 Let me just take you through the design of the training course so that you understand how we're going to try and communicate this information. As you know, the forest farm facility supports forest and farm producer organizations and and we support them towards climate resilient landscape so and improved livelihoods. So we want to help those organizations build businesses that improve livelihoods, while also being resilient to climate change. And with that overall goal, we're hoping that by the end of this training course, you'll you'll have a bit more confidence. Firstly to install business support services business incubation services into your organization. We hope you'll be able to help businesses undertake a risk self assessment process. And that's critical to to set a trajectory for the business that tries to tackle the main risks it faces. And we hope you'll be able to use one or two of 30 options for making your businesses a bit more resilient in the face of climate change. Throughout the training course I'll be providing some examples as many as 40 examples from around the world of these sort of approaches. And I hope to illustrate some elements of women specific issues that need to be tackled in that in those examples. At the end we're hoping that you'll be able to use the tool kits that we're sending you to train other people, so that you can pass on this knowledge. Now we've got five days it's very short we've got two and a half hours each day. So in the next two sessions, what that will mean is that I'll try and give three half hour blocks of teaching with a 10 minute question and answer session and then we'll set you some homework, which we will review at for half an hour at the beginning of the next day's training. I hope that will work for you. In terms of the structure. The first day today we're going to try and cover business incubation. So we're going to introduce it. We'll try and say what the scope of it might be for you. And then trying to help you understand and plan how you would offer business incubation services. Follow up on them with your own forest and farm producer organizations and for the homework today we're going to have a little bit of thinking about what challenges does a business you know face and what services could you offer to help it with those challenges. Tomorrow, we'll turn our attention to risk management and and we'll introduce a securing forest business toolkit. We'll teach you how to identify risks, how to go through a process of identifying and then ranking the risks so that you can begin to say well these are important risks or less important risks. And for the homework we'll have an exercise that allows you to to practice that. On day three we'll carry on with risk assessment so then we'll be thinking about well once we've prioritized our risks, how do we. Yeah, how do we manage how we put risk management in place and how do we develop an implementation plan so that in a year's time you've actually addressed some of the risks you've identified. And how do you report and monitor those sorts of risk assessment processes. So we'll have some homework link to that. On day four, we're going to turn our attention to a specific subset of risks that are do with climate change. And rather than focus on the risk which we'll have covered in the previous two days, we'll try and take you through some options for climate resilience. And those options are drawn in different sorts of options for becoming climate resilience. There are things you can do within your organization social options. There are things that you can do with your farms and forests ecological options and economic options for resilience. We'll have a sort of bit of homework to get you to think what are we already doing and what could we add based on the training from today. Let me just admit somebody. Then finally, on day five. We'll look at the last set of last category of climate resilience options to do with putting in place different physical and technological infrastructure. And as we finish this toolkit, we're going to also just pay a little bit of attention to, well, how would we get financing, how would we improve access to finance for the institutions we work with. How could we spread the knowledge of our business incubation risk management and climate resilience to attract climate finance to support our work. And that will leave you with a whole year of homework to try and put some of this toolkit into practice. So I hope that gives you a flavor so we've got a day on business incubation two days on risk assessment and two days on climate resilience. And let me just stop there briefly if you've got any particular questions or or queries. If you could write them in the chat and or raise your hand and I'll get cat to try and spot anybody who's raised their hand. So you've got any questions about the structure of what we're going to do over the next few days. As I say, if you could each think, what is, what am I really hoping to get out of this training course and write your expectation for the training course into the chat. That would really help us so that as we go through the training course we can make sure we're meeting your expectations. Does anybody have a question in the chat please. I think that's fairly clear then. But do do write any questions you might have a queries worries and particularly expectations into the chat and we'll try and respond to them. As we go. So, in which case. Let me, as we're waiting for those. Let me. One question will there be some planning of each participant put in place that in their ffpo what they've learned. So yes, thank you johnny for that question. Yes, each day johnny what we're going to finish with is a set of homework exercises. What we will do is we will try and get people to apply their knowledge to their specific ffpo, and then bring their thoughts back and present it to their colleagues at the beginning of the next day so thank you for that useful question. Another question from Mark Duncan, and whether we could have any specific case around how businesses have mitigated risks associated with Corbett. That's a very good point mark and yes, I think we should in the risk management session. I'll give some examples of how you have been coping with risks associated with coven. So one of the one of the pieces of homework is to think through what are the most critical risks facing your business and I'm sure some of them will be to do with coven so we can handle that. Oh, we've got Hadjia has now joined us from Ghana. A member of the Savannah women's Farmers Association that's great. And the women's wing of gaffa. Excellent. Are there anybody else who has joined us in the interim would you just like to take an opportunity, maybe had you could you just say hello and introduce yourselves to everyone. You might be on mute. You've you've introduced yourself on the chat so is there anybody else who hasn't said hello yet who would just like to say they've joined. Oh I've got another question could we have some clear methodologies and tools for risk assessment and resilience analysis. Thank you for that question and Annie. Yes, we will provide you with some clear methodologies for risk assessment, and we'll also be sharing with you a published toolkit on risk assessment, which we hope you'll be able to take and use that explains risk assessment and resilience analysis. Thank you for that question. And I've got another introduction from Damian James from with Russia, the farmers organization in Russia Tanzania. Great. And Vincent, thank you for joining us Vincent Ciba from FFF Zambia as the national facilitator there. Very good. Let me let me press on then because we've got a lot of material to get through today on business incubation, and I'll try and get through this first section and then we'll have any more questions. So I'm just. We're going to introduce the structure of the day already. We're going to introduce forest business incubation is. We're going to look at the scope of it, the types of people you might want to help. So this afternoon in the last session will will have a little bit of a teaching on what services you might want to offer and how to deliver them with some homework at the end. So let's start by introducing a toolkit. Now Ali has in your invitation sent you a link to a toolkit called for bank, which is a business incubation toolkit, and that's what we'll be using modeling this one day training on. Next, let's start by saying what is business incubation, and perhaps the best way of thinking about business incubation is is to think of a hen incubating its eggs. The eggs have already been laid so the businesses have already been started, but the hen still needs to nurture and sit on and keep the eggs warm, until they hatch and can stand on their own two feet. And that's very much what an incubation process is. So it's not about starting up a business. We have a toolkit called market analysis and development, which is for starting up a business. For business incubation we're trying to think more about, once these businesses are started, how can we support them so that they don't fail so that they survive. And the, the business incubation toolkit which you'll see on the right hand side was based on some work we did at the forest and farm facility called forest business incubation it's a book, and that book looked at 10 examples of forest business incubators around the world, and tried to distill some of the knowledge into a practical set of guidance to help you with. So you can get access to both of those products on the IED website. And I'll ask Ali just to circulate the link to the four bank toolkit in the chat so that anybody who wants to get access and hasn't had a chance to look at it gets a chance to do that, and that can be part of your homework today. In this forest business incubation toolkit, we try to think of a circle of things you need to put in place to make forest business incubation work. So the idea here is that a forest and farm producer organization itself should try and be incubating businesses of its members. And for that we have to think, well, which clients do we want to help. And that might be subgroups within a producer organization who want to nurture a particular type of business. We need to have a little bit of thinking about how do we identify groups that you can see those little dots are maybe subgroups within an organization who we're trying to help incubate their businesses. The second step we need to do is we need to design what sort of support services we want to offer to our clients, so to the members within our FFPO, what sort of structure we need to set up, what sort of staff we need to have in place to be able to act as a business incubator. Once we know what our clients need, and we've designed what sort of structure we want to put in place, we have to think about actually how do we deliver those support services to our members. So there's a section on services, what sort of training, what sort of networking are we going to offer, what sort of links to finance are we going to provide. And then there's the question of management, how do we manage that whole process, we don't want it to become a support process that goes on forever. So we want to be able to say well we're going to select you as a group that we want to support, we're going to provide you with some services, and then we're going to exit. So that we say now you are