 So let's start then. Well, I'll have a this each of these modules will take about 30 minutes and then I'm hoping we'll have 10 minutes for questions. So today what we're going to do is we're going to introduce you to a risk management toolkit called securing forest business. And we're going to take you through the process of how do you identify risks of different types and severities. And then finally in the last module, we're going to teach you how to rank those risks so that you don't focus all your energy on solving something that isn't important. But instead you focus all your energy on solving the really critical risks for the business. And tonight, I'm hoping or this afternoon when you finish the training I hope you'll have time to do a little bit of thinking by yourself a little bit of homework to think through some of the challenges that you've already identified for a business, and then rank them as to which are the most important things to solve in the year ahead. Oops. So, this is module four, we're going to introduce you to the tool kit. Now, the, the securing forest business toolkit which I hope you will all have access to Ali sent that out on the invitation, and he'll include it in the file sharing. If anybody hasn't received a copy of this toolkit, please do send an email to Ali, and he can send you one immediately following this meeting. So the first thing we have to do is to just introduce the whole area of risk management why it's so important for a business. And that will be the subject of this first module. It's this this toolkit is something you could probably use every year. So, you can use it in the first, first year, and then identify what are the priorities this year. Next year, you'll have sold some of the risks or manage some of the risks and there'll be a new set of risks facing you. So for example, back in 2020, none of us knew that we were going to be facing COVID. So the whole new set of risks and challenges will have emerged it unexpectedly so if you do this exercise with a business once a year, it can really help the business to plan for the, for the future. The toolkit is laid out in a series of steps. So we introduce what risk management is. And then there are a series of other things that steps that we go through. So we identify and rank the risks, then we think of management options. We make people responsible for putting in place those management options. And finally, we monitor progress. And we're at the first stage of this in the blue introducing risk assessment. The first thing to say is that all businesses face challenges. All businesses face risk. It's inevitable. And it's also necessary that we take risks sometimes so that something may be a bit of a risk we may all have to contribute money to buy a new piece of equipment. We're not sure if the equipment will work properly and we take a risk in order to make progress. If you're a business incubator, and you're trying to help a forest and farm producer organization. It's worth remembering that most small businesses fail. It's usually between two and five years after startup. And there are often, often the reason for that is that there are cash flow problems, so that you are spending a lot of time and effort producing something, but you're not able to sell it. There's a lot of money in the short term and the business interest in joining the business group fades away. But there are many other risks to, and I'll try and talk you through some of the main risks in a little while. Two businesses manage their risks proactively. And so when risks aren't managed, they often tend to cause the business more problems than if they were thought about in advance. So risk management is a way of trying to think in advance of the problems you might face and avoid catastrophe. We've noted yesterday, there are limited technical services to assist businesses after they've started up. So often all the energy of NGOs goes into starting up a business, but there's very few people who accompany a business over time and support it over time. And that was why we were trying to emphasize yesterday that it's good to have a business incubation unit in a farm producer organization that accompanies these businesses and helps them over time. Now, a question you might ask in terms of risk is, if the manager of your cooperative group fell ill tomorrow, would your business survive? Or if one of your most important buyers went out of business, would you have anyone to sell to? So these are risks that you will face in any business and you need to think through, what are the risks? Can we put in place a plan so that if our cooperative group leader fell ill, there would be somebody else in place to manage the business? So that's the process of risk management. You think what the risk might be and then you try and manage it. So let me take you through a number of the most common reasons for business failure. The first of these is in terms of lack of expertise. So you want to produce something, Nixon was talking about honey production, but the people producing the honey don't have the necessary training or expertise to produce a quality product. So an important failure is just people don't produce the product to the qualities required because of a lack of expertise. Do you have the technical skills you need to run this business? So that's a common reason for failure. And secondly, we heard Alima talking about their group that's a woman's group producing shea butter. And often businesses fail because they have insufficient quantity to meet what the buyer wants. And so the buyer doesn't buy from you. They go and buy from somebody else who can provide them with the quantity they need at the time they need it. So maybe your problem is that you have too few members or too little land or product, or you're not managing your product sustainably so the resource base is degrading. So think about that as a key challenge. That's often a reason why businesses fail. They don't have enough quantity to meet buyers needs. The reason that businesses often fail is that they have too few customers. So maybe you have a particular buyer who buys all of your product. But if you have only one buyer and that buyer decides to do something else, you can't sell your product anymore because you haven't got a buyer so you need to try and broaden the number of customers you have. You also need to spend time with your customers