 Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening. A very warm welcome to this episode of Forte Fridays with MOI Sport. I am your host today. My name is Hagema von Dittfurt and I work as a digital advisor with the German Development Corporation short GIZ in Uganda. I am also the co-chair of the Young Water Professionals Chapter in Germany and part of the emerging water leaders career-building group, which is why we are here today. Welcome to our new listeners and to our returning listeners. Thank you for joining us again. We have an exciting guest speaker today. Please meet our dear Canadian friend MOI Sport, who is currently living in the Netherlands. A few sentences introducing her. Since her master's in water science, policy and management, MOI Sport has worked with the Oxford's primary health care department, Oxford Environmental Change Institute, the International Water Association and Water Technology Startups. She is actively involved in global networks, empowering young professionals in the water sector. In the last few years, she launched and chaired the Smart Water Network Forum SWAN, Rising Smart Water Professionals Leadership Program. MOI is currently serving on the IWA Emerging Water Leaders Committee, the IWA Strategic Council, and is an advisory board member to the Aquatec Innovation Forum. She works for a Dutch engineering company, Royal Hasconing DHV, and has the Digital Water Partnerships Lead there. I am sure you are as excited as I am to learn more about this passionate and ambitious young professional. Welcome Emma. Thank you for taking your time out of your very busy day to join us today. I'm so happy to be here with you, Hagymar. Well, that's awesome to hear, and I'll start right with the first question. From Canada to the Netherlands, what has brought you here or there? Yeah, so it's actually my second tour, if I can say it like that, to the Netherlands. But I've actually lived and worked abroad since 2010 when I graduated from my undergraduate degree. And at the time, there weren't that many opportunities back home in Canada doing the kind of work I wanted to do in the water sector. And I've been privileged enough to have that type of passport that a lot of countries allow me to move a bit more easily and been even more fortunate and also grateful to employers who've been nice enough to hire me on and sponsor me to live abroad. So most recently here, the job that brought me here was working in digital water for Royal Haskell and DHB. Great. So the second time, the first time it was with IWA, right? That's correct. I can say that here. Yeah. IWA for Fridays. The next question would be, what are your three? Core values as a young water professional. Narrowing it down to just three, that's a challenge. Let's go with curiosity. And number one, second one would probably have to be service. We work in the water sector. After all, we're all serving our customers, our clients. And the third value, probably connection. Great. So you narrowed it down. I was also questioning the ambition of that question quite a bit. Narrow down to three though. Yeah, absolutely. The next question is what were your vulnerabilities when entering the water sector and how did you overcome them? So to be honest, I don't know that I've fully overcome my vulnerabilities. I think that's partly why they remain vulnerabilities. I think mainly I've mostly just accepted the fact that I am not a technical person. I'm not an engineer. I'm not particularly detail oriented. And I'm not what we would consider in the water sector to be highly specialized. And I think what I've managed to do is turn those vulnerabilities into my niche, growing my career in the sector. So being somebody who tends to focus more on making connections and bringing ideas together, I've managed to carve out a niche for myself where that is essentially my core skill set and what I bring to the table as my value. And I think it's an important lesson to bring forward into other jobs, other roles that everyone has vulnerabilities and that coming into the water sector, nobody can be perfected everything, but you just need to make sure that you are identifying what you want to do and how you want to do that moving forward. Thank you very much. So there are vulnerabilities and they remain, but you managed to harness them. I think I have actually a nice matching question there. If we look at obstacles for women, joining international consulting firm, any thoughts on that? Yeah, I think it's not necessarily the joining part that I would consider to be the biggest obstacle. It's the retention aspect of it. So international consulting firms, engineering firms in general have a challenge in maintaining a diverse workforce. And I think the number is something along the lines of 40% of engineers, of women engineers, leave engineering. At some point along their career. And what companies need to understand is that we need a better holistic view of how we can create better retention policies, better retention programs and a culture of retention in these companies so that a woman coming into these companies getting hired in her 20s, let's say coming out of university, the things that she needs at that point are not going to be the same working conditions, terms of employment that