the value to the city of having that digitally, because it meant that urban planning could involve otherwise sort of informal systems. So, like, when China or USA or someone gives a lot of money to Kenya, they're not just planning a new road network, they're actually acknowledging what's already happening. And so adding this layer of digital transparency for planning purposes was the actual primary objective, even though that wasn't as like fancy. And then Google asked if we could put the data onto Google Maps and didn't want to pay us, didn't expect it to be very used. And after the first year, usage was so much higher than they expected, they then renewed it to have the data maintained and keep us updating the data, which speaks to some larger trends about spatial awareness and technical literacy and geographic literacy. So, yeah, I'm happy to talk about all those things, the usage of phones that like Rise of Android, sort of from 2008 until today, I'm now more part-time, but I have sort of a historical background of technology, emergency in East Africa, so. I'm on mute. Great, thanks. Mark, do you want to talk about the work that Arcus does and what you do? Yeah, of course. And I think a really important thing to consider here, it's a little bit of what Adam mentioned, right? So a little bit of the market fundamentals when you see emerging tech in emerging markets, right? So for us at Arcus, it was really interesting how it played out. Basically, we started, the whole idea behind Arcus was regali. And basically what we tried to do before was to be able to send money from the US to Mexico instead of the remittance, rather to pay your bill. So regali was a play on words of regalo, like a present, right? But one thing we noted on when we were trying to build this network is that the infrastructure in Mexico and at that time, it didn't exist. It's not like in the US when it's really easy to transfer money from point A to point B, right? In Mexico, it was a mess because it was like big incumbent players that were not sophisticated. They didn't have the tech. They didn't have APIs, right? So Arcus pivoted and it shifted to a little bit to be the technology behind the fintechs that want to do these kind of things, right? So basically what we did, it's build the network through APIs in order to connect the builders in one end and the payers in the other end. So to connect your utility bill or your Spotify to your bank account, right? And something why I think we've been able to explode in the last, I want to say, 24 months is because the fundamentals in emerging markets to create these technologies are there. The problem is there and it's really, it needs to solve. So you think about, for instance, Mexico, right? Mexico, you have a population of over 80% of the people use smartphones. So they have the phones, but they didn't have bank accounts. Less than 20% of people have bank accounts. It's like, what's going on? Banks are not acquiring 80% of the market. This is such an inefficiency in the market. And it brings to bad financial services to the general population, increases in equality, et cetera. So what we're trying to do, it's like by building that infrastructure, we're letting new banks, new players, rapid to become a new bank, new bank from Brazil to come to Mexico, from Argentina to come to Mexico, and be the infrastructure behind that powers all these financial service providers or new banks to build these new kind of services or the realist that we wanted to build three years ago and we couldn't. So I think that's what we're trying to do and happy to answer any questions on fundamentals. I think I'm much more well versed on theme tech, obviously in financial services, but basically the market fundamentals that make emerging markets the best breeding ground for technology and for innovation. Great. Great. And Rachel, do you want to talk about what the YAMO does? Sure. So I think I'm coming from the other side when we talk about smartphone penetration because primarily the areas in which the YAMO works and especially which I work have extremely low smartphone penetration and this really gets the whole idea of user centric development where how do you design programs, how do you design projects so they can have impact and they need to be with the technology that people understand. We cannot buy everyone a smartphone. We cannot provide that technology. So a lot of what the YAMO does is working with simple mobile phones and what that means is really IVR calls, so like interactive voice response calls, USSD and SMS to really work to program for the devices that people already have and are already using. So we primarily work in the fields of data collection. So running surveys for organizations to gather data on their benefits shares and this is really just to make sure that you're informed about your users and you can do this through IVR calls and local languages. So where I'm based in Uganda, there's over 40 local languages. So if you're trying to collect data in English, which is technically the official language, I can tell you're going to get nowhere. You need to really focus this on the languages that people actually speak and that tends to be local languages. So we work to provide services in local languages to gather data or alternatively to disseminate information. So we partner with mobile network operators similar to Verizon or Sprint in about 20 countries to provide a free to user information service. And what this means is individuals can call into a service. It's a short code number often three to one and access a whole variety of information on development topics, but also on gamification news, other topics that could be of interest. And since this is free to user and really geared at creating impacts, not only delivering information, but delivering an interactive way with the call to action. We've seen substantial amounts of behavior change of listeners to the service. And like as of today, over 14 million people have listened to beyond those messages on COVID-19 on the three to one service, all free, charged and all in local language. So we're really focused on individuals who don't have smartphones, who don't have access to Google to make sure that there's still that access to valuable information that you wouldn't get in other places. So I'm happy to answer any questions specifically on information exchange in sub Saharan Africa, but we also have a large presence in Asia as well, but I'd be happy to answer any questions on. Great. Great. And I wonder if each of you can then kind of talk