 Okay, let's start then. Welcome everybody. Welcome to this webinar, which is organized by the technical network of FAO on Sustainable Food Value Chains and Rural Finance. And, you know, this is a technical network, one of the technical networks of FAO and it's a platform for exchanging ideas. It's a place for sharing documents, sharing information about whatever relates to food systems, food value chains and rural finance. The technical as among other activities, knowledge generation and dissemination through webinars and this is one of them actually. So today we have the pleasure of having a GSMA with us. I guess most of you know that GSMA is the global system for mobile communication. And so today we have Q presenter, Panos and Sonia, who will talk about the digitization for procurement activities and access to finance, so the link between the two. So the subject for today is transforming farmers access to finance through digital agriculture. That's something that's, I guess, very interesting and very something we are all looking at due to its relevance. So I'll just give some rules of the house as usual. Please keep yourself muted during the presentation. Make sure that you are muted so there is no background noises. If you have during the presentation any question or comment that you want to make feel free to post them on the chat. We'll be looking at them and taking note in case of questions to be posed during the Q&A session. You can also pose the question yourself if you want that will happen during the Q&A session. As regards the agenda, the presentation by Panos and Sonia will last more or less 30 minutes approximately, then we'll have our discussion and then we'll close. Without further ado at this point, I'd like to give the floor to Panos to introduce himself to introduce GSMA and introduce us to this very interesting subject. Thank you very much to you Panos. Many thanks Massimo and Melitza and warm welcome to our audience today. My name is Panos Lugos. I'm Acting Insights Director at the GSMA Agritech Program. I am joined today by my colleague Sonia Pietossi, who's Insights Manager at the Agritech Program and we're both very excited to present at FAO's webinar series and discuss about the link between use of digital agriculture and promoting farmers financial inclusion. Now, before we start with our content in the next slides, I want to acknowledge the Agritech Program donors. The material that we are presenting today has been funded by UK8 from UK's Foreign Commonwealth and Development Office, the FCDO, and is supported by GSMA and its members. Moving to the next slide, just to look at the agenda for today, we will start with a few words about GSMA and the Agritech Program and after that Sonia and I will discuss the role of digital agriculture in addressing pain points faced by farmers and other actors in the agriculture ecosystem and we will make the connection between digital agriculture and promoting farmers financial inclusion. We will then very briefly look at the use of digital agriculture during the COVID-19 pandemic before we move to the Q&A session. Before closing today's webinar, we will just spend a few minutes to present the key conclusions from today's presentation and also to direct you to a set of relevant GSMA publications that are publicly accessible on the GSMA Agritech Program webpage. Any time, please feel free to share your questions in the chat box. Sonia and I will do our utmost to answer your questions at the very end during the Q&A session and any question that we may not be able to address today will be more than happy to cover via an email or maybe to connect at the later points in the next few days. Moving to the next slides. Let me share a few things about the GSMA and the Agritech Program. First with the GSMA. The GSMA is the Global Trade Association of the mobile industry. Members of the GSMA are over 750 mobile operators and some 400 companies operating in the broader mobile ecosystem. GSMA is known for its events. Mobile World Congress in Barcelona is one of the most well known events of the GSMA, exceptionally for this year taking place in the last week of June. But GSMA also runs more specialized events such as Mobile 360 events, which is happening regionally and other topics specific events. Within the GSMA there is a not-for-profit unit of the organization, which is called Mobile for Development. And Mobile for Development is positioned at the intersection of the mobile ecosystem and the development sector to stimulate digital innovation and deliver both sustainable business models and large scale socio-economic impacts for the underserved. The work that Mobile for Development does is funded by donors. Within Mobile for Development there is a number of programs and the Agritech Program is one of these programs, but there's also a wide variety of other programs as well. And for example, we have the Mobile Money Program, the Mobile for Humanitarian Program, the Connected Women Program and so on. Specifically for the Agritech Program, the work that the program does is funded by UK's FCDO, the UK government. We also receive funding from Australia's defaults, Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. We've had funding recently, very recently from the Inter-American Development Bank and we're about to actually announce a new initiative with funding from new donors, which is going to become go public very, very soon. The vision of the program is to support equitable and sustainable change that empower farmers and strengthen local economies. So we have to put that because. Can I ask, thanks, can I ask everybody to mute your mic? Thank you. Thank you everybody. So to deliver on the vision of the program, we bring together and support the mobile industry, agricultural sector stakeholders such as