 you, who are at our seminar today on the business case for nutrition and improving value chain productivity. And I'd like to first hand over the welcome address to Jakob Granit, who is our Centre Director for Stockholm Environment Institute in Sweden. Thanks so much. The microphone is working. We are very welcome to the Stockholm Environment Institute and we are really happy to see you here at the Institute for this, which I understand is the first discussion on the topic of nutrition and how it links to sustainable business opportunities in a broader sense. And as you heard, I'm Centre Director here at our office in Stockholm and also Deputy Director of SEI globally and all of you might not know SEI in detail, but we are an international science to policy institute. And we try to work very broadly across the issues of access to energy, food, food security, water, livelihood issues, spanning the more complex nexus issues, the trade-offs between water and food, for example, in development, all the way up to the SDG process and international issues, rate to climate change. So we have to do that work. We work across the world. We have centres in Thailand, in Estonia, and we have a small centre in Nairobi, in US, and in UK. And that type of network gives us a sense of what's going on in different parts of the world. But to be able to carry out this mission of working towards sustainable futures, we have to work with partners. So we are very happy to work with Inclusive Business Sweden, which is not only bringing in other colleagues like the SP, the Swedish Institute, that we are working very closely with, and of course, again, Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition with its broad network globally and excellent work. So that partnership is what makes these discussions interesting and valuable for you, I hope, today. Just as an example, an illustration of how broad this topic is, that you are tackling, but how it also fits into a broader development agenda, we are also very engaged now in the ongoing Stockholm Forum on Security and Development, which is organised by CITBRI. And it's these two days in Stockholm. And the discussion is about fragile states, how to create more security for these countries to avoid falling into civil strife and destabilisation. And one thing that I took with me from the opening yesterday is what Jan Eliasson, the Assistant Secretary-General of the UN, and Minister Levine said, and that is, we have to work horizontally. The time is up for working in silos, and we really have to work horizontally. And I think the topic we are going into today about nutrition, good, bad nutrition, that is something that really spans the whole spectrum, because it links, as we know, to livelihoods, to education, to health, and all those aspects. So we are very happy that we can also utilize the Swedish International Agriculture Network to spread the world about this discussion. It is streamed. The broader network will have access to this discussion, and it's recorded for the future, so that what will be said here will be kept and we can build on this discussion. So we are very happy to see you all at SEI, and wish you a great day, and thank you. Okay. I'm very happy to have that overview, and since you mentioned SEI, I would just like to add that the Network Initiative is a CEDA-financed project that has been hosted by SEI since 2009. We have, who is one of the statisticians here, 1,500 members, and more. Okay. Oh, well. I remember the last party we had. We celebrated 1,500. So we have 1,500 members, about almost 90 institutional, and those are individual members, 90 institutional, and I urge you all, if you're not already, to sign up to be a member of SEI on the Network, because very important information, useful links to other websites, and our partners are up at siani.se. So I urge you all to become members. It's very good for your professional development, and we're here organizing, co-organizing this with two appreciated partners today, Gain and Inclusive Business Sweden. I'm the chair, it's just chairperson. I'm used to being called a moderator, but that's alright. I interpret chair very literally. I'm going to sit in my chair for most of the time. And I'm very particularly happy to, we have a very packed program, 10 minutes per presentation. I'd like to have questions saved for after two to three presentations, so we make sure we keep our time schedule. And I want to point out to you that it is, for in professional terms, I'm a production, agricultural production economist, so you know I'm one of the old school, not only in age, but in training. And it's unusual to find the words business case, value chain, and nutrition in the same headline. They're not. I remember years ago there's a person, Per Pinstrup Andersen, who's a Danish professor at Cornell, who does a lot of work in nutrition, and he was a lone figure, a sort of a unusual eccentric person who worked with the Aggies and brought in nutrition to us. But I think this is in line with a general trend that we see in food security, where we're moving from the production-led, food security is producing more food, to the demand-led, to the consumer-oriented, and then of course nutrition comes into, because it's not just to increase the production of grains on a global scale. We need to look at what people eat and where, how it gets to where they are, etc., etc. And of course, when you look at the productivity aspects of nutrition, as Jakob mentioned, health and livelihoods and education and all these things, which will have some very detailed presentations in a minute, then you start realizing that increasing productivity in this way will lead to economic and financial gains. And there's something very important in that for the ag processing and agro industry private sector. So, with those words, I will now find my chair and welcome you all, especially though I'm very happy that we're so diverse today. And our first presenter, let's see, my English isn't doing too well today, is Charlotte Pedersen from Gain, and she's going to give a session on how poor nutrition impacts on production, education and health in developing countries. Okay, so we do the technical thing. I think that the technical people are not used to the fact that the chair doesn't go on for ten minutes. But that'll give us more time to discuss. Thank you, Charlotte. Thank you for getting this opportunity to work with you today on how we can make value change more productive by using nutrition. I work for the Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition, which is a global organization. We were born in 2002 within the UN system, but we are now an independent organization with headquarters in Geneva. And I work out of the Copenhagen office, and I'm responsible for the work we do with Nordic partners. So we work very much, it says also a bit in our name. We are the Global Alliance, so what we do is really building alliances to make value change work for the poor, give access to markets. And also we work on nutrition-sensitive value change. This is not my presentation. I don't know where that is. I have a PDF file sent. That is, yeah. Okay, that's it. Okay, I'll push down the next one. This is one. Can you push down for the... No, this one is not. Okay, this one, if you can. Okay, but if you can just put it on to the next page, I just wanted to explain that in Scandinavia we have started to work with mainly Danish organization, but also one Swedish, the Tetra Pak, where we really try to work on finding solutions that are market-based, so sustainable and still achieving a nutritional impact. I think, sorry, I'll just go up here and see if we can... Can you view here? I don't know why it does like this. But anyway, the size of... I wanted this presentation just to give some feeling for what are we actually talking about and how big is this issue. So we have about 800 million people going hungry to bed every day, but we have two billion that are actually not getting enough nutrients, so now we're also talking about micronutrients, so vitamins and minerals, and that has a huge impact on people's lives, so really missing essential nutrients in the diet. But we also have... I don't know if some technical person could get this one here to work or not. Okay, that might be it. Yeah, okay, I'm sorry. Anyway, but we also should recognize that we have about almost also two billion people that are actually overweight and of these 600,000 million are actually obese as well. So we really need to look at this double burden of malnutrition. So one important part, and actually if we look at this malnutrition part of it, it has a huge impact on children's survival, so about three million children are actually dying each year, which can be gone back to malnutrition, and actually one million of these can actually be attributed to a micronutrient deficiency. So if we think how many this is actually each day, it's maybe 3,000 children every day losing their lives for missing out of these essential vitamins and minerals. So if that would come up in the papers every day, I think we will have much more actions around solving this problem because it is actually solvable. But this is really like a blind spot for the people who are not in nutrition. How many of you are actually nutritionists or really working with nutrition? No, that's good because then I'm not preaching to the one who actually knows this issue. But one of the terms that we are talking about is stunting, and that is actually chronicle men nutrition. And it's really for many people who are not nutritionists, this is really a blind spot. It's not really recognized because you don't really see children who are stunted. But they are actually very short of their growth. So it's not apparent. It's not like they have big bellies and look very hungry. They are just very small of their age, and it really means that they are not only physically impaired, but also mentally, and the immune system is also impaired because of not getting the right nutrients. And especially a certain period in life, what we call the thousand days, window is extremely important to get the right nutrition there. So this is really from when the women get pregnant and through the pregnancy, through the breast feeding period, it's important that the children get exclusive breastfeeding at least six months. And after that, going on to complementary feeding, which also has the right nutrition, up to the second year, it is so important that the children get enough nutrients in this period. If they don't, they actually do get impaired for the rest of the lives. So it's really important to see how can we break the cycle of malnutrition, because if a child is born, if it survives, and it is spawned by knowledge, it will get, you know, have a higher chance of dying. And if it survives, it has a higher chance of really getting less developed in terms of, like I said, the cognitive and immune systems and so on. I'm below average. But also, it's learning capabilities is decreased. So especially young girls have a bigger chance of falling out of school, and often solution is again to get married early, and then we have the cycle of malnutrition running out. So it's also the thousand days, but also we put in here the S11 girls, it's really important that we get, you know, solutions that also captures the young women before they actually get pregnant. I have put down some overview of where we actually have this problem, which we call the hidden hunter. So now I'm really talking about these micronutrient deficiencies. So it's, of course, sub-Saharan Africa, but also Southeast Asia, and India is a huge issue. So we will also hear a bit later today about a problem or a solution we have for that problem in India, working with Unilever. So just to give a little bit of data in this short introduction, I'll take some data from Ethiopia, where actually, like we saw in the picture from Tanzania, about 40% of the children are stunted. So there are, for many countries in Africa, there is actually been calculated what kind of economical impact those is actually have. So it actually, if you count everything up on the loss you have because of less learning capability, the extra cost of healthcare and so forth, it actually is counted up to 55.5 billion beer, and in Swedish Krona it would be about 20 billion Swedish Krona, which is lost economic value for the country. So that's a huge sort of business case we have lying here, if we can capture that loss. So it's actually in Ethiopia, it really mounts up to 16.5% of GDP. So that's a lot. So what we're going to talk today is about, and my colleague Herbert will give the next presentation, that is really how we can use value chains to really address malnutrition. Really working on three main components, how we can improve the diet, dietary diversity and get more nutritious and diverse food into the basket. It's a company on how we empower women also to take part in the value chain, but also taking the right decisions on the household level. And it has a great company around training and changing behaviors towards making more nutritious choices. So if we can do that, we really can both get more healthy and wealthy farmers and workers, and we can get some happy customers. So that's also another side we need to discuss, how can we really use Swedish private sector and the value chains they are engaged in and the Swedish NGOs to really find out how can we use this to reach out and really using these value chains as channels to reach out to a nutritious solution. And if we do that, we can increase the productivity at farm level, or it can also be in factories, it could even be in mines. Wherever we have people that are in the workforce, but are still malnourished, this is a challenge to reach. And of course, there is also a business case around brand equity that can be captured for the private sector here in Sweden. I'm sorry for the presentation didn't show up, but we can send it out to you, so you can have it afterwards. Okay, thank you. After that general introduction on the concepts of nutrition, I think stunting is really quite shocking. If you think about the economic impact it has, plus the impact on the development of the human being, which is as important on the micro level as the economy is on the macro. Now I think we'll have a more specific discussion. You can present yourself here a little bit about what you are and on how nutrition can be looked at in a value chain. Thank you. So my name is Herbert Smuerberg. I work for Gain in the Netherlands office and I'm leading Gain's program on cash crop value chain nutrition. And today we'll specifically talk about cash crops, which means farmers and workers are working on an agricultural produce that is sold and not for their own consumption. So it could be tea, coffee, cocoa, flowers, bananas, anything that generates an income, but it's not for their own food and nutrition security. And again, there is more detail than I can cover in the 10 minutes, but a few assumptions. So we're working with existing businesses, supply chains of these cash crops. There is an income for the people that we target. It may be a minimum wage, it may be low, but there is some income, but it doesn't lead automatically to a good nutrition situation. That's what we have learned, what we see despite income and earnings. We'll see stunning prevalence of 40 to 70% of people working in these cash crop value chains. And so what we're trying to do is improve the nutrition situation by making use of the existing agricultural infrastructure. So whether it's in plantation or whether it is extension workers that work with smallholder farmers, we use that existing infrastructure. And we realize that there is some income, maybe a little bit, and it's much more about behaviors and awareness of the farmers and the workers than the fact that they don't have anything. We do this not alone. We work, as Charlotte mentioned, in partnership with many other organizations. And we work in Indonesia, Malawi, India, and we're going to start working in Kenya, Ghana and Ivory Coast, mainly in the tea sector at the moment, moving into the cocoa sector. And it's still a program in development. This is something that is relatively new. It's not fully developed. I need to disappoint you if you expect to see a hard business case on retention and productivity figures. There