fully incubated if you like, and you have to stand on your own two feet so there's a little bit on management, how do you manage an incubator. Finally, we want to talk a little bit about how do we monitor this process. So we understand the impact it's having on our clients and on the structures we've set up so that we improve the business incubation services over time. So that's essentially if you look at the four bank toolkit, you'll see those five steps within it those five modules within it. And what we want to do today is to introduce you to some of that, so that you feel, okay we could try to set up a business incubator in our forest and farm producer organization that does this sort of work. Let me give you an example. So, this example is from Nepal. And essentially in Nepal, there were groups of forest producers who were thinking what sort of business to do with their to develop from their community forest areas, and they decided to set up a business in charcoal production. And they, they decided that they wanted to make charcoal briquettes to sell into the city of Kathmandu in Nepal. So in this particular example, and sab, which is a, an NGO decided to incubate their business. And it looked first at well what are the challenges facing that business what are the needs of those community groups. One of the needs was that they didn't have a very good market people didn't understand about charcoal briquettes. And so they started to develop labeling, which explained to the buyer what these briquettes were and how you use them. And they also worked with a stove producer, you can see on the bottom left that this is a ceramic stove and you put a briquette in, and it's actually for heating your house in Nepal. So that is how you provide heating Nepal is a mountainous country with very cold temperatures. And so the incubator decided to provide these services to the communities it helped them develop packaging and labeling. It helped them develop a stove that would fit their briquettes that they could sell along with the briquettes, and then it helped them to market the product so you can see in the bottom that the incubator helped the community groups to establish sales outlets for their products in Kathmandu. So that's the sort of thing an incubator does it doesn't run the business, but it, it stands ready to help the business to progress over time. Why, why is business incubation so important. I think thinking in the big picture, we have to remember that small holder farmers and communities dominate what happens in forest landscapes, and also that farming is the biggest cause of forest loss. So we have a both a scale issue here we have lots of rural communities, trying to use forest and farm landscapes, and those producers are the key to producing food to restoring forests to developing rural economies, and to climate action. And so we want to help them to run businesses that sustainably manage the natural resources where they're based. But most of these rural communities are very isolated. And the cost for somebody in the capital city of providing business advice to rural communities is very high. We have a support gap, a support gap that we have and forest business incubation can fill that support gap if the forest business incubator is actually the forest and farm producer organization itself. When we're thinking why is forest business incubation so important. Well actually we know from all around the world that the failure rates of small businesses are very high. But research has shown us that businesses that receive business support services for us business incubation that doubles the rate of survival. Business incubation if you have somebody to give you a helping hand with your business to give you advice and support that can double the chance that you'll end up with sustainable business at the end of it. We also know that the best people to do to give that advice to provide business support are the forest and farm producer organizations themselves. Once you have a successful business being run by a forest and farm producer organization. You, you're in a very good position to offer advice to other groups in your region who want to run a sustainable business because you've already learned the lessons of what works what doesn't work. And so we think that the forest and farm producer organizations are excellent business incubators. Now let me give you an example of one very successful forest business incubator from Guatemala. So in Guatemala, there are many community forest groups, and they produce a variety of things they produce coffee they produce cardamom, they sell timber and do process timber they run ecotourism businesses. What they did is they group together those forest and farm producer organizations in an association called Federico Vera. So that's a producer organization that represents many smaller community forest groups and Federico Vera learned how to do particular types of business so they started helping the coffee producers to process and sell coffee. They helped the cardamom producers to to process and sell cardamom. And as they gained business experience, they began to be able to offer training in how to run a business. So recently, and Johnny will know this example, they set up a business training school for other producer organizations how to run a successful business. And also a business in their own right so Federico Vera was actually selling some of the products from these regions. It was an umbrella organization that was selling many different types of product. And because of that they were generating profits, and they started also to provide financial support credit that that farmer groups could loan money from Federico Vera and then pay it back in order to get their businesses started. So forest and farm producer organizations can become really important sources of business support and forest business incubation. How does how does it work. Well, as I've said we're not really talking about startup businesses here with we're talking about supporting businesses that are already established. So usually in year zero if you like on this chart, you've, you're trying to start a business. Now business incubation is really trying to help businesses in subsequent years who've already established trying to help them to do better than they would otherwise do. So helping them to develop a business plan, thinking about market advice and market research, thinking about how to attract finance into that business, maybe helping them to export their products to new markets. And by providing that sort of business incubation support, you're making the business do better than it would otherwise do and as I've said, we've got good evidence that business incubation doubles the success rate of businesses in different contexts. Another thing to think about when we're thinking about business incubation is that if you don't have business incubator support every single business if you think of if you're a business like those blue dots that you can see on the left hand side. So every single business has to work out how to register their business with government authorities. Every business has to work out how, how to link to the market, and every business has to find out about finance and input, where to buy it input it's packaging or it's packaging separately. And that's a lot of work for every single business. But if you have an incubator, the experience of the incubator can make those links, much easier for all the businesses. So it saves a lot of time and effort for the businesses. And there are many tool kits out there on business incubation the world bank, I think, put together a 12 module tool kit, which you can see on the right hand side, about how to design and run a an incubator. Often incubators business incubators sell their services to businesses. If you want business support, you can pay us and we'll provide that support. The problem for forest and farm areas in places like Africa is there are very few businesses being started. And so the business incubator would never have enough business to make that incubation profitable for them. And so we have a gap, we have the fact that business support providers often don't work in rural forest and farm areas. However, farmers always group together in some way, work together in some way to pool their information, and to sell their products to get finance and to share their costs. So the experience of these farmer groups can begin to help other farmer groups in the region to run businesses better. And that's why we think forest and farm groups can become business incubators. We need a special approach. It's not, it's not like being in a city where there are everything you need is is just a hand in when you're trying to run a forest and farm business you have problems of being quite remote. There are high transport costs and communication costs. You almost always have to work together to sell larger volumes of product so that you can take that product to the market, which is quite expensive. And so you need to have an organized group to run a business successfully in a remote forest area. So one of the things a business incubator has to do in in forest and farm landscapes is to concentrate on helping an organization develop. And these organizations usually make their decisions collectively, which slows up the process. You can often get conflicts between different producers that you have to have sort of a little bit more experience in conflict management. And when we're talking about growing trees and and using trees as a business that often takes a lot of time. So you have to think of how are we going to finance that so that farmers are motivated to put in in the trees. In rural areas we have low levels of education often and and there are differences often between women and men in access to education and support. So we might need to have a specific approach for helping women's businesses. Particularly ones that are rooted in the local production system and culture, the roles the different roles men and women play in the rural environment, making sure that we design business support for women as well as men. In rural areas there's always a lot of informality to it's often difficult to get all the permits you need to do business. So a business incubator needs to support businesses through that process of registration, getting the right documents. Let me give you, you know, I was lucky enough to visit this particular community in Ghana, and they were, they were working with Tropenbos was was helping them incubate their business. And what the farmers were doing was trying to plant black pepper in a government forest area. And then selling the black pepper to the market. But the, the whole process for the community of well how do we get formal rights to grow our pepper in these forest areas. How do we process the pepper and package it and market it so that it is profitable for us. How do we get enough pepper that a buyer would be interested in buying our pepper from our region. That needed support and Tropenbos were trying to help the, the, the producer organizations make a success of their black pepper. So the in this introductory session that I'm giving you, I think the most important point I want to try and convince you of is that if a forest and farm producer organization is running a business. They should be able to help other groups who are trying to run businesses. So forest and