agribusinesses and cooperatives, innovators, such as agri-tech organizations and investors operating in the agri-tech space to launch, improve and scale impactful and commercially sustainable digital agriculture solutions for farmers. And the farmer that we have in our focus is the very, the farmer at the very bottom of the pyramid, the farmer who lives in less than $2 per day. To deliver on the vision that I mentioned just now, we are engaged in a number of activities that you can see on the right hand side of this slide in the circles. Through our research and insights work, we inform the donor and investor communities, as well as the service providers themselves, mobile operators or agri-tech organizations on the operational and business models that have the highest potential for success, commercial sustainability and socioeconomic impact. And we produce a lot of vast body of insights and we publish all this as a public good on our website. So we will mention some of this at the very end of today's webinar, but there is a lot more available in the resources page of the GSMA agri-tech program. And another important part of our work is innovation funds and technical assistance by providing funding to organizations and technical assistance to them. We support scalable and commercially viable models and we aim to support and deliver benefits. And naturally, we also facilitate partnerships and synergies and collaborations between those different parties that I just mentioned. Now in the next slides, and I'm just going to start now framing and kind of contextualizing the topic of today's discussion. I want to spend maybe a minute or two to discuss the focus areas of the agri-tech program. Our first area of focus is the digitization of the agricultural last mile. Now, the agricultural last mile is the point of intersection between those who produce the crops, the farmers and those who buy the crops, the agribusinesses or cooperatives. In that last mile, there are many systems and processes that take place. And our work focuses on facilitating the transition from paper or analog systems to digital technologies in this space in the last mile of food supply chains. Specifically, we work on developing digital solutions that can benefit both farmers and other value chain actors can create transparency, allow better monitoring invisibility in supply chains. The second area of focus is that of climate resilience. We are working on testing and scaling models that use mobile data or other sources of data such as satellite data. And to deliver various services to farmers and improve their climate resilience services such as insurance products to farmers like weather index insurance products, or other services such as even basic weather forecasting or agromet services, specialized agronomic advice based on weather. And the third area of focus is that of financial inclusion of smallholder farmers. And in a later slide, I'm just going to actually discuss and show to you how we actually, how we approach the topic and what is the connection, the link between digital agriculture and financial inclusion of farmers. I mentioned a couple of slides earlier that we are engaged in innovation funds. And in this slide, you can actually see information on our portfolio of grantees from our current innovation fund for the digitization of agricultural value chains. This is a fund that we launched in 2019 with funding from then DFID, now UK's FCDO. The fund aims to scale digital solutions for the agricultural last mile, such as those that digitize farm and farmer records and enable the transition from cash payments to mobile money enabled payment enabled payments for farmers and this is massively important. And we will explain in a bit why through this work we aim to improve the financial inclusion of farmers and also allow the farmers to produce more higher yields of better quality, increase their profits and improve their livelihoods while at the same time improving their climate resilience. This is a global fund. We have allocated grants of 220,000 pounds to seven organizations, four of them operating in sub-Saharan Africa, two in South Asia and one in Southeast Asia. These grants will last for a period of about 24 months. And together with the financial support GSMA offers to those organizations technical assistance, we offer in-kind support in areas such as user-centric design, monitoring and evaluation studies, business intelligence and so on. Now, after this introduction that contextualizes today's discussion, I would like to move to slide number nine and talk more about the specific topic. In agriculture of value chains commodity sourcing happens in the last mile we mentioned earlier. And that is where the buyers of the crops interact with the producers of the crops and traditionally value chain actors, farmers, agribusinesses, cooperatives. They face significant number of inefficiencies and bottlenecks that increase the cost of production, do not allow for clarity visibility transparency in the supply chains, but they also have a direct impact on farmers. And that's direct impact on farmers. As a result of that impact, farmers are stopped or are not able to access financial products or services, remain unbanked and exhibit a low degree of financial inclusion. Handling procurement on paper and in cash increases the risk of thefts and frauds and that affects both farmers as well as agribusinesses. And also takes away transparency and clarity that is necessary for all parties in agricultural value chains and that becomes even more important these days with the ever increasing demand for traceability that is coming from consumers, especially those in more developed markets. Under these circumstances, it becomes very difficult for farmers to achieve a living income. It becomes difficult