 Thank you very much for joining us. Good morning, if you're in the Americas, plural, particular thanks for those of you who are in Pacific time zones. I know it's extremely early for you, much appreciated that you've made it to this session today. I'm Nick Kind. I'm sorry, I should say good afternoon if you're in the UK. I can see at least one person is in the UK. Vanit and I are in the UK today. And good evening if you are east of the Mediterranean Sea. I'm hoping that some folks have joined us from that part of the world. Really nice to have you all here today. My name's Nick Kind. I'm a senior director at Titan Partners. Titan Partners is a strategy consultancy and investment bank. We work uniquely in the education and human capital management space all over the world. And we spend a fair amount of our time working with impact investors and mission driven philanthropists, particularly around education. We're delighted to be putting together a series of sessions with SoCAP during this virtual event. And this is one of the ones that we've been really looking forward to. So we have hopefully a couple of people, but at the moment, Vanit, to talk about really substantial issue around impact investing in the global south in lower and middle income countries. I'm not going to do too much of an introduction here because Vanit's got quite a lot to say about this. But just a sort of few orders of how we're going to run this session and then we'll get straight into it. We're not going to do extensive introductions. What I will do is say that I'm hoping that Emiliana Vegas is going to join us briefly. In a change to the sort of advertised personnel, Rebecca Winthrop had to, was called into a very high level urgent meeting, but her co-director of the Center for Universal Education at the Brookings Institution, Emiliana Vegas, should be joining us shortly. So Rebecca's co-director is coming in who has just as prestigious a CV and some really interesting perspectives on this whole issue. So I'm delighted to welcome her when we can sort out some of those technical issues. I'm not going to do extensive further introductions. Vanit and I will carry on. You will see that my colleague Sarah Gunning is going to post some of our biographies in the chat. And talking of the chat, please feel free to think about questions and indeed ask questions during this session. We're going to reserve the final 15 minutes per session for questions from the audience. And we'd love to have those and do also feel free to introduce yourselves. One of the nice things that we can do in these virtual events is do that. Having said all of that, I'm going to hand over to Vanit who's going to kick this off. And then hopefully we're going to be able to introduce Emiliana. If not, he and I will carry on. Vanit, over to you. Thank you very much. I hope everyone can see and hear me. All right. It's always ominous when when Nix says Vanit has a lot to say. It gives me a few butterflies. Really, I'm just here in the spirit of sharing. I have worked for both grant makers and investors in education done a fair amount of stuff across most parts of the global south. And so these are just sharing some observations. One of the wrinkles of this being a virtual SoCAP is that I can't really ask for a show of hands. So I'm not sure what's the balance between entrepreneurs versus investors versus operators. But regardless of that, I think if you're working in education in any way, you know it's not an easy sector. It is a sector that's actually poised at a very interesting point in time. But easy, it definitely isn't. So I thought I would start and hopefully the technology will work by showing a brief video from Brazil just to remind ourselves and perhaps reinvigorate ourselves as to why we do this. So if you can bear with me, hopefully this will work. It's a really nice video. Yeah, in school it was, for him it was, it was being very little. He was frustrated because he doesn't teach that kind of thing to me. He's crazy and if there's not a lot of argumentation, he doesn't ask anything, he doesn't question anything. It's different here. It's different here, school. What I don't see as a difference is that those who helped me there in the school, they pass and you ask her like this, no, you have to do what you understand. And here they don't even explain it to you. And the method isn't the same. It's the rule. We know how it works. And here it's not different. He puts his ideas, he asks, he cares. And it's something that he never thought I would see. Like, wow, methodology, man. You know, with ten years of age in school, we had a lot. For me, he would never see that. And that event there is wonderful, you know. And I think what I like the most about Alicerce is the way we learn. She had a lot of difficulty, she's in her third year and she didn't know the alphabet, for example. And what they're here for a month or two months, more or less. And she knows. So she hasn't learned until now. They managed to do it. The class I liked the most was programming. We learned to start moving the computer, to create sites, games. That's what we learned. And I see that she's learning, and it's not in a boring way. She says, wow, today we played, and then I learned that. Like I said, for a child to feel pleasure to come and want to come. Because I think that any child, for the most of those things in school, the day goes by. She says, today she won't go. She says, it's good. And not here. They have to feel pleasure to come and participate. I don't know about you. That gets me every time I see it when you see the kids and the