farm producer organizations like Viva, like, you know, NACO in the Gambia should be in a good position to provide incubation services to their members so you should think about yourself, your organization as a business incubator in the future. And I hope this diagram will help you to understand what it is that a forest business incubator does. So you might have many individual producers the green dots on the left hand side of the diagram, and they one group might be producing black pepper. Another group might be producing timber. Somebody might be selling cabbages or cassava. So there are many different producer groups. And you have some kind of forest and farm producer organization that is trying to help their members. And that group is it could become an incubator. Well, what does it do as an incubator. Essentially, it tries to link those producer groups to the sorts of support that can help them. So you might need help in registering your business getting legal papers, transport permits. So the incubator can learn how to do that and link you to the right government agency. Or you might need to process your product in a new way, and you don't know how to do that you don't know how to grind up your pepper in a way that you could sell to the market so the incubator can do a little bit of research. What sort of machinery is best used for pepper grinding. You don't have the incubator doesn't have to be a professional who understands everything about pepper grinding but you need to know who to link to who can provide that advice. Similarly, you might need help with, well, how do we develop a business plan to get some finance for our business. Again, you might have in your country, business support services that you can link to that will provide you with the sort of support you need. So in each of these cases technical advice how to organize a social organization that is robust and has the right sort of procedures in place to run a business. You can learn over time how it works, and then you help the groups to link to the right people. Does that make sense so that diagram I hope will give you a feel. So you don't have to know everything yourself to be a business incubator, but you have to build up a network of contacts that can provide you with the right sort of support and advice. So, you know, producer groups within your umbrella organization can get access to the right sort of support they need. And the more you do have that support and linking, the better you will become the more useful you'll become in providing those services to your members. So we've got, we've got these five steps. We need to take you through. We need to choose who we're going to help. We need to think about how do we set up as and staff, a unit that is responsible for business incubation in our organization. We need to think what services should we be providing and what services do we need to link to other people who could provide those. How do we manage all of this, and how do we measure success. Those are the five steps that I took you through. How do we, we start by looking at the people we're trying to help. What are their needs. What do they lack information about. Secondly, we think, okay, who's responsible within our organization for helping. Thirdly, what sort of services should we provide. Fourthly, what sort of management process are we going to put in place and finally how do we measure success. I just want to finish this section by giving you the example of China. Now in China. The government recognized that in rural areas, it was very difficult for rural communities to run sustainable businesses. And so what they did was. Okay, we've, yeah. So what they did was they set up in the bottom you can see a picture of something called a Chinese timber market and trade center. And the government actually set up the centers as a one stop shop for providing business advice to forest and farm businesses in China. And it's technical advice on, on planting trees on planting crops they provided business advice, how to write a business plan. They provided insurance and finance, and they provided help with market, sort of running trade fairs and so on. And you can see in China, over the last, well, 30 years now that the area of forest is actually increasing, because more and more farmers are realizing that they can make good money out of selling trees. The reason those farmers are doing that is because they have these support services that can help that can take them through the process of setting up and running a business. And you'll see in the map, the area of forest increase in China that is resulted. So forest business incubation is not just about making improving livelihoods. It's about creating more sustainable, more varied forest and farm landscapes that are profitable for the people within them. So I'm going to stop there because that was a lot of introduction. And I'm going to just take a few minutes now to see whether we've got any questions. I want to understand what a forest business incubator is, and why we think it's so important. So I'd welcome any questions that you might have probably easiest if you write them in the chat. While we're waiting for people to reflect on your question, Duncan, I just noticed that there were three people from Tanzania who joined in the meantime. And two participants from FAO Togo. And then we had a question, a general question from Anani, whether participants would be receiving a certificate at the end of the training. And a general comment from Mark. On the context of the social organization being of importance as an entry point for smallholder FAOs, in terms of using strengths in numbers, particularly towards accessing or internally mobilizing finance. So I have a couple of questions, all of them. So, so yes, we should we could and should provide you with a certificate of training. So I'm going to ask Ali, who's the coordinator of the forest team here at ID to to to maybe help me develop a certificate. All of you who stayed throughout the course can get a certificate in the training. I hope that's that's an answer to that question. Secondly, in terms of marks question. One of the roles a business incubator can play is helping a group organize itself for business. And that's really important because when you're trying to sell something, you usually get a much better price if you sell in bulk as a group. So you have to integrate the price together, and you can stop traders from playing individual farmers off against each other and negotiating down the price. So the bigger the more members you have who've agreed to sell as a group, the light the higher the chance that you'll get a good price for your product. One of the things we have to do when we're incubating businesses in rural areas is to try and strengthen and increase the size of groups who are selling products that selling the same thing together, and get them to agree to sell the product as a single group, and not as individual farmers where they're very unlikely to get a good price. One of the things, once you've got a group that's selling a large amount of product together, you can perhaps work on making sure that all of the farmers are producing high quality. And then you can develop a logo and packaging for your product so that it's those machines that you need for packaging and labeling their shared costs among a large number of farmers, and so they're more affordable. And the crucial organization is a critical important point and thanks, Mark for raising that issue. And I would like to welcome Dao Prennibbe and Lamboni from Togo so welcome to to the group. We've got any other questions about what a business incubator is what what we're why we're talking about this question from Johnny. Which is, if you in countries. You often have business incubators sort of professional business support. Do we need to have our forest and farm producer organizations also incubating business. And I think the answer to that question is yes we do need forest and farm producer organizations to be able to incubate their own businesses, because often the professional business support services are based a long way away from the rural areas. And secondly, they're often quite expensive in providing advice to businesses so the more advice and professional business development services we can offer ourselves, the better it is for our members. I'm going to talk about financing the business incubator in a bit so I'll answer that question then. Yes, thank you. We have a summary of what a business incubate beta is provides startups and early stage businesses with the support and resources those young groups need to make progress to do things better. So thank you very much for that that summary that's absolutely right. Good. In that case, let me, you can, you can, when we have these question sessions, if you need to grab a drink of water or take a comfort break please do. And then I'll try and move on to, to the next section of the training. In the first module, I introduced you to the idea of what a business incubator is. And in this next module, I'm going to try and put a little bit more detail on what should be the scope of the services we're trying to provide. How do we choose what what groups to help. How do we look at what their needs are, and so on. How do we staff our business incubator. And I'm going to focus first on these particular things of, we need to first think about who we're trying to help, which clients are we trying to help. How can we assess what they're struggling with what they need in terms of support. Then I'm going to look at, well okay now that we know what our clients need. How can we structure ourselves internally to to try and staff and finance an incubator. So I hope that's clear. So these are very simple steps. The idea is that you gradually use your experience of business to help other groups who are trying to do business. It depends very much on what sort of organization your forest and farm producer organization is, or whether you're a support organization like FAO or NACA or something, you know, a little bit who's got its own resources to provide support. And the first thing we need to think about is who are we going to try and help. This is this is very important because, obviously, it takes time and effort to support somebody develop a business so we need to keep it manageable. Often the best way of starting these these things is if a forest and farm producer organization says right, we've got a business running honey production in Tanzania. And we know how to begin to manage a business. We know how to write a business plan. How can we help another group of farmers within our area, develop a business they're interested in. And that might be avocado growing, or it might be nursery seedling production. So you have to decide who it is you're going to try and help and keep it at the beginning of a forest business incubator, keep that list of people quite manageable. The second thing we need to do is we need to assess what it is they're struggling with. We need to understand the nature of their business and and what support they need and there's no shortcut for going once you know who you're going to try and help having a visit to those people and and looking at how do they get their product from the field to the place where what are all the stages in that value chain. You have to plant the crop do they have problems with getting access to good seed or