asking them what it is that they like about your product. Could you do anything differently to try and attract more customers. So having too few customers are very common reason why businesses fail. Another reason why businesses fail is that they underestimate the startup time. So the group has this brilliant business idea. And there are lots of members, lots of enthusiasm at the start, but they underestimate how much time it will take to get a business plan, organize the group, get the machinery in place, sort out the transport links, find enough buyers, develop the quality standards they need. And because they're not patient enough, the business fails because they've underestimated how long it takes to make a business work. It often takes two or three years before a business will work. And the cinnamon business that I talked about yesterday in Vietnam took four years before that factory was properly functioning. It was very fast. So I'll just keep going through these you'll you'll get the slides at the end of the day. But if you're taking notes. Another common reason for failure. Very common is the lack of financial records. So, either nobody is keeping track of the, the money in the business, especially if you have a group that are trying to group their product and sell as a group, you need to have very good accounts so that people can see. So we sold this amount of product for this amount of money. And we need to invest this bit of money into the new machinery for the business, and this amount of money is distributed as profits. So unless you have very good financial records, people lose trust in a business. And you also can't tell whether you're doing well, or you're doing badly. You can't see what the main costs are so so or you can't see who which buyers are paying more for your product. So you need to need to think about developing business groups financial record keeping. And that's a very common reason why businesses fail. Another reason linked to finance is that people just have a lack of money to actually run the business. Sometimes, particularly with businesses like tree growing. You spend some money on seeds you spend a lot of time weeding and thinning and looking after the trees, but it's a long time before the profits before the timber can be sold. So do the members of the group have something else they can sell until those longer term products are ready for the market. So the amount of money to keep the business running is is a is a common problem, and it really helps if you set up a joint savings and investment fund. So that if there are short term needs, you can loan a member some money that they can repay later, rather than them having to sell up all of their product individually, rather than selling it through the group. Let's talk a little bit about that yesterday. Another reason for failure in business is that the group sells its product and it receives all this money back, and then it spends all the profits. It doesn't reinvest any of the profit into the business. So what you have to do if you're running a group business you have to keep some money to invest to keep improving the business to develop, you know, maybe buying some transportation, maybe, maybe fixing any machinery you have you need to have some money to run the business and to reinvest in it, not just distributing all the money at the end of each year for profit. The profits are a reason for for failure. And this is often the case when businesses don't meet up regularly. So setting up regular group meetings where somebody can describe what has been done this month what has been sold, what the money has been used for, really helps to avoid group conflict, especially in these farmer group businesses. And trust is absolutely important. So having regular meetings is a is a is a really good tactic. Finally, the issue of legal issues. You have you run into trouble with the authorities you haven't got the right permits. The, you know, you aren't registered. You don't have any problems with a business will come on to this much more in the last two days of the training, but there are also reasons for business failure to do with climate change. So, in many areas, whoops, let me go back up in many areas, unpredictable rainfall can reduce your crop or timber yields. When you can plant things, you get extreme weather events like drought or floods that can put an agricultural business at risk, and you can get pest and disease outbreaks because the plants are really stressed. Now we're going to take you through some options for dealing with those sort of risks on the last two days, but do be aware that there are risks to do with climate that are becoming increasingly important. So, what do we mean by these things we we have to understand these these main terms we have to understand what the business is trying to do. That's your business objectives. Anything gets that is it might threaten what the business is trying to do. That's called risk. And risk assessment is when you you look in a in a comprehensive way you look at all the different threats to your business. In advance of them occurring risk management is when you're putting in place plans to try and avoid some of these threats to your business. Risk management forms part of business planning. So risk management should be a process that happens regularly and is part of your regular business planning process. It's worth also just mentioning that I've I mentioned before, we also have to take risks, one who risks nothing is nothing is a is a famous quote. We need to we need to be aware of risk, but we don't need to be frightened of them. We don't need to put our head in the sand like that ostrich is doing. When you face challenges and risks. Your project might might come to what feels like the edge of a cliff. There's there's a challenge that you're facing. And there are various ways to approach risk. You can walk away. You can say it's too challenging to set up a group business and try and sell our baskets in a distant market when we don't know who the buyers are so we can avoid selling to those distant markets will just sell our products locally. Or you can put in place something to mitigate the risk to reduce the risk you can see the little man's putting in place a trampoline I think a net. So you can you can do things that reduce the risk you can get support from from experts to explain to you how to meet the legal