she might need when she's in her 30s or her 40s or all the way throughout her career. So in terms of the obstacles, joining I would say is less of the point to make, but really how do we make sure that women are being retained, not just in international consulting firms, but in the water sector as a whole? Wow, thank you. That's a pretty convincing case. I challenge to transition to the next question after I actually want to dive deeper into this topic, but we brought along a few other questions and it's about the future. We know you're a fan of the future and because of that we would like to know what are the two most exciting future topics facing the water sector? Yeah, I would love for this to be more of a conversation because you and I co-authored the digital white paper together on the Young Water Professionals' vision for the future on this and established our manifesto, if you will, of what this could be. But from my perspective, two of the most exciting future topics are also exciting now, but we'll just get more and more interesting and exciting. So the first one, I would say, is the future workforce. So in the United States, for example, because that's the statistic I know off the top of my head, 30 to 50% of the workforce will be retiring in the next five to 10 years. So that is a massive exodus of institutional knowledge of skills of just basic labor moving out of a sector that is fundamental to society. These workforce shortages are a challenge around the world. I don't know the numbers off the top of my head for other countries, but we do know that this is a shared challenge globally. And to me, that is one of the most exciting topics to work on in the water sector now because the things that we create now, the ways that we attract people, retain people, the technologies that we implement, all of this has a draw and a hook for people coming into the water sector or staying in it. And we need more skill sets. We need a diversity of talent. It's just, it's such a rife topic for discussion and exploration that I get, I get extremely impassioned and engaged anytime we start talking about it. So that's the first one. The second one slightly tied to this would be decentralization. And I would say decentralization, not just of what we're working on and the technologies, but of how we work as well. So I don't know if it's been the same for you. I imagine so, but for the last two years, we've mostly been working in decentralized distributed teams. I've been living 10 minutes down the road from my office for the last almost two years, and I've barely seen my team in person. We work with people around the world and we work on, for the most part, automated virtual operators for water systems. And this to me is such an exciting topic to see how we can transform our water systems so that they are decentralized, as I mentioned, not just of the actual workforce, but also of the systems that we're implementing as we move into the future. Yes. Two most exciting future topics. Decentralization and decentralization. Just of technology and of workforce. I kind of expected digital, but yeah, digital is just a means to an end and a tool. Exactly. Yes. Thank you for highlighting that. To close off the session, there are a few fun questions or one that kind of transitions into the fun section. Two things your young water professional peers don't know about you. I imagine quite a lot, which is partly why we're doing this interview today. Okay. I will not be a young professional for much longer. I think it is the main piece of this. Hopefully this comes out before my cutoff date, which is coming up very soon. And something else that my peers might not know about me. I love baking bread and cooking. And one of my favorite things to do is hosting dinner parties, which unfortunately haven't been able to do much recently, but would love to do a lot more of so any young professionals who are ever close by to me would love to do so. I think that would be a great way to do that. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for sending me a message and we will do a dinner party in the future. Great. That's, there are some very nice things. And I think we will still have you around. No matter your age. Maybe what's another one. What's the most daring thing you've ever done? Oh, that's a. Outdoor excursions, expeditions. So probably something along those lines. I've done a very long extended camping canoe trip. Which had very few supplies with it. So we were out in, in Canadian wilderness for three weeks. And that is one of the more daring things I've done. So a nature lover and a lover of the future. With it's exciting topics ahead. Last but not least because I really enjoy working together with you and your visionary approach to things. If you were a ruler of an imaginary country. What would your first law be? Oh my goodness. Don't give me that kind of power anymore. It's dangerous. My first rule or law of my imaginary country would be. It's going to be a bit of a cop out. Universal and accessible and affordable water and sanitation for all. Beautiful end. Thank you. Thank you very much again for your time. And I really hope our listeners enjoyed this. I invite you to tune in for future sessions with other exciting speakers. Thank you very much.