 Welcome everyone, it's just gone 11 o'clock here in the UK so we're going to make a start while a few more participants join us. So welcome to today's special event productive uses of energy what does it take to stimulate demand. This is both a side event for the United Nations high level dialogue on energy and part of the IED debates series. We are delighted to have you with us and I hope many of you have had an opportunity to engage in the other activities happening this week as part of the ministerial level thematic forums. A huge thanks to our co host today we've joined forces with some fantastic organizations who we will be hearing from shortly including class Ministry of Water Irrigation and energy for Ethiopia to leave a solar United purpose and Ethiopian women in energy. My name is Juliet I'm the events officer at IED, and I will be providing some technical support in this event today. With that, I am really delighted to hand over to our co chairs for today McKenna Erie who is the manager of the East Africa at class and Kevin Johnstone who is a researcher here at IED over to you both. Thanks very much to it. Very happy to be hosting a side event for the high level dialogue on energy ministerial thematic forums. The high level dialogue on energy is the first global gathering on energy under the UN General Assembly since the UN conference on new and renewable sources of energy in 1981. So we're quite excited to see what comes out. I'd like to first set the stage for our audience or a great lineup of panelists can get straight into sharing their own experiences. I'll start by highlighting the energy access need, which for clean cooking solutions is around 2.6 billion people. But today we're focusing on electricity and productive uses and globally the electricity gap stands at about 759 million people. We'll be looking at productive uses of energy experiences from Ethiopia Malawi and Uganda. And overall Sub-Saharan Africa remains the world region with the largest access gap, accounting for about 75% of the global deficit and 570 million people. Energy is not an end goal it's rather an enabler of other development sectors. It's difficult to achieve any sustainable development goals without achieving SDG seven universal energy access. Energy enables tools and opportunities for teachers and school management for better educational outcomes. It supports clinics and hospitals with life saving machinery and equipment, especially important during these times. It provides sustainable irrigation solutions as we'll hear more about today for smallholder farmers and enable small businesses to offer better services and capture more value within communities and their countless other examples across sectors. The bad news is that between 2017 and 19 progress in energy access outstripped population growth, resulting in a drop in the total numbers of un-electrified people. But this progress is threatened by negative impacts of COVID-19. Some additional bad news is that investments into the energy sector continue to fall short of what is needed to achieve SDG seven by 2030, especially in Sub-Saharan Africa. Energy access investments financially viable and more importantly to enable more opportunities for remote and poor households, productive uses of energy is critical to enabling energy access. So what is productive uses of energy or PUE as we call it in the industry. Evidence from IID's research and many others in the sector such as CLASP shows that investing in installing energy infrastructure does not necessarily generate demand from communities organically. Additional efforts are needed to establish initial demand, and this is where productive uses of energy or PUE comes into play. PUE can be defined as using energy to increase income or productivity. And this could simply be a light bulb that allows a business to open longer hours in a small village, a more efficient and accessible institutional stove, or it could be powering large equipment and machinery in a remote location. PUE is also relevant for grid extension areas in some contexts where communities face similar challenges in energy access as off grid areas. In recent years there's been greater focus on activities that promote productive uses of energy. So what does it take to stimulate demand? Well today I've baked a small PUE pie in an electric oven for today's event to highlight to our audience some of the crucial supporting services needed to enable PUE. And here you can see each piece representing just some of these supporting services that are needed to be in place to ensure that demand can be generated through productive uses of energy to enable livelihoods and local community economies. There are many other supporting services or pieces of the PUE pie that you can read more about at the IID website and also CLASP's website. We'll be looking at three different perspectives of energy access and PUE and the critical cross cutting theme of gender. So we'll start with the government, according to analysis from SMAP, policy frameworks to support minigrid and off grid systems developed more rapidly after 2010, then did those for on grid electrification. So that's some good news, but much more needs to be done to support an enabling environment specifically for PUE. And we'll get more information on this from the government of Ethiopia today and their efforts in supporting PUE. Energy systems that can electrify entire communities so-called minigrids are expected to be crucial in reaching universal energy access and importantly, an enabling remote and poor communities economies. And today we'll hear about smaller generation solar minigrids in Malawi and what PUE challenges United Purpose has faced and how they've overcome them. Moving down a level, most sub-saharan economies rely significantly on agriculture. There are millions of small holder farmers that could be