for them to save enough. Basically, it creates a need for farmers to reach out to organizations, usually formal organizations, to request credit and use that credit to reinvest in their farms. The situation becomes even more complicated when we have crops with an irregular cash flow across the year. Farmers require financing and they usually ask or request financing from informal or formal sources. However, farmers very often do not have the ability to access financing because they lack economic identities. So what is an economic identity. This economic identity is basically consists of farm and farmer data that allow organizations operating in the form of financial systems as banks and the FIS macro financing institutions to assess the credit worthiness of the farmers and offer them access to credit and savings products or even other products as insurance products. And basically for them, the banks having access to those economic identities allows them to see how feasible it is for the farmer to repay the loan and for them to minimize the risk. If we move to the next slide, digital technologies allow agricultural stakeholders to mitigate some of the risks and the pain points they face in the procurement of crops. And in this slide, you can see specifically business challenges that affect the dissemination of information or maybe the payments of the farmers for the procurement of crops or the profiling of the farmers when recruitment of farmers happen at the start of the season and so on. Digital procurement solutions refer to the use of digital technologies across any of these particular processes and digital procurement systems may involve a mix of digital technologies and interfaces. For example, it might be that digital procurement solutions involve a mobile application, a cloud service for storage of data, a web interface. They may integrate an ERP system. They may use SMS or USSD for dissemination of information or maybe integrating mobile money for payment of farmers for the procurement of crops. So there is a number of different digital technologies that can play a role in supporting the development of a digital procurement system that can address specific pain points that farmers and other agricultural sector stakeholders are facing. For agribusinesses, digital technologies can help to make production more transparent, allow agribusinesses to better monitor the operations. And for farmers, they create transparency and clear terms of trades, but they also allow farmers to onboard on the pathway to financial inclusion. And how is this done? If we move to the next slide, digital procurement solutions used by agribusinesses in the procurement of crops capture a wealth of farm and farmer data. For example, data that identify the farmer, who the farmer is, what is their telephone number, how big is their family, what is the location of the farm and so on. Data about farming activities such as the type of agri-extension support that has been offered to that farmer in the previous season, or the types of fertilizers and pesticides that that farmer has used in the previous season. There is also less other information about that farmer. When a digital procurement tool integrates mobile money that can be used for paying those farmers instead of cash, then the procurement tool generates a lot of transactional logs as well. These records in combination with other farm and farmer data can support the development of economic identities for those farmers, which is actually what was missing previously to allow those farmers to access credit and savings products from the financial sector. Those economic identities from the digital procurement tool, when shared with the bank in a secure way and following consent from the farmer, can allow those financial institutions to assess the credit worthiness of the farmer and extend to them customized credit products or maybe savings products that specifically address the needs of those farmers. You can see in this slide that cash in is actually the kind of first step in this process, the cash inflows, and the cash inflows are coming from the procurement payment to the farmer. So this is the entry point and following that point, farmers can engage as they start building trust to the digital system can engage in more transactions such as P2P payments or maybe bill payments and so on. And slowly more and more data is generated, which can support the development of a more holistic economic identity for a farmer and a better assessment of the farmer's credit worthiness and extending financial services and products to them. Sonya will now take over and will share even more information with the topic by taking a deep dive onto specific areas around extending financial products and services to farmers. Thank you, Panos. Indeed, as Panos was telling us, all the different digital agricultural tools and solutions that help address specific business challenges and pain points among the value chain. At the same time, they also produce data and digitize a number of information that otherwise would be very costly and difficult to collect and especially to validate for instance financial service providers who would like to extend finance to farmers. From the perspective of these financial institutions, what kind of data do they normally need to conduct these type of assessments? We are really talking about these three categories of data. Those that can give us the profile of farmer and really respond to the know your customer regulation in each country. Other data that can give us information on the sources of income and therefore estimate the ability to repay our farmers. And then those that can help in loss mitigation and therefore also start replacing the need for financial collateral. Indeed, when we talk about these data-driven