reaction. That's actually a very interesting company. It's a company that's you can see is clearly tapping into strong family demand. It's delivering an innovative approach. And that it's clients value. And it's actually responding pretty well to some of the very big challenges that COVID has brought. Now that ought to be enough. You think that would be enough for any company in any sector, but it's not. Education has many challenges. So here are some of the top four challenges I've noticed through my work. One, it's highly polarized. Many, many ideological battles. Lots of people have strong opinions and take sides. Some say the state should be the only provider of education. There should be no role for the private sector. Others take the ideological opposite and say that the fact that hundreds of millions of children are undereducated shows that the state has failed. Two, it's highly incumbent friendly. The large monopolies and oligopolies, public, private, and union that are present in education mean that a company, a startup, can have a pretty tough time within the mainstream sector. Incumbent corporates have cozy relationships. Government sales cycles are long, bureaucratic, typically centralized. Revenue models can be very tough to build and scale. And if you switch to the private school sector, it's often hyperfragmented. In many places, teacher unions are a law unto themselves. It's huge political power and entrenched vested interests. Three, the sector is often highly, not always sensibly regulated. Now, regulation is clearly important and necessary. These are children, right? But regulation too often becomes around process-ticking, inputs requirements, sizes, those sorts of things, not about whether children are actually learning or not. Four, all this leads to a sector where it's very, very difficult to distinguish signal from noise. So most of the stakeholders involved in education, whether they are regulators, companies, politicians, civil servants, civil society, experts, whoever, have actually quite low accountability. There's very little, if any, price of failure for them. The failure, it's typically born by the poor, whose children are let down, right? If the health sector had performed the way education has in terms of soaking up so much government budgets, but delivering such poor outcomes, they would brightly be outraged. But because in education, it's children not learning and that's perhaps more difficult to see, it just gets lost and forgotten, historically. Now, that probably sounds very gloomy, lots of challenges, but actually, I think education and in particular the role of private capital, private sector in education, is poised at a very, very interesting moment right now. And unfortunately, it largely stems from COVID. When the pandemic first started, there were a few, let's call them ideologues, some of them even call themselves philanthropies, but they use a definition of philanthropy that I have never seen in a dictionary, who were happy about the economic pain that poor families were going to be facing, because they realized it was going to be so bad that enrollment in private sector schools would go down. And for them, this was a silver lining, right? And that's a direct quote from one of them. The sad reality is that the distress caused by this virus has been so extreme, though, that all sorts of status quo arrangements, old ideological battles have to be looked at afresh. So what's happening right now is governments are facing a double whammy, tax revenues are going down and need is going up across the board, health, education, social protection jobs. And I do think that old ideologies, old arguments, old social contracts are now both unaffordable and also unjustifiable. So where does this sort of lead to? So a couple of observations are on some of the opportunities that there are in this. Efficacy does something work and equity have always been very important matters. And they have been rightly scrutinized in education debates on public versus private sector. And the picture is mixed here, right? Many claims to private sector outperformance disappear once you factor family characteristics in. But the reality is, and there is high quality evidence that shows that intelligent and subtle regulatory approaches can lead to efficacy and equity gains, which involve the private sector. So there's some fascinating work on report cards in Pakistan that has been coming out of Harvard. There's some emerging evidence from Kenya that's showing that low cost operators there are being more responsive in using better literacy pedagogies. Now throughout all of these, one of the factors that is almost always true is that the private sector is more cost effective. So even if it delivers the same results as the public sector, it does so more cheaply. And I think this is an important thing not to lose sight of when you look now at the fiscal realities facing societies. Another important role for the private sector going forward is innovation. More has to be done with less. And particularly if you want to help the people who are being left behind, the people who are not wealthy enough to be able to bubble, you know, form their own bubbles and look after their families and their children. And so effective innovation, and I really do emphasize the word effective innovation, is crucial. The public system's ability to innovate is often constrained and that's not a criticism. Its primary task is to execute at scale. Non-state organizations can be more agile and that's one of the competitive advantages that they have. Ali Cersei, which is the Brazilian