is some literature that shows that improved nutrition, for example, for tea workers in India with iron supplementation, leads to an increased productivity. We are focusing much more on how can we improve, how can we develop a program and approach that can be taken up by businesses working in these value chains that is easily understood. It's pragmatic in terms of its implementation and it does lead to a nutritional outcome and it's scalable. For those who want that, there is a complex theory of change and it's much more complex, but basically, I don't know whether you can see it on the bottom, but there is a stream that looks at dietary diversity. So generally, these people have enough food, enough calories, but it is monotonous. It's staple-based and it's only your Ugarli or your rice or your whatever and it's monotonous. So that's one stream and that is where our main effort is. There is another stream that looks at supplemental sources and as Charlotte showed, for specific target groups, for example, lactating and pregnant women, young children, dietary diversity is not enough. You need to have specific interventions to address the nutritional needs of those people. That's this stream. And then thirdly, if the hygienic circumstances are poor and people are receptive to illnesses, malaria or diarrhea, then you can do on the nutritional side whatever you want, but if it gets out, it is not absorbed in the body. So we're looking at that integrated approach. I'm going to take you now to Indonesia and where we have started working in 2013 in communities, smallholder farmers that produced tea and sell that to a cooperative where the tea is then produced. So these are smallholder independent farmers. So there is not a feeding program that you sometimes see at plantations, but this is basically individuals. We have focused on behavior change, so giving training. We've trained extension workers and people in the community to give the training to the farmers and their wives if the wives are not the farmers themselves about what good nutrition is. We have taken the concept of dietary diversity. Basically, we say the world of food exists of several food groups. People understand food groups, so you have your staples, you have your animal or your protein sources, you have your green leafy vegetables, you have orange fruits and we have divided the world in 10 food groups and basically say you need to eat every day five food groups. That is a concept that is easily understood and everyone understands that. That's what we have focused on and we have basically looked at a baseline and measured how much and how often do people eat certain food groups and if you look at vitamin A rich vegetables and tubers, the orange food groups as we present them, we have a baseline and we have an end line and in a year's intervention we see significant changes in the consumption of nutritious food groups. You see that for all the food groups and what we realized in these tea farming communities which are far away from sort of urban markets, they get to the market only once a week perhaps, that access to vegetables and fruits etc. was a limitation factor. So one awareness of that they should consume more fruits and vegetables but then how do you get access to those? But these are farming families so when you tell them you should eat this, it's quite easy to start vegetable gardening and give them the ideas and that worked quite well and so what you see here is that basically cultivation of vegetables increased very largely so we had some demo plots in the communities how to do it to overcome the issues that the young plants are eaten by the chickens, they invented that themselves, do it in elevation and so quite engaging the whole community into solutions and you see an enormous increase in vegetable gardening in these communities and which explains in the end also the huge shift in the dietary diversity so what you see here on the on the horizontal axis is the number of food groups that people report that they have eaten the 24 hours before and so the yellow is the distribution of food groups in our baseline where you see this monotonous diet I mean people eat at maximum sort of three four food groups which is rice a little bit of some vegetables and if you're lucky a third element and what you see after this intervention there is a huge increase of dietary diversity now in the nutritionist and that's been validated that nutritionists find that if you eat a diet of five or more food groups that leads to in general to a nutrient adequate diet so you get sufficient micronutrients and protein etc if that variety broadens and that's what we intuitively know but that's been validated in the nutrition research that that should be a nutrient adequate diet so we have focused at this level the intervention we haven't gone into blood sampling or measuring stunting I mean these are effects that are very long term you won't see in a year's time a difference but this is how we measure the impact is relatively simple and that and what what we can learn here from Indonesia that this intervention at least shows relevant results on nutritional outcomes whether that leads to a higher productivity of these farmers or less sickness or so what is the business case we haven't looked at that in Indonesia we are looking at it and as we speak now in Malawi at the tea estates but that is still work in progress and we'll hope to report in the future on that thank you very much we're going to have one more presentation and then we'll take questions from the floor Johan from the Swedish Food Federation I think you need to be fitted with a microphone I'm going to look at the importance of the sustainable value chain you were supposed to be here yet so she was being very efficient but you are here thank you for inviting me I will broaden the perspective a little bit and I will talk about the importance of a sustainable value chain and how this can improve the nutrition in in developing countries and my name is Johan Anel and I'm representing the Swedish Food Federation I'm the sustainability manager at the Swedish Food Federation and the Swedish Food Federation is the we are the employer and trade federation for the food industry in Sweden and represent approximately 850 members all from the global players within the food industry to your local bakery and employees approximately 55 000 persons in Sweden and 38 of those are women and we're working hard with the sustainability issues when it comes to food production and we launched a sustainability manifesto almost three years ago two and a half and the purpose is to raise the awareness about sustainability issues and CSR issues linked to food productions both for the food manufacturers in Sweden but also for the for the public and for for the politicians and to raise awareness that a lot a lot of things are happening within the companies and to make this very communicative we made 10 commandments that the the food industry has to follow and it's all from from reducing your energy use to to work with with zero accidents in your in your in your plant and also to use sustainably grown produce and if we move on this is the global risk report or global risk survey that is taken from the World Economic Forum where you can see the the companies are looking at the risks the next 18 months compared to 10 months when it comes to overall risks linked to to your company profile and as you can see for the next 18 months it's a lot of the risks are linked to the the society today you can see large-scale migration but also you can see a risk of state collapse of crisis but for the next 10 years almost all these five risks are linked to food production you can see the risks of water crisis climate change extreme weather events and food crisis and this is of course a risk that's are all linked to to food production and also the nutrition in in developing countries and and this is one or this is one of many reasons that why it's important to work with the sustainable supply chain for a swedish food producer and i will say that the swedish the sustainable supply chain involves four different aspects is traceability fair working condition sustainable sourcing but also packaging and transportation and to traceability this is a picture that shows the the modern the modern value chain when it comes to food production and it's of course very important and it's a very crucial thing for the swedish food producer to understand better the the value chain and how they are part in the global value chain how to work with for example the the small skilled coffee coffee farmer in in south america and how this is part of a much bigger global value chain and another example is the the not only in developing countries we also have to work with the working condition in sweden for example we have the berry pickers that come here every every summer to to under living picking berries in the forests and we've been working very hard to make the situation better for the for the berry pickers both from southeast asia but also those coming from from southern europe and this is of course we have to work both with the with the working conditions in developing countries when we're sourcing produce from from developing countries but we also have to work with the working conditions here in sweden both in the factories but also for example when we have people working to source the products and one another example that we've been working on trying to improve the value chain but also and if you improve the value chain you also improve the the living for a lot of people and that's the initiative sustainable sourcing of palm oil and 40 percent of the the farmers when it comes to palm oil is small holders and it's of course very important for for us to find ways on how to improve the the both the the big value chain or the global value chain when it comes to palm oil but also trying to improve the situation for the small holders and this we're trying to do by making an initiative for all the swedish food producers to only use rspo certified palm oil that's not enough but it's one way on how to work with the value chain from sweden to the to the ground in southeast asia and also we're working with the water we have very good water conditions when here in Scandinavia and sweden but as you could see in the first slide one of the first slides that i'll show you water crisis is one of the emerging challenges when it comes to food production globally and this is one way on how we're working in sweden together with stock on international water initiative with a water cluster on how to find ways on working with your water impact and how you can reduce your water footprint and it's very hard for a small medium-sized swedish company to find your own way on how to work with reducing your food water footprint you have to do this together and this is one way on how to find an easy way to to all five steps on how you can reduce your water footprint and that was my last slide that was just a small picture of me everyone's keeping time without me waving my watch and shrieking and all that very good okay and i think we have a few minutes here we can take some questions from the floor for the first three presentations if anybody has any okay i i've abused my position as chairperson and would like to ask a question from Herbert you said that you don't know the long-term impact of your improved nutrition you only had time to measure the the increased diversity of consumption and things but you do have plans to measure any impact on productivity and if so where can we find those okay and i think we're sorry yeah i think you want to answer and talk to everyone yeah not just me um i think there are um two answers to that question one what what we have shown here is the uh the change in the dietary patterns after one year and so one valid question is what will this last when the project is over and when when will this last forever so that's one dimension that we're going to follow up to sort of track during time whether this is a sustainable intervention that that has a lasting impact okay secondly um it's it's difficult to measure the productivity of smallholder farmers so how do you do that so where we have started to work is with estates where workers tea pickers are employed and where they keep records of people being yeah present or absent from work and and so what we want to do but that's only work that we have started to sort of last year is um when you do nutrition interventions do you see first of all uh more social well-being is is there from from the workers perspective more loyalty to the company more satisfaction because they see an improvement from the employer on their the food provision or the the food infrastructure so that's one dimension that may lead to um longer term loyalness to the company less sort of work turnover or employer turnover secondly um what we find in malawi that approximately on average 20 of the workforce is not turning up at work for various reasons reasons that are related to illnesses reasons that are related to oh we have received our money last saturday and so we had a good party on sunday and i don't feel well to go to work on monday and there is a funeral in the village and the whole village goes to the funeral instead to work so there are all kinds of reasons but what we hope to see that um if there is a nutrition program and that leads to unhealthy nutritional status and therefore people are less receptive to illnesses or their children are less receptive to illnesses that that leads to a reduced absenteeism and that even if we can shift from 20 percent to 90 percent absenteeism that makes a huge economic case at the planning of the logistics in in that that whole supply chain and so that's what we're looking at but obviously you'll understand that will take some time and we will certainly publish the results you can find it always at our game website what we publish but when that is i can't promise that's all right you already won my heart when you said measuring small farmer productivity is not easy yeah no it's not but we're always happy to see it go forward is there any other questions from the floor cecilia thank you um cecilia from cedar um i have a question for you too uh sorry it was so interesting uh you had a slide of of the central java and west java and we could see that the response was somewhat different and i i take it that that is for for all the countries that you're working with have you been able to analyze what are the key factors in your approaches uh that determine the outcome or the the results in response of the communities and again um we see some differences um and actually we're focusing much more on the similarities than the differences so far so our conclusion has been in both cases has worked to a certain extent we see some differences we don't understand fully because we haven't measured all the details and dimensions um what worked what didn't work what we have learned here that in the indonesia case the involvement of the local community and this was a case where there's a year round being followed up with community involvement um has worked well um and we don't know why the differences are and what we hope to learn from now are also our work in india in the south of india kache will tell a little bit more about it our work in malawi um that we're starting to see patterns and get a better step but this is relatively young work and it's as i said it's in development um so the ins and outs when and how it works um and we can't compare the different interventions directly because again they are always a little bit different it's not completely randomized controlled trials in one or the other so that's that's part of the nature of the work okay i'm going to have to say thank you sorry that couldn't allow more questions and we have to get going here because we have uh we're one minute behind schedule thank you yoan i'm very impressed to see that the private sector has such a good uh control of their sourcing and traceability is a very very important for the consumer to know where things come from and to be able to rely on that information okay thank you our next presentation is by katja freywald um who from unilever now it's now i'm now it's your turn um a particular uh activity called seeds for prosperity and i'll leave it to you okay thank you um as you see