 Now, we asked Mr. Wisdom Akpalo from State University of New York to reflect on these findings. Please welcome up, Mr. Wisdom Akpalo. Thank you very much for inviting me, and most importantly, I want to express my profound gratitude to CIDA for helping me to acquire my PhD program here in Sweden. So I'm a direct beneficiary of Development Aid. So I just started by saying a big thank you to CIDA for supporting me to study in Gothenburg where I had my PhD, and I'm very proud of. In fact, the fact that two of us out of the four Africans here benefited from the aid that we received from CIDA speaks to the fact that aid is indeed making an impact. We were not just selected at random, the fact that we have been selected for doing something good means that we can attest to the fact that aid is making an impact. So as rightly pointed out, we have realized that aid is indeed playing a very important role in developing countries, and aid has helped some of the countries to transition from being low-income countries to middle-income countries. But as we know, there is a very fine line between some of the low-income countries and the middle-income countries. So it is very important that even for countries that have transitioned to middle-income countries, the poor in those countries continue to receive some aid. In fact, as indicated here, I think if you are poor and you live in a very poor country, among your peers, it is better than being very poor and living in a middle-income country. So it must be very depressing indeed to be poor and living in a middle-income country. Those who are poor in middle-income countries certainly need help. Now we also know that there is a new challenge that has emerged from what we understand in climate science, indicating that although these countries, some of them have transitioned to become middle-income countries, they still have the challenges that are imposed by the changing climate. Indeed, even without talking about the changing climate, the growth that has been experienced in Africa in recent times has partly been due to the fact that there has been extensive exploitation of natural resources. In fact, about a third of the growth that Africa has registered in recent times, which has made Africa look so good, comes from overhaversing of fish stocks, depletion of soil capital, and then extraction of forest stocks. So if you look at it from the long-term perspective, this growth may not be sustainable. And then out to the problem is this changing climate, which is becoming a very serious issue. And now we understand that there are funds available, as has been pointed out this morning, that potentially Africa can have access to. But we know that there are some challenges that are making it very difficult for Africa to assess some of these funds. And the question would be why is it that we have so much funds going around, but Africa is not taking advantage of this? And we can speak to a few important points. For example, we know that there is very limited knowledge of climate science in Africa. In fact, when I studied in Gothenburg and went back to Ghana trying to do some work on fisheries management, I realized that I was alone. And this is not only in natural resource management, it's also in climate science in general. So there is very limited capacity on the continent to address these pertinent issues. Now, if we do not know what we have, we cannot sell it. We cannot assess the markets. If we cannot, for example, determine what addition we have made to the stock of climate, the stock of greenhouse gases that we've been able to sequester with our forest stocks. So it is very important that we provide knowledge of climate science and climate management. We also know that there are demand uncertainties implying that because of the fact that the market for carbon is not really very functioning in a way that we will be able to determine how much we will get from selling carbon is very difficult for us to have the right investment made in Africa or to be able to channel the limited resources into that. We also know that some of these initiatives that have been discussed are based on forests. So if you are a country within the continent that do not have access to forest stock or your forest stock, you are not well endowed with forest stock, you may not be able to have access to some of these benefits. And most importantly, Africa is bedeviled with weak institutions. I have been working on the fisheries sector, fisheries management, and you will clearly see that the institutions that govern the fisheries in many countries within the continent along the coast are very weak. So obviously, you have overharvesting or people investing too much effort than they are supposed to be investing in the fishery, and this leads to overharvesting. And eventually, the living conditions of those fishermen have been deteriorating over time. Now, so the question is, what can it do to Africa? And this is one area where I would like to spend some time on. First of all, it is very important that we begin to strengthen and build institutions in Africa. This is of paramount importance. And specifically, if we can develop independent academic institutions, and here what I mean is that we try to nature, we establish a nature institution that will be able to train Africans on the knowledge that we need to be able to address this problem. This will be a long way to provide the needed ingredient to solving the problem. For example, we have a situation in Ghana where I come from, where there