credit products, usually we're talking about unsecured products, products that do not need collateral. And indeed, the data that digital agricultural tools produce can support the financial institutions to have better visibility on each category of this type of data. For instance, through digital procurement, as an example that we use until now, we're looking into digitizing farmers' profiles. So from having, starting from the borrower's name and the national ID that can then be verified if there is a national ID system, the mobile number button then can open for data with the mobile network operator, for instance, and mobile usage, and smartphone ownership or even the size of the household, but also then farm activities and information, the size of the land, the ownership of the land as well, but also the mix of crops, for instance, to see also what kind of cycles and crop cycles need to be taken into consideration for that specific farmer. And also we're talking about use of, for instance, the digital advisory service, right, the use of proper agricultural practices or use of machineries and renting equipment and things like that. It could give a sense of how mature is the farmer's knowledge of the operations and therefore a bit of a sense of the risks that we're actually taking in financial activities, is operation and agricultural activities. Another use for data is, yes, to assess creditworthiness, but then also to design a credit product or even a saving product in a way that really matches the needs and preferences of farmers. And as we know, depending on value chains, farmers have different crop cycles and therefore different cash inflows and outflows. So it's very important to take this information into consideration when designing a product to maximize their ability to repay. So it's not only estimating their creditworthiness, but also then do the best that we can to really facilitate the repayment process. And then in the usage of this data to really maximize the opportunity to use this data and then serve farmers, we see a number of models emerging that always require the participation and sharing of data between partners. There is not only one partner that has only one stakeholder has all the different characteristics and capabilities required in this process. For instance, at the data collection stage, typically agribusinesses or agri-tex are closer to the farmer, so in a better position to actually collect and digitize the data. And also for instance collect consent from the farmer and also use all the data privacy, let's say, checks have to be in place. So when we start moving towards data aggregation and data analysis that are required to use the data, we see that agri-tex or even financial service provider might be a better place in this state. I would say that financial service providers that are indeed very interesting in using digital tools and target farmers are starting to equip themselves to be able to fulfill these steps. In other cases, some FSPs are not really used to use data in this way, so that's where agri-tex or fintechs can help in the aggregation of data from different sources. Because we talked about digital procurement until now, but as Panos mentioned at the beginning, there are other sources of data. For instance, smart farming, we are talking about sensors, satellites, drones, etc., that give us further information on what the farmers are doing and how they're managing their farming activities. And as I was saying, these are important indicators in terms of risk mitigation. So agri-tex can aggregate data from different sources and then also analyze them with proper business intelligence tools. But definitely the last step when we talk about risk modeling and credit scoring, usually financial service providers do have those capabilities, or anyway, they have to have a credit scoring system in-house to really fully understand the implications of the risks that they are taking. Since at the end of the day, they are always responsible for the non-performing loans or for customer protection issues, etc., and towards the regulator. So ultimately, it's their responsibility. So actually, we talked about digital procurement data, how we can have economic identities, and how we can leverage these economic identities for credit risk assessment and credit product design, and what kind of partnership models we've seen emerging in this case. And now we can talk quickly about the use of digital agricultural tools during the COVID-19 pandemic. We can see how digital agricultural tools really helped during this crisis food systems become more resilient in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic. As we said, I was already hinted through representation, digital procurement is only one of several use cases in a very digital agricultural landscape. The program, just in the AgriTech, has categorized these digital agricultural tools in three macro categories, depending on the challenge and service they're providing to the farmers, the challenge that they are addressing. And these are under, for instance, access to service. We talked about digital advisory, and these are really information tools that provide information to farmers about economic activities, but also about weather or pests and diseases, and not to deal with them, but also about, for instance, market prices and how to access markets. And also on the access to services, we have agricultural digital financial services. And here we are talking about from payments to savings, credit and loans and insurance products, as well as solutions, for instance, like credit scoring models, credit scoring solutions that can enable access of farmers to digital financial services. In terms of access to markets, we're looking into digital procurement that we've already discussed, so