already on the design so what i'm talking about is very much linked to the the work um that herbert presented just on myself um my name is katja freywald i'm the global partnerships director um within unilever and what i'm basically doing a referring to what um checkup said in the beginning um in order to really tackle this very complex um issue we will need to work in the partnerships and that's something what is not only um realized by um the development community but also from the private sector so the department that i'm working in we are really looking um to cooperate with organizations like gay and un agencies um government organizations and particularly myself i'm looking very much in the area of women's empowerment nutrition and smallholder farming and that's where i also come in the in the game here and want to share a little bit more on what we have been doing in the past um in this area together with scale but before i'm doing this i just want to um give you a little bit of a perspective why a private sector company like unilever is very much interested in that topic and really wants to actively um participate here and not only one but we really we really must participate in here because there's a business case for us um in this topic so just a couple of years um back and um my colleague Maria who's um from Sweden and unilever could tell much more after that um if that's interesting um for the Swedish um community but um in 2010 um we had a really very significant strategic shift with unilever and we launched um our compass strategy which really anchored our um vision that we want to make sustainable living commonplace very bold vision for a company like unilever and again we are a private sector company and we are not doing that out of CSR or out of um charity purpose we're a company and we need to make business so the vision that we have set um is really we want to um double the size of our business but the way we want to do that is by reducing our environmental impact and also increase our social impact and the way how we really anchored that in the strategy so it's not something what is led by um our department it's something what is really anchored and it's our um core strategy as a company and we have set um three very big um bold targets so we want to improve the health and well-being of one billion people we want to have our environmental footprint and we want to enhance the livelihoods of um millions of people and in this last um third pillar actually the program um what i'm going to describe now is falling very much under this um last pillar now again as we said um in order to really drive um transformational change in these areas that are important to us we need to work um with organizations like yourself and we really um looked from a unilever perspective if we really want to create um systemic change and we really believe that we need to work on a horizontal way we cannot do this in all areas that are important to us so we have really looked um at three what we call transformational areas and the one that i'm going to focus um today on is really the one in the middle championing sustainable agriculture and smallholder farmers so that's something what's very important um to our business now for your background unilever is working with more than um 500 000 smallholder farmers in our supply chain and that's increasing um over the years so what we have um said and what we are aimed is we have said we really want to enhance the livelihoods of these smallholder farmers but a lot of them are obviously um we only reach them through our suppliers so what we have looked um over the past two years you said we really want to look into what does it mean actually enhancing the livelihoods of smallholder farmers and how can we do that now over the past um six seven years we have worked very much on certification sustainable sourcing but what we have said and um and harbored um echo that as well what we've seen sustainable sourcing or certification strategies that do not necessarily um lead to enhanced livelihoods in the way that we um really would have envisioned and that's why we've came up with um a new strategy and said which are the areas that we really want to focus on so we're going to continue working on sustainable sourcing practices um and drive certification further but we have also said we really want to look at um other areas that we think are very important to us as a business but very important also from a smallholder perspective to improve their life one area nutrition and another area which is very close to our business is the whole area um around wash so we are a business that has a big business in in sanitation wash products etc and we really think that's an area that we can champion as um as a company as well now in order to implement these areas we know there are a couple of um things that are inherent like we want to stimulate um entrepreneurship in these areas we want to um really offer we need to offer finance solutions to the farmers and one area what you also mentioned what is very important to us and actually became this year a force transformational area for us is the whole area of women's empowerment and a lot of the smallholder farmers are women so we really look through all the interventions with the lens of um of women now um coming to the the area of um smallholder farmers and improving their livelihoods we are not only working um with gain but we are really working with a variety of um partners and um maybe one thing which is quite interesting to mention as well through a private sector lens we really want to stimulate um also investing in market-based solutions in the supply chain so for example i'm not sure if you're familiar with acumen which is the impact investor so we are looking also on kind of finding social enterprises linking them to our supply chain and really driving um the impact in the areas that i've um described before but um very an outstanding partner for us over the last years is um gain and um Charlotte and Herbert and um the whole team in the Netherlands have been very front-running with us to really thrive um to nutrition programs in particularly our tea supply chain and i know i'm very short in time so i'm trying to just give you a little bit of a flavor of um to work um in our tea supply chain which we have started in um India and as Herbert um shared before we are interested in rolling this out in other countries like um Kenya for example where Unilever has a very significant tea supply chain now i'm not going to go in all the nutrition um um background just for um a little reminder i mean for us it's really important that we improve um to nutrition of these small hortic farmers in our supply chain and the way we want to do it is one integrated approach which um we have seen before on improving dietary diversity and other nutrition interventions but also linking that into um the whole hygiene and wash area so we really want to thrive a very combined um program and we as a Unilever think we can add quite some expertise especially also in the area of um health and hygiene again we're not going in the very complex um theory of change but what i've tried to do is just um trying to minimize that to three areas where i think what's important to us for um a Unilever lens again the first thing the impact on nutrition is obviously um very important to us but we also said we really want to look through a much more um business lens here really are interested in exploring opportunities on market-based solutions fortified products we have foods company as well to really improve to nutrition but also we do have um strategies strategies in place that really um are market-based in order to improve hygiene um practices in small hortic farmer communities now you cannot see um this very well but i think it's a very important one actually why is this so important as a business what's the business case for us and there are a couple of areas that um i think are important to Unilever and why we are doing that and the first one is not only from an ethical perspective to really thrive um where we responsible supply chains but for us it's kind of um important to survive our business that's our future supply and if these farmers um and we know um 85 or 70 percent of um the food is produced by a small hold of farmers and this is the input to our product so if we do not have our house in order there's a risk to our business in the future so that's first um area for business case for us um obviously we have set this target on improving health and well-being and that's inherent for us and we really want to thrive um that forward and one thing what is pretty new and which it's very close to my heart and where i'm really happy about is a big part of our business is foods and the foods team has really revised their strategy into really driving sustainable nutrition in the future so it's becoming part of the core strategy and programs like this are really part of that and we will have um placed in here in room to also drive market-based solutions forward with which help to grow our business so i think that gives you maybe a little bit of an idea why um we are really interested in that and it's not only that Unilever should take and win out of this i think there's also a big way on how we can um give um to the smallholder farmers how can we um help to enhance these programs or develop these programs together with partners um like um gain for example and what i just want to share um very quickly with you is um the ultimate objective is improving nutrition of the farmers and we don't want to do that through a lens of um this is the solution you need to adapt it but we want to look at um smallholder farmers who are in the end consumers as well so what can we do to make nutrition um aspirational for them how can we get to create this pool that people really want to have healthier diet what's kind of the the story for them what's in for them and i think us as a company we have a lot of expertise to think in a consumer way and there is um a model which has been developed over the past five years on behavioral change together with leading um scientists so it's not something what is only created by Unilever and i've got for you some um background information here to read on that so what we've looked at this model which is based very simply simplified now in this um graph on four phases to create awareness get commitment from the people to really practice the new behavior reinforce the behavior and ultimately reward people so that's kind of the four phases very simplified and leading also to what um Herbert said before can we sustain the behavioral change over a long time and we do believe by adapting this model linked with um really the follow-up um with our suppliers we think there can be a sustained behavioral change now um live boy i'm not sure if um people know about this but it is a soap and over the last um years we have um created a the the largest um hand washing program in the world which really has proven this model um referred in the harvard's business um with you us eight um has um taken this on so there's a lot of science science rigors here that this model is working and what we're trying to do now in the space of nutrition take the elements out of that and translate this into the dietary diversity program um which Herbert referred to and we have started to test this in um India in our tea supply chain unfortunately the the baseline is done but our end line results are due by the end of next month so i cannot share this yet but um what we see in the first feedback is that it's working quite well and that's just the flavor of um the materials that we we are using so do i still have two minutes or yeah so i'm but i think that's quite an important one so let me just try to um explain that from much more as a perspective um i'm the smallholder farmer and what do i get um in this um program so first of all what is very important for me i do not have an idea why nutrition is so important to me i actually do not have an idea that i'm doing something wrong i don't know that my family is um undernourished or malnourished and that's the reality on the ground that we saw that people do not know what's good nutrition and why it's important to them so that's the first thing in this whole phase on creating awareness how can we overcome that and a very simplified um maybe have a lot of posters explaining make this all very um attractive and understandable for them but i think the one key insight um what we have learned farmers know how to grow food they know how to nurture their plants they do not know how to nurture their families not because they don't want because they do not know so what we've tried to start the dialogue with them is this is a plant this is a good plant this is a bad plant how can you nurture your plant so we all kind of mirrored what has been done in um in their good agricultural practices to make sure their plant is growing they have the best um yields etc so they see that is working and now we tell them that's what you need to do to nurture your family and why is that important because it helps your children to have a brighter future they perform better in school etc but by making this comparison the farmer does understand it so that first step to really create that awareness and make it easy to understand is very crucial for the success so that's kind of all these materials developed for that afterwards what's very important is what we have learned through the hand washing model that people need to really pledge that they are doing that so you really need to kind of make them in the community some stand for this we are doing this collectively as a community and that's very important that step it sounds a little bit um yeah not so needed but it's very needed so that's the second phase and then we have developed a couple of um materials that helped them to really um reinforce the behavior more and more tracking sheets um 21 days um that they really practiced the behavior we have made a lot of materials that helped them to really make it easy for them so that's the really the phase of reinforcement and then obviously you need their consumers their human beings you need to be rewarded to do that so we have uh looked in a couple of um rewards in one which seems to work very well is a game where the whole family can come together and play reinforcing again the messages so that's kind of what we have for the moment and I'm not saying that's the perfect thing we are learning as Herbert said we are looking if this is working we see the first reactions are very good and we are here to kind of um really adapt that and learn by um by going so that's a quick overview from my side thank you very much I think that that was one of our longer presentations I'm sorry no no on a good way in a good way so we can take questions directly okay perfect yeah okay so are there any questions here from from the floor okay no one has a uh yeah okay we're giving him a chance to ask all right well I'm staying here for the rest of the time so yeah okay um I have a little question as usual using my position as chair uh I wonder um what channels do you use to communicate with a community unilever as a company do they send people out into the field or how do you reach these communities and smallholders that's the one slide that I just uh oh you went by it okay so basically um one thing what we really wanted to do and where we looked into is what we don't want to create is kind of a secondary channel to um hire an NGO go into the the supply chain speak about it stay there for a couple of months pull out and then let's see if um it's working for the rest of the day just to simplify now what we said is very important we want to sustain the behavioral change so we are building on the existing implementation structures that we do have on the ground so if you take the example of t there are two ways to look at that so one is if you purely look from a smallholder farmer perspective um there is an infrastructure on the ground where sorry there is an infrastructure on the ground where you basically have a trainer structure in place that are working with the smallholder farmers on improving their yields on agricultural practices and what we want to do or what we are doing is basically add on nutrition to that infrastructure train these