company, is one example of this. It's an innovative after-school model. Some of you may have seen a New York Times report recently about a Botswana nonprofit that's using SMS messages to help learners in lockdown. What that report didn't mention is there's a company called the NASA, a Kenyan company, which has three orders of magnitude more learners. It uses the same approach. It's now in four countries. The government of Rwanda has just taken it into Rwanda. It has over a million users. That's an example of innovation. There's a South African company, a machine learning adaptive company called Siavula, whose technology is so good that Google basically asked them to take the entire Nigerian secondary math curriculum and put it on their platform. So these are examples of some of the ways that the private sector can be doing things to contribute. Each of these three may seem slightly tangential because they're out of school. Ali Cersei is after school. I'm not going to say that. I'm not going to say that. Siavula's ed tech products can be used in school or out of school. Does that mean that there is no role for private sector innovators within the mainstream school system? No. I wouldn't say that at all. It is tougher. The capital and labor costs are higher. But it can be done. I'm sort of conscious. I'm going to be running into my time to speak soon. This is the most exciting school model in the global south. And that's not my words. That's the economist has even described it as such. It's a really interesting school model that uses blended learning technologies to deliver elite private quality education at the same cost per child as a government. So let me hopefully the technology will work. I will show that. And let's see. Our teaching is based on research from around the world and unique learning models that we believe work the best. We're here to revolutionize education in South Africa. So we use revolutionary methods. These models are non-traditional but very effective. Gone are the days of a teacher lecturing to students in front of the room while the kids sit silent and bored. Our learning models are engaging and interactive. We know that every scholar has a different way of learning. So we ensure that they are treated as individuals in class. Personalized learning means everyone learns in a way and at a pace that's most effective for them. These are some of the progressive models we use to give our scholars an all-round education for life. Right. I'm running out of my time. So we started with a video from the B of BRICS and we're ending with a video from the S. This is deliberately being fast and whistle-stop just to give a sense of the challenges and some of the activities and the creativity that innovators and entrepreneurs are responding with. I just conclude by saying that COVID is rightly forcing every society on the planet to look at itself in the mirror. We have to change. Social contracts have to evolve. I think that means the private sector has a role to play. Old ideologies I don't believe serve the disadvantage regardless of where you are on the political spectrum. It's also important that the private sector plays its partner responsible way. So I'm not going to be a market fundamentalist in a booster. It has been as culpable to over-claiming and over-stepping but really it's incumbent on all of us now to try and park some of these old battles and figure out a new, better equilibrium. I'll stop now but hopefully there'll be lots of questions. And I'm Vinnie, thank you. That was great. And I'm delighted that Emiliana's here to join us after the delights of technical fun and games. Emiliana works at the Brookings Institution has huge experience in so many of the issues that Vinnie has been raising and has been looking at them both from an academic and from a very practical point of view as a funder and as a researcher and so much else. So you know what? I'm just going to pass straight to you, Emiliana, to respond to what Vinnie said. Oh, thank you, Nick and Vinnie. Great presentation and really good highlighting the key issues. I am really in a lot of agreement with everything pretty much you've said. I wanted to kind of put an emphasis on a few areas, particularly given the audience. So you mentioned that if health had the same outcomes, it would be in much more trouble than education. And we'd like to say that education is an assignment crisis because it really is as grave as the deaths we're seeing from COVID, the learning losses, the earnings losses that are going to result from the learning crisis that even before COVID, but now with COVID has just been exacerbated and accelerating the inequality, you know, so kids and poor communities are really being so hard hit by this. So, you know, I think we all need to also recognize and push our societies to recognize that education, you know, that the loss in learning and the poor outcomes that we have been seeing and are now exacerbating is a critical problem for us to make progress. And then I really like the examples that you brought because they, a lot of our research is saying that a lot of the failed efforts to improve education, both at the kind of systemic level with school reforms, as well as with innovations in the ed tech space, part of why they have had disappointing results in learning is that they've focused very little on what we call the instructional core, meaning this, you know, triangle between the teacher the learner and the content. And when we really try to innovate, you know, my message in our recent reports has been, you know, really focus relentlessly on the instructional