that increases the transparency and digitize all the transactions between farmers and buyers. But also AgriCommerce solutions, so these platforms that allow to sell the product or buy inputs directly from, you know, shortening the value chain, so putting in direct contact with the supplier on a wide platform. And finally, in terms of access to assets, as I mentioned before, smart farming solutions that re-leverge IoT internet of things to help understand and manage the agricultural activities and understand how well farmers are doing, for instance, to help manage water systems or the like. As you can see here that we made a direct connection between the type of them challenges that each one helps addressing, as you can imagine, and I mentioned knowledge gaps, financial exclusion, but especially low productivity and climate resilience as well. And what we noticed during the pandemic is that the farmers really struggled due to the measures that have been put in place to contain the COVID-19 spread. At each stage, so land preparation, cultivation and storage, farmers really struggled to, for instance, acquire inputs due to the travel restriction put in place, so inputs could not go from urban settings to rural settings and actually reach the farmers. And when these happen, the few inputs available, of course, they were more expensive than normal. So here there is also the need of financing that is not met, additional financing, also because usually when we don't have digital solutions available and the files of financial service providers, banks, really, I need to go to the rural areas to conduct the validations. And this was, of course, not possible. We also saw, for instance, how social distancing and perfumes and safety measures reduce the availability of laborers to conduct exactly during the cultivation stage, to conduct the labor, or when it was available, once again, it was more expensive than usual. Also, travel restrictions are limited the availability of extension services, so farmers cannot have that knowledge support anymore. And finally, in terms of the access to market, we see closure of local markets, and at the same time, challenges in transporting produce to further markets, or even, for instance, for exporting. So challenges in all different levels. And with the challenges I mentioned, my camera's not as surprised as we see that digital advisory, agricultural digital financial services and agri-commerce have actually emerged as the three most sought-after digital tools during the pandemic. So, for instance, as lockdowns and limits on in-person gathering, it's a shifted advisory from in-person to online tools. We saw several agri-techs and agribusinesses included, or using the normal communication channels, not only to provide agricultural advice, but to provide also health advice and communicate and spread the measures to contain COVID-19. So we saw this type of adjustment. In terms of agricultural digital financial services, we see an acceleration of the use of mobile money, for instance, among farmers. We see an increase of 400%, for instance, in Rwanda and the weekly number of transactions in March and April 2020, so immediately as soon as the measures started to be put in place. And also, we see how agricultural companies are using data collected from smallholder finance, exactly leveraging this data for credit risk assessments to try to mitigate the necessity to go into rural settings to collect these data from agricultural financial service providers. And in terms of agri-e-commerce, this solution, indeed, managed to give an access to markets for smallholder farmers, but especially we saw a change of business models. Before many of these solutions put farmers in touch with other businesses like supermarkets or retailers, but as these businesses started to close, so these solutions changed business models and put the user directly in touch with their customers, trying really to mitigate losses on both sides. So these are some of the findings we came up with in our report that will soon be published on COVID-19 accelerating the use of digital agricultural tools in the next couple of weeks. And now we are ready to have some Q&A, so I'll let Panos and Massimo let us know if there are some questions. Yes, thanks so much. Thanks Sonya and thanks Panos. I'll ask Panos to start maybe replying to one of the questions that appeared on the chats on the long-term crops like trees. Go ahead, Panos. That's a very interesting question and it actually shows how digital agriculture can play an even more important role in perennial crops and I will explain why in a minute. That doesn't of course mean that annual crops cannot benefit on the contrary, but even more so in the case of perennial crops. So a farmer might have a farm, in this case a tree farm, or let's say it's a cocoa farm to kind of make it a bit more relevant, let's say to West Africa or a tea farm. And it takes some time for trees or the crop, the plants to mature. During that period of time, the farmer is actually involved in negative cash flows, which means that the farmer carries on spending money on looking after the trees or maybe buying more stock or using pesticides and fertilizers to get them to the maturity stage at which stage the tree or the farm is going to start producing the crop for which it was cultivated. For example, in the case of cocoa, it takes a number of years for a cocoa plant to actually become mature and start harvesting and the same applies to a typical tree farm that was actually asked in the question. For that farmer, it is crucial to be able to carry on financing their operations and having access to the right credit solutions that will allow them to, for example, replace some of the trees that may be aging or buy some more higher value items or higher