trainers and um use them basically to further um train the nutritional programs the reason why we think that's very good is that we do not need to stop after a couple of months so we can kind of have um reiterations afterwards if we see um it's not working or we need to fine tune so really building on the existing structures and equally in um estates um their infrastructures even better you have for a good um network on the ground which we're going to use so no new structures building on what's existing and using gain in this case as the one that building kind of the um the skills and the capacity on the ground in terms of nutrition um yeah very good I think that's extremely interesting because now in all the world all of us Aggies will have to be nutritionists and I think your your similarity between a healthy plant and a healthy family is very easily understood by agricultural production people okay thank you very much and yeah sorry pair go ahead quite straightforward I think this is it's about uh when you said pledging or commitment and so how do you actually do it because I mean that's one of the key challenges in all this kind of awareness creation how do you make sure that the village or the the household is actually committed so I think um this is also very specific um on a on a country context on on the implementation channel um what you have so what we have learned um from our hand washing experience our programs were very much in the schools so we have used the the children as um change agent and they pledged together with um their parents to um apply these hand washing behaviors and then what we could see is that if parents do that together with the children the children are the ones that reinforce and kind of we have promised that so we need to do that so that's one thing which is working in um in this um implementation channel it's a bit more difficult so we're trying to get the communities together but also we're using again the supplier on the ground which has a very close relationship to the farmers and they bring people together and they say you are our um farmer suppliers be pledged together you are part of our community so if we really want to have a successful crop and successful um farmer families in the future we need to do this together so there we use the power of the supplier and the master trainers and the field workers on the ground to um really reinforce again we don't know yet the results from India but that's what we trying to do very interesting okay any more questions my name just a comment uh in Tanzania uh the Unilever are using some of the radios which are being uh listened by many listeners to to talk about the diversity in diets yeah so they're telling about how to plan your breakfast how to plan for a healthy lunch and so forth so it's working maybe a comment on that so when I was speaking about um the market-based solutions um 45 products etc so we have a lot of um categories and what you are referring to that um indeed have nutrition programs that they are implementing in the whole markets um so an idea for us in the long run is dietary diversity is the anchor point and we think it's very easy to understood by um by farmers but obviously if this is working we could add on other um fortified messages or products which they could kind of use um use this fortification because that's important so and then we can also use and tap into kind of the brand programs that are available from a Unilever perspective but for the moment we said we want to focus first and get the dietary diversity right and work in that channel of um yeah suppliers um and then we use radio as well in the future that's um certainly a possibility and great yeah yeah i'm delighted to everybody knows that blue band is okay yes hello my name is annie grossa and i come from we effect just to get a picture of the extent of your of your activities and your projects how many villages do are you active within and how many farmers are you reaching but i cannot tell you the number of villages but i can tell you the number of um farmers so um our universe what we are aiming to reach is 500 000 smallholder farmers now we have started an india visit program which is reaching for the moment um 5000 farmers in the tea supply chain we have another supply chain of gherkins which is about 10 000 farmers um we are trying to reach but what we have um signed an agreement for is we really want to upscale um this now to kinja and to our further um tea plantations in india and i think in the next um two three years and i'm looking at her but we are still working on kind of the numbers but i think something like a hundred and 150 000 is realistic and um and do you work with the like local farm organizations or yeah but i was a player network on the ground so it's only supply networks yeah and again kind of the way also we work in terms of how to reach the scale this should not be a unilever show i mean the tea sector is very big we have a big influence in the tea sector and what we are trying to do is influence the sector so for example part of that program is um idh i'm not sure if you're familiar with them but it's a convener um that is bringing the tea industry the cocoa industry together to um convene on certain um interventions so one ultimate vision why we have put them on board is to convene the tea industry and say other suppliers and private sector companies you need to act on this and we want to be the the pioneer and pushing the industry and create that pull because once it's done and it's becoming a standard everybody needs to follow and that's where the the scale also comes in but that's nothing what we can do alone okay i guess the the like the standards of these kind of corporations are have to develop so is unilever would you be open to make like a cooperation with other uh companies from the private sector we do and we um urge for that and um if you follow a little bit our um CEO he's the first person that is always kind of inviting um other companies so very very open and if you take the tea sector which is back last week from um from Kenya not on nutrition but a big issue is um women's empowerment sexual harassment etc in supply chains so we have kind of pushed this forward from our side and convened and invited other suppliers um and companies that are sourcing in Kenya to really collectively um try to change here because it's important for the industry certainly open for other we think so too thank you okay thank you very much great uh now you're you're you're excused thank you okay we have a next program presentation yeah okay now from we affect we have can i mutale i can say uh but archangel yeah okay i thought the same as in the church okay there we go uh i wasn't sure okay we're gonna have a presentation now on homegrown school feeding programs school feeding programs for example this isn't an example from malawi but they're very famous from uh brazil which has managed to incorporate small uh holder productivity in its local supply of better nutrition for school children and had a win win win situation in terms of their social safety net which is also another word that us aggies have to get used to uh not easy but there we go uh thank you very much please give me all right thanks uh and thanks everyone i am archangel mutale from malawi and welcome to malawi i think gain was talking about malawi somewhere but now you have the face of malawi yeah um i work with we affect um this is my third year uh doing the homegrown school feeding program as the uh program coordinator um i'll talk about slide three the malawian basin program that we affect is working with the uh the other local NGOs in malawi and they then talk a little bit about the situation analysis and then i would well into uh the homegrown school feeding program um uh in malawi we effect is working with the um viagra forestry uh malawi union of savings and credit cooperatives musko this one does the financial services and the farmers union it's a union of farmers that are in uh in malawi and the national small holder farmers association of malawi we are implementing the malawian basin program along the lake the districts that are along the lake and the it is basically only agriculture climate change energy uh nutrition then we also have the aspect of business business development and marketing and the financial services that's where uh malawi union of savings and credit cooperatives fits in and then we have the organizing farmers into uh groups or cooperatives and associations and that's where the farmers union of malawi comes in um but then when we were in the course of implementation we saw that there was a challenge of markets and the the other part was that the uh the aspect of nutrition was not uh being taken care of so together with the uh wfp we now um employed the homegrown school feeding program i think for those who have done research um uh the time when we uh we came from the single party to match party that president introduced the free primary education it was an exciting thing but then uh what happened was that we had a lot of environment uh as we were um uh in the middle then we started experiencing the dropout rates high dropout rates so um one of the things that was um looked into was that uh hunger and malnutrition have been identified as the uh strong factor in the school attendancy and the linking to that we also believed that agriculture could contribute to nutrition by increasing the availability of staples uh access to micronutrient rich food uh income and women's empowerment so from the malolic basin side uh the one that i was talking about uh also tack was the issue of women empowerment and then uh these women are also linked to the homegrown school feeding program so uh here uh usually what happens is that these women are involved in the cooking for the uh the uh the students but then they rotate like in the communities so the nutrition idea is actually spread out through the process um the objective was that poverty alleviation and road development through support to local agricultural production and markets should be enhanced improvement of children's health nutrition and education status as per the problem that i was talking about and the development of a viable local supply and demand model because we uh like i said we had the problem of markets for the farmers that we are working with um and the key partners uh we are working with wfp we are working with and land money and then the minister of agriculture and the minister of education local farmers and the we effect now um like as of today what is happening that uh we receive uh funding and then uh here we have incorporated the another research institution it is the center for international potato i i hope probably you know it uh why we have done that is that you know we saw that in the process of implementing the homegrown school feeding program um crops that were being produced some of them were not that uh nutritious so uh cip came in with the the sweet orange orange potato to take care of the iron deficiencies and the um here from the funding we effect uh supports the cooperatives or the farmers we do the uh nutrition calendar the food availability calendar um we also do the financial financial uh savings we do the group organization group dynamics and how they can live i mean they can stay in the corporate uh cops and then here these farmers they sell to the schools but in addition to uh the schools they also sell to uh p4p purchase for progress this one is also an organized market uh why we do that because it's because the schools that we're working with now they are about 43 but it is a small market uh so to take care of let's say the surplus and the demands we have also linked the farmers to the other markets that's how it is it is working and then we also have this one the it is a savings cooperative there then when they save and do the the the businesses they would also like now be able to send their uh children to the schools um one thing that we have noted from the farmers and the community is that because of the homegrown we have the rubber markets that's that that's obvious and the increased productivity under the increased productivity we've actually just isolated a few because it has been like difficult for like to cover everyone but what we have seen is especially what someone was producing per unit area that is what has increased and that's the effect of we effect then we have diversified income like in the past they would only probably sell you talk of maize but this time because they are at the school they are demanding several diversified kind of foodstuffs then these farmers are involved into also several interventions as a result we have experienced that one and then crop diversification and change in food habits this one is at the the the community level the issue is when the students eat different foods at the schools they also go home until they are parents then the ones who are cooking as they are rotating they are they are also gaining some knowledge and the the diversification in food habits is also increasing then in addition to that we also conduct like the community awareness that that one is on rice masses and because of that we've also seen that this now is like a story that can be told in in the communities then because because of the standards that are demanded in the homegrown school feeding program we've seen that the farm organizations are also getting more and more organized and so far we are working with eight cooperatives but there are small ones like this time I've experienced the the cooperatives in sweden that an advanced lay was compared to ours that side and from the school side what we've seen is the there is now better health and the nutrition status increased our school attendance this one like in the past you you'd see we had some like 25 percent but we have 40 48 percent and the low dropout rate high pass rate we had the 60 60 we had 50 54 but now we have 68 increased motivation and concentration by renors and this is like you know she would say I want to go to school because there is something that I'll get and the so far we have 46 619 renors of which she 23 000 there are girls and it is in 43 primary schools so the 43 we have three districts Palombe Salima and Mungoji that's what we are doing as of now but then the other success is that the government has also seen that this initiative is helping and we are working together with wfp to like how to scale out to the other schools and the also government to like channel the the model in these different districts that's that thank you thank you very much presentation I would have liked to see success three presented which is the government and the macroeconomic gain from doing this because that's a very important way to clarify why you should have further support for this it's important in fundraising so that that you get successes one and two yeah please I have two people here hello my name is Sarah and come from the hangar project global organization I was just wondering how how is your program all your programs affected by the current draw in Malawi yeah and what you do to like yeah to to improve the situation given these circumstances along these conditions thank you should I take it yes okay thank you thank you the drought the current drought is actually a threat to this initiative and the like this time uh I'll tell you that we had a the prolonged one in the actually the planting season which affected like most of the crops and we had like I think most of them dried out but then what what we've done as an initiative now from the Malawalek basin program supporting the homegrown is that we've involved the farmers in the winter winter production and then we through the CIP that I was talking about we have also um surprised the sweet potato vines um but then we are also and I expecting that he would have some funding actually because there is a fundraising activity now that we should have the cassava cuttings and the uh in the winter farming farmers are able to plant even the staple food like maize of which we believe that if it can be done at a uh a reasonable scale the farmers might uh will be able to uh sustain themselves whereas uh supply some of the products to the schools so that's that's what is happening as of now thank you thank you for your very interesting presentation and um I've been working