about kind of the role of mobile technology, the role of phones kind of in changing. I mean, it seems to have an explosive change in terms of what can happen, who you can reach and what happens, whether it's a smartphone or just a simple cellular. So I don't know if, Adam, you want to start there, but really talk about kind of and then where, when you think of things, where might it go from here? Or is this kind of the technology that everyone needs and people can do what they need right now in terms of accessibility? So I'll sort of pick up on what Rachel was talking about. I've heard them call dumb phones or just feature phones is sort of the more correct term, like the phones that are more common throughout the world. So I'll go back a little bit in time. So I started working in Kenya 10 years ago, almost 10 years ago in October. And at that time, and PESA was growing really quickly. I don't know if you've heard of PESA, but PESA is the sort of the first major mobile payment system. So what Mark was talking about, like a lot of people don't have bank accounts and PESA was a solution for that. It wasn't the first, but because one cell phone company in Kenya has about 70% market share, Safari com, which is sort of tied in with Vodafone, they were able to get and PESA pushed out to a huge amount of people very strategically, very quickly. So it became like the mobile bank of Kenya and then tons of features got built on top of that. Also in 2010, phone prices started plummeting and Kenya got an undersea cable so that internet and data prices started plummeting. So like all these forces happened right around that time. A new constitution came out that guaranteed internet access and data access. So just like all these forces were coming in 2010 and the phones were getting really cheap. So I sort of estimated at this point, everyone in Kenya has access to a mobile phone. That may not mean that they own their own, but their friend or family member does. So like every community has access to a mobile phone. And in Nairobi, the capital, it's pretty close. I've heard it's 80% plus that have access to an Android phone. So that means a smartphone, but not necessarily an iPhone. And again, that's access. So they don't necessarily doesn't mean 80% of people own an Android phone, but like they can actually access more advanced stuff than just a feature phone. Like Android uptake in Nairobi is huge and it has to do with, you know, like Nairobi is a middle or middle plus income city in a middle income country that has some really underdeveloped areas. And so I think that's important to consider in the broader question of development. So there's the technical thing about mobile phones means that you don't need to wire every house. So you can actually get internet access more quickly all across the country. And then the amount of services that you can get via mobile phones to Rachel's Rachel's point also the services and products that you deliver by your phone dealing with local languages dealing with access being aware of like the screen size. Like, you know, now we're getting used to like watching TV shows on like our smartphones that all this pretty much have in the US. In Kenya, people are watching all sorts of things even on feature phones. And they're using T nine and other inputs to do sorts of things that we just don't do all the time. And like codes like three to one or codes, you know, USSD codes and all sorts of menus in your phone that we don't even use because we're using such a sophisticated interface. So I think there's a lot to be said for about good design of interfaces. And we saw a lot of projects that failed because the interface was kind of bulky. And it just wasn't realistic about how people would use their their phone for like some companies that were doing similar work to what Rachel's company is doing. But, you know, eight or 10 years ago, we're like divide designing really intricate mobile surveys on phones that were only in Swahili, which wasn't the local language that people were actually filling out the surveys in. So then what you do is have data collectors go and translate from a local language into into Swahili in front of their computer, but they then had to still type it in on their phone, even though they were like sitting at a desk. And so we did a lot of research on on improving program design, just being really mindful of what technology people have access to. And then the other thing that I just always say is the technology is not good or bad. It's just how you use it. And I've seen it used in terrible ways. I've seen it used in really negative corrupt ways. I've seen it used in official ways. And then I've seen tons of great things. I see with COVID, the phones being increasingly essential, especially as people are stuck at home. But I also think that and especially with work that I'm doing now, like we're realizing the limits of technology, maybe more quickly than we were going to. You know, like we're seeing online school just like people hitting walls and like how much screen time and especially if your whole family has maybe one Android phone or maybe one feature phone, you're not delivering tons of educational content. So I always think about how can technology supplement things around your house or supplement sort of things that you already have, rather than being the whole thing. And I think we've sort of swung in this over emphasis on technology and screens. And I think the COVID is actually going to help us swing a little bit back in a more balanced way. And I see both what Mark and Rachel are talking about is good moderate technology from my perspective. Yeah, I would agree to a lot of the things that I'm just mentioned, right? For me, the best way to understand it, it's like, at the end of the day, technology, it's the catalyst for the democratization of services, right? And the biggest driver for technology adoption has been mobile phones, right? Without mobile phones, it's almost impossible to get to those services. Why? Because previous to that, the cost to acquiring a customer who was in a small town, it might be in Sub-Saharan Africa, in Latin America, whatever, was really high, right? For a bank, for whoever, it was really difficult to go and acquire those clients, right? And the cost was really high. And being companies first and non-governments, they're profit-driven. So that decreases their profitability. What mobile phones let, it's the customer acquisition cost to go way, way lower, because everybody already has the phone, right? And you can acquire them really