standards for a product for example. Sometimes you could transfer the risk so insurance is actually a way of transferring the risk so you might say well. One of our risks is that the crop might fail because of climate change, but it's not very likely to happen. But if we paid an insurance company, a little bit of money each year, then in the good years we'll just sell our crops and if we do have a crop failure, the insurance will cover us so that's a way of transferring risk. And finally, for little risks, you can sometimes just accept them you can take the leap and think, well it's not so serious if it all goes wrong. So I hope that gives you an understanding of the different ways in which you can approach risk. And as I've mentioned, any business will have to be managing the business they'll have to be a manager who decides what happens when when are we going to buy products from farmers in our group. Who's responsible for for processing that product who's responsible for selling it and risk management should be part of the business managers, regular sort of arsenal of tools. So, yeah, you should you should you should put risk management in the center of changing the way your business works, so that it's less risky over time. Just to give you an example, we gave you some examples yesterday. This is a business some of us saw in Madagascar, the co-op Sinjo in Madagascar, and they sell various products that they're mostly agricultural cooperative. And they also sell a wide number of seeds, agricultural seeds, so that people can plant seeds in their gardens and and farms and nearer to the main cities. And they also have egg production and poultry production business. So you can see looking at the landscape that there's really quite a lot of aridity, and there's very little tree cover. So, one of the challenges they face is in maintaining soil fertility. So thinking of, well, one of the risks is that our land may, the productivity may degrade over time. What can we put in place to maintain our soil fertility. Perhaps we could introduce terracing as they've done. Perhaps we could plant nitrogen fixing trees, which we use for green manure to fertilize those fields. There are a lot of ways you could manage that risk, if you did a regular risk assessment with that group. So, I think I wanted to come to a point here where we just open up questions from you about why it's important to manage risk for your business, or how could you use it to enhance your business. Let me stop at that point. I'm just going to flick down a couple of slides. Yes. So let's stop at this point. And we can have some questions about risk management in general, and what is the purpose of doing risk assessment and managing risk. So I'll stop sharing my slides just now. And perhaps we can have some questions either in the chat or if people want to raise their hands about anything I've talked about so far. Or even if you just want to comment on some of the main reasons for business failure that I outlined. Are there reasons that you feel I haven't covered why businesses often fail. I can see your hand. Do you want to? Yes, I can. Yes. Just wanted to chimp in the idea also of looking at the risk around the policy environment and maybe any changes that may okay within the national context. And maybe some policy changes might adversely affect a business and then also flipping the coin some policy changes might also offer opportunities for a business. So it's also important to track policy and see how you respond accordingly. That's a really important point. Thanks Mark for raising that and our FFF work in Kenya has had two really good examples of that in recent years. One where the government banned the use of plastic bags. And that sounds like a really good environmental step but of course if you're running a tree nursery business and there are thousands of tree nursery businesses in Kenya. All of a sudden, you're not allowed to use plastic bags in potting up your seedlings and it's not easy to find an alternative that is cost as cost efficient as plastic. So they didn't spot that in advance they were tracking it, but the policy went through. They then had to work retrospectively with the government to get a special exception for a limited period of time for the nurseries. So that was one reason why tracking what policies might be changing is really important. The other one as as both Johnny and Sophie know was in in Kenya there was a lot of emphasis on trying to make charcoal more sustainable. The Kenyan government introduced a ban on charcoal production. And that had wide ranging consequences for groups of producers who had charcoal as a business. And indeed when the forest farm facility team assessed people in real need of social protection in Kenya last year. Some of the groups who are most poor and most affected were charcoal producers groups who are struggling to sell their product. Thank you so much, Duncan, and I want to contribute one of the key challenges could also be legal challenges, because in our own context, if the laws are not adequately enforced, of course, there is this unfair competition flowing the most. This is one of the key challenges and what we did in addressing that challenge is to train the producer groups on the different legislations, the laws governing natural resource extraction, especially from high ecological areas. The other challenge is normally entrepreneurial phase is basically to do with structural issues. That is, the law literacy and numeracy level of some of the ffps. So what we are doing in the government is to address that challenge is to the national adult literacy programs, the literacy programs are being administered by the Ministry of Education. So of course we link them to those possibilities so that they bring animal skills using their own language, local language. Thank you so much, Duncan. Thank you. Thank you. And those are such good, good, good points and and good examples. Yes. And if we were thinking of what a business incubator can do to help these local groups take on their challenges. You're absolutely right. Helping them to understand the legislation governing governing resource use so that so that they understand everything very clearly and meet all the required procedures is great. Another example of what a business incubator could do is making the connection with, say, a government program that's building literacy and