in in school feeding programs with WFP for quite a while and I think it's it's a well-known fact that school feeding programs promote school attendance and reduce dropout rates whether or not that's locally grown yeah um so that's good my question is um I've two or three perhaps three questions sort of you mentioned sweet potatoes as an element so um how do you look at what that's the nutritional composition or the composition of what is being prepared so what is it if you couldn't align has that um had consequences for the cost per meal because sort of the staple based traditional world food program school feeding programs is maize and beans and you cook it um so is there an increase in cost which which is always important when it's yeah you're looking for upscaling and thirdly you mentioned uh you had an impact on health and nutritional status I'm very curious what you have measured how you have measured all right okay maybe I should start with the third one uh yeah yeah I think so uh because basically what what is happening is we've been doing like uh tracking the life of a child like before uh she started gaining uh getting some support in the home grown school feeding program the way she was looking like and then that was like uh 2012 and then we've been following up up to where she is as of now yeah but they hasn't been like um the new nutrition measurements as based on like what is found in the body of the child yeah so basically it's about the outro uh the outlook of the uh the the child and not necessarily what is in the body of the child yeah um and from the indicators I think we've not had uh such measurements uh in terms of what they uh the body is composed of or that child so probably that one would be a little bit difficult um in terms of the sweet potent provides what is happening is especially like specifically for Malau we combine like let's say several food stuffs together so you have you have like let's say sweet potatoes you have ground nuts uh the ground nut meal and then you have like let's say some added the cooking oil a little bit yeah so it is usually saved as a mixture yeah uh in terms of let's say the cost yeah that one uh as per the evaluator that um came just uh I think some two weeks ago uh advised us that probably we should reduce in terms of uh let's say how many uh food stuffs do we provide to the child so that he uh it becomes sustainable because uh what has is happening as of now because of the drought the uh food prices that are increasing as a result um in terms of like let's say the quantities that the schools have to buy as per the budget that they have they are in some way like uh being reduced so yeah that's the challenge that we have yeah okay Catarina Ericsson Tetra Laval Food for Development Office thank you very much for a very interesting presentation we are involved in Tetra Pak is involved in school feeding programs in 56 countries at present I think funding is always a a challenge and could you elaborate on that you you said you you you are working with the government with ministry of education ministry of agriculture um I saw in one of the slides that there is some donor funding funding this project so what happens when this project is is over what's the plan for sustainability is the government gradually taking over what's what's the situation and and are there other measures um how communities can start to support it themselves or what's the plan all right thanks um because of the sustainability issue that's why we've come to work with the the ministry of education um because in the beginning it was like we effect uh FOW and WFP but then that that one was considered like um an isolation from the like whole system um but what we are doing now is that we are involving the government uh both the ministry of agriculture because they have got already established extension workers so these workers they are receiving like let's say the asarees from uh from government and we believe that uh because of their involvement like this time they would be able to provide the extension methodologies to the uh the farmers that we are working with even in the absence of funding and then we also together with government as well we are drafting another model like how how how would we do it without uh external funding that is meaning external funding meaning uh um funding from within the government yeah the government of Malab so uh in addition to that we we've also I think I didn't mention it there there are also some like school gardens but then the communities would come and the like how um take care of the gardens apart from a small garden that is being taken care of by children the small one is for just reigning purposes but the Rajawan is that uh these farmers or the community they are producing the crops to add on what uh is being uh bought by the school by through the funding from the donors so we believe that this uh the the second model would be sustainable and the probably even in the absence of funding of I mean absence of donors still more something would be would be done and the uh there was also a discussion that probably we can start with this time we have concentrated in the southern yeah central and southern but then there is also a discussion that we can scale up to uh the north and they do about 43 schools again as just a start for the government yeah okay okay one more question that's you yeah i'm how you're lalawal a pcs kandeneviar yeah hello oh it's only recording okay uh my name is how you're lalawal from a pcs kandeneviar first of all i would like to commend you for this great initiative on a terrific presentation and listen to your conversation presentation attempt to think that this idea was replicating in most developing countries however you have not been able to come up about the challenges you know tell us about a little bit about the sport analysis and what could likely be you know how you've been able to overcome those challenges you faced and if there will either going to be any sustainability or replication in all the places what is your advice for the people that might likely want to tap into your knowledge thank you okay thank you uh so i think for like he as of now the key challenge has been in terms of flow of fans because the uh from what i was uh i showed you i said that wfp would send fans to the schools for the schools to buy uh the foodstuffs from the communities but then when the schools have not managed to reconcile their reports uh in time it happens that he uh wfp would not release funding to the schools uh in time as well so sometimes you would find that there is a gap in like feeding the children because the school has failed to reconcile in time yeah i'm seeing some heads like yeah yeah exactly so because that that's like a very practical and we have experienced it and we've worked together with the wfp to like i run that out and it is working you have any recommendations for others wishing to take on your model yes um the thing is from what i've learned is that probably we start together um especially uh all the stakeholders that would be involved the government both the ministry of education the ministry of agriculture and the um yeah the civil society because it's the voice for the voice race especially in the developing countries yeah so uh because what we saw is that the issue of sustainability came in later when we had already started so probably that would be one of the recommendations okay thank you very good thank you very much excellent do we have our representative from okay so we start with our one we are very fortunate please ladies come i think all of you even if not and you're not all presenting please we want to have you all up there um and if you want to stand okay this is which we're trying to make it easy for the live streaming and all that but yeah i yeah all the chairs yeah a little bit yeah well okay so when you very good everybody up and shaking hands excellent so we won't all die okay are you all ready to make your presentation and and we need to we need to begin by presenting yourselves first okay and then you can make your presentation i'm going to give you my time i'm giving you my my minute okay very good okay sorry happiness is always short lived as my mother says okay please sit down again thank you okay we are very fortunate today to have with us a delegation from the african women's agribusiness network at siani we're very fond of networks and we were very happy that you could be with us today um i'd like you all to introduce yourselves individually and then proceed with a presentation on the view from the producer hello everybody my name is christine i come from burundi it's in east africa and i'm a farmer flower farmer and vegetable farmer and i'm a member of awan which is the african women agribusiness network i'm happy to be here hello all my name is mary commander i'm from kenya and i'm the regional secretary for awan which is the african women agribusiness network i'm a farmer i grow indigenous african vegetables and i also process and package honey i'm happy to be here too hello everyone my name is rose romanos from tanzania uh member of awan i'm the vice chair of awan tanzania and treasurer for awan east africa i'm a food processor i process whole grains spices especially ginger cinnamon and garlic and also i'm an advocate of healthy eating though i'm obese but so hello everyone my name is Felicia muriyuki i'm the regional chair of awan and i am a honey processor and also grows strawberries and my family is in coffee and tea production so maybe i go through a small presentation i use the mic does this not work so i'll go through a short presentation about what awan is and then my colleagues can contribute about the different aspects i'm from kenya so awan began in 2002 as a regional body and the idea behind awan was to grow key players in the global market a lot of the people who started awan was just about exports and we're looking to go into the agor market so we're in various sectors tea and coffee fruit and vegetable dried products dairy and aquaculture so various people in in different aspects a lot of the people were looking for their agor market so these are big export women in export and over the years i think we we did a lot of successful things in terms of going holding market access aspects b2b but as we went along we realized that as long as the value chains further down the road are not as well established we're not going to reach our goal and about 20 percent of our members were actually doing export but the rest of the 80 percent is what now we began to focus on because of aspects of food security because of aspects of how do you manage your value chains if your bottom of the pyramid is not strong the rest of it are not able to supply so awan's mission is to provide that platform for women in eastern africa that advises and powers commercializers and promotes their agribusinesses and this is our value proposition it's a women-driven organization focused on women and youth in agribusiness it provides business support for sustainable agricultural value chains to its members by providing the technical advisory financial mentorship policy formulation services and it offers a platform for networking and the idea is to enable them grow and scale up their enterprises uh enhance food security and wealth creation so um i talk very fast somebody slow me down if i don't yeah okay okay so we meet um some of our members are customers through networking activities we have monthly meetings in the different countries various chapters we have open monthly meetings we have field days where we exchange meetings between the countries or even within ourselves we go and visit somebody have exchange visits we participate in different sector specific meetings because one of the things we noticed to ourselves sometimes we may because we're in so many sectors we really need to be in also other sector specific programs so a lot of networking in that we have different partners and we meet them in those ways and then cross cutting issues we have a website and all that you can visit us um one of the things in in uh our one is realizing somebody mentioned about training and awareness aspects if in terms of entrepreneurship how do we build our entrepreneurship skills as long as we're not strong in our in our entrepreneurship skills we may have be growing excellent things but we're not able to sustain our businesses so we've been having different courses women enterprise development courses to help us upscale what we're doing also talking about standards with the export team the 20 percent in our group that are exporters that was a non-issue I mean you have to be able to be standardized to be able to export but for the other group maybe it wouldn't have made much sense to do that because they're going into the local market but more and more it's important for us especially in terms of food security to bring the awareness of why do we need those good agricultural practices if you're going to even supply to the local markets so that we're not exporting all the good stuff and then we're eating poor nutrition and eating things that are not healthy for ourselves so financial literacy is also important mentoring is something that we started a while ago in terms of the exporters mentoring the non-exporters way what are the things that we need to do and that has worked very well for us market access has also been very important where people are exporting to how do you get into the local market how can you pull somebody else along financial finances are also been a big challenge and I think in any meeting that you ask what are the challenges it's always finances so we started the Awan Sacco in Kenya in Tanzania they have a different Sacco that they work with in Uganda they have an investment club so different models for different countries but the idea is how can we pull our our monies together in terms of savings we we lend out at one percent and are able to at least be begin the process of how do we save how do we manage our businesses and information sharing talking about a virtual marketplace where are the good markets where can we access different things and then also green technology we've been talking about green technology and we have green ambassadors in the different countries just realizing the aspects of water are very important how do we manage our waste can we improve it better some of so those are some of the people that we trained in in the region in terms of mentoring providing access to finance entrepreneurship lobby and advocacy is also very key especially for women within different agricultural sectors yes we're the most who work in that sector but sometimes we don't affect the policy because we're just absent in the decision making tables so that's one of the things we've really been pushed pushing for is to be able to be in the decision making arena so that we can actually make an impact in what affects us so the idea is to increase entrepreneurship and technical skills efficient healthy safe nutritious agricultural food create wealth in terms of does our business does do our businesses actually make money and are we able to buy other things are we able to take our children to school and also just realizing that when we are not aware of some of these things the impact is actually quite negative in terms of how we use our land how we use our water technology we're not very tech savvy some of us so we're learning how to use technology to improve that and how we can improve our communities so just sharing some of the things some of the meetings we have and what it is about for example having field days what kind of irrigation is available to us can we buy in bulk a B2B to I think that was Sweden and Norway and visiting different groups and realizing even in families sometimes you don't just train the women you have to pull along the men because it has an impact in terms of culture and visiting women and I was going to give an example of how do we work yes we really meet the business woman but behind this business woman we have outgrowers and other people who supply us in a sense so some of us have worked within an estate so 50 or so or perhaps even hundred permanent workers but in terms of this particular farmer has is producing has 3000 farmers who have probably two kettle and things like that and she wanted to pasteurize but in