supported with solar irrigation solutions. We'll hear more on the experience of Tulima solar in Uganda and their efforts in reaching more small holder farmers. And finally, we'll touch on the crucial cross cutting theme of gender. So energy access doesn't necessarily bring equal benefits for everyone, especially between men and women. Women often face additional challenges and barriers to benefit from energy access. We'll hear more on some of these today from Ethiopian women in energy. And now I'd like to hand off to my co-chair host, Makenna, to start the panel. Thank you so much, Kevin, and thank you so much for giving us a kind of big picture view of PUE and energy access. So I don't want to check out too much time. Let's just jump straight to it. We're so excited to have Yodit, representing the Ethiopian government from the Ministry of Water Irrigation and Energy on the panel today. Yodit, Ethiopia seems to recently have really embraced productive use of energy. Could you please share with us how the Ethiopian government is, what activities you're doing to kind of support productive use of energy? Thank you. Yeah, so we recently have accepted this productive energy based on our new 10-year strategy document that we are following. And this national electrification effort that we have been doing for the past few years has helped us to recognize that productive use of energy needs to be interlinked with households, which are the rural households where we don't have grid electricity or grid connection. So in doing that, we actually have commissioned six agricultural production and processing studies. It mainly focuses in horticultural irrigation, grain mining, injera baking, milk cooling, and grade baking, so that we would integrate the agriculture and the electrification project. So this has helped us to assess the benefit both in cost-wise, whether the grid and the utility from our electricity generation. We could recover cost and also how the community will be able to sustain their own self. So that's been the main objective of the government using this productive use energy. So it's so great to hear that you're thinking about it all the way from the national electricity planning, your commissioning studies to gather data, because we know data is so hard to come by in this sector and especially for productive use, and that you're using that data to inform decisions. So it sounds like all taking all the right boxes, but what advice would you give to other governments in terms of, for example, collaborating between different government streams? Because sometimes where we recognize even with doing everything perfectly, sometimes there are silos that exist that don't allow us to work together effectively to deliver productive use. So would you have any advice for other governments looking to integrate productive use? Yeah, so one of the main issues that we faced is financing when we start to do with this productive use energy. So what we use is we followed those areas that are not grid connected, which means it requires quite a lot of investment in off-grid solutions, which means either importing or producing solar panels, and also we need to train and educate the community that having light or having energy would actually help their livelihood. So if they are a farming household, then they usually don't see the benefit of having electricity right on point. So we'll just automatically say that, well, I only have one light bulb to light, so why am I investing in electricity? But through training, through mobilizing a lot of resources, we were able to convince community that having a communal off-grid energy solution will actually benefit them. So that's why we had to attach our electrification scheme with agriculture, so that if we provide milk cooling opportunities, then the community will see the benefit of collecting milk as a communal and then they will be able to sell it, not only around their area but to different towns nearby. So that helped them to generate more income. So that's how it started for the community to accept that having off-grid solution like solar panel as a productive energy use was slowly and slowly being accepted by the country. So for other governments, what I would suggest is that they need to invest more time, more infrastructure and condition, and they also have to follow what the local community needs so that the acceptance will be high. Thank you so much, Yodit. I love the way you've talked about how you focus on the off-grid spaces and you've started with understanding the needs of the community, right, and then integrating planning based on those needs. So I want to maybe now focus in a different area. We're hearing that off-grid communities that that's going to be one of the places that productive use can have the most impact, but also maybe some of the challenges. So moving over now to Malawi, we know that Malawi has one of the lowest rates of electrification, but there's been a lot of effort recently to ramp up decentralized energy such as many grids, especially for rural communities. And recently United for Purpose has been supporting rural electrification efforts as well. So coming to you, Elizabeth, what opportunities do you see for many grids, especially in your context in Malawi? Thank you so much, Makina, for having me on the panel. Well, there's a lot of opportunity for many grid development in Malawi. First of all, Malawi has a very low national electrification rate, estimated at 12%, and only 3% for the rural population. And expansion of the national grid to the rural areas is slow due to the limited government budgets on utilities. That's why the current Malawi national energy policy is promoting mini grids as one way of accelerating electrification in locations where grid extension cannot be an economically viable electrification approach. The advantage that we have