in knowing how to plant. When they harvest the crop, they need to process it. Do they have the technology they need to do that. Do they have the advice about where to buy that technology. When they're thinking about transport, what are the problems with the transport to the cities. Do they have a problem with transport. What sort of support would they need for that and finally sales in the city. Are they depending on only one buyer who's not giving them a better and a very good price. Could we do some market research to find other buyers who might compete with that first buyer and give them a better price. So, we need to assess the needs of our group who are trying to help. And then we need to sort of think about well what are the problems they're facing. Do we already have. We need a map of what sort of support they need. Are there already people out there who are providing the sort of support they need so do if we are thinking about timber production for example. And we need some advice on accessing and maintaining chainsaws. Is there already a company in our country that sells and maintains chainsaws who we could get to kind of bring in advice that would help our business. And finally you do an analysis of what's what's the support that we as a farmer organization can already provide. And where do we need to bring in expertise from outside. And that's the sort of creating the network of of contacts that I talked about in in the diagram. So what we're trying really trying to do is to get a list of the people we want to support our clients, which areas we're going to help them. And then we try and do some sort of interview or survey of our groups and talk them through each stage of their business, each stage of the value chain, and where they might be struggling. And then we map. Well, can we provide this advice already. Maybe this is something we already know how to do and all we need to do is to teach the group how to do it, or do we need to make a link to find somebody from outside who will help our businesses progress. So that's the, the first step in in the business incubation process is deciding who you'll help and understanding their needs. And you might, if you were, if you're a very big organization, you might think, well, we can't provide support to everyone all at once so we're going to start with a particular area where we'll support groups in this area to start with. So we need to, to understand how many groups there are, how many potential enterprises, there are in that area, and how many other sort of institutions are already providing support and who they are. So you're probably talking about an initial kind of field visit, when you're setting up an incubator you need to do some background research and think these issues through so that you know who you're going to try and help where they are, what sort of businesses they're trying to start, and who else might be able to help you in your network of business incubation. And this is very much what happened in, in Cambodia. When there's a program called the non timber forest product exchange program. And that program is trying to incubate businesses of many different sorts in different countries. And in Cambodia, when they thought, well we want to help community forest groups. And some of those community forest groups scattered all over the country were producing honey. So we decided that the best way of helping them would be to help those honey producers form a single association a single federation for honey production within Cambodia to increase the volume of honey that they could sell in the marketplace. The problem was that different honey producers were producing very different qualities of honey. And they were using very traditional methods of cutting down the tree in order to extract the honey. They weren't using filtration to get very pure quality honey. And so, as an incubator, NTFP EP said, okay, we've, we've talked to these honey producers, we can see what the problems and challenges are. And we need to do several things. On the right hand side, you'll see a book. And that book was produced in a local language and it, and it explains the processes of producing quality honey. And they learned what the best way of producing quality honey was, and they developed a guidebook for the, for the members of this federation to make sure that the quality was always meeting the standards. Then they needed to help the producer groups to get the right equipment in place to know where to source the right equipment for storing and filtering honey. And they needed help with how do we package and label our honey? Where can we get jars? Where can we buy these jars? Where can we get a label set up? And they helped them to, to understand these different bits of the value chain so that the federation as a whole began to produce these very beautifully packaged products which could be sold to tourists and to supermarkets from all over the country from different areas. So that might be an example for you. You might have several groups who want to produce the same thing, and they would benefit from working together and having common quality standards, common labeling and packaging, the right equipment and so on. So that's an example from Cambodia. If you, if you want to do this, I guess the best way is to prepare a questionnaire to assess what the needs of the groups who want to run businesses, what their needs are. And you might want to think, make sure that you ask enough questions in that questionnaire. So, so try and stimulate them to think through. It's not just issues of what we grow on the farm. We also have to think of, well, how can we get, do we do we know everything we need to know about finance and markets? Do we need to know everything? Do we need to think about legal documents and permits? Do we need to work on our natural resources, the way in which we're planting and processing our products? Do we have any problems with our organizational cultural issues? And this is very important to think particularly about challenges that women might face in running businesses if they have not got the same access to our natural resources as men. And then, do we have anything we want to do differently, but we don't know how to do it yet. Sort of in the research and technology. If any of you are familiar with the market analysis and development toolkit for business startups, you'll know that asking questions in the each of these five areas is, is the way in which that toolkit helps people set up a business. And it helps those areas of MA and D, the market analysis and development to create a questionnaire and ask your, your, the people you want to help. Do you struggle with any of these areas? How could we support you in any of these areas? Instead, you need to get those, your, your clients to talk through the business with you. So, you know, here is a business in Brazil that's trying to sell timber. They're a cooperative, they run a community forest area in the middle of Brazil. And they, they have to have some quite heavy machinery to get those very large timber trees out of the forest. They're trucks and then into a stock yard. They need to have, they've got a local buyer who's a sawmill, and they need to be able to deliver their products to the local sawmill and get a fair price. And then there are various markets for their products. So one way of finding out about the needs of, of, of your business groups is to get them to talk through the value chain how the product gets from the farm or the forest. To the place where it's marketed. And, and that's one way of finding out what their needs are. So, here is another example. And this example is from Guatemala. And the, the Guatemalan. This is north of Guatemala. There's a big area of forest. And there's an association of many different community producer groups. And they were producing primarily timber, trying to produce timber sustainably, but they wanted to know what other businesses can we, can we run. And one of the, the ways that aquafop, the association, which is a producer organization helped to incubate new businesses was to link to do some market research. And they found that there were various people who were buying palm leaves. And they thought, well, we, we could make this into a business if there are people trying to buy palm leaves, we could make this into a business. The reason the buyers were buying palm leaves was for Easter celebrations in America. And so they were, they were wanting to have Easter Sunday services where they waved palm leaves in the same way that when Jesus entered Jerusalem on a donkey, all of the people wave palm leaves. And, and it turns out that there were a lot of churches in America trying to buy these palm leaves. But they wanted a particular type of palm leaf, they didn't want a brown dead palm leaves they wanted nice green palm leaves. And so aquafop tried to help the producers, particularly women's groups in in the communities to produce the sort of palm leaves that would be sold. And they, they taught them how to grow the palm tree they set up a nursery for growing the palm tree. And then they taught them how to harvest the leaves into nice bundles. And they, they, the best way of storing and transferring these palm leaves was to keep them cold so that the color of the palm leaves was was green until the buyers, it reached the buyers. And so they, they set up a refrigerating unit so that you could collect the palm leaves over several months and store them in those brown packages in a refrigerator in a cold room, so that when they arrived in America on Easter Sunday or Palm Sunday, they were still fresh. And that business now is is worth several hundred thousand dollars per year. And the incubator aquafop who'd learned about business from timber helped the women's groups to make a business out of palm leaves selling palm leaves into the market. And so that's an example of of how an incubator can can work with the local groups to say, what, what is it that you need help with. And they needed help with how to grow the palm, how to process this and store it, how to pack it up and send it to the market in a way that made a lot of money for them. So you will find out when you ask your members what businesses they want to run the areas of help that they need. And maybe they need help with farm advice on growing and harvesting, maybe they need help on processing, maybe they need help with business management, how do we, how do we run a business organization, how do we set up the terms of reference. What do you call them. You set up a constitution for an organization. How do you develop rules for for managing the group, you know, replacing the manager every three years. So they may need help with various different bits of running a business. So you, you have a list of what your of what help your groups need. You can then think, well, is there somebody external who is already helping them. Is there a project in my country in Tanzania or in Liberia, which can already help them. In this case, you can, you can note the external skills available. You can also think, well, we have some experience of running businesses in our farmer group. Could we offer. available skills that will help them. And so you note down, you know, who in your organization could help them to to overcome this particular difficulty that they're facing. And then you have to have a list of things that are missing, where they