core. If you're just replacing, you know, let's say technology for analog solutions, but nothing's going to change in terms of the interactions between students and content or educators and content or educators and students, it's likely you're going to be, everybody's going to be disappointed. And so, you know, I think we have collectively failed in that way in great measure. And then for, you know, having been leading kind of the decisions of development banks, like the Inter-American Development Bank on investing in some, you know, pilot projects in some innovations to then with the idea that we would then scale them up. I think one way in which a lot of investors could do better is in from the get go, measuring the impact of the interventions and having a plan to be able to show that your innovation is really leading to improvements in learning. Or even as Vinny was saying, even if it's just, you know, the same learning, but a much lower cost. So measuring both the impact on learning as well as the cost effectiveness is something that I don't think we've done well enough. The example that you're giving of Botswana, what's great about that effort is not only the innovative part of shifting to SMS and texting and reaching to parents, but also that they built in a randomized control trial very quickly and are already showing some promising results. And also I have to say that the evaluation has allowed them also to adjust the interventions to, you know, increase the impact. So it's not just, you know, to show that you have impact, but really to improve your intervention because, you know, at the start we might have good ideas, but as we move along, we really have to learn about how they are implemented in real time in a particular context. And then the final point I want to make before we go and have more of a conversation is you made a very important point about, and I liked how you said it, that there's highly regulated, but often not sensibly regulated. And I totally agree. I mean, education systems are so regulated in terms of inputs and processes and much less focused on outcomes and, you know, how different groups of students experience the process to then lead to different outcomes. And so the more that we can collectively focus on working with governments to make more sensible regulations, I think the more there will be space for, you know, kind of good private investment to take place and really move the needle. So I'll leave it at that and just see what your reactions are. What we've got a load of, I'm actually going to relatively quickly move on to the questions we're getting in the chat because people are asking some really great things and they're raising some of the issues that I wanted to raise anyway. But I just want to bring out one more thing, Emiliana, out of the work that you've been doing. So one thing that people say, and Vanid has said as well is that the private sector can be a really great place to develop and test innovative solutions and that might be innovative pedagogies, it might be innovative tools, it might be anything which gets involved in the education sector. We've seen some private sectors players who are arguably not very interesting pedagogies but have, you know, had a degree of success. But some of the work that I know that you've done and you've done with Rebecca is all about what you call a leapfrog. About finding innovations that arguably can take, you know, lower and middle intercom countries education systems further than where the global north is and actually start to deliver some of the outcomes that we here in the global north want to see in our education systems better for those educators. And I'd love if you want to talk a little bit about, you know, what you've seen in terms of the role of the private sector in driving some of that leapfrogging which you've written so interestingly about. Oh, thank you. Yeah, so what we, you know, we started this work about five years ago. I must say my team because I was not yet with Brookings and what they did, which I think, you know, obviously it's part of the reason I'm now at Brookings, I was so engaged with that work and it had so much impact in the work that we did in the development field and the development bankings, was that they started saying, look, look, we have a huge learning outcomes gap between students in the poorest countries of the world and those that are in high performing education systems would tend to be the OECD richer countries and if we continue thinking about educational progress in the traditional ways that in the ways that these systems that are now high performing systems evolved, it will take us 100 years for these countries and we don't have that kind of time. And so can we think of ways in which we can leapfrog in education to make sure to basically push them forward in faster ways and the leapfrog pathway that we put forward really is thinking about how innovations building on previous work work to not just substitute or augment what's currently happening but really to modify it and really reinvent how instruction is happening and how kids are engaging with instruction. And so the proposal really is to think about in this framework not just doing the same with a different tool or just marginally more of the same but rather really transforming and we're really in the COVID world thinking a lot about this word systems transformation. How do we take advantage of some of the innovations that are happening and some of the changes that were really hard to envision or to implement a year ago. We never thought that teachers would be able to go