easily. So I do believe, if Arcus, we've seen this thanks to COVID and the use of phones, that adoption rate for our services has increased dramatically in the last three months, right? Because everybody wants to pay their bills through their phone, right? And without the new banks who are doing that and we're powering them, it was impossible beforehand. So the catalyst, the main driver behind technology adoption, it's definitely, well, part of it, it's definitely mobile phones. And I would just follow up supporting that. I think what we've seen is that mobile phones lead to democratization of information, allows people to access information. So in ways that you or I would just Google something, mobile phones allows for people to connect with their family, connect their relatives, but also access information in ways that before there was this widespread access and before I would echo what Adam said, before the price of phones plummeted, you just didn't have that. That's what we see as a huge change for the Amazon as a company is when these phones became affordable. They're the cost, they're cheaper than the cost of a radio in some of the countries that we work in. That's a huge change. So that really has been a big driver in mobile technology. And I would echo what everyone here has said about COVID being a big driver because at the time of social distancing, how do you train community health workers? How do you train teachers? How do you disseminate educational content to students? It's a real challenge to do so. And what we're really working on as a company, like I'm really interesting is how do you do that when people only have simple mobile phones as well? So we're working to provide audio based trainings on COVID-19 to health workers in Zimbabwe where the signs and symptoms of COVID and it really allows you to deliver that information in a way that people understand. And since now there's that widespread, like we say around like 85% of people have access to a simple mobile phone at the bare minimum. And this is looking at some of our less developed or less reachable countries that we work in, often in West Africa where there ends to be less cell phone penetration. You are able to see that you are able to access the vast majority of individuals by using the phones that they have. I'll just sort of add back to that. There's on the democratization side, like that was a big part of our project in transparency, but there's still a challenge of like interpretation of that information. And I think that's something that people don't always sort of understand is like, so we released a map, but a lot of people still couldn't read a map. So there's these realities around like technology doesn't magically solve problems that still weren't solved, but it can add access. And so I think, like Rachel's point about using audio rather than text, if you're dealing with populations that might be illiterate, or there's speaking languages that are just not written. I don't know, Rachel, you want to say something like that. Or I would just was following up, it's and also just because you have access to information doesn't mean you have to follow what that information says. So I always say like, we all you just because you have access to information doesn't necessarily lead to behavior change. You can tell me that I should go to bed early. Have I ever gone to bed early? I know it's the right decision, but I'm not going to do it. So I've accepted that. But one of the things is we are able to provide more information with technology. Absolutely. But at what point should we be encouraging people to make different decisions? And at what point does everyone have the right to make the wrong decision, which is probably at most points, everyone should be make their own incorrect decisions. So just because we're allowed to disseminate more information, I think we need to be careful to acknowledge that that doesn't necessarily mean that behaviors can show their will change. So it's like when you're talking about like, math access, things like that, you don't know how to read them out. That's fine. If you don't need to for your day today, that's also fine. And there's also like in the election violence in Kenya, there were a lot of examples of like rumors that were being spread via mobile phones that escalated the violence. There's examples of that on social media worldwide. Also, the other just thing I'll add quickly to that. I'm also to Mark's point about like lowering the cost. I also have seen still now, but especially over the last 10 years, a lot of startups that were like, well, we've got technology so we can do this new product and service to a population that's never had it before. And you'll get signups because it costs nothing. But the reality is it's not actually not actually having uptick. But in financial services, like you're actually seeing products and services that are changing people's lives, and people get it. But you've got other product services that sound really good, but people just don't get it. So they sign up because you incentivize them to sign up. And then after a year or two years, the startup burns through 10, 20, $100,000 and then they're gone. And they have tons of users and phone numbers. And it just doesn't never materialize because you lower the acquisition cost, but you didn't actually solve a problem for those users. You just sort of paid them to jump on. And you didn't have to pay them a lot to do it because the phones were everywhere. So there were lots of like bubbles. And Nairobi sort of had a tech bubble burst around 2014 was the first one. And it's sort of stabilized and matured because of that. When you when you started, you talked about the difference between the formal and the informal economy. And I'm wondering if you guys can kind of address that in terms of where technology plays a role, but also between like kind of like startups and entrepreneurial businesses versus kind of very established businesses, like what role technology plays in kind of making people's lives, things more accessible or better or who uses it better kind of type of thing. So whoever wants to start. I can take that. For Mexico, that's a huge problem. And even it's like an upper middle country, around 60% of the people working in informal economy. So and that's a huge issue for various reasons. If you look at like for from the economist's standpoint, right, starting from 60% of people don't pay taxes. So there's tax recollection. So there's met various money for the government to do programs, right, all the way to