have their struggling with a particular problem, and there's nobody external that you know of who's helping them. You don't know the answer inside your organization. So you've got a missing skill set. And then the job of the incubator is to make inquiries. Usually in in in the local city or in the local town, who can help us with this sort of advice. And that's the way you build a network of useful contacts. Is there a local, you know, a government research and training center. Is there a local Chamber of Commerce, who might be able to help you. And you try and fill the missing skills that you need in that way. So we're setting up this incubator. And we have to think, okay, we now know what sort of, what's what our clients, what help our clients need. And we know what sort of thing we could offer in in our own organization. So we set up a structure within our forest and farm producer organization that actually helps these people on a regular basis. So in any forest and farm organization, you will have some sort of structure of your organization. Usually you will have an advisory board of some sort. And then maybe you will have a management team for your farm organization, usually a manager, a treasurer, a secretary. Probably also have a different departments in your organization, somebody who's working on timber somebody who's working on, you know, agricultural production, or maybe you've organized your organization differently. Now what you have to think is, should we establish a new business incubation unit. Who, who will we make responsible for developing businesses within our forest and farm producer organization. And that's the first step, think about what you've already got as a structure, and then try to think well where would this best fit. We already have a business support unit that we could build on. So, when, when you're thinking about setting up a business incubator unit. Usually the best thing to do is to select the people within your organization, who are best at business. Usually who already really knows a thing or two about business. So they might become the manager of your business incubator unit. And you might need to identify other staff within your within your organization who could provide services to the people you want to help. Usually you won't be able to have all of the knowledge in your organization already. So you'll need to think about having external experts who you can draw on to help you. They may belong to a non government organization, or a government research department, or a small business support unit, or the local church. So that would be your expert support group. And sometimes, if you have in your farmer organization, and a board of advisors, you can choose people for those advisory roles, who can help you with your business incubation. So, I guess the trick of this stage is to try and put somebody in charge make somebody responsible for a business incubation unit, have other staff who will be willing to help, and have particular skills, and then think that we've got our core unit, but we also need to make links to particular types of experts who are outside our organization and can help us. And that's the process we we almost always go through. So if we come back to this diagram, you'll see that the business incubator group is really trying to form a network that can give advice in many different areas. You can link people to government authorities, you can link to research and development people, you can link to business experts, you can link to technical experts, you can link to people who know about how to set up social organization. Usually in countries there's some sort of cooperative farmers cooperative organization, who can help with setting up good social organizations, and then you need to make links to the banking sector. You know people who offer you credit like Zanaco in Zambia or other other development banks. And so you're not trying to do everything yourself. You're just trying to establish a network of advisors who can help you and help your businesses to become better than they would otherwise be. I'll give you another example of this is an incubator called Farm Africa it's a non government organization, and they were working in Southern Ethiopia, trying to help coffee farmers. So in Ethiopia coffee is occurs naturally in the understory of the rainforest, and there's a particular market for specialty coffees. And Ethiopia is the origin it's the home of coffee. And so Farm Africa wanted to help the groups get a better price for their coffee. The problem was that the farmers had very variable coffee picking standards so they didn't understand how to pick the highest quality coffee beans, and they didn't understand how to dry and store and process the coffee to meet the highest standards. And so Farm Africa, they didn't have all of that expertise in their house so they asked, they tried to find a coffee expert who could help them give some guidance to the farmers on how do you collect and and process dry and store your coffee. How do you test it to show that it's good quality how do you package it in a way that meets needs and and by the time they finished their business incubation. The farmers groups were selling their coffee to an Italian coffee coffee company called Le Piantadione, and that company was paying the farmers 10 times the price they had been receiving at the beginning of the incubation process, because the company knew they were getting high quality coffee, which was all produced and stored and processed, according to the best standards. So Farm Africa are then in a very good position to help other businesses do that, develop their own coffee businesses. Also, in this section, we need to think about, well how would we pay for the the businesses where the business incubation process. And when we looked at business incubators around the world who are helping forest and farm producers. They were getting their money from from many different ways. So plan Junto in Ecuador, almost all of their money for the incubation services was paid for by the farmer groups themselves. So plan Junto said we can we can give you training in this we can give you training in that, but you need to pay us for it. And that's one way of, of trying to provide business incubation services. The way is sometimes governments will give grants to help you provide business incubation services, and maybe there are projects that can can pay for your, your business incubation services so you might be able to develop a project with an NGO to support businesses. So the easiest way of, of providing paying for business incubation services is if your farmer organization is making money from the businesses of the farmers. If your organization is selling product into the market and making a profit, and then out of those profits, you assign somebody to help other businesses in your farmer groups develop their own business ideas and you can say well we'll help to sell your products as well. And because the more products that you're selling, the more profits you're making, that can then mean that you are able to provide, you can pay for staff within your organization to help other businesses. And I think within the forest and farm facility, we're really trying to move towards a model that's like the right hand circle Federico Vera in Guatemala, where the business incubation unit is actually paid for by the profits of selling products into the market. I hope that's all clear. Let me let me give you another example I'll move more to African examples as we go through this training, but I just want to give you a vision for what is possible. So, so this is an example of a farmer cooperative. It's a farm forest cooperative in Sweden, called Sodra, it's about 100 years old. So this is not something you will achieve overnight. But they, they were at the beginning 100 years ago they were getting very the farmers were getting very poor prices for their timber. And this is because the traders were coming in and saying, Well, we'll pay you this amount for your timber. And if you don't sell to us will go and buy from your next next door neighbor. And so the price was very low. So the first thing that Sodra did was, they said well we were going to agree that all the farmers in our region will only sell their product their timber through this association through this cooperative. And that way the traders can't negotiate individually with farmers, they have to negotiate with the farmer organization and we will set the price. And because they got a much better price for their timber, the cooperative starts to make much more profits. So it would deduct a small amount of the sales price to run the cooperative. So the farmers know they're getting a better price for their timber so they're happy to deduct a certain amount and allow that money to be used to staff the cooperative. And once the cooperative had had a knowledge of how to run business it thought well, maybe we could also start to diversify our businesses. And we could maybe because we've got a lot of profits from our timber sales, we could invest that money in things like a new nursery to produce high quality timber seedlings that will grow faster. So that we will make even more money so they set up a nursery business. They set up a saw milling business so that instead of just selling the trees to the buyers, they're now selling sawn timber which is much more profitable. And at the bottom you can see this is the newest thing that they're doing, which is they've set up electricity factories using wood chips, which are burnt to produce electricity. And all of this has come because the farmers decided to work together as a group, and they decided to give business support to different businesses, based on their experience that they already had of how do you run a good business. And 100 years later, this community forest cooperative in Sweden is one of the world's largest timber companies. So it's, if you if you make business incubation knowledge about how to run business central to your farmer organization, then, ultimately, you will learn how to do good business, and you can develop into a very successful and profitable organization. I've been doing a lot of talking. And I'm now going to pause at this point and invite any questions on anything I've said so far. Is there anything that you're unclear about. Is there anything you'd like more information about Duncan there's been a couple of questions and comments posted in the chat would you like me to. Yes, can you read those to start any anything you're unclear about please please do ask a question, because we can we can give you more information. We're trying to compress a two day training into a two and a half hour training here. There will be things that we're not giving enough information on. Yes, Kassa. Thank you for this asking is it possible to start selling locally before the business is formally registered. And what happens if the producer organization is registered as a nonprofit. Two very good questions. For the first question I would say that it's very important that you do start locally. So, the best way of starting a business is to know that you have some buyers for your products. What what what are people asking to buy. If you don't have a local market that will buy your product then it's very difficult to start a business. And also you need to gain experience in how to meet the needs of that market. What sort