digital in the massive ways that they all of a sudden did because they had to and kind of the historical fears and resistance and I guess conservative wisdom of education systems had to be broken down and there's a lot of interesting things happening. The way that parents are being engaged in children's education the way that children themselves and students are being forced to take more ownership on their own learning so these are things that we're hoping that we can keep post COVID and really transform systems and have students play a bigger role, parents continue to play a bigger role and educators really shift their role from sort of the owners of knowledge and the sole conveyors of it to really a person who facilitates and guides a student to access knowledge and access skills and something that in the education community has been talked about for a long time but that it was very difficult to get educators kind of wrap their heads around that and losing the complete authority that they had but now with COVID they kind of have done that anyway so let's take some of that. So Vinnie I don't know if you want to lean in on any of that before we move on to any of the other questions that I can see pinging around and by the way Beth who's been a really active participant in the chat I think that that probably addresses your question around pedagogies because you know there are plenty of local contextual pedagogies and I think that's been a very important part as I understood the leapfrog work is thinking about those very much in their local context. Vinnie no I mean I would just I found myself nodding along so because I agree I think Emiliana was making excellent, excellent points and that's reflected in many of the insights that have been coming from Emiliana and her colleagues. There are important things here that the learning is fundamentally a huge at least from my perspective I'm not an expert educator but everything that I've seen and experienced is learning is fundamentally a human process you're changing the way a human being a child thinks about what they themselves are capable of so do they need basic things do they need literacy numeracy those sorts of skills yes but it's as much around unlocking what they think they are themselves capable of and if you look at what the best teachers do it's more than just sticking words and numbers down a child's throat right it's it's that's part of the instructional core that's and I noticed that there's some questions around some of the softer skills. Those are themes that run from early childhood through to late adolescence right I mean I've seen models which deliver tremendous educational outcome gains in late adolescence where people have traditionally said oh it's too late by then but actually no it's just understanding what it is that needs to be unlocked and then making sure that they are able to get some of the really the things that they may not have been able to access before right I'll give you a great example there was of a teacher in rural very very rural South Africa in KwaZulu Natal the province of Ndala came from the school is so rural that there isn't even a mobile signal secondary education their big end of school school exams there so there was a teacher what he did for his students this was at a math competency level where the teacher realized I'm probably not going to be the best teacher but I can get the product there is this product out there so the teacher used to drive the kids to the top of a hill so that they could pick up the mobile signal and the teacher was basically mentoring and encouraging them that's just one example so I mean I think this you know teachers absolutely have a really important role to play that goes back to this instructional core and but it's and the other thing I would just really echo very much is this the point around being open and honest about impact measurement don't overclaim too many people overclaim I think it does it's a disservice to the families that we're trying to help and also frankly it's poor investing because you're kidding yourself you know you cannot run away from what the actual facts are and if your product is not working it's not working and it's really really important and again I think echoing what Emiliano was saying around and what's so good to hear about the Botswana thing is the course correction there is no such thing as perfection it's continuous improvement so if you approach that mentality the companies non-profits the organizations will be better will be healthier for the long term and even if you want to think as an investor you will have a better company that you're invested in I'll shut up there thank you look we're going to switch we've got so many interesting questions coming in but I want to sort of deal with what really important and pointed one which is around business models so there have been a couple of questions about one was around I think from Natula around okay great that the private sector can do this more efficiently making that assumption great there's plenty of innovation but if poor people have to pay for that surely that completely defeats the object so interested to hear about what you're seeing in terms of and my colleague Andrew Minnelli asked the question which is you know okay so how impact investors participate and pay for this so I'd love to hear from you about some models where perhaps you know the parents aren't having to pay but nevertheless the public sector the private sector is driving some innovation maybe Emiliana you want to lean on that particularly I know is that you worked extensively on this