as a nation is that we have a lot of renewable energy resources like solar and perennial rivers, which can be used for electricity generation. And most of the rural villages, they have a cluster setup. So this type of setup makes power distribution easy and cost effective. And we have also seen that demand for clean and reliable energy services from people in the rural areas is very high and that the majority of rural communities are engaged in agricultural income generation. So there is a big opportunity for mini grids offering productive use of energy in the agricultural value chain. It's great to hear that you're seeing that demand and you're trying to meet it with renewable energies, especially in the form of mini grids, even though there are some challenges of course with financing. And as you're trying to deliver PUE attached to mini grids, what are some of the lessons you're learning as you engage in with the community. Well, through our experience in developing a small solar mini grid in Malawi, we have learned that small scale village businesses are not very reliable and stable in terms of energy consumption and income generation. Without linkage to large productive use, to large productive energy users, the mini grid is likely to struggle to reach the critical revenue needed for financial sustainability. And in addition to that, we have seen that it is important to engage the community on productive use of energy before developing the mini grid. So that we can actually deliver an impactful solution to the community. The people in the community have very brilliant ideas on productive use of energy, but it is not enough just to provide electricity and expect that community incomes will automatically increase. The communities need support to set up the businesses. They need financial support to buy appliances or machinery for production and processing. They need technical capacity building, and they also need support with finding markets for their final products. But for all of these to be successful, a sustained collaboration between stakeholders is required. The main challenge that we have faced as a mini grid developer is that the ability and willingness to pay is lower than anticipated. And this has been a challenge in terms of making decisions in tariff adjustments to balance a cost reflective tariff in order to support operations and maintenance. That's why we are looking into adding some large productive users to increase daytime demand. And in such a way increase income and allow for lower tariffs. This is so great. You're already touching on the pieces of the pie that Kevin was talking about, you know, the consumer financing, the technical assessment or technical sort of assistance that consumers need. Again, very, very crucial pieces of the pie that you're speaking of. And it's so great to hear how you are trying to kind of augment demand by attracting larger and larger kind of users of productive energy. So that's super, super interesting. Kevin, now as we're talking about the pie, I'm going to hand over to you to kind of dig a little bit deeper into some of the examples from Uganda and then also into the gender aspects. Thanks very much, beginner. So I'd like to move to Uganda now. We know that agriculture is a significant portion of Uganda's economy. So we're quite excited to have to Lima solar offering solar water pumps to support horticulture and livestock activities here today. Listen, what are some of the general challenges that you've seen in reaching some customers with solar water pumps in Uganda. Thank you for having me, Kevin, and the team. So the biggest challenges that we're experiencing with the experience in our market in Uganda is that smallholder farmers are sparsely sort of located or populated in different districts across Uganda. So the distances become a challenge, especially for us, you know, service providers that are providing them solar water pumps. But luckily for us, we entered the market in 2019 backed up by Simu solar that was established in Tanzania in 2014. So when we came into the market, we felt that the way we would address the challenge of the distances is to partner up with organizations that have an aggregation of farmers. So in the market, we have about 27 lead generation partners. And this lead generation partners are organizations that have that are cooperatives, some are circles, and then others are basically what we call aggregators sort of that by produce and sell it abroad. So this has greatly, greatly, greatly helped us in lowering our customer position costs. And what we do, like on a monthly basis, we hold trainings and we hold demo days for solar water pumps amongst their farm members, their farmer members. So in terms of, in terms of membership, they have about some range between 500 all the way to 500,000 farmers per lead generation partner. So that's a very good, you know, cashment area for us as a private company. So when we hold these trainings, we normally get leads or people that are interested in solar water pumps. And those people that are interested, we go out. So we have sales officers that are located in many of the districts in Uganda. So we go out, we do an onsite evaluation for the need of the farmer. So we look at, you know, the farmer's water needs, look at the water sources, we look at the distances that the farmer has to pump the water to where that's actually needed. Then we have a very robust tool, a design tool that selects out a different pump or a customized pump for that particular farmer. And this is very, very important because getting an asset that's customized to them enables them to be more productive than actually getting a ready made solution that's off the shelf. So that's a very, very key component on our business model. So once we feed in that information in our design tools, we usually come up with about