value expenses that are required for the looking after of that farm. And of course for access to finance, the farmer can actually go to informal sources and that might be people in the community, the family, often it's unlikely for them to have enough savings to support this farmer, especially with high value items. You know, for example, replacing aging trees is a very expensive process, and it takes a lot of time to get some sort of repayment back. You mentioned that maturity comes several years later. So that is why digitization of agriculture and making the connection between that digitization and the promotional farmers financial inclusion becomes even more relevant because those farmers are in even greater need to have access to credit and savings products to be able to buy those items those high value items, or even if we forget about agricultural activities to be able to sustain themselves and cover expenses of expenses of the farmer faces on in their day to day life like we do, like healthcare expenses or maybe education expenses, or even expenses household expenses and so on. So even more so in perennial crops, this need is actually there this needs to identify sustainable sources of financing for farmers and allow those farmers previously unbanked farmers to gain access to customized certain products and services that are aligned with a crop lifecycle to offer those farmers a typical credit product like the one that I can get here in the UK that would not help them because the farmer will not start receiving any income from their crops for a significant amount of time. It is important for those farmers to be able to access customized products that will take into consideration the new crop lifecycle and the maturity of the crop. Basically, I'm referring to the cash inflows and outflows so that they will have the best chances of repaying that loan in the future. Great. Thanks, Panos. What a comprehensive answer. Thank you very much. We have a couple of additional questions from the chat. One is from Pedro. We're asking whether do you see digital solutions evolving around the one-stop shops to be supported or by supporting a constellation of startups. That's one. Let me read you the following one so you can reply to both. This is from Ben West and he's asking if you have practices to share of fragile conflict affected and vulnerable countries where access to finance markets and all kind of these services is even more challenging to you, Panos. Thank you, Massimo. So let me start with the first question of Pedro. If we have seen examples of one-stop shops, so this is again a very relevant question. So, earlier on, I was talking about the various types of digital solutions that fall under digital procurement. This is a presentation that's based on the segmentation by the GSMA. We have six different types. One is looking after information dissemination. One is about mobile payments to farmers. One is about profiling of those farmers and so on. There are agri-tech organizations out there, innovators, who are actually looking and addressing the specific needs of one particular area only. That's totally fine. For example, a mobile operator in West Africa, in Ghana, for example, has mobile money service as a standalone or a kind of standard offering in their product portfolio. And although a mobile money provider is not the typical agri-tech you would have in mind, but in real terms, they can actually address that need that the agribusiness of the farmer is facing when it comes to payments of the farmers. However, that might not be enough and a significant number of agri-tech organizations, innovators, is actually emerging that address multiple areas at one time. So there might be a solution and I will mention a name here. I hope I'm not, you know, it's not taken as a promotion of a service or a product because it's not meant as such. But organizations such as Farmforce or Source Trace, they operate platforms, digital platforms, that are able to digitize the collection of farm and farmer data for profiling of the farmers. They integrate mobile money, which means that they can actually make payments directly to the farmers through the digital solution. They offer SMS or USD functionality that allows them to share alerts with the farmers or send information to the farmers through those push channels. So they integrate a number of different functionalities and they are becoming a one-stop shop that allows addressing multiple challenges at the same time from a single solution. I think that is where we're going to in several organizations already doing that, especially organizations that have reached some level of maturity and are present in more markets and having more clients across regions and countries. Now the next question, I was wondering whether you have any, Sonya, I was wondering whether you have any specific example from any of the markets that we have researched with, you know, information about credit and savings products. Markets that are more fragile than others. We don't have any particular research done specifically for FCB markets. However, many of the markets that we cover with our research do fall under this, if you like, categorization. So Sonya might have some examples from there. If not, please let me know and I can answer that question. Actually, Panos, I was thinking about Myanmar, which I would think it would fall under this categorization definitely, isn't it? We started the market, actually Panos started the market beginning of last year, if I'm not mistaken, and you can see how Myanmar, when it was more stable, digital tools were booming. The spread of smartphones and use of digital solutions. For instance, during my research, I was talking with the World Bank and supporting BRAC to start exactly experimenting with credit scoring