recognition of how poor they manage their kettle so talking about hygiene of that talking about how do you put your silage together and in this case we work a lot with our ministry of agriculture to improve that and just realizing that the kettle is sitting in a lot of manure how can you clean that how can you turn that into biogas and then it means education for the children because they have lighting so they can learn at night it means talk about how why are you feeding your cows only dry matter what else can you feed them so in that particular group at the end a lot of the questions what to do with where the markets what can we produce for which market so having access to market both locally and internationally are very important and also in terms of what do we where can we get water can we purchase water or can we build our borehole together so those are some of the aspects that we we talk about and help each other growing the question was asked about food basket and we've been working with the Grusher Michelle trust in terms of how can we better develop a food basket so thinking more holistically how can we create those meaningful platforms for women how can we create a ready market um one of our our our members is growing putting together a good seed because sometimes good seed is very challenging and being able to import that and supporting our farmers with the right potato seed but not just so they grow and then we get a clot in the market but more focusing on one buyer who is interested the social entrepreneurs who would think of them who would then support by their products and be able to produce a very specific potato that they're making potato chips so more and more working with that kind of social entrepreneur who's able to get the good potato seeds able to support with various inputs and then it works both down the value chain and further up into the market the idea also creating jobs and talking about how do we produce good quality and affordable inputs and having the right promoting regional trade I think one of the aspects about our one is having members in the different countries being able to supply in other countries what is easily available and exchange those ideas that's been very beneficial in having that group um I'll let the others just input in terms of how their businesses are able to um what you're going to prepare I am an advocate of healthy eating and I produce whole grains whole maize flour whole wheat flour whole saugam flour and whatever that is grain but it has to be whole why because there is this culture of refining grains and from history it shows that this started during the world wars because there was a need to keep you know to store the grains for a longer time but now we are not in war but still we are refining grains so what I'm doing is to change the mindset the eating habits we are producers of grains in terms and in fact we produce even in excess and we sell to neighboring countries but yet as the previous slide showed uh we are facing 40 percent uh my children who are not healthy okay so this is because of poor eating habits why because we don't value what we produce or maybe we don't know how valuable that what we produce is so my main task is to make people aware that they have to change their eating styles and you know moved back to the traditional way of eating because previously they used to take whole grains but now they've just you know shifted to refined grains and from where I come from they even soak the maize in water for three days to remove everything so they take something that is really you know plain but it's very difficult to make them you know change because they say that the the whole maize grain is not tasty so they are for tests and not for nutrition so this is what I'm doing and again with food processing uh we are I'm trying to address the post harvest loss we're producing excess in vegetables we have vegetables in excess so we have no way uh that we have no good way of you know preserving the the veg so that they we can keep them longer so I have got a solar dryer which I use also to to dehydrate vegetables especially those which are traditionally you know liked by our people like cassava leaves you know peas leaves and so forth and I also process spices but mostly I use the solar dryer so that I do not lose the taste the aroma and even the nutritional value of the spices so we are we encourage I encourage my customers to take the spices when preparing their meals not just for tests but also for the nutritional value that I try to educate them on what ginger is going to do for them what garlic is going to do for them what cinnamon is going to do for them and how healthy these spices are we have got also spices in Tanzania in Zanzibar but yes people are not using not because they don't have but because they don't know how valuable the spices are for their bodies so this is what I'm doing as a an entrepreneur and a food processor and with R1 Tanzania we are working as a team through mentorship program we have been able to link those who are farmers members who are farmers with those who are processors so that at least we can you know improve the value chain within the network thank you so much as for me I'm into processing and packaging the honey and basically we have a lot of people who are who are in epiculture and you find that they may not know exactly what they need to do with with the honey so we've been buying honey from from the farmers and bringing the honey to Nairobi processing it and packaging it and we are also helping them to understand the values of the honey though culturally almost every tribe we have 42 tribes in Kenya basically they were using honey but it depends the others were using it to make alcohol others were using it just to eat others were using you know it's for various various needs so we also trying to incorporate modern ways of using things like you know the what would I call it using I keep forgetting but at least using some of the honey waste to prepare other things like lotions making the the lip balms and all that kind of stuff which is you know it's a more natural way of being able to have something that is good to use for the body and now on issues relating to indigenous African vegetables just as rose has said that okay in Kenya with the 42 tribes we have various ways of eating our eating habits are quite diverse so you find that there are some vegetables that would be of very good benefits to to families so we try to also use that to share with other with other tribes so that they are able to understand why do you eat this and you show them how to prepare it I was initially working for a Dutch organization that is based in Wageningen University in this in Netherlands and we came up with a book that was covering the various vegetables that were growing in Africa I was not a farmer before but that really encouraged me and I started looking at the various ways that we can be able to share and diversify this information so that's why I come in on the issues of African indigenous vegetables we have some you know rose talked about cereals culturally we also have some cereals that were used by pregnant mothers some which were used to you know to you know for lactating mothers because they would be able to help to produce more milk that was more nutritious so we're trying we are trying to also bring and diversify and share that information as much as possible so those are some of the kind of things that we're trying to do going back to our culture it's not that our people did not know what was good for us but I think with modernity people started discarding what they thought they started looking at it as primitive it's not primitive and what we thought was primitive is now what we are trying to go back to but incorporate some sense of good knowledge having good knowledge to be able to know that it really means a lot to us so that's what we are also trying to do in in Kenya thank you okay um I will not speak a lot of words I speak French but I will try to speak in English so as I said I come from Burundi and I grow flowers and I'm very happy to be in this meeting because what they were talking about I leave it every day I'm a farmer I live at the field I'm at the field and uh this thing they they talk about stunting now I realized when I went to Amsterdam I found all those people they are tall and I say how come all those people are tall and we we are short and to say the truth that's true that's real true it's it's about nutrition I mean mainly it's about nutrition and and also another part of my country is the south those people they are tall and they live long but the area where I am it's a hot area uh we are hard workers we are short and we don't live long but I will live long so um at my farm I grow flowers I'm the only farm in the whole country so this is like a strange crop but beside that I have those people who come to work uh not permanent workers but day workers and you can see around around 10 around 11 those people are very weak because we we grow in the open and uh around that time 11 we have like 28 30 degrees Celsius it's very hot and in our in our way of living in our how we not say culture it's people rural people are not used to eating in the morning so they just wake up and then they go to work so one day I decided to introduce watermelon watermelon is uh is it a vegetable or uh it's a fruit but it can be a vegetable it looks like this this vegetable so um after three months we started to harvest those people they didn't know about it so we cut in pieces we sit under the mango tree and then we start eating from that time up to now those people they are growing those watermelon at their places why because first they were no more thirsty because there is a lot of water in that fruit and also you feel full and what I'm happy to say about is that that area it's a cassava today it's cassava tomorrow it's cassava you know after one week either leaves or the the roots prepared maybe in another way so they could discover that there is there is something else especially for men and grown up people because fruits are supposed to be for children so this malnutrition I think it's a very very important issue even more important than this weather climate they're talking about because it's every it's everyday life if you don't invest in life today there is no tomorrow so um and to add something I think we need to emphasize on women because women are the ones to to cultivate to know what they're going to to put in the land women are the ones to prepare the food women are the ones to give food to the whole family so if they are aware and they are educated about what to do what to prepare how to prepare it to know that the whole family needs to eat like the five groups that's the biggest investment I think we could thank you all right I'm decided to sacrifice my closing remarks here because I think it's so interesting and rearrange the plenary so does anyone have any questions or comments okay we have two back there yeah thank you all oh my name is Mary Brackner I'm representing the AFRI forum that is african is cardinavian forum basically I'm the coordinator and thank you mr honoribu because is the one that invited me um I'm in Nigeria and we are believing in the Scandinavia for a while but we believe that uh what should we do you know to help you know the african continent and with what my sisters are doing here I believe me in the house you pardon me because we women are the nation builders so I give you good for that good job that you are be doing but the thing I wanted to ask is that do you plan you know in future to to to add rise to transfer all this none that you are having to the to the youth especially the young ones you know between the age of 30 I mean 20 to you know 30 30 because you know when you look at the Kenya and all those east area the the the youth are getting involved in terrorists because they are high do you plan in the future that okay all this thing that you are doing now you want to get them involved and you are you know in parts you know this learning into the life of the youth thank you thank you very much and then we'll take one more question uh madeline if you want to have a question right there yeah so for you who don't know me I am Madeline Fugda and I'm also coordinating the Siani international network initiative one of the organizers and I just want to thank all the speakers and all the attenders also for coming here today and as we have this knowledgeable group from here on the stage I would like to ask you a question because we work in a network we address a lot of questions and also transfer to the youth in Sweden and also in Africa so yeah yeah yeah so we have a youth page you can join that later but I would like to ask we we are working across sectors and we have discovered that there is a you know we are here discussing nutrition which is really good we are talking about production but we we can also link it to other sectors which will influence what people eat have we discovered and we have seen very interesting links with uh access to energy and what people actually can consume and in terms and I don't know if that affects also the cooking time for whole grain products compared to the refined how because that is of course a very important choice when you choose your diet if you if I have energy enough to cook what I am supposed to cook so I just like to see if this if you perceive this is uh related to the question as well because we we work with all sectors and I just want to hear a little bit about what we have worked with these energy access and food security and nutrition okay thank you very much I'll let you and you hold on okay I'll let you start okay and divided up energy and youth okay thank you in fact we are involving youth like when we started it was a women network so we are mostly women of my age and even over my age but now we have established you know a wing of youths who are who fall under the mentorship program like in Tanzania every year we visit a university one university and we speak to them about opportunities which are there in agribusiness and also we talk to them about nutrition how healthy they can be if they you know they improve their healthy habits that they're eating habits and we realize that even though the university is at the capital city Dar es Salaam but mostly they survive through fried potatoes through you know rice they don't take veg because most of them don't like veg some of them they consider eating veg as you know primitive you know rural eating style and also they they don't just take fruits not because they can't afford because they most of them are sponsored by the government but because why should they take a fruit instead of a coca cola or a Pepsi cola so they opt for a you know for a soft drink you know better than a fruit so it's just a matter of educating them and also we are working with a school on the gardening sack gardening we've got these empty sacks whereby we fill sand in it and then we train them on how they can improve their health by growing vegetables and we are working with grade four students they enjoy it very much and they have really changed their families through telling them what to do when it comes to vegetable eating so we are working we have considered that they use well program regarding energy we are in contract with a rural energy agency in training women on using waste from maize to make charcoal because mostly in Tanzania they use charcoal so we are this year we signed the contract last year so this year we are going to work in two regions to train women on how they can use the maize waste to produce charcoal and also dry waste from coconut to make charcoal therefore this will improve the energy and it's also a cheaper energy and it's a source of income too yeah. Anyone else want to have youth or energy? I think it's one of the things that when we're reviewing our strategic plan it's realizing yes we need to include the youth and it's we're doing it they're on mostly on social media so there's a lot of effort to include youth and the other question you asked was also how do you not only pass on the baton but Nigeria West Africa was actually one of the Ghana came to introduce us to Awan and how to work with other people and we've had opportunity also to talk to people in West Africa and even Zimbabweza and Zambia on improving