corruption through the informal economy. The rates of the narcos, right, the drug dealers, everything is in informal economy. So in formal economy, it's a big challenge. And one of the things actually that I was studying at Tufts, right, and for me was like a various thing is how do you solve that? Right. How do you solve the informal economy in Latin America? It's a huge issue. So for me, the first step was taxation, right? How do you get them? But before you can tax them, you need to get them to stop using cash because that's 60% of the informal economy. It's cash based. It's not they don't have their credit card. Everything is cash. So the first step was like, okay, through technology, you can digitize money, right? Stop being cash centric, start using your credit card, start using your phone, your wallets, right? So I think technology has a big role to play in the democratization of those services that at the end will try to solve the informality in Latin America, right? So now a great example in Brazil, it's Nubank. Nubank is the largest commercial bank in the Western hemisphere. It's larger than JP Morgan Chase, is a larger than Bank of America. Why? Because they have so many accounts from informal in Brazil, right? It's crazy. I think the last time they were over close to 100 million accounts, it's crazy. So 50% of the population almost. And they're coming to the rest of Latin America. So I think tech can really help to solve those issues such as informal economy 100%. So I'll give actually a project I did in Mexico on exactly this. So first of all, when I talk about formal and informal, we definitely are interested in the informal sector of the economy, but we were also really interested in just informal organization in general. So it's like, how does a transport system organize when the government doesn't step in and actually like establish and define routes. And so we did a project on Taco Stans and informal vendors in San Luis Potosí. And actually a tough friend came in and sort of joined him on the research project because he was from San Luis. I hope you ate the tacos because they're amazing. Well, that was the research project. So we had to try all the tacos. And what was really interesting was the city was sort of the client and they were exactly trying to do this. Like, how do we tax these stalls, these like, you know, like the guy selling corn on the street or the guy selling balloons or the guy selling, he said, yeah, it's just on the corner who like makes it at home, which is a big part of like the culture and food culture in Mexico. And they wanted to get in. And it was it was really interesting projects. So we did the research and we found that like there's lots of opportunities, but there's also lots of fears from people in the informal sector about formalizing. If you want to read about this, the book Seem Like a State by John Scott Scott is the book to check out about this, about like, how does government see formal systems and requires formalization and technology is shifting that. And so we started working on this project and the city was really excited. They're like, great, we can actually do digital licensing. Because what happens is if you've got a formal restaurant paying their rent and their taxes, and then in front of them, a guy opens another food stall, it hurts the formal business who then doesn't want to keep paying taxes, doesn't want to keep paying for the license, because they feel undermined by someone who's not following the rules. So how do you encourage businesses to sort of move along the formalization spectrum? And what we discovered was that the informal businesses were actually regulated by the by the cartel. So there was a taco cartel in the city. And the reality was the city was actually trying to declare war against a sort of gray formal sector that was informal and illicit and was actually licensing out like you're the only churro guy who's allowed in the square. And we're going to enforce it our own way. And so those organizations don't want to have the transparency of digital money. So there's sort of this still struggle of, as soon as I digitize it, like, then I actually have to start paying taxes, and I'm not getting services from my taxes. And I've got sort of organization of a cartel or whatever it is, a collective, a co-op that's protecting me in other ways. So I think that the sort of cities thought that technology could solve their taxation problem that's been around for hundreds of years. And the reality is that's definitely not the case. It could just make it a lot easier. And I think that's where like Mark's organization is really interesting is like, as you start to get people who like right now, people are scared of touching cash. And if people are scared of face to face contact. And if banks are digitizing money, and there's more more trust in digital money, we're going to start to get the shift to digital banking that's going to allow digital payments. And then as long as you approach the sort of formalization taxation fairly, and reasonably, you might not get sort of this pushback. But even in Berlin, where I do a lot of work, it's still a very cash based city, because they've got this holdover from East Berlin and and tracking stuff. And people don't want to pay for little expenses with a credit card, because they just don't want every they don't want a digital record of everything they've done. And so I think there's that piece of technology that people are increasingly realizing in in our society, but have already been learned in other more sort of authoritative governments like, you just don't want everything digital, because it's written in ink, and then the government has all that access. And so I see that being the attention point here. Really interesting, because that's something that we've seen a lot in Uganda, where there's becoming more of a formalization of the Boda Boda taxis, which are motorcycle taxis. So Adam, I'm sure you've heard of safe Boda, which is yeah. So basically it's a way of it's an Uber, it's an Uber for Boda's, where you should go on the street, go to an area of your neighborhood where you knew there would be Boda's, jump on the Boda, pay cash and go. And what this company's really done is now you can call them like an Uber on your phone, they come to where you are, and you pay via mobile money. But I've definitely heard this concern among many people where it's like, I don't want them knowing where I'm going and coming from. I have no desire for whoever these safe Boda people are. And if they may have a