two, basically two options. Either the farmer pays cash or we choose to finance them. And for the financing option, we do underwriting where we do an evaluation of their cash flows. And preferably we finance people that or we finance farmers that have been in the business for about two to three years and have proven cash flows that can be backed up by the lead generation partners that we basically have in the market. So once that decision is made between cash and financing, we deploy our engineering teams to do an onsite installation where we educate the farmer on how the pump works so that the concentration is removed from irrigation and it's really focused on being productive in the farm and making as much income as possible so that they can actually grow. One other aspect that we, one of the sort of component that we do offer in the market that's not really available is we offer a two year warranty or a two year service warranty where if there's anything that's wrong with the system in case the farmer wants servicing repair costs. We deploy our teams within 24 hours to make sure that that's resolved. And so that's really interesting. So it sounds like you guys are using existing structures to reach more people, more farmers in this case, which is quite, I think, a unique solution. You also touched on some other important issues in terms of the crucial aspect of customizing the pump for the solution for each farmer. The after sales service issues around the warranties that you offer and so forth. Thanks so much. Looking at the time, I think we've got a lot of interesting questions to get to so I'm going to have to move on to linda in Ethiopia. But like most places, and greater energy access in Ethiopia is a challenge can be a challenge when talking about gender equality access. So, Lina, I'm interested to hear what are some of the challenges related to gender and productive uses in Ethiopia. What, what have you seen. So, when we look at the gender and electricity and productive use of energy, the main issue we're looking at is on starting from project design when we need to look at the winners. Most projects are not asking that question on how can we affect a woman's life, how can we impact women's life. So the project is most of the reports and literatures talk about the in the goal of the energy access which is changing woman life, health care education but then we're not looking at a deliberate interventions which will affect women's life. So when we look at the woman in the picture in the slide, we're not, we can see that the woman trying to provide for energy but we're not looking at how we can change their life. So the main things we need to look at is first, providing a project design, project design should be culturally sensitive. For example, when we look at a woman's the main dominated households, main headed households, if we're providing finance just for productive use of energy, we need to keep in mind that prioritization would be made by the decision maker. So instead of buying a refrigerator, a decision could be made to buy a TV. Again, when we look at the access to finance, so the most important issue is access to finance. So looking at energy access and different comparing between female headed households and male headed households. We have seen an evidence that most male headed households are more able and willing to invest on electrification and thus increasing their income, the household income. And finally, when we look at the other, how do you implement finance so providing access to finance is not enough by itself. We need to design commercially viable businesses to women. So when we design businesses, we need to start moving away from the traditional gender roles. So we need to make sure that we need to keep in mind that there are women, even in the most remote rural areas to our entrepreneur, so we need to try to reach this woman through different training programs, and so on. Thanks so much, Linda. Can you give us some specific examples of what that might look like beyond the project design. Have you seen any success stories that you could tell us about. Okay, so maybe not a direct example but for example, looking at energy access and how women and male are being able to finance energy access. So a very good example I was able to find was from the World Bank reports, where they looked at World Bank energy access diagnostic reports for Ethiopia when they compared between male dominated households and women dominated households. So in an connected areas, they give them, there was an option to pay upfront for electrification and it was seen that twice the percentage of male headed households were willing and able to pay pay compared to women house or headed households, which only around 1% of such households were able to pay, but then when they give them an option of 12 months payment option, then the percentage of women headed households increased substantially, and it gets up to the point of 85 around 85 percentage. So this shows us that if we provide targeted financing and training to women, we can increase actually willingness and ability to pay. That's great. Thanks so much, Lena. I think I hand over to McKenna now we can start looking at some of these great questions that we're receiving from the audience. Thanks Kevin. Yeah, so many amazing questions and please keep them coming. So I guess we'll start first with our government representative and surprisingly some good questions there. What you did is P is subsidized by the Ethiopian government and actually will hand over again to Elizabeth afterwards to respond to the same for Malawi. And if it is, can you give us some examples. Thank you. Yes, most of our electrification projects are financed and subsidized by the government and the since the productive energy use is any new concept for us. So most of the studies we're doing and also the