financial accountability at financial accounting, and actually link the producers so that they can be trained in some of the very basic but important elements of business. So that's a two excellent examples, both of risks that you've mentioned but also what a business incubator can do in creating that support network over time. Thank you. Have we got any other questions or comments. I think I have one question. Yes, but I can. No, this is Donald. I'm using the same. Yes. Thank you very much for opening up our mind on the issue of priests. I just, I don't know if it's a question but as in a business as a manager. I have this concern on this the approaches which uses to the risks like, when is the right time that you feel like this type of priest now I have maybe to avoid it. I have to transfer it or I have to accept it or mitigate when as in a business and as a manager when you said like this I have to do this. Does it depend with the type of risk. Or there's a situation where you say maybe now this is the time we need to transfer this. This is the time we need just to take it. Yeah, that's my question. That's a very good question. And I'm hoping that we'll provide a structured method for you to do just that. So what part of the process of ranking and prioritizing risks is to put them in different categories. You can put them which you can just accept because they're low, they're low impact risks, other ones which are really likely to occur. And they will have big consequences for the business if they do occur, and then you have to have either put something in place to solve that problem, or you have to transfer it. You can put a diagram a little bit later in the training today that will, that will show you how to think about putting risks in those different categories so that you know what approach to take. But it's really good that you raise that issue. Kali wants to contribute as well. Canimans mentioned. Good morning everybody. Kali, yeah, you say speaking from the Gambia. Thank you, Mr. Duncan for your wonderful presentation. I think one of the risks among the POs is lack of accountability and other groups are facing with the FFF POs. But secondly also if you look at the risk, it's better for me that all businesses should start from risk when even before establishing their business was enterprise. That will help a lot. That will help a lot to avoid this future risk or minimize risk at the latter part of the enterprise. Thank you very much for giving me the floor. It's a pleasure, I'll call you and thank you for raising those important points. I agree with you, I think that accountability, especially in group businesses is a real challenge for making these businesses work. You need to have a group because you need to have lots of product to sell to get a good price. Accountability within that group and proper management of it is so fundamental and risk management looking at the risks facing you. Often you can waste a lot of time and effort developing a business that is never going to be successful because it faces critical deal breaking challenges in the future so really good points thank you very much for those. I can see something, oh Johnny you would like to make an intervention please. Thank you Duncan for your explanation is clear and very helpful. I have a question is that risk management is very important and to be in a conscious about our risks are also key for businesses. However, from my point of view there is also a risk that if the organization concentrates too much in the risk is like concentrating in problems and not looking at something positive that is something to overcome. You know, you suggest to, yes, they should look on the risk but they should not be focusing all the efforts on trying to avoid the risk because as in your presentation risk. We live in an environment with risk and how despite of this risk and risky environment and they could be positive so on the positive thing is what will move the organization forward so what would be your suggestion. Thank you and over. Thank you johnny. And that's a it's a real, it's a very good point. And it's something we grappled with, even when we wrote the toolkit. There was a group of us from from around the world who who worked on this toolkit together. And so we called it securing forest business, because we didn't want people to think that risk is all about avoiding risk and being a cautious. So we wanted people to think that, you know, you need to take steps to secure your business going forward. And, and risk taking is is a vital part of business. It's an opportunity, and you seize it and you take a risk it might not work out, but it's vitally important that you take risks. And so I think your, your, your words are really helpful because they. It makes the point that risk management is not about being safe. So risk management is about taking opportunities, but trying to do so in a way that is as likely to succeed as possible, and thinking those things through in advance. So thanks johnny that's really helpful. I've got a couple of points I can pick up cat in the chat is that right. Yes, there was a point here. Nicky saw 78 I'm not sure Nixon, Nixon, yes. Which reiterates the point about the importance of record keeping and knowing where you actually stand financially. And then there was a comment from the moon that which reflects a little bit also Johnny's point and that the every aspect of the business can become a risk, if not manage properly and he's here referring to the leadership. Yeah, potential source of risk. Yeah, I mean, all of you will have known of really good business people. Entrepreneurs, we call them and in the market analysis and development training which is about business startups. It's, it's primarily trying to encourage entrepreneurs and entrepreneurs are usually people who are prepared to take a risk with their money. It's really an opportunity to sell something to somebody, and they in order to sell something to somebody they have to invest in a, in a piece of equipment, and they have to phone a few people, and they're very proactive they take risks, quite a lot. So leadership, getting your leadership right in a in a business you have to have the right person who's proactive and not reactive. And, and I guess if we see risk assessment and risk management as a proactive thing of we want to improve our business we want to secure our business going forward. We