of quality. What do they do they need, you know, have, have you asked the people who are buying your product, what sort of quality what sort of packaging, what sort of volumes what containers, they, they would like to buy. So if you're starting local and building a business to meet the local market is almost always the best way to start. And that's because if you want to sell a product nationally, or even internationally, you have to meet very strict quality standards, you're competing with other businesses who've had a lot of experience. So I would say yes, please do think of incubating businesses to meet the local markets. I think that's critical. What was the second bit of that question. Sorry, what happens if the essentially it business incubating unit is set up as a nonprofit. Yes, that's a real challenge. And I think this is often the case where registering an organization you can register an organization as different in as different things so you can have it have it set up as a nonprofit association, or you can set it up as a cooperative which some in some countries have a really bad reputation, or you can set it up as a business. So different costs associated and different complexities. I think farmer organizations as business incubators, ideally would want to be set up as for profit businesses you want to be able to take the product from your farmer groups and sell it to the market and provide business advice to the groups who are providing that that product to you in a commercial way, but that might not be possible at the start. So, you can get started any which way you can. But just bear in mind that how you choose to register your organization will affect whether you can make a profit from the, the sale of products and therefore how many staff you can employ, how many paid positions within that organization you can have and so on. So it's a very good question. And it does depend. I can see Vincent has raised your hand Vincent have you got a question you want to ask verbally. Yeah, no, I wanted just to say a bit more on your response for registration, like if an apex organization is registered does not for profit, but he can be an incubator for a member organization, which is registered for profit. But itself is not a profit making the organization. It's like it created for other nonprofit needs, like market linkages for its members who are into profits. Linking to finances, policy engagement, they could be registered like that but they provide business incubation to the members who themselves are into business. That's what I thought I could just ask. I think that's really helpful. Vincent. So, so in that model, the umbrella organization the apex organization is funded presumably out of membership fees of the groups it helps. And it's nonprofit but it can still provide staff because that it has members and paying membership fees. But it itself does not act like a business. Instead, it helps its members to act like businesses. And that's a very good model as well. Yeah. Thank you. Hi Duncan. Hi. Yeah, there's something similar to Vincent's point. We also have to be cautious and sensitive to the local situations there are specific national laws that has to be complied with, depending on the activities that some of these small holder organizations have to want to engage in. And it is one critical area if you don't do it quite well and they begin to make good profits and become competitive. The big businesses that knows that they are this legal. We use that opportunity to bring them down. For instance, we did an analysis of the FF POS and you see that they can be registered under different categories, social welfare, cooperative department, the Registrar General and all that. So you have got what is established as a national federation and its main operations is consolidating the advocacy efforts of member FF POS and trying to assess available opportunities for members. And this registration is more under the not for profit. But under GAFAB is the business incubation link, which is the GAFAB green market, which is opposed to support members to consolidate their business efforts aggregate and add value in order to make profit. So if we don't register that subsidiary as for profit making subsidiary of GAFAB, and then you go operate only with GAFAB and you begin to make money, then somebody takes you on that you are not registered to make profits, and you are making profit. So the law will get on with you. So I think the local laws in the various countries also need to be taken into consideration. Thank you. Thank you Elvis that's very helpful. Good. And we've had a number of comments and questions so we've have a comment about in Tanzania selling through cooperatives has been very successful for some crops but the idea of cooperatives offering incubation services not so common. So, so we need to think this session is the financing business incubation is a very useful idea, and somebody asked whether we will be distributing the slides at the end of the session, which we will be so every day when we give out the homework. My hope is that Ali will be able to email you the slides that we've used so that you can use them when you're doing and any any afternoon thinking about the homework. And we had a interesting question from Sophie. Okay, regarding selection criteria, given that a business incubating FPO might not be able to support all of the potential business ideas of its members what would be useful selection criteria. Are you anticipating the best or the most promising business or the most. Yes. And I guess you need to have some, if you're choosing who do you support and you've got limited resources. I guess you want to start by picking groups who are producing something that you think there's a really good market for. If you supported that group to build a business, it would be something that could expand because there's good strong market demand. There are many people who could potentially produce the product. But you can see in your own mind that you could diversify from a simple product like selling raw coffee beans to selling more advanced products in the future. But you can invest if you support that business you think well we'll start with selling something simple, but over time we can help you to sell different types of product and make more money that way. So it is useful to think through. What are the criteria which we would need to use to select between many people who might be wanting support and pick in that selection try and pick ones early on that would really benefit a lot of people where there's a good strong market and where there's plenty of opportunity for processing that product in different ways to make more money in the future. I've got a chance just to take a couple more because we're running a little bit behind time. Hamisi said this is a very good presentation. Can you share experience on how you start to organize individual farmers who are doing business individually in order to be a group for doing bulk marketing. That's a very important question. And usually to make that possible. The group has to be able to buy the product in advance from the farmers, and then sell it on bulk to the buyers. So the group needs to have enough cash in order to be able to pay farmers for their product, aggregate it, and then sell together to the market. How do you do that if the group doesn't have very much cash. And maybe the best way of doing that that we're exploring in different countries is for groups to think of building up a savings and loans fund. You can buy a product over time that has enough cash in it that eventually you can buy your product from many different farmers using that fund. And then when you sell the product to the market, you replenish the fund so that it acts as a sort of cash flow fund for you. That's probably the simplest way of doing that, but it takes a lot of will, a lot of trust that you need to build in the organization and its leadership, so that you can set up a group, a group account, financial account, maybe a savings and savings fund, and then eventually get to the position where you can agree that you'll sell as a group. You can buy the product directly from the farmers. First of all, and then sell to the market afterwards. So, Danny man, you had your hand up. I'll just take your question and then I might have to come back and answer some of the other things. I think one of the key reference points would be the developed business plan by the groups because if those business plans are adequately developed. Of course, there's a folk, there's a future between them. They wouldn't, they wouldn't, of course, it would be clear on the business, then from there, the support of the business class. Thank you. Thank you, Kenny man. That's very helpful. Right. I'm afraid, because of time, I'm going to have to press on with the last module that we'll cover today. And this will, so we've thought about what business incubation is and why it's needed in the first module. We've looked at how do you choose who to help and and what sort of needs they might have, and whether you can provide those needs from your own experience or whether you need to get a network of advisors who help you. In this final module, we're just going to race through what services you might think about offering how to deliver them and follow up. Okay. So I'm going to talk mainly about these next two sessions. I don't really have time to talk about how to measure impact today. But the, the, if you've decided we're going to try and provide incubation services in our cooperative or our farmer organization. What sort of services should we try and focus on, and how do we manage that whole support process. We looked worldwide at what services incubators were providing in rural areas. This was the list so we had we did research on 10 incubators, almost all of them were providing business planning support how do you plan a business. How do you manage your finances and how do you do market research. Almost all the business incubators were doing that. They were also a lot of them were doing advice on farm management or on growing the crops or on harvesting the timber. Almost all of them were trying to advise on product developing how do you develop a product for sale. And almost all of them were trying to give some advice on technology upgrading. And you'll see there's a long list of other things that they were providing advice on how to develop a brand how to manage a group. How to do quality assurance. So make sure that all the farmers are producing the same sort of quality, and you can quickly set up quality standards. You identify what best practices and then you provide advice on quality assurance, and then a range of other things that you'll see. When you're thinking about what services should we, as an incubator be providing to our groups. There's probably some core services that you need to, to think about providing. So that's in the area of market research, you need to help groups to actually ask the buyers the people who are buying their products, how you could improve your product, so that they're more likely to buy it and they're more likely to pay a higher price for it. So the area is very important in terms of incubating a business. Secondly, financial management. Really the core of any business is understanding its finances, knowing when it's making a profit and when it's not making a profit. I'll talk a little bit