has been mixed signals that have been sent to the fisheries industry. On one hand, we have the catch per unit effort, meaning the catch that fishermen get per trip declining over time, but governments still subsidizing fishing boats by way of giving subsidies on premixed fuel. Governments providing echo soundness to fishermen to be able to catch more fish whilst we know, or there is evidence out there that catch per unit effort is going down, or fishermen are catching less and less fish. The only reason, or one of the main reasons that this is happening is because perhaps the government have little knowledge about the stock dynamics, the dynamics of the stock over time. Perhaps because occasionally you have some upward sedges in catches, they feel that well, maybe the stock will come back. And fishermen themselves, if you talk to them, you realize that they lack the knowledge of the fact that when you harvest too much of the stock today, there is less to be harvested tomorrow. So education is very important, both in terms of building local academic institutions and educating the players involved, such as the fishermen, to better understand how those resources behave and then perhaps that will give them the opportunity to manage them sustainably. And if you ask me, if you have aid and you are thinking about where to invest it, which area will be the most important area to invest the aid, I will talk about institutions. And this will include building academic institutions, eventually managed by Africans, or managed by developing countries in those countries. And then nature in those institutions to become independent, to tackle this problem. I think that is where my money will go, institution building, including academic institution. And then in addition to the institutions, or building the institutions and training those people in the developing countries to understand their problems, there is a need for investment to be made in research and development. Because if we do not direct resources to research and development, it will be very difficult for those institutions to start a test of time. If you are well trained and you don't have the resources to be able to do research, to come out with findings that will influence policy, the knowledge may even disappear over time. And we've seen this happening, some people from Africa training outside of Africa, going home, but because of lack of resources to engage in research and development, over time they lose that capacity. So resources for research is very important. It is also important that we support communities to adapt and then mitigate climate impacts. This is very, very important because there is some connectivity or there is some relationship between adaptation and mitigation. For example, as we saw this morning, the funds that are allocated to adaptation issues relative to mitigation issues is declining over time. This clearly means that over time if nothing is done, this developing countries will be moving more towards, I encourage you to move more towards mitigation than adaptation, but if we know that adaptation issues are very important to developing countries, that it's important that resources are directed at those adaptation issues as well. What I mean here is that, for example, if you do not provide resources for adaptation, let's say adaptation in agriculture, it is possible that the developing countries may, for example, cut down trees or cut down forests to expand the area that they devote to agriculture, and this may have implications for mitigation. So the two issues are related. Now, the other issue that I think is very important is that there is a need for some impact assessment to be done frequently. If you invest a lot of resources in this capacity building and all the others we've talked about, but you do not carry out frequent assessment of the impact of what the resources or the aid is doing, eventually this may lead to some form of rent seeking and corruption that we have seen in developing countries. In most cases, a lot of resources go to these developing countries for a lot of projects, but eventually some of the resources are not really allocated to what they are supposed to be doing. So there is a need for continuous assessment to be done to assess the impact of the aid that is allocated to these developing countries. Finally, I would also like to say that perhaps most importantly, aid should be tied to good governance. There are situations where we know aid is fungible. There are situations where people have misallocated the aid to other things that they are not supposed to use them for, or they allocated them to doing other things that may gain them politically. I mean, especially, again, a case in Ghana with regards to fisheries, a research, a paper that I did recently on the effect of aid on fisheries. I realize that when aid goes to fisheries capacity building, the impact is lost in the industry. We realize that if you increase aid to capacity building, fisheries capacity enhancement, for example, by one percent, the impact of that would be a loss of about 2.2 to 2.7 percent in catch losses within the fishery along the coast of sub-Saharan Africa. So indeed, a very important point here is that aid should be tied to good governance, so that the aid is directed to, for example, protecting and enhancing the stock rather than harvesting more of the stock today just to gain political, I mean, just to win votes or for political expediency rather than supporting the stock of some of these resources. Thank you.