using these tools in Myanmar. In that case, we're talking about six-month cycles that were working, if I'm not mistaken, around maize and this type of crops. And at the third cycle when they were going to collect data, the COVID-19 kit. But more recently, we were actually reading about solutions that are experimenting challenges with the access of the internet. This security load at the moment is drafted and might not come into life because of the current political situation. So indeed, some of the countries we're working are also affected by these, by also conflict and these type of problems. And then, Panos, you know, the Myanmar context quite well. Yeah, maybe I should mention that there is another program within the GSMA which is called the Mobile for Humanitarian Program. And it is also looking at how digital solutions can support populations living in markets or in countries of this type. That doesn't necessarily only restrict into farmers. So we are actually talking about digital solutions that are, you know, suited or available to the general population that is facing humanitarian problems and so on. But there is certainly an opportunity to also support digital agricultural solutions for farmers in FCD markets, fragile conflict affected in vulnerable markets. And we've seen that in the case of Myanmar. But and maybe I should also mention that there is a report, a state of the sector report that we published last September. And the name of that is digital agriculture maps. And in that report we are offering mapping a landscape analysis of digital agricultural solutions globally. These are examples of solutions that are available to certain markets, including FCD markets and I think that's a great starting point to kind of understand that digital agriculture is not just for farmers in Africa. It is not just for farmers who live at less than $2 a day. This is the key kind of focus group of farmers for us, but even farmers in a bit in more developed markets. It is often the case that those farmers are, you know, affected by the same challenges as other farmers. However, the general GDP per capita of those countries does not allow one to understand the real complexities of value chains and the real problems that those farmers are facing. Only recently I was actually talking about, maybe I should say that and then stop for the next question but only recently I was actually talking to stakeholders in Latin America. And we were actually looking at the level of financial inclusion in Nicaragua versus Ghana in real PPP terms GDP per capita sorry about financial inclusion, the GDP per capita, and the GDP per capita in Nicaragua is slightly higher than that of Ghana. However, the rate of financial inclusion in Nicaragua is significantly lower than that of Ghana. So, one would think that farmers in Nicaragua are better off, they have better conditions, they have access to more assets and services. They are not affected in the same way farmers in Ghana are affected. However, thanks to mobile money in Ghana more farmers have access to financial services and products enabled by mobile money than other farmers in Nicaragua. So, the FCB markets are very important. However, I think that one can identify pain points and vulnerabilities even in markets that are not FCB markets or markets that you would not expect to find problems in previously. Okay, thanks Panos, we have seven minutes so we can go a bit farther because we have one question from Henry, from Henry, very relevant, which I think you already read and you reply to I'd like also to read the other questions came in from Jim because they're also very relevant, and Martha raise her hand here. Let's see if we manage at least to reply to the first two and then reply to Martha. So, the one from Henry, you read it, it's about the, you know, the fact that the GSMA decided not to invest anymore on digital services for small scale farmers. And then so if there are any plans from GSMA to invest in in foundational services. The other one is those from Jim, I want to read them because they're very relevant as I was saying, one is about if some farmers already have negative scoring ratings, then this would risk to increase the exclusion right the financial exclusion. And I would add also if they don't have devices with them or if they cannot use the devices that the risk of increasing the digital gap and the financial gap, and then what mechanism for sharing data between finance providers to support not corporations or overloading of loans. Let's keep to this now. Thanks, Panos. Thank you, Massimo. Maybe I can ask the, I can answer the first one. And the first question of the second set of questions and then Sonya can answer the second one from the second set of questions about the sharing data mechanisms. So let me go to the first one. GSMA, the Agritech program is all about supporting smallholder farmers. Those at the very bottom of the pyramid are living on less than $2 per day. And we do that through funding from donors, as I mentioned earlier, UK, CFCBO, Australia's defaults. So we are actually investing donor money and we are supporting the organizations receiving this money through technical assistance and other services in kind of support to deliver and design and deliver those services. These are the agricultural solutions that are enabled by mobile technologies, by SMS, by USSD and all these different types of technologies. So we are very much investing and supporting smallholder farmers at scale, only in the previous iteration of the program of the Agritech program of the GSMA. And finally, that was called the M Nutrition Initiative and you can find more information on that on the website. We supported farmers with digital advisory services, consumer to farmer, and business to consumer, sorry, digital