connection with the government to know that I am coming back from the bar at 3am, that's none of their business. So I do think there is this resistance to having your information formalized, especially in where that's not formal part of your economy and you're used to operating in a cash-based society. Yeah, 100%. There's resistance. One thing, I think a startup that popped out in Mexico, I want to say seven years ago, it's the square of Mexico, it's called CLIP. And then the way they bring that adoption that you see all over Mexico is like, accept credit card, increase your sales. So that's how they get the taco stand guy. It's like, hey, you're going to sell more because now people are going to be able to pay. But of course, there's resistance because for CLIP, people are like, ah, that's a private company. It's a business, right? It's not a government. But it comes from government policies. And across the world, in that time, they're for sure, they just buzz a lay fintech two years ago, in which they're putting, it's called a CODIS system, which is basically a QR to pay over your phone across Mexico. There's been a lot of resistance from people. They're like, I don't want to pay taxes. I'm happy the way I am. And I don't want the government to take my month, what for? They're not building schools. They're not building roads. Well, I'm going to pay. There is resistance. However, what it's undeniable, it's that tech. It can use, to allude to the previous point, from big government to use it on top of the people, or for really good practices, right? So you don't want people, the Taco Stangai, to have cash because he's going to get mugged, right? It's way better than he has on the wallet. It's much more secure. So, if technology brings change, how it's used, that's a different question. And that was, so in PESA, the way in PESA really sort of made itself essential in Nairobi was replacing that trip home to your village with your bag full of cash. It was like, wait, I can pay, yeah, it's a lot of money, but I don't have to risk carrying my months of sort of remittances on a bus. I don't have to trust a driver if I don't want to physically take the trip myself. I can send the money and I can pay a large percentage to use in PESA. It could be, you know, a very sizable chunk to use this mobile system, but it was cheaper than the time cost and the actual cost of the trip. And so that's how in PESA, and then Savarecom was wise enough to make sure that you could withdraw in PESA from every village in Kenya when it launched. It wasn't like, oh, you've still got to go to Nairobi to use it. It was like a local lady in the village, like has a phone and she has cash and she can give you digital money in exchange. And I'm happy to talk about some of the nuances of PESA, but going to like Mark's story of like the, I don't want to pay taxes. So there were a lot of companies that tried to get the first round of digitization of businesses and accounting, particularly in informal settlements in Nairobi. And I was like, oh, we're going to go door to door. We're going to get you signed up to our mobile and PESA payment system. And again, it's another fee on top, but you're already using PESA. So people are getting a little used to losing that percentage to use digital banking because the cost of cash is high. And but their upsell was like, but we're going to give you all these great accounting services. So you'll be able to see which of your products is selling better. You'll be able to see all this data about your business. And after six months or a year, the percentage of people who even checked their data once was virtually nothing. So like the value of that sort of analysis of their business just wasn't, wasn't realized or understood. So they were selling people on this service, but it just wasn't, people just didn't care. They were still running their business the same way. They were still sort of keeping their separate accounting by hand that was pretty sloppy. And they would still buy tomatoes that would go rotten before they could sell them because they didn't realize that like demand for tomatoes would peak on certain days of the week. Or it was just all very informal knowledge about how to run your business. And the sort of database approach just wasn't relevant to people. And it's still not totally relevant. And the way you see people spending advertising dollars, like it's just not as sophisticated, which I don't mean as a in a derogatory way. Like I think that the US might be oversimplicated in how we market things. But like it's so technocratic. And it's just not there yet. And so I think there's that element too. Great. Let me ask one of the questions is how has increased access to information impacted the politics of developing nations as it influenced people's participation in government politics? What are you guys seeing? That's a good question. I think we're when I would think about this, I would look on two sides. One is what information are we talking about? So there's an increase of information. If it's good information, if it's valid information, if it is that forwarded WhatsApp chat that you get is a big question. So I do think that when we talk about increase the access to information, we're also talking about a lot of rumors being spread. And this is something that Adam spoke about with regards to the election violence in Kenya. But we've seen globally is that the increase to information access isn't always going to increase people's participation, formal participation like government and voting and things like that. That's definitely something that we can talk about. I do think that we have seen at least in the AMOS work a lot of success with get out the vote efforts delivered via mobile phones. So we've worked to provide people with information about where and when you can vote. And that's actually been quite successful when we talk about formal voting mechanisms. But I think this ties a lot into these questions about what does participation and government mean? And looking at it as a traditional voting idea might not always be the best way of considering what the metrics are around participation in government. And I can quickly just chime in from the Digital Matatris project because this was a lot of our sort of original thinking behind it and what we ended up sort of delivering on was by adding as geographic literacy grew, but there were other ways that you could access the map. So we actually printed a map that was on like the front page of the newspaper when we launched it and it can be accessed and