pilot project that we're doing are subsidized by the government. We're working along with some international companies as well as funders, donor funders to to establish some communal in mini grid and upgrade solution. So, in most cases, and almost in all cases it's been subsidized. So I'm guessing those are grants for the pilots and not specific grants for the actual products. So for for for both the pilot and as well as for the project so the community will say will contribute through their own labor and also by providing you know some some areas where the project will be commissioned but in providing the solar or in in building the infrastructure it will be for the government with the donor funders of the international community. Really interesting model that Elizabeth to you what is happening in Malawi do we have the subsidies and as you're answering that maybe you could pick up this other question about how you choose to locate your mini grid. Thank you so much Makina and United purpose is in a governmental organization, and it implements projects using donor funding so for this particular mini grid project, we are implementing it with funding from the Scottish Government, and we're implementing it in collaboration with University of Strathclyde so in the case of United purpose is basically using donor funding. So the subsidies for Malawi for mini grid development, theoretically, they are on paper but then its implementation is yet to begin. So moving on to the question about how we choose the areas to invest the mini grids. We do conduct site assessments for all the sites that have been earmarked for mini grid development so we work hand in hand with the the Department of Energy through the Malawi mitigation section. So they already have a number of sites that have been earmarked for for such type of development. So we do conduct site assessments using a number of parameters like distance from from the nation agreed. Number of households ability and willingness to willingness to pay and more other parameters that we look at before we do the final selection. But I'm sorry I had a glitch there with my internet. So, thank you for answering that question. And I hope you also I don't know if you answered the one on the large productive loads and some of the examples of that. If you did we can move on. Okay, so so far, we only have small businesses that have been connected to the mini grid as I said, people have brilliant ideas but then they don't have the finance that they can use to actually buy machinery or appliances for for such type of businesses and unfortunately our funding does not provide financing for for for productive use of energy so we are trying to look for parallel funding to actually support that component. So just to give an example, in the community that we are working in it's a community where there's a lot of rice cultivation and they don't have a rice milling facility in the community. They actually travel for a distance of about 10 kilometers to access the nearest rice milling facility. So the community has been asking us if it is possible to power a rice milling in the community because they feel it will help them a lot. But as I said, they, there's no one in the community who can come in front to say, I, I'm going to take up this business I'm going to buy a solar milling machine and install it in the community so we're trying to look at ways of how we can. We can get parallel funding and develop some business models that can be able to actually implement such type of productive use. Thank you. Over to you, Kevin. What questions are kind of rising to the top for you. Thanks, McKenna. So here we have another one with regards to women empowerment in a male dominated society, most African cases. Don't you think mindset change is a project that should be looked at in its own on its own, since it involves cultural change include funds for training capacity building and invest in the mindset change for a significant period of time. I think this is a really interesting question so I'd like to kind of leave it open I could default to Lina but if anyone else has any thoughts it'd be great to hear a bit more on on that. Hello. Oh, thanks Vincent I just asked a question so we'll get to you after this one. So any thoughts on gender equality and kind of it being an entire gender transformation so to speak an entire project on its own. Any thoughts on on that and energy access. So, yes energy gender equality is an issue on its own but we cannot separate it from the other aspects energy, it could should be looked at side by side to energy and that's why we were saying that we need, we need a targeted and deliberate interventions. So, we need to look at how energy is affecting women, specifically instead of looking at the society in general and we need to design project is specific to women so that they look at the culture sensitive cultural difference in designing projects. I think that makes sense so it's kind of gender is indeed very important and is a project on its own to transform really societies, but also as you say Lina it's it's important to keep that gender lens within the energy access and perhaps that can contribute to this gender equality issue. Thanks very much. I think this next question that I'm seeing source of financing for initial investments I believe that was answered that Scottish government grant funding. So that one is answered. So here's an interesting one. Do you think it is worthwhile to provide grants subsidies to establish enterprises and or productive uses of energy in remote settings. So this issue around subsidizing P itself. Oh, Vincent you're back. I want to get you in while we while we have you so let me hold that question. So Vincent, can you tell us a bit about financing the solar water pumps and how quickly kind of farmer cover their investments through your pay go