in South America for example yeah well it's interesting I think that is a very tricky question to get right and you know I think the best way to have students not pay is to partner with the public sector and as Vinic said it's tricky the public sector is not as nimble it has all sorts of processes but if you want to go to scale if you really want to have an impact at scale they're the big players right they're the ones who end up serving the majority of kids in most countries and the majority of disadvantaged kids in many countries as well so you know I would say what we've seen in Latin America in countries like Chile for example which is very different from honestly the rest of the region because of its nationwide school choice program where public funding goes to private schools and families arguably can select I mean there's been a history of schools really selecting the students as well but I think the big lesson there has been that you know that over the years having a lot of information and really processing it and really seeing what worked and what didn't you can establish a regulatory environment that is more sensible and that encourages kind of the private sector to produce results for disadvantaged people and provides the resources it recognizes that serving poor kids who don't have the support at home that more advantage affluent kids do requires more investment and so the governments are smart in doing that are very few unfortunately and so I think that's something that partnerships with the private sector and kind of seeing how do you do that regulatory environment that allows the private sector to innovate and really find those creative ways but also get a return if you want to add anything otherwise I will go on it's really difficult there isn't a magic one answer to this sadly I mean Emiliana's touched upon some of the approaches where if you can get the public sector to somehow or governments to start supporting this but you do then and into this at times very politically contentious conversations around the government paying for private schools to educate poor kids there are I think this is a multi pronged approach the reality is if you look at urban India right now more than 50% of children in urban India do not go to government schools and so there is a whole socioeconomic curve but more than 50% of kids in urban India their families are sending them to private schools will the poorest be able to afford those? No but what's interesting and what's really gives me optimism is you start to see the innovation that's coming in the afterschool sector so very often I talk to people and I say look I can't afford to send my child to a private school even a low cost private school I can't afford those fees but what I do do is I send my child to an afterschool tuition right and once upon a time tuition was one on one it was something that the middle class could afford but with the benefit of technology you're now starting to see group based tuition approaches which are again will the poorest of the poor be able to afford that unfortunately no but it can allow for quality education to start to percolate further and further down the curve but I don't think there's a magic wand answer unfortunately thank you there are plenty more questions coming in Gabrielle has raised the issue about measurement effectively she's saying okay so how do we measure the strongest education systems are the current so the PISA tests are they skewed in the wrong direction I broaden that question out I have to say which is how do we if we are impact investors looking at the sector how do we effectively measure success particularly given what both of you have said around not being too ambitious and not setting ourselves unreasonable rhetorical targets I'd be very interested in that and I know you've done a little bit of work on this and where you come from on that and then I'll pass to Emilia I think measuring especially if you look at measuring at a system level versus measuring at an organization level I think it's really really important to be very very objective about measuring impact and that means looking so there are techniques where you really want to try and look at is it your core school or your education product that is actually delivering those are those learning gains going up are those learning gains being driven by family characteristics or what you're doing it's also really important to make sure you're not doing things like cream skimming you know unfortunately there have been examples of that that's not right and it's also misguided because you're kidding yourself if what you're doing is cream skimming kids and then saying we're delivering really good at quality education you're kidding everybody so I think it's really important to be very very objective and open about that and to say this is what's working this is what we think we want to get better I use a very for me a rule of thumb that I've used in my work is is the quality of whatever I'm looking at whatever this organization is doing is the quality at that level that the richest families the top 20% would want to send their kids to this right because I think I personally speaking in personal capacity I struggle with arguments where they say well you know because the poor can't afford it they should somehow make do with a lesser quality education I think that's a defeat I think we are more than capable and there are models that can say hang on how do we deliver using the resources we have a quality of education that the top 20% would send their kids to but in a way that is accessible and affordable