our downloads went up. But we ended up doing a lot of public forums around the data with drivers of Matatris, the minibuses, passengers, operators, owners, just sort of a lot of public forms about it. And by creating the data, it was adding legitimacy to a system that otherwise felt marginalized and felt like they were not part of the formal planning momentum in Nairobi. So I don't want to say it gave a voice because it was just a representation of what was already going on, but it added some legitimacy. And because we did it in a really engaged way, a lot of people had actually tried to do this project for probably five years before the meeting, at least a few years. And it just would never catch on. And we think the reason ours ended up being so much more successful was by doing these public forums as we created the data, people felt like they shared ownership of the data. And so then when it was released, they were proud of it, perpetuated it. And they didn't feel like, oh, hey, you're assaulting our system by trying to add transparency to our way of life. Sort of like we're talking about like, I don't want to start paying taxes. I don't want everyone to know what I'm doing. Instead, they were like proud of the map that was created and felt like it was a representation of what they had accomplished. And then they helped correct it and edit it. So we got participation that way. And then it stuck around. I'm going to shift a little bit the access of information instead of like from the end user perspective. So people like us, rather like the access of information from governments, right? Because that's a big shift as well, like the technology brings now. And I'm going to be a lot of a pessimist and a lot more of the optimist, right? Because again, it's how you use technology. But one of the things that we see, for instance, one of the good things about access of information, it's previous gathering data was really hard for governments, right? And let's talk about like on fintech. It was really hard for them to understand what how people how businesses were doing. So if they wanted to do a policy to promote SME, small and medium enterprises, right? In the country, it was really hard for them to enact a policy without good data. Because surveys tend to have a bias, right? People don't necessarily say the truth. So one of the good things of access of information that technology brings in emerging markets, it's the other way around. When you're digitizing all this information and government can look at it, they can enact policies that are much more effective for the better or the worse. But they're going to be more effective for sure. Because now they have that access to real information and not only the amount of information, the quality of the information. I would second that and also talk about what organizations can do with that information. So I think all of us know that like traditional development programming is often like a bunch of Americans and Europeans going into the developing world and having solutions that aren't actually solutions, but thinking they have solutions at least, which step one or not really. But so I think that with this increased information, with increased information about what information people want to listen to, what information people are seeking out and how they listen to that, you can actually understand more about the needs of a population than if you're going in and doing a traditional survey about development program where your beneficiaries are going to tell you they're happy with the results because that's what keeps them money flowing. So by looking at indirect indicators and looking at what information people are actually seeking out, you can understand a little bit more nuances than these beneficiary feedback surveys. Great. Great. We have a question for you, Rachel. Can you talk about Viamo's role in using mobile tech to provide essential information to farmers? What have been some of the benefits from this service? So that's a big question and we've actually done a lot around agriculture as agriculture is the primary sector, most of the countries that we work. So there's a couple of different things when you talk about agriculture that you can provide information around. One is around providing information around agricultural diseases. So this is something around fall armyworm. And I'm not sure if people here are familiar with fall armyworm, but it's really a devastating disease that's affecting crops across East Africa. So you can provide farmers with information on how to diagnose that in their own crops before they can get in touch with an agricultural extension agent who is a government adjacent worker that what comes and supports farmers in their agricultural practices. So you can see really good results around providing individuals and providing farmers with information on how to better farm their crops. And I can't remember the statistics around their most recent impact surveys, but we I would say we have at least we have over I think two million people listening to information globally on agriculture on our services. And then we are also continuously doing information uptake to make sure that people are actually understanding and utilizing this information. And ensuring that we're actually working to increase I think the really basic goals of subsistence farming, which is increased output. And also alongside that increased avenues to sell crops. So I think this is where we tie back into that informal economy is one of the challenges that you see with agriculture, especially in sub-Saharan Africa is market linkages. So how do you link subsistence farmers or small farmers that are going one step above subsistence to markets. So that's I think a real area where we can take advantage of this access to information. And I was previously working on only like three weeks ago with Projects in Zimbabwe where basically we worked with small scale farmers to link them to markets in their area as well as providing the most recent selling prices. So you know what to bargain for. And I think that is key because if you go on with last week's prices, if you're further out from the selling markets, you're going to be behind what the current prices are and you might lose out on revenue if you start too low. So I think there's a lot around market linkages and providing information about market prices that can be taken advantage of. I can just quickly chime in because I did some research for an organization, a company called M Farm, which was like a pretty famous one of these