want potential challenges and get them out the way so we can move forward. That's really good tacky. You would like to tacky Kwame Paul. Please. Thank you. I just wanted to add some few contributions. The first one has to do with the labor force and management, one of the center. When we went down, and when he was talking, he was talking about the labors that he employed that they didn't support him in building his business up to the level, let that work through this issue. And when we sat and he was explaining it was like, he was so furious that all the workers that he employed were stealing from him. But we also got to find out that the minimum wage that he needed to also give to the workers to keep them working was not the best. Okay, so the workers team up, they go to work, but instead of producing 15 sandals per day, they will produce 10 and the rest of the five, they will engage an outsider who is selling coffee every day to the shop. He will come and pick the remaining five. Yeah. And they will sell it outside and make money. Yeah. The TV camera that was monitoring this happening actually. So that pushed my boss away because we were to go into cashew processing with the cashew nuts, and also using the cashew juice as brandy and sort of assorted drinks. So this is one of the key things you also need to look at building our businesses. I think that's really helpful point. Yeah, I mean setting the, the pay of laborers fairly making sure they feel they get a good deal from from the workplace is so important. And that's all part of, you know, if you're if you've got a business that's actually employing people. I'm sure you've got a really good regular dialogue with them. So you identify some of these problems before, you know, before they spill out into into your workers selling your product on the side. Very useful. Thank you. Let me let me draw a close to the that this question session because that was an introduction. And with your permission, I'll kick on into the next the second module that we'd like to share today. And let me see if I can get down to the right place. There we are. So we've we've introduced risk and why it's important to take it to manage it to take it to avoid it to transfer it different approaches to risk, but certainly being proactive about knowing all the challenges your business is facing. As long as it doesn't deter you from from doing the business is is a really helpful process to establish so that you're constantly improving your business and overcoming the challenges it faces, putting in new policies skills procedures to address any deficiencies you see. And so we're going to go through a little session now on identifying risks of different times. And the main reason for spending some time on this is that often people just have concentrate on a very narrow set of problems. And they may not, you know, perhaps to do with finance or access to finance. And they fail to realize that the business has many different elements that need to be addressed and we've just talked about some of them. You know, there are policies that might change there are skills, literacy concerns building up the capability of your staff. There are labor issues that might need to be resolved. You know, there are financial record keeping issues that might need to be handled. And so the risk assessment process needs to be really broad so that it doesn't just focus in on a particular subset of risk, but it covers the ground. In a way, you'll make progress in the different areas that you need to make progress to make a business really work. So, when you're, when you're thinking about this the first step in any risk assessment process is to review what the business is really trying to achieve. Some businesses are set up purely for profit, but other businesses have a wide range of objectives. So you might want your business to yes be generating a profit, but also be improving the, the landscape, the fertility of the soils on the farms where the business is operating. You might want the business to be strengthening the social cohesion of the farmers who are working together. You might want the business to be offering opportunities for women. You might want it to, to, you know, have a special opportunities for youth. There are various objectives that a business might have. And it's only when you really know what the business is trying to achieve that you can think through, well, how can we make this better? How can we look at the challenges and risks that might stop us from doing those things? And so in this second sort of step, we really have to review business objectives for our business to make sure that everybody in the business is first of all clear about what we're trying to achieve. You know, are we just trying to, you know, for example, you might have a business that would make as much money as possible from selling timber. But if you just pursue that objective, the farmers might cut down all the trees on their field so that the sustain, the longer term sustainability doesn't happen. So we need to have a good look at our business objectives before we start. An example of this was that in Myanmar, there were several seven communities who had community forest areas. And one of the ideas they had for business was to harvest ratan, which is a climbing cane that we saw yesterday. And they were harvesting fairly small dimension ratan in order to sell to the traders. But this wasn't the only objective of that business. The other objective of that business was that it was in a business in a province in the north of Myanmar called Kachin. And the Kachin communities were actually at war with the government of Myanmar. And so they wanted to consolidate their control over forest areas. They wanted to secure their rights to those forest areas through their business. And part of that was to elevate the Kachin identity, cultural identity. And so when they were developing the business, they wanted to make a profit, but they also wanted to improve the visibility of their native culture within the national thing so that they could argue for their territorial independence within Myanmar. So you get quite complicated reasons for setting up a business sometimes. And in their case, they managed to hire in an expert weaver who could weave the ratan into these very beautiful traditional platters for serving food. And it was a way of showcasing their culture through