for the bottom 20% I think that's the challenge and you can start to see those signals in different ways you can have RCTs but you can also sort of look at actual customer behavior do you have rich families saying I want to use this product or not Emiliana I mean I agree with most of what we need to sing I think in practice though one thing that we've seen in developing countries and part of what you were reporting in India what we've seen throughout Latin America is that families choose schools not only based on learning outcomes and on a big driver and it's been quite research in some countries it is the characteristics of the peer group and so it's natural for families who are for example the top 20% in wealth to want their kids to be with the same type of families and that's part of why it's so hard to disentangle for example whether elite schools in when you look at PISA results in developing countries the kids who are attending the private elite schools are outperforming kids who are not, who are in public schools and who are from generally lower socio-economic backgrounds however you know does that mean those schools are better? No it means those kids are better and so to your question how do you actually measure this that's something that economists we really worry about that about attributing the impact when you don't know what is the real effect we talk a lot about selection bias so you talked about cream skimming right when schools have some sort of admissions process where they select students based on you know characteristics of how committed out there are they to their school philosophy or school instruction you know that already creates an easier let's say environment for your intervention to succeed and so that's why randomized controlled trials are so respected because it really forces the intervention to randomly assign spots in the school or spots to benefit from the intervention and follow a group that is then because of the random process statistically identical and so that's what we really in the end would encourage everyone to do I mean there are ways to do this that you can after control for that but it's much more complicated it's much easier to just do admissions by lottery or some sort of random assignment and then follow up the kids who were not admitted I suspect we could carry on talking about this for hours if not days but between us and indeed between between us and this very active and engaged audience which is fabulous particularly on such a virtual event it's really heartening everybody to see that happening so I'm going to kind of try and wrap this up by asking you both the same question and it's slightly building something that Brian had just put in the chat so Brian's asking a question about you know there are some innovative business models in the US around income sharing agreements which doubtless you both know about where effectively a student or child doesn't have to pay up front but sacrifice some element of their future income back to pay for what they've had that's one innovative business model that might be an interesting thing across the world and in lower middle income companies but I'm going to throw that one at you but also throw you if there was one thing that you'd like to see more of now given our horrible Covid crisis given what we are going into in terms of how the private sector might intervene and educate around this whole area what would you like to see more of or what would you like to see happen I'd love your relatively instant responses to that and Amelia you're smiling so I'm hoping you've got an instant response but it was deep in thought so I'm going to give him 30 more seconds well you know I think that what I'd like to see more particularly now in the Covid time is interventions that help low income young children I think those are the ones who are you know at really great risk when they have for example families that can't really help look after them properly and stimulate them their development cognitively and socio-emotionally you know investing in really high quality early care and pre-primary education opportunities for the most disadvantage I think is it would yield the highest results in the long run thank you Vinny yeah I think I'll end up in a very similar place to Miliana I would if I could have a magic wand I would ask for much more focus on the non-cognitive aspects of children's lives and I think that that's an area that is being massively damaged right now it's being disproportionately damaged for poorer families so early childhood absolutely one of the biggest reasons why early childhood is so powerful is because it works in non-cognitive domains but the non-cognitive domains are still very very plastic even in later in adolescence so there's some fascinating research that's coming out of the neuroscience departments out of Cambridge and a bunch of other places where this is an issue for adolescence as well that to me that is the big thing if we can somehow protect and then continue to develop the non-cognitive aspects of young people's I don't know it's not brains but I think that's the most important and most powerful thing that we can do for 20, 30, 40 years from now thank you and thank you both very much for spending your time with us Daphne and thank you all wherever you are in the world for joining us this afternoon morning evening wherever you are we really really appreciated your really active engagement in this and really look forward to carrying on the conversation when we can whether virtually or hopefully face to face thank you all very much for joining us thank you