like agriculture information service providers in Kenya. It began about five years ago and they were doing some of that crop pricing market information and they realized that the opportunity was kind of cut out these middlemen who were the brokers of crops. But the problem was the middlemen also were the people who owned the trucks and were the delivery sort of people. So it looked from the outside that you've got this sort of informal system, you've got these middlemen taking advantage of it and they're not providing much value, they're just sort of taking advantage of subsistence farmers, which isn't exactly untrue. The problem was that they were actually providing really huge value in terms of delivery to the market. And so it ended up just sort of flopping because they couldn't cut out these middlemen, get more market share directly with the farmers because the middlemen were too essential to the market. So it's the same sort of issue that I was talking about before with transitioning formal and informal markets. There's a lot of people in the middle and if you don't understand their needs, they can just like shut down a project with levers that you don't even know they have. Great. All right. And then another question is there are talks of developing digitized currencies in China, US and some European countries. Do you see this being implemented as well as in countries with mostly informal economies? Is it feasible? I'm not a crypto fan. So yes and no. I think let's talk about like financial services and like payments, right? Because that's money at the end of the day, that's what it is, right? I'm going to transfer goods and services, right? That's what it is. So the theory behind crypto is like, yeah, governments suck and like we can do it in a libertarian way, which is much more democratic, right? However, it's really hard to diminish the power of government and the power of like all the systems that are in place that hold like that currency value, right? So there's a value to the dollar because there's an intrinsic value that we people put into the dollar. Same thing. And because you expect that the US government is going to be held accountable for the value of that dollar. Same thing for the Mexican peso, same thing for the real in Brazil or the Colombian peso, right? If you ask me, I think like those crypto currencies, they already work in informal economy and a lot of like drug dealers paying Bitcoin, right? So it can do like for those out of the system kind of things that many of those kind of the system, because the system is not big enough in emerging markets, you need those. But as governments get more into crypto, you see Israel doing crypto already, right? US has a project, Japan has a project as well. And they become and they be democratized financial access and financial services. So that system is going to get larger, that bubble called government. Cryptocurrencies are just going to be another currency for traders to use and be playing around with it. And that's just going to be another asset class. You guys have any opinion then? There's many opinions on that, but yeah. So another question is kind of as you guys look at, you know, what you've been talking about, where do you see like someone coming out of school now and thinking about technology and development? A, what are the kind of the soft and hard skills that would be good to have? And B, what directions should someone be looking? You know, what mobile phones have, you know, had a huge impact. But if you wanted to get into this, where are you looking now? I'll just say one piece to start in the bottom. I think that there's a emphasis a lot on coding. And I think that that's, that's always great. I think that we're going to have too many coders. So I don't think you need a lot. I don't think that's the, the only skill that you need. And I also don't think that that skill alone will guarantee you a job forever, especially as I think we're about to see remote workers be allowed way more. So I think that the, like if you're not a really good coder, then you're never going to be a really good coder. But you can learn. But I think that maybe taking one or two of those classes is not a bad idea. But I think most importantly is understanding what technology can and can't do well. So that when you like read about Bitcoin, you can actually be like, Oh, well, this is what blockchain is. And this is, this is actually not very sophisticated technology. It's just thoughtful or clever technology and being able to part, you know, like there's a lot of talk about AI, which is more sophisticated technology, but AI can't solve the problems that some people are applying it to in its current iteration. It's pretty far away from that. And so I think it's like studying enough about technology so that you actually know what's hard and what's easy. So that way, if you join one of these teams and you're not the technology person, you can communicate effectively to the technology team and you can realize why something's going to take months and something else could actually be tested in a week. Yeah, I'll echo that. And it really does depend on which stage on tech development you want to be. So it's very different, like if you're going to go to Facebook, so a big tech company, or if you're going to go to a small startup, because the needs are very different, right? So arguably, if you want to be in a small startup who's doing tech, very small, so people like you're not a founder, right? It's either they want to do coding, right? Because they want to build product, they want to build tech and sales, right? And for me, that was a big challenge because I came from a non-traditional tech background. So economics, international relations and investment banking, I didn't know how to code, right? But then I learned and it's important because as a manager, you need to speak with engineers, right? As that progresses, I think more roles become available, right? Because as the company progresses, it's not a lot about product development and sales, right? Now it's about market strategy, going to different places. And that a little bit more, the business acumen, whatever, may help. But I agree, like you need to understand the tech, taking courses in computer science, stuff like that being a code helps, because I didn't believe that's how you do it. It's the language behind the technology, right? It's like studying English, if you want to do learning how to write, if you want to study literature, right? It does come handy, but the core is like really understand the