about this on the very last day about building access to finance. You need to be thinking about some sort of business planning process. So developing the idea of your business what it is you're really trying to do through your business, and having a plan that covers, you know how your production process is going to be managed, who you're going to sell it to, how you're going to overcome the challenges and risks it faces, and so on. There are other areas that will be more specific, depending on what sort of groups you try and support. So it might be advisory to work in a particular type of product to start with, you know and help them to understand how they could improve the quality for that particular product, produce guidelines to support them, help them to understand what technology is being used. So the incubator might travel around and visit different pepper producers and find out what's the technology they're using for grinding the pepper. What are other people using to pack their products up for market, you know you can vacuum pack things you can put them in jars or bottles or they can be plastic or glass. So, so you might want to start with particular value chains, but over time, our intention in this forest farm facility is to help people to diversify and have many things a basket of products that they're trying to sell and I think Mark you commented on that in the, in the chat, that the things that people can sell, the less risk they have both economically and from things like climate change. And so, so you might then move to develop, help them with product development, how do you develop new products and so on. So, I think, when you're planning what services your incubator will supply, you need somebody in your incubator who knows about business planning, managing finance and market research, and then the other areas you can develop over time, and maybe bring in external experts at the start. So here's an example from the Indonesia. This is a community forest farm group, and they were trying to the the the local NGO was trying to support the group to develop businesses based on their products and one of the things they wanted to do was to try and diversify what they sold. So they were selling agricultural staple crocs mainly very competitive markets, quite low, low profits. And instead they also had in their farms these trees, which were called candle nut trees you can see the fruit. And if you crush the nuts. You can eat the nuts I think or you can crush them, and you can make an oil, which is is used in cosmetics as a sort of beauty product. And so the incubator began to research what sort of cosmetic products people were using in the market, what sort of labels they had what bottles they were put in, and so on. So it helped this group to develop from being just a farmer group selling farm products to a group that it was also producing hair care oil, Minyak Camiri from the candle nuts that was being sold in the local supermarkets. So it was, they were helping them develop a business that would add to the farmer production and diversify the products and provide income for people, which would encourage them to grow trees on farm, which also helps the, the environment and climate change and so on. A business incubator, like for the candle nuts would be offering advice on the core business bits this is, we have a product we want to sell we need to develop a business plan for it. And we need to have set up an account and have an investment account so that we, we can actually buy the equipment we need to put it in those bottles and to crush the nuts to make the oil. And we need to do some market research to find out what people are buying in the local supermarkets and so what they might buy if we produced that product. So those were the core services that they offered. And, and you can see that outside of the core things you often don't know everything about that that you need to know to help a business grow. And so, if you, when we looked at the 10 incubators, quite often they were having to go and bring in external experts to support particular new technologies. That's not something you're going to have expertise on in house probably. So you need to find somebody who makes and sells those machines and come and do a demonstration and and and show how it works and see whether the farmer groups are interested in, in that particular technology. They also often looked outside to get help with market and trade fairs. So they tried to form links so that their farmer groups could go and to a market fair and showcase their products, and they didn't do that internally they made links to existing trade fairs and and business meetings and so on. And quite often they, they asked for external support to to get legal help with register how do you register this business, what are the advantages and disadvantages, and so on. So always when you're setting up a business incubator think, well there are some things we should, we should learn about and have expertise on in house. There are some areas where we will need to find external experts and gradually make up a, you know, an address book full of useful contacts, who we can call on. You know, this is an example in Nepal, where the local farmers groups were growing a poplar tree on their farms, and the poplar tree was used for making paper so the fiber from the poplar tree was very long and very useful for making paper. And an answer had very good core business expertise in the areas of business planning and accounting and market research, but they needed to draw on others for particular business linking services so they linked into trade fair on on products that put them in touch with a cosmetics company who wanted to use handmade paper, beautiful handmade paper in packaging their cosmetics you can see in the bottom left, the sort of products that that company that cosmetics company wanted. They wanted these beautiful boxes made of handmade paper, and answer, you know went outside to get external help to provide them with those sorts of expertise. So, when you're you're thinking about services to offer often one of the services that comes up is where can we get access to money to buy our new equipment. And people often think that the first point of call is to go to a bank, but banks are very skeptical of loaning money to farmer groups in remote areas for strange things like forestry. So they will be quite resistant to giving money, especially if the groups you're supporting are very new and haven't got a long track record and haven't got a bank account that's got very long, a long history. And so, if you can't get money externally. The only place you can really start is to sell your products and to use some of the sales money, the profits from sales to develop a group savings and loans fund. You can then use that savings and loans fund to loan monies to farmers save for processing equipment that they need to meet the quality standards for a product that you want to sell. And so think about mobilizing internal finance in the forest and farm facility. It's been the case on several occasions now that buyers who want to buy a particular product. They invest some money in the farmer organization to establish a more professional processing technology. So in Vietnam, a buyer of cinnamon products put up 20% of the investment costs for a for a cinnamon processing plant. And once you have a bank account saving as a loan fund, maybe you've got some finance from a buyer, then it's much easier to negotiate with a local bank. If you need a slightly bigger amount of money for a particular piece of equipment or for cash flow or something. Sometimes in some countries where the incubators are within a for profit farmer organization. The, the incubator itself becomes a credit provider. So that's, that's one model that we've seen in a couple of Latin American countries, particularly. So if you, if you are a large farmer organization or a large cooperative, and you're generating substantial funds, you can often set up a credit loan facility for your farmer members to invest in useful equipment, and that increases the quality of the product and so the farmer cooperative ultimately makes more money itself. Projects are a good thing if you want free money but they're hard to come by. And then an incubator is trying to help local groups to get access to finance. It's the most common way they do that is by brokering discussion or a link with a bank in some way, or a project in some way. I've said some some incubators develop, they become so good at business incubation that they get projects and that can offer grants to their member groups. And in some cases incubators make money themselves and can loan money to farmer groups. It's not an easy road finance. So you, you will have to develop you will have to decide how and where to provide your services. Are you going to do your trainings in a in a central area of your farmer organization or your NGO or your program, or are you going to go out into the field and deliver client businesses where the, the, the producer group is based. So most incubators try and go out into the field and deliver trainings with the groups themselves. Some do it online. If farmer groups have access to mobile phones or other ways, and some bring the farmers groups to them to a single training school or a training point. Quite a, quite a few times we've seen incubation happen very effectively just by taking one set of farmers to see a business that is already working run by another group of farmers, and you almost don't need to do any training. You just take the group and show them and they can ask questions well how did you make this work. What equipment do you need. So that can be a very effective way of providing incubation services just arranging a peer to peer visit or exchange. Sophie asked the question. Well, who do you select which groups to help it when you're managing an incubator you need to decide who it is you're going to help so you need some criteria for that in the management team. It might be that you're only going to help democratically owned forest and farm producer groups, you don't want to help individual private entrepreneurs, but you might do the reverse, or you might have a criteria we're going to focus our on incubation where we see really, you know, lots of market demand, lots of buyers for our product, or you might focus on things that that you can really supply in volume that you're familiar with supplying in volume. So think about that in your management of the incubator, and you might want to develop a formal process where groups have to apply to the incubator. You review and score their application, you choose which ones you want to help you have an interview, and then you select them. So if you've got many groups who are trying to help you might have to have a formal process. And once you've selected your incubator this is just thinking about the management of the incubator itself. You might then want to do a more detailed field visit and talk through different areas of the business. You might talk with them about how, how they're there, you know, have they got enough cash finance to do their business. Do they have enough natural resources to meet the demand from buyers. Have they got enough buyers so that they're not at risk of one particular buyer pulling out. Do the staff within that group do they need a bit of training or capacity building. How are they doing