financing. So that question. So once we are selected out a system for a farmer and the farmers been approved for financing of credit. So we normally we, what we usually do is we have them pay 25% of the cash value of the system, we pay, they pay 25% down. And then they pay installments with a little bit of interest rate for for about 22 months. And then we have incentives where they can pay three months, that will last within three months and then they get the deposit back. The initial deposit back, and then if they pay that full full financed amount within six months. They can pay half the, they can actually get half the deposit back. So basically that's those are the three plans that we have for farmers here. Great. Thanks, Vincent. And Vincent, do you collaborate with the local authorities in the course of providing irrigation pumps. What is the impact of the intervention to the rural livelihoods. And do you have this a lot of questions to the households afford the pumps. So maybe you can talk a bit about any interactions with local authorities. Yes, there's definitely a big push. You know, I think like 23% of our GDP, you know, comes from agriculture comes from the production of smallholder farmers. So government is very involved. Local authorities are very involved. But sometimes the involvement could be either either in training, or sometimes it's within actually the local authorities themselves by buying so a lot of pumps from us. There's a little bit of there's a bit of interaction between the local authority but it's it's more open, you know, to different private companies. Sometimes you do get the beads. And then sometimes you actually do, you know, get opportunities to train farmers that that are organized by the local government. So we do quite a bit of interaction with them. And there's a lot of initiatives that actually driven by the government. With regards to agriculture and small orders. So we do participate in those a lot. And can you give us kind of a clear picture of what the impact of the intervention is on rural livelihoods what what have you seen on on farmer incomes for example. So we've been in this market for about like roughly right now about two years, we have installed about 150 systems. Just a few examples that I'll pull out is so so 60% of our customers actually horticulture farmers and then about 25% livestock farmers for horticulture farmers just to give just one example. There was a farmer that was supplying a local restaurant within within Kampala, they're based in the outskirts of Kampala. So before we we sold we sold him a solar water pump he was producing about 6000 heads of lettuce in a month. But he was spending a lot in terms of maintenance and fuel on the generator pump that he was using it was basically diesel generator pump that he was using. Once he switched was able to save that money. And he expanded his farm right now is producing about 10,000 heads of lettuce a month. So he has been able to expand he has been able to save and even when we talk about the labor that he actually uses at the farm it has. It was reduced because you know solar water pumps are more or less automated. If you compare them to fuel pumps. So that's one example that I would give another example was a poultry farmer that we found in the same scenario using a fuel pump. Spending about the same about $1000 a month on maintenance fuel and repairs, he switched over. So right now he had about when we when we when we found we had about 20,000 birds. So right now he has expanded to about 30,000 so there's a lot of a lot of examples that I could go through, but we definitely see the change with different see the difference in terms of productivity in terms of incomes in terms of farm expansion issue. Thanks Vincent that was really clear. It sounds like there's a clear business case for switching out gents that's there. That's, that's great. Maybe I can hand back to McKenna so she can have a go at some of these questions. Thanks Kevin. I'm really curious about this one about subsidies. Because we I think there's been an ongoing discussion in productive use and even in energy access really generally about the role of subsidies and asset financing. So we've got a question there here about are there any examples of asset financing and subsidies to customers and relatedly there's also questions about is that worthwhile is that a worthwhile thing to do to push productive use now I have my own thoughts but I'm super interested in what the panel has to say. I don't know who wants to start. Perhaps Elizabeth, do you think there's, you know, it's worthwhile to push the subsidies and are there any examples of what this is worthwhile. Well, I would say subsidies are good, but then there has to be a clear model on how that is going to work. So, for example, in our case, we are talking about buying the PE assets, and then deploying them in the community but then we, we have to come up with the model of how that is going to work, because we cannot just give the community the assets to the community for free. Obviously, it's not going to be sustainable. So there has to be aware of the community paying back, even if it means maybe 50% of the of that grant of a period of time, but then to give it to give productive use of energy like the larger productive use of energy, a push, there is need for that type of subsidy. Yeah, perhaps another perspective, I don't know, Lilna or you did, what do you think about the idea of subsidies, how what they are and about where they have worked. Okay, maybe I can add some. Well, I think from, from our side, the subsidy part is much more profitable, in a sense, most of the communities that doesn't have the grid connection are, you know, very far away, either topographically or there are certain ways why we didn't have the grid connection for them. So it is best to subsidize it so