that and definitely youth are very important the other question we're talking about is the green technology a lot of effort we've put into especially biogas we have a lot of waste in that sense so how can we utilize that in especially cooking so a lot of the members have had opportunity to even calculate how much would I save how much would I make in doing that and quite a few of the people who did the training have actually began putting together the biogas systems there's one that is most more affordable than the norm it's called flexibiogas you can move it around as you move around the kettle or so that's been an important aspect about it do you want to contribute yes yeah okay one more one more question and then I'm back again on stage for a few seconds I just I kind of advise I would first commend you guys for who you women for the fantastic effort you're putting into making Africa in a better place you know in terms of the youth you know I would suggest that you can look for a role model maybe a football star because we know in Africa football is like the kind of our most popular game and every youth can relate an average youth in any country in Africa can relate to football and they have a study always in every country there's always a superstar who is playing in international league in Europe or somewhere else that they look up to and I think if you could influence such a person in promoting the values of nutrition maybe you know you display them on your Facebook or whichever platform you're using it will attract and it will enable you to connect with your ideas and secondly it's just to you madam regarding uh people dying long and people dying short there are a lot of factors that are involved though but I will encourage that you promote the idea of intermarriage between those tribes so that you'll be able to leverage it thank you very much thank you all right so yeah okay well just two seconds wait wait wait yeah you can do that I want to ask one little bit rude question uh I know that I wonder if there's an Amman I just want you to discuss a little bit the necessity of having a woman's network and why it is just a network of agribusiness producers yeah please there are many things about we're women so we're not going to start out I want a man but I think there's some things unique about women in in our context that necessitated that why we began our one and not the gender equality issue I think I'll I can speak about myself and then move on to others in terms of how owning owning the land um it's it's family owned so the decisions that are involved in that are a little bit more complex in what you grow there how you grow it and how you pass it on to the next generation and things like that uh access to finance is it easier for men to a lot of men were in the already trading in global trade so women are more disadvantaged in that sense and agriculture I guess in in going to get collateral and things from the bank it's so much more difficult for women so in terms of how do we sit around the table and discuss how did you do this how can I learn from that can I replicate what you're doing those kind of conversations became um more important for us I think men are already good at it and already doing it probably not sharing as much as they should have but so sitting around and having a formalized way of of learning passing it on to somebody else is one of the main reasons that we began um somebody else yeah in the case of Tanzania uh for those of you who know the history of Tanzania uh we got independence in 1961 and just after independence we nationalize all the major means of production and we were socialist it was not until 1995 when we moved back to the privatization of the uh means of production and guess what men were smart enough to grasp all the opportunities and therefore women were left behind in the villages you know just producing and selling to men and men we are taking now the the products to the to the to the local market and also to the global markets and therefore our one is there to make also men not remain in the villages to produce and then sell to middle men who are men and also to big uh uh sellers in the global market instead we want women now to move ahead and you know uh go up to the global market that's why we have our one but our man is somehow indirectly there because when we deal with youths we do not segregate we have got both ladies uh girls and boys so a man is there indirectly yeah okay yeah all right yeah wait wait wait we have a small uh Siani is very proud to have published and and have several co-authors here of transforming gender relations in sub-saharan african agriculture and we thank you very much for coming from and thank you very much for coming okay now we move on to our last presentation here which strangely enough it's about female small holders uh integrating them with a focus on nutrition okay do you have a no you know just that it's fine okay well first excuse me to go to the next slide now it's okay well first of all thank you very much you would say it was a great uh learning experience from us from Frusch I think we're with four people actually today normally I go out and I do all these lectures at universities and conferences and I just go there one one person and I say the word crop or hectare anything related to agriculture and all the students are like wow she's really knowledgeable she knows a lot and then I go to this audience and I think I'm gonna put all my technical expertise in the back and say just thank you very much and I learned a lot today already so I'm just honored that I'm here and why am I here and I was just sitting in the back thinking well can I even can I contribute to this discussion at all you guys are the ones you know you you're working on you're making the difference here and I think what I realized is that well what makes us unique Frusch and our story here so we're a tiny little business we are the market leaders blah blah smoothie producers in in the Scandinavian countries so big size that way but we're 62 people who are small company but we don't work with any institutions or any NGOs or any governmental organizations in order to promote or to work with our CSR programs rather what we do is that we go from here from our small little company and then we go to the farms in itself and we have a lot of stories that we are sharing from the farms so we're kind of trying to to skip the the bigger link which is important as well but we're trying to go straight there and see what it is that we that we find and then communicate and take that responsibility on our shoulders because we have decided about five years ago that at least 50% of all the fruit in our smoothies they have to be from developing countries and it's a threshold that we cannot compromise on so we make new recipes our marketing team they make all kinds of fancy new trendy flavors every six months two flavors every six months but it has to be at least 50% from developing countries and that's my responsibility to make sure that we always abiding to that one and some of them are at least 90% I would say so blah blah blah you know starting 2008 where the market leaders in Sweden Denmark Finland the Baltics Iceland Japan and this one a little bit more important for you guys what we tell our marketing team we have three two of them right there is that they can always communicate three things that they have to communicate three things when they're talking about fruit everywhere of course we need to be the best quality smoothie on the market that means that we have to buy the best fruit from developing countries as well we can't compromise on the flavor and the taste of it we have to use a chicken personality in order to to get our target group the young the the cool urban trendy people but mostly we believe in trading with developing countries that that is the most sustainable solution to ever overcoming the big issue of poverty and we do that not just grabbing it a political idea because my background is in international politics I come from nothing but from the beverage sector and and my my CEO used to be the president of Coca-Cola in Africa so he has it from his roots as well but it's not because of our personal interest it's because we have a fruit farm program where we send out staff and consumers and media to go out and to working visits in fruit farms in developing countries in order to see for themselves how trade can actually prosper and change community and we call it food on a mission it's our mission so the core of the whole program is this one it's our fruit from trips we've been to their 24 five-ish in the last three years and we've been to all these countries say that you see just before I went to the next slide that one right here you see Malawi Malawi has been mentioned a couple times today and it's it really sparked my attention a lot particularly you said Salima as well because a lot of our experiences are from Malawi mangoes I'm sure you're familiar of them and we've been there 10 times by now I was there like three weeks as well and so a lot of our experiences a lot of our stores are actually Malawi mangoes in Salima as well Guatemala, Thailand, Ecuador, Ethiopia, Peru and India and we're going to continue to to to grow on this one and the core of our of the trips is that all staff has to go and if at all we can have them go before the first year of employment then that's that's important we like to get that done also we're inviting customers and when I say customers it's it's the stores it's the trade we invite consumers that's the end consumers and then increasingly we invited media so journalists what we call public figures people that we think can open some doors to the media and to the public that we can't just by being a small little commercial company someone that we trust someone that we trust will speak up their mind and then we tell them come with us go to Malawi go to Malawi man goes live on the farm go wake up early in the morning go out to the to the to the small holders go and visit and see what kind of impact that buying that mango actually has for that fruit farmer and we've been doing that for yeah for three and a half years and it doesn't really matter where we go to Malawi is one of our closest to our hearts and we continue to go back there we have a lot of the of work and partnerships with them but it doesn't really matter everywhere we go we always get people coming home completely uplifted about all the amazing things that that the fruit firms are doing in order to build the communities that they're surrounded by so this is just a few of the things that we've seen you know obviously you know this one there's a creating lots of jobs of course it's both and not skilled but also engineers and biochemistry and so on working on a processing facility we get building schools building health clinics building infrastructure roads all kinds of initiatives that you would say that at least from a social democratic point of view that the government should take care of but of course it's not always being done and and also improving the CSR programs trying to think about an environment and trying to integrate integrate the communities in in these programs and all these things is for you guys it's obvious of course this is what's going on but for most people in the Nordic countries even in Japan like our news market way this story is like really is this working isn't small private businesses or big private businesses isn't it just evil white men capitalist that come and wants to destroy everything well no not not if we do it the right way and I think that what I've seen is that we are on the right path in many in many um in many directions so we have a lot of fights in fruition we're a small company we call it a fight in order to like motivate and one of the fights is that we want to change the perspectives on trade and want to to let the public know that as long as we do it in the responsible way it is the right way to to to go on board and we also say things a little bit weird like like we should go out and buy global things we should buy stuff from developing countries we should also buy local that's great it's very trendy in the media right now to only grow you know grow your own apples and your own strawberries and so on or be all local and and yeah and political correct but we're actually saying hey it's a good thing to go out and buy global as well and then we have a I would say the organic discussion particularly in Denmark is getting there in Sweden now as well it's really big most bigger stores and chains in Denmark they won't even take us in if we're not organic and I have kids and I give my kids organic and goods most of it yes I do yet I'm a little bit pragmatic whenever it comes to tropical fruit whenever it's mangoes from Malawi for instance and if we are requiring that Ngawai who has four trees that when he has finally been able to to find someone who will actually buy in his his mangoes for a fixed price and he has grafted it from into an Alfonso mango getting the best one for the European market if he has finally got that and then there's a bug or a pest if he can't spray it when he finally has something this I'm just not there in my mind so that's why we're trying to take like a pragmatic approach to the whole organic discussion and trying to get people to think about it a little bit like one thing is that you go in your in your nice shoes and your your nice bag and you go to the grocery store and you want to be political correct and only buy organic well think about the bigger picture a little bit as well that's what we're trying to say as well so it's a lot of you could say not really popular not not the not the political correct fight that we're taking but we're going to continue to do it and all these stories that we see when we go to the fruit farms we're trying to increasingly focus on communicating it here in the Nordics and in Europe and in Japan as well so I go and I speak a lot of universities go to a lot of conferences try and see if we can get our message across not in terms of marketing money not big campaigns and so on but with PR trying to get our voices out there whenever we can we don't speak Frugemann we speak the voice the fruit farmers voices of course I have a little movie and we don't have time to see it I know we got it's like seven minutes no no no no I know it so why this is actually why we're here and I don't think I have to go into go into this one because you are obviously very much aware of this one and I only came in the in the last part of the we effects presentation but I'm sure that mace was was mentioned a couple times and and particularly in the area of where Malala mangos are operating in Salima it's a big issue like the only thing that you that you do eat is is mace it's for is for breakfast dinner and that's it right you don't get anything else so what what they've done is that they've seen a couple of failed unfortunately NGO projects and I'm very happy to hear that some of them are successful maybe we can facilitate something right there but particularly in terms of a for instance cashews that NGOs have given out to the farmers and they they teach him and they give them for free the cashew nuts and then after a while they have to go and sell it to the market then you can't get anything for it because it's way too expensive a crop blah blah blah blah that kind of short-term thinking unfortunately and the same times with the the the failed government attempts of trying to produce even just just produce more mace and then giving it out and quotas and then if the if the villagers can't get us enough then the reason is because the whole donation and the aid structure has switched it from being a one portion of money given into the Malawian government and then there was some corruption stuff that they didn't want so then now it's going to specific projects so now the excuse from the government is that well we don't have any more money now so now we can't do anything right so all these issues has encouraged Malawi mangos full private business here to develop a new project that's called garden to mouth and and the the ambition was to provide nutrition and rich and again you guys experts so I don't have to talk to you about vitamin a and so on but meals for the farm workers and the surrounding villages and maybe who knows for