their business rather than just being seen as a for profit enterprise. So the possible of the objectives of the ratan business. When you looked at the objectives they did want to increase local incomes from the forest. But they also wanted to develop a savings and loan fund for their members so that they could loan money to farmers who needed it to develop other interests that they had. They wanted to enrich their ratan cultivation under forest cover so they had community forest but the timber was very poor quality, so they wanted to enrich the forest cover with ratan. And they were very dependent on on one or two traders. So they wanted to diversify the buyers that they had to ensure that they had different markets and you could see them they sell the raw ratan, and then they also split the ratan which is slightly more valuable, and then they wove the ratan into products. And so each of those had a different set of buyers, so they weren't so dependent on any one buyer, and they weren't taken advantage of. They also had an objective to use their business to formally register their business under the community forest laws so that they were given formal territorial control of that area so there was a legal and political objective for the business that I mentioned. And they wanted to develop the skills, particularly of their young people and young women. And so they wanted to develop weaving skills to add value so that was about building staff capability. So they wanted to improve their ability to do business through a financial accounting and planning. And finally, they wanted to develop a reputation for sustainability. So they were looking at how could they certify their products using either an external certification system like the Forest Stewardship Council, or maybe one of their own brands. We have this first step of making sure that we're very clear about all the objectives of the business. And once you know what you're trying to achieve, you can then look at things that might block you or might, might be challenges to achieving those risks. So this third step in the toolkit is looking at identifying the risks once you've reviewed your business objectives. And let me turn to that now. So this is a process of identifying risks. You really have to think in a very sort of simple way about what's giving you a headache. And how could you do differently, do things differently to avoid having a headache. And as I mentioned, it's important to look very broadly at different areas which might be giving you a headache. So you do need to look at your finances. Are you managing your finances. Well, are you, are you financially healthy. Do you have a profit from your business higher than the costs of your business, obviously. Do you have enough cash to invest in the things that you need to invest in. And those. So you need to think of some financial risks or challenges that you might have. So as the whole area of natural resources. Do you have enough forest to produce the rat and that you might want to produce for the market. Is it being sustainably harvested. Do you need to have a nursery for producing the plants to make sure that community members are enriching the forest with this rat and the forest and natural resources is a is a key set of questions you need to ask. Thirdly, there's the whole area of business relationships. You know, businesses only work because they can sell something to somebody. So do you have the right sort of business relationships. Do you have enough customers. Do you have customers who will be patient with you. If you are delayed in your delivery. Do you have a good relationship with them so that they'll keep on buying for you even if they have some flaws. Will they tell you what their problems are with your product. Do better in the future so that you can change things in your business. So that whole area of business relationships. Think about that when you're thinking about what challenges and risks you face. Danny man rightly said, you know, are the laws and policies. What are they, are they supporting your business. What are they saying you should be doing that maybe you're not doing now. And so understanding the laws and policies is vital as is potential changes to the forest laws. Should you be campaigning for a change to particular laws and in, in, in, in a particular country. I remember when bamboo in, I think it was in Myanmar was used to be classed as a tree, and there were limits, there were restrictions on transporting tree based products across province borders. So some of the groups campaigned to make the government class bamboo as a grass, not as a tree. And once it was classified as a grass it could then be transported without any restrictions. So there might be things you have to do to try and campaign for changes in policies and laws. Fifthly, there's the area of a staff capability. Do all the staff in your business have all the skills they need to do their jobs well. And that includes the leader, the business leader should should that leader be sent on a leadership training course is it is the financial accountant doing, doing a good job is the secretary of the business, keeping records properly, are all the technical people the technical managers, are they aware of what quality standards they need to meet for government regulations, or just to sell their product. So staff capability is a fifth area where you need to look at challenges and risk. And finally, the reputation of your business. You can do a lot if people think that they're buying a product that will really help rural communities. And you can build a reputation and a brand that is all about restoring the environment, helping local communities income. Have you have you got challenges in that area maybe you haven't even got a label for your products. So when you take them and sell them in the market. Nobody knows can distinguish your product from all the competitors. What can you do differently to develop a brand a reputation that will cause people to buy your product and not somebody else's product. So those are six areas where you could think about doing an assessment of challenges or risks in in the market and analysis and development tool. They had five slightly different areas to look at. So they have the area of markets and finance, the institutional and legal area, natural resources again, social and cultural challenges that you might face