that, you know, the economic and social activity in that area will be motivated once there is a subsidized mini grid or off grid solution. And once you associate those initiatives with productive using of the energy than the community will be able to generate new income and also through time they will also be able to be motivated to invest in this themselves. So, subsidy in our opinion is a little bit more acceptable so that you know through time things will change. And maybe while I'm still here, I can answer one of the questions where a participant has asked about example, where the project is, is that okay. Absolutely, go for it. So, earlier I said that we have commissioned some studies about, you know, the benefit of this productive use energy and we've identified it in a context and what kind of productive use interventions we need. So the context is that we large rural village, you know, where there is large and dense villages and where the grid connection is 20 kilometers away from that area. There's also another context that we've used where there is a small rural village where they are small partially populated village and the grid is five kilometer away. So in those two contexts, we have this projects, one it's in, in the town of Kenting, it is a large rural village around Lake Tana, east of Lake Tana. The nearest distribution line is 20 kilometer away and the residents is around 15,000 residents in the surrounding area. So, usually, what what this productive use energy that we have commissioned is for meals for grain meals. So, there is around three grain meals in that area, they have been using diesel to provide the meal service so it costs us around, you know, $1 per liter because they had to travel to the nearest town to also buy the diesel so that was a little bit costy for the community. So once the solution we used is the hybrid mini grid system where we installed 160 kilowatts of solar along with 160 kilowatts of diesel generator and 240 kilowatts per hour lead acid battery. So with this hybrid mini grid system we were able to power the existing meals and also to add two more meals in that area, which actually saved money for the for the millers for the milling. So the cost has just reduced to 16 cents kilowatt per hour. So this is one of the projects we have. And then the second one is for the small specially populated rural village. It is in the town of Aoramba in South Gondar. So this is also the same, their income is mainly from maize, tapes, sorghum, chickpea and also cattle. So they have, they usually have only three meals that serve the surrounding area. So they also irrigate their agriculture through traditional methods. So what we used in this project is we also, we use the standalone renewable meaning system. We installed a six kilowatt of solar with a 16 kilowatt hour of lead acid battery, which helped them to have this system. So these are the two very effective examples that I can say. Thank you. Thank you so much for those wonderful examples and I'm sure people can follow up on the ministry website to find out more information. I just want to go back to Lilna a little bit here and talk a little bit more about women. So how can women use the encourage especially in male dominated households. You told us about how the decision maker influences the type of productive use and it's typically men. So how do we encourage sort of more women to take up productive uses in the households. Thank you Matana. So here we need to actually implement different kind of training programs that will actually change the mindset of the society and overall because if we say the decision maker is the husband or a male in the household then it will be up to that person to make a decision on prioritization. So until we get to a financial empowerment where we will need to also have programs. For example, calling on community meetings when we're implementing energy programs, mini-grids or standalone systems so that to educate the community on the use of these appliances and how it will actually change the lives of the entire households. So it's about education and not so much about focusing as suggested here on typical household uses of energy but it's about like a wider education piece about how it's beneficial to the entire household regardless of I guess which gender uses their plans and sort of enabling women to take to take up this productive uses. Exactly because providing finances just for example if we provide finance for cookstuffs or refrigerators then the woman may not have the capacity to take on the loan. By itself she may not have the decision making power or also a capacity financial capacity but if we educate the entire society then it will be actually because people before making the decisions if we go into household and say it will benefit one person in your households then they may say okay television actually would entertain the entire family. We need to tell them that even Charlie when you buy a cookstuff this person your wife or your girl child could actually save time to go to school which would eventually change the lives of all the households. She could buy you a day's TV in the same action TV so we need to have work more on education when we're implementing energy programs. Thanks that's such a great and powerful kind of tool to kind of start this journey of transforming not only a family but I think a community. I'm going to pass it over to Kevin for the last couple of questions here as we get to at the end. Thanks beginner. We have a very interesting question at the top here around tariffs and this issue around daytime versus nighttime energy and the costs of producing that energy and different tariffs that can be designed and can get into a very technical discussion. But I'm wondering if Elizabeth you could talk a bit about how United Purpose looked at tariffs. Are they are there different