with government. Formal registration, how are they doing with brand. So think of interviewing your clients about different areas of their business so that you build up a picture as an incubator of how you can help them in the management section. So this is an example of of a business in Sulawesi in Indonesia, and the farmer group were pulling rat and which is a long cane spiky cane out of the forest. They were pulling it to traders, and it's a lot of work it's very painful work because it's very spiky, and they were getting very poor price. So the incubator went and and did a, it had a process of, of going out and interviewing the producers and saying what are they, what are the challenges you're facing in terms of financing and so on. In terms of producing this material. One of the things they found when they did those interviews was that the buyers really wanted to buy pre processed rat and they didn't want to buy raw rat and the way of processing rat and is to put it in a boiling oil bath that kills the potential bugs that can borders that can can be inside the rat and which which decrease the quality of the rat and so the buyers wanted to buy processed rat and but the producers didn't know how to do that. And so the buyer, the incubator, then went to a rat and expert and said, how do you set up an oil bath, and they found somebody who knew how to to build an oil bath for the local community, and the community paid for it, and the the process of processing that rat and meant that they could double the price they got from the traders. So everyone benefited through the incubators action and the and the way it happened was simply that the incubator went and talked with the producers and they talked with the buyers, and they decided what is the block that's that's holding this business back. So, once you've asked them what they need you then might have an incubator kind of contract you have an action plan, we are going to help you in this way. We're going to provide this training on this date, and, and we're going to check what you've learned and so on on this day. And so, for whatever area of of of support you've agreed with your client group. We're going to have a plan that you, you, you formally develop with them and say well we promise we will provide you this sort of support and advice and bring in this expert. And then it's your job to make sure that you honor your side of the, the agreement with the producer group, so that they trust the incubator and the incubator team. And you can measure your progress. So you could. You might want to take stock when you do that initial interview, you might want to collect information about how much profit a business is making now. How many hectares of, of this particular crop they're producing. How many buyers they have. How many staff have been trained. How, you know, things like electricity supply and so on. And then once they have been supported by you. You can go back to that group and say well now tell us how much profit you're making, how many hectares of this crop you're growing, how many buyers you have. And so you can measure the success of the incubator by the change in the groups that you're supporting. So if you want to, to have a project to try and win project funding for your, for your business incubating work, you can show to the project, the, the, the development agency. We can prove that we're successful because we keep a record of those people we help. And we know what their situation was at the beginning. We know how, how much they've advanced with our incubator support. And so you can trust us to do a project on business incubation for you. And that's one way an incubator can get project funding. If you measure and monitor your progress. For example, in, in, in Indonesia, the, the, one of the businesses that a community were running was they had a small sawmill, and that sawmill produced a lot of sawdust waste. And eventually you could use that sawdust waste to make the substrate for growing mushrooms. So they bagged up the sawdust and, and put in the seeds of the spores of the mushroom and they put some water in to make it moist. And then they stacked those bags in a dry place in a sorry in a, in a cold in a cool place in the dark. And the picture at the center at the bottom and the left shows the mushrooms blossoming out of the sawdust. And so the incubator had said we will help you to develop this business and we're going to measure your profit on timber production at the start. And then at the end, when you have this new business will measure your profits, and that will prove that Javlek incubator is a good business incubator, and so it can win more project funding. So this is what I've already told you, you can measure your, your impact of your support work to attract further support from NGOs and government and so on. So these are some of the things you might want to measure. You know, how much money they turn over how many jobs they create, how much finance they've attracted any certification they've achieved. So you can measure impact, and that, and that can help you as an incubator attract funding. So just as an example in Zambia, many of you Zambians will know agbit, which is an incubator and they have 25 questions they ask a business that they're helping. And at the end of the business they have targets each year, and then they show what they achieved through their incubator support, and that proves that they're doing a good job. So here's the, here's the example of in Vietnam, the Vietnam Farmers Union were acting as an incubator. And what they did was to work with cinnamon tree growers on the left you can see the cinnamon trees growing. They worked to attract an investor to help the cooperative build quite a large factory with money from the bank, money from the buyer and money from the cooperative so the cooperative put in 20% the buyer put in 20% and then the banks put in 60% to build a thing. So this is an incubator Vietnam Farmers Union now use this example to show how effective they have been at business incubation, and that allows them to attract project funding. So I'm a little bit over time I'm afraid. And, and many of you stayed bravely until the very end. I'm going to just give you a little piece of homework. Now. But before we have the homework I is everyone happy to stay on just for another five or 10 minutes. I'm sorry I've run over I knew there was lots to get through today. Yes. Thank you so much. Yes. Okay. Well let me. Great. Thank you. Well let me just then quickly explain the homework that I want you to do. So, sometime this afternoon. I would like you to think about a particular business, a farmer group that you know. What are the challenges that they're facing. And then I want you to think if I was a business incubator, which of those challenges could I help them with what services, could I provide to help that farmer group do its business better. And I want you to also to think what of the challenges they face do I really not know how to help them with. And is there particular person I could ask to give me the help I need to provide to help them with that challenge. So is that clear so I want you to, to list a few of the challenges that are being faced by a farmer organization you know. What services they would need to help them with that business, which of them could you provide individually or people within your organization, and where would you need to try and create a link with an expert to help them move forward one more step. Is that clear to everyone. So what we will do is, I may be right on a piece of paper. A few challenges faced by the group, and then what you think would be useful services trainings or, you know, exchange visits or something that you could do to help them, and then some things that you think I would need to have an expert. I need an expert to help me help them with their business. And, and tomorrow morning, what we'll do when we arrive is we will break into three groups, and we will nominate one person from each group, just to feed back their, their homework. And they will I'm working with this farmer group and they're trying to sell cassava chips, and they're really struggling because they need a processing machine. And they also struggling because they haven't got enough transport, and they're also struggling because they haven't got enough buyers. I need to help them with the training on cassava processing but I need help with transport and doing some market research. So you'll present back your homework to the group and you can discuss it in those groups, and then we'll, we'll start tomorrow to have a discussion on, okay, is there a way in which a business incubator can work regularly with its business to help them look at their challenges and risks, and identify what they're trying to fix in the year ahead. So we move from the idea of an incubator to how do we do a regular process of risk assessment and risk management with businesses tomorrow. I'm absolutely willing now to stop and take questions, final questions maybe for 10 minutes. Were there any questions Cata that came up in the meantime. Not that I can see. She wanted to mention that an important difference with any business service provider and a business incubator is that it will not be a one off support, but a longer term support for that business so that's very important. So business service provider comes in, they do one thing with that group they provide a training and then they're off. So business incubator is is a team that stick around for several years with each of their businesses and really try to help them in a longer term way that's very useful so if you thank you. So if you made another very important point. I did early on saying that not every forest farm producer organization can indeed be a business incubator and she put in the link again to the toolkit where there is some information provided or kind of internal capacities would be necessary to provide such services. I think that's right. I mean I think if you're a very small producer organization, then you might not have enough staff or time to offer business support to other groups. So what we're really trying to focus on here is on producer organizations that are more like apex level larger organizations thinking through how could we spread good successful businesses within our area. Yeah, so thank you for that clarification. And Donald you've asked thank you for the presentation can we get the slides for our review. Yes, please. I think I sent you as a PDF day one presentation. Would you now be able to send by email that to all the participants so they can get that when they're doing their homework. I will just spend a few minutes on your homework. You know, try and think through for your particular context, what we've been saying. And that'll help us tomorrow. Ali, were you in a chip in. Only to say I've set up a share folder which I will share the link to. So I will email the slides but also set up that folder and we can put other useful documents in there. Thank you very much Ali. So you'll receive an email from Ali and you will also receive a link where you can find the tool kits and other documents that we're trying to share with you. Great. Well in that case I'll stop sharing. And, and I'll just thank you for your participation today I hope we'll keep it interesting and engaged. I'm going forward and look forward to seeing you all tomorrow. Yeah, bye bye bye for now.