products and the markets that you're trying to serve. I'm just going to quickly jump in with who looks like a lot of the development sector. It's almost stepping back from technology. And I think there are two really basic skills that I look for anytime I hire anyone, budgeting, project management. I want someone that can write a budget and understand it. And that is top of my list, to be honest, and manage a project on time and on scope. So I think especially the budgeting side is something that you can really use to set yourself apart. And something that I would say sets a lot of candidates apart when I'm hiring, is knowing that I can give you the budget and you know how the track aligns, you know the difference between budget versus actuals, and can be trusted with that. That is a huge skill. And especially at smaller startups, that type of skill is something that's invaluable. So taking them a little bit back from the technology side, I would say like focusing on the budgeting skills is something that I've advised people to do and I will advise anyone to do. Okay, can you hear Rachel? Are you? We lost the last part of that. But I would echo that. And that's how I got into the startup. Because my investment banking skills made like I could forecast and do budgets and do PM really well, you know. But I still feel like I was hindered by my lack of technical skills. But yeah, 100%. And if you think about like going to grad school, like Adam, you went and Rachel, did you go, I'm blinking, did you go to grad school? And Mark, you have Hopefully undereducated. So when you see your field or you think about it, the role of grad school, the type of grad school you might want to go to, you recommend not going to grad school. What do you guys think? I'll become the first naysayer. Coming out of banking, all my colleagues went to MBAs. All of them, like either HBS, GSB, MIT, everyone went to an MBA. I think it's depending on like what skill you have. So if you think you already have the skills because of your previous work experience, and you're good at budgeting, and you're doing like you're good like with that, and then it might be redundant. But it's also a great place to acquire those skills. So it really does depend on the skills you want. So for me, I've been debating, which I think I won't, but like debating of actually going to a master's degree in computer science, you know, I've taken a lot of like courses, I'm talking like boot camps in which I know how to code. But I want to get a little bit more into the technical level, right? But that's a matter because that's the thing that I have a very strong business background out of Goldman. Now I want to have the technical background. So I think it really does depend on which skills you're trying to acquire and the stage in your career that you are. So Rachel, I'll let you go. No, you go ahead first. So I went to grad school. People ask me all the time, like, would you do it again? And like, did you learn a lot? And the answer is I learned very little in my grad school classes, and I would definitely do it again. And the reason, you know, like a lot of my like network and community that I'm a part of comes from that. And some of the issues that we sort of thought with in grad school, you know, I went to, I went to the UK in London. And so the system there was was very rigid. And so it didn't actually, I felt like I learned way more and like epic than in my year of grad school. But it was a little bit more developed, you know, a little further along. So I got something out of the curriculum, but mostly it was the network. And it was helpful to have that like extra year. I also graduated in a rough time. But I do think that we're about to see a big shift in what education looks like. And that's sort of the work that I'm doing these days. And I think that grad school is going to really be up in the air. And so I think technical grad schools are where you're learning sort of, like my degree was too academic, but the community was great. So that's my answer. Rachel? I have an interesting perspective on grad school. And I think it's one of those things like saying the quiet thing out loud. I think grad school can be very beneficial in the technology company if you're coming from an unconditional background. So if you're a woman trying to work in tech, if you are a minority trying to work in tech, grad school gives you that credibility that as a traditional candidate as a white man, you can walk in and have in the door. So I think that's uncomfortable for us to say, but I would really, I think it's an unfortunate truth that grad school gives you that credibility that two years of work experience. So people can walk in and just have from that first interview. So I personally didn't go to grad school, but obviously like benefit from my own privilege. And have seen that grad school can give people credibility in ways that experience doesn't always depending on what your background is. And as a white dude, it's always giving you credibility you don't deserve. You know, like I went to 11 school of economics. So now I've learned things I'm good at economics, but I did a degree in urban design. So it's like, Oh, I have a financial question. Can you help me with that? I was like, Yeah, probably, but they're asking me because of the name, not because of any skill that I actually have. Okay. Okay. Okay. You guys, thanks so much for spending the last hour with us. Do you have any, any last words, any last advice, any, anything we didn't cover that you want people to know about? I just say like for everybody here that are thinking about doing tech and emerging markets, it's actually the best place to be. Like the need for tech, it's much more greater in Sub-Saharan Africa in Southeast Asia and Latin America than in the US and Europe, right? So if you see a lot of the innovation, it's coming from those places, right? If you think like the largest payment network, it's built by WeChat, right? Targeting those guys. The largest Neobank in the world, it's Neobank for the, for the people in favelas in Brazil, right? So if you, if you are interested in developing economic development and in tech, it's definitely a very good place to start, like in startups, big tech, whatever, even in research, right? And I think it's a very, very booming sector, even more than tech, traditional tech on the US in my personal opinion. Great. Anything else or people should know? No? All right. Thank you guys so much for spending the hour with us and hope to see you all soon. Bye. Thank you. Bye. Thank you.