more of Malawi at some point and at the same time getting income generation getting some some money that you can actually go out and and and buy buy stuff for and how they did it was they started to to focus on the the female workforce and then like they trained them into training programs of nutrition and nutritional insights why is that you have to eat something else but maize getting some scientist recipes on what is the best supplementary crops and vegetables that you can grow in order to supplement the the maize production teach them that and then having a start at the actual farm where they start to teach them how to grow it and cook it as well and then give that meal every day to the farm workers now they've been able to give them the crops that they can take home to their villages and then spread that message as well at the same time they're getting financial training so they're able to to make a a bigger budget for their families and this project it started about a year and a half ago in the in the research process and and already it's it's growing very very well and challenges in this process again and I don't like to I realized I'm in the lion's den here there's a bunch of NGOs and that is good and it's great to hear that things are things are moving yet the experiences that we've had here is trying to reach out actually to various NGOs working in the in the area that are working specifically with childcare where Malawi mangos where it's a it's a fruit farm is a big business they are not experts in childcare so they try to reach out to the NGOs and say hey can we do some kind of collaboration here you know you can come in you can take care of the kids while we make sure that the work goes but eight out of ten didn't even answer and two of them replied that no not interested a because you're private business and b because we don't want to have anything to do if it's not software so if it's hardware if it's a building an actual school or building the road to it then we can't have anything to do with it and that sort of mentality of like the old I would call it old-fashioned and and almost naive that the government has to take care of the infrastructure the other ones have to build their the railroads they're the ones that have to build the the the roads well it's just that's not how it is right now right so I think what we take out of it is if we could just on the ground establish a little bit more open discussions amongst both government and private sector and NGOs not just on a theoretical level but actually on the ground then that would be I call it like the dream scenario right unfortunately still in in many cases a dream and smallholders in particular that's also why we're here and Malawi mangos now they have about six thousand is if not even more I think small orders as I started in 2011 so they've been able to convince six thousand smallholders to change their crops into into the more nutritional and the bigger and the better it's called Alfonso mango from from india right and and I would say this this outcome to to go and see that suddenly you go from from having two local varieties of trees and then to to maybe having 600 big trees that actually you can sell into your to your farm and and at the same time consuming it you're for yourself because I read through the the thing when I read the outline for today's program that one of the issues was that well if you if you're just going to head and export and sell all your your crops what about the nutritional value for your family it's not really what we see we see that of course you're going to to eat a part of it yourself plus you also have some other crops and plus most likely like a local variety that is not suited for the western standards and the western way of thinking like our taste buds right so I would say that the chance is not really the lack of the consumption is more that I put here there's the short term mechanisms that affects the value of small holes are introduced to crops that are not economical efficient yeah too expensive to sell on the market like like I mentioned just before and so again trying to get like a more of a holistic approach and not narrow-minded but trying to think okay like of course you want to give and provide your family with the best nutritional value across but you also want to make money you do and try and see if you can make that approach at the same time yes trying to be as environmental friendly as possible keeping a pragmatic approach in that one I think that would be a the the most efficient principle is that it yeah that is it thank you very much that was an excellent presentation I mean not only did you convince me about Frouche but I also got a lot of information from a non-aggy really well thank you then I'm I'm well wait wait I'm waiting we might have a few questions here we are going to sacrifice any summing up and conclusions and planaries and all those things that actually I don't really like so this is planned that we didn't so yeah question here thank you for the presentation I find it extremely interesting I do buy a lot of Frouche bottles especially for my kids but I also find you are very black and white and I would have appreciated to actually if your presentation had been a bit more about the driving forces for Frouche and not so much about your war on your war on aid and yeah there was some other issues you are yeah the driving forces what do you mean by that I mean yeah exactly what you're doing is really good I think and and it's really needed but I also think that I mean there's a lot of farmers that wouldn't even qualify for your for being producer for for Frouche at this date so I think that again I mean we do need we do need aid we do need trade we do need uh governmental influence so but and I think that if you could be a little more humble about that it would actually make your presentation much more valuable because now as they feel now you've sit and then you feel like you're really like you're on you're on to a war and do you need do you really need to do that it's it's my question nice question I think I think particularly for this one if I if you want to go ahead and you want to contribute something to to a discussion with someone who's out who's already very much specialist in your field I think it's important for us to distinguish us and and say that if if there's anything new that we can bring upon this then then it is that we are a little bit more yes in our communication black and white then then um yes definitely uh the other thing about uh the driving forces like the the why we would do this well we think that we have a responsibility and we think that all all companies who are actually getting their their first product from for developing countries they need to know what's going on is it a good thing and and I think that curiosity and responsibility in knowing like what what is it we have to know before we go out and make a big marketing campaign whether this is a good thing or not I think that is actually the driving force then of course to try and see if we can engage our staff and get them to see it with their own staff like with their own eyes that is a motivational driver the souls are imploring branding okay is it anymore okay one two and three and then we oh all right we have to try here first short because now we have to now we're over time anyway go ahead my name is Herbert Smoynberg from Gain and NGO but we work with the private sector quite a lot I presented this morning on what we do in Malawi and Indonesia with the tea sector my question to Frusci is I mean the income generation by buying fruits from your producers is a great thing but then you're talking about the nutritional programs and how to improve how do you measure what effect your programs have well first of all it's depending on what kind of programs it is if you're talking about the garden to mouth and nutritional program in itself that one is not ours I'm just like the I'm just Malawi mangoes voice here I'm just speaking up their product so all credit to them we're just going down there and we're just trying to follow it and tracking it and communicating it and in terms of validating their projects then it's only been a year right now so let's wait and see I'm a I'm working with with women deliver you know the the NGO because there are a lot of NGOs that good out there as well and working with them right now with the women empowerment project particularly the garden to mouth one trying to to show the progress that they've done in the last year so that's another way of doing it then that then women deliver will take over and try and go back and within the year or so and see where's the progress is right now but in terms of them of us specifically and our projects our project is really to send out people to food farms and then communicating about it and I think in terms of evaluating that it's you can you can think of it internally if if our country managers and our marketing team they didn't see the value for this I wouldn't have a job right and I wouldn't be able to get all the resources that I do to focus on this so I think that one is the most the most valid like evaluator of does it even you know can we even do this does it even make sense for fruition itself to to focus on this okay thank you Katja so I had a comment and a question I don't remember um the name of the lady with the plantare Sarah um so I totally agree um actually with what you have said and my question basically on that is what are you doing to influence the the whole sector so I think it's it's great what you're doing and I think I've also marketing I'm sorry it's going to me or to Sarah to say both of you are okay I'm taking up what she has said okay um and I think you haven't been here in the morning I'm from Unilever yes and um I heard a sort of my phone I was watching perfect so um basically what we presented in the morning was on how do we try to be a pioneer in the tea sector to improve nutrition there so my question is um how do you do that from a more sector perspective I think it's great and there needs to be always an activist who mobilized the the industry but I think the important thing is to use that energy to have to see the bigger picture and try if that change so my question is on how do you do that in the industry right I agree I agree very much I would say trying to get like we do right now trying to go to as many conferences within the beverage industry that's that's our field right as much as possible and trying to engage in in as many political discussions as as we can and try not to particularly within the juice industry there's a big CSR that's what they like the CSR platform I think it's called right and and I think for me it's a it's a lot more valuable whenever we try and like erase all that about sustainability and CSR within the juice industry and try and integrate and still and and try and think what can we do as an industry like from a business point of view in terms of of making this and then and improving it and not just keeping it on the CSR shelf and so so whenever we do we have big conferences and CEO is talking about look how great things are I think they should take upon this you know use it like at least if you have 10 slides and use four slides on on what is it actually that you're doing in order to to improve the the the world today it's a bit naive yes but I think we have the chance for it to do we need to have okay okay quick because you've been making lots of comments you know that's what I meant though yeah thank you very much for that opportunity basically I have a lot of questions to ask from you yeah because of my experience in Coca-Cola in the corporate and NGOs and not political I think but the questions that maybe I would take those ones after the after this but my basic question is those are familiar you are involved in Africa how do you do the pricing how do you immediate between the the price place on the product you buy from them yeah you know I'm saying yeah how do you give them a fair price in order than the other side thank you how we can do it because we're not how you've been doing it not how you're going to do it how we have been doing it is that we we have a supplier we have a middleman right a fruit mixer because we have about 15 different fruits in each in each little glass bottle right so we have to use a fruit mixer who buys fruit and then mixes it and then shifts it up to us right and what we can do is that we can tell them we can make a contract with them a pre-preferential contract that's what it's called saying if you can get the fruit from a lower mangoes you can get their bananas do it then he has to do it that's how we can do it we can't do any kind of contract farming or direct sourcing so that we say that we have to buy from them we're way too small we have 15 different kinds of fruits so how it's working is that we have to make a contract with him saying you buy from there and then we have a very close dialogue between me us we have the the supplier the middleman and then we have the farmer's self a little triangle okay I think his question was though how you arrived at a price how do we arrive at the price well it's again it's it's the the requirements that we set in preferential agreements is a matter of price and quality so you have to meet those requirements and if we have an issue with a farm who which we haven't had but if we would have an issue with a farm who cannot meet our price and demand for that type of quality then we go into a kind of of compromise we have to okay all right we're gonna save a few one last comment you all right you have to yeah just a comment from Malawi yes I know Malawi mangoes yeah and I've been there we've also taken our farmers to just learn about the plantation yeah but then the other issues especially because I know Malawi mangoes as a company and then we have like places some community members who work in the company in the farms so the issue would be that probably Malawi mangoes would also try like places some other initiatives how to make sure that the small holder farmers are benefiting from let's say the whole setup because in some ways it's like you know being a company these small holder farmers are left out and that's why probably you'd see that in those issues of like how do we work together there have been like some of the NGOs that are directly involved in those there have been like some resistances so yes so that that issue of how do we make sure that the small holder farmers or the rural community is really benefiting from the initiatives probably that has to be well I think I think as a as a very very basic and primitive answer because again I'm not I'm not there on the ground and you would know a lot more about this if you talk to the small holders there I've just visited numerous times but I think I think just the fact that you actually can you can make agreements and contracts with at least 6 000 farmers I think that is definitely benefiting them and the fact that it's spreading that fast I've seen other other cases particularly in Ethiopia where it's been really hard to convince the small holders to change their crowds particularly into passion fruit because it takes a while it takes longer for it to actually to actually grow and be able to produce it and like females have divorced their men for making that decision so on like big big big issues here but I think particularly in Malawi the fact that you can you can you can convince so many people within such a little time I would say that that the mechanism is that it's that it's that it's worth it whether there are people outside of that that would like to get into it I think that's very interesting and I think which you know that's a that's just a good potential yes for sure okay thank you very much okay excellent funnily enough I'm not going to sum up and present any conclusions here I'd just like to ask you to please fill in our form here for evaluation of the seminar and and then after you've done that job then we would like to invite you to a sandwich wrap a lunch mingle here outside the room but that's your meal ticket okay and a big thanks to everyone and all of you that were online too and we streamed too for attending today I think all of us have gotten renewed energy and will move forward with nutrition issues in the future thank you okay yeah I have to fill it out