advisory services, and we reached more than 12 million farmers. So that's a huge number of farmers benefiting from digital solutions. Now the first part of the question by Jim about the risks. Yeah, so what is key to mention here is that it is important to go to farmers with a value proposition that includes very specialized customized products for them. So a farmer that has access to a standalone of the self credit loan products from a bank will probably end up defaulting on that product. So we want to actually create the right conditions for that farmer to be able to repay that loan creates enough history, repayment history and be able to better access more products in the future. And through the seven services that we're supporting with the innovation fund we're running currently with FCDO support. We are supporting those farmers by doing a lot of user experience work to understand the real needs of the farmers and looking at the crop lifecycle and understanding at what point in that lifecycle does this farmer has positive cash flows that will allow them to repay the loan. And while this is happening, we also disseminate information to the farmers, economic advice weather information and so on, to allow those farmers to have access to the best good agricultural practices and produce more crops of a better quality and increase their chances of repaying that loan. So it is important to take this into account because you're right, it will go to those farmers with a very standalone kind of un customized products. It is likely that those farmers are going to default. We're also talking about what kind of farmer can we first target with our work and the farmers that operate in more formal value chains, where they are exporters of crops, buy crops and sell them to other markets, other global markets. Value chains where traceability or sustainability are more important. These value chains have more chances of accepting or increasing the adoption of these the agriculture tools and the farmers that operate there might offer a better first step towards realizing the potential of digital agriculture to promote the financial inclusion of those farmers. And just because those farmers operate in those formal value chains that doesn't mean that those farmers are better off or are well off. They're not. Those farmers are facing the same challenges as other farmers, maybe not to the same degree, but they're still farmers living in less than $2 per day, operating in formal value chains and selling, for example, to call coffee or tea to big businesses exporting crops to global markets. Sorry, I'm just going to stop here and ask Sonia to actually answer the last question we only have a couple of minutes left so. I also sorry wanting to add the importance of bundling services, we also see an increasing number of services that are bundling insurance, for instance, whether in its insurance something like that exactly with mitigation type of services that will help businesses improve scores of the farmers. And then I think also I wanted to add Massimo to your question about what if the farmer doesn't have access to digital. And that is why as I was saying before leveraging the key skill set and assets of the different partners, that is why we see agribusinesses with their already filled agents, you know, sometimes they have problems and therefore collect the data for farmers and many farmers don't even need to have access to digital solutions or digital tools by themselves. And we also saw different other types of solutions that can go around exactly this problem, even agritex data creating their own field force exactly to overcome this problem. In terms of ways for was data sharing. This is definitely, I think you're referring to issues with credit bureaus and the like, and indeed, I think that's why also other organizations that offer financial services need to be regulated. We see a lot of agritex and fintechs are currently experimenting with this type of solution that definitely wants to reach a certain scale of the need to acquire a license and start reporting their loans as well. Of course, in countries where I'm aware that countries where credit bureaus are not available. This definitely needs to be addressed in other ways. Regulators are definitely there. Okay, thanks, Sonia. Thanks, Panos. Unfortunately, we have already reached our time limit so I can't allow Martha to pose her question and there were another couple of questions, one from our phones on access to market to help succeed in repayment of the loan. There was another one from Zang, which was close to the thing of privacy and utilization of data. I would invite you all to write to both Panos and Sonia at this contacts that you see here for continuing this super interesting discussion. I would have had at least other five questions to put that there's not enough time. I'll take the chance to thank you all very much thanking specifically Panos and Sonia for their time and for this very interesting information. And I hope they will share with us the publication as soon as is available so we can share it with our network. Again, feel free to connect and to write to the technical network so to me and to me, it's a and and also to to Sonia and Panos for going further is in going further in this in this topic, which is super interesting. Thank you very much all I would like to ask me leads also to post on the chat contacts for the technical network so everybody can see it. Those who have not joined the network yet please do you'll you'll you'll have the chance to attend many other webinars like this. Thank you very much again everybody for joining us today, and I hope I'll see you again at the next webinar we'll organize. Thanks so much Panos and Sonia, and thanks me Lisa for organizing this. Bye everybody thank you.