levels of tariffs on your mini grids to households versus productive users. For example, which one is more expensive. Is there a daytime nighttime tariff and so forth. Thank you so much Kevin. Yes, we have different tariff categories for our customers. So we have other customers who are only like a service, they only pay a service fee for the man. So they have a limited amount of electricity that they get paid day. Once it is finished, they get cut off and then it resets the next day that one that provision was made for poor households who can who cannot afford the pay as you go tariff. So, other than that we have the pay as you go tariff, which has also been. It's different depending on the time of use with the daytime use being lower than the night, the night time use, and also it gets cheaper the more the more a customer uses through the month, the more it gets cheaper. So we also have a tariff for institutions. So yeah, we have different tariff segments. The reason why the daytime tariff is cheaper than the rates is because we have excess power being generated during the day during the daylight hours and yet the load during the day is lower than the night time. So we are trying to encourage people to use more electricity during the day. That's why we have lowered the daytime tariff. So once we get more productive users doing their production or businesses during the day, it means they will be able to utilize that as per capacity and increase income. So if we have that type of increase in income, we should be able to subsidize even the other tariffs, including the night time tariff. And just a quick follow up in terms of the daytime, nighttime. Have you actually seen a shift in demand more towards the daytime because of the lower tariffs? Not really because we don't have a lot of productive use of energy customers. So the businesses that are there, they're just small scale village businesses. Like someone is selling cold drinks, they're powering up a fridge, a barbershop, a video show. So because the number of businesses, the larger number of customers are households. So for the households, they are busy during the day doing other income generating activities, but then at night when everyone is back home, that's when they actually switch on their appliances. They have their lights on. But for the businesses, we haven't really seen a large increase in the number of people using the electricity during the day because of the because of lowering the tariff. Thanks Elizabeth. Interesting. Just looking at the time I just want to ask one last question, talking about demand stimulation from cooperatives so using existing structures to build up demand more quickly. I'm just wondering if I just want to place it out there and see if anyone wants to take this on. It's related to Vincent's solution in terms of targeting cooperatives for aggregate demand for solar water pumps so it seems to be working there. I'm a bit curious. Is this an option in context in Ethiopia and Malawi for example, using a cooperative model to maybe be an anchor client for example, could that be successful or have you seen success with that. We have not tried the cooperative model yet, but it's something that we're trying to look into moving forward to our next mini grid site. So it's a community where there's a lot of soil being grown as well as ground nuts. So they are already cooperatives around that type of agricultural production. So I cannot say we've already had an experience working with that model, but it's something that we are trying to explore. Thanks Elizabeth it sounds like there might be some potential there to for United Purpose that's that's great. We have two minutes left and I have to hand back to McKenna to give us her final thoughts. Thank you so much Kevin. I think this has been a really excellent conversations we've had from all sort of stratifications of kind of people and stakeholders engaged in productive use we've seen the example of the European how they're integrating productive use into the national electrification and those great examples from you did about the work that that is being done on the ground. And then we've seen these challenges that smaller mini grids can really encounter the examples from allowing from United Purpose have been so powerful to show what is the potential but also kind of some of these challenges that we are yet to meet and the fact that more investment is needed more technical support is needed. I'm especially for productive use and exploring those questions around some of the levers we can pull like tariffs like subsidies was also been really interesting to discuss. And then we talked about solar water pumps as one example of a productive use in Uganda and how Vincent and team are really working hard to give bespoke solutions to small holders coupled with this market linkages and all the other ecosystem solutions that really help to push a productive use. And then of course the challenge of integrating gender and, you know, Lilna's remarks were so exciting to see how it's really possible if we think more holistically to integrate gender. And so our panelists have been great at showing us the challenges and lessons and all this productive use of energy debate has been so exciting and want to thank them so much. There's so many barriers to be tackled yet on productive use, especially if you want to scale and we want to achieve SDG seven to get that universal energy for access class ID and all the folks you see on the call today will continue working partnering with each other to kind of spar and promote the benefits and impacts of productive use and hopefully SDG seven will just be around the corner for all of us. So with that, I just want to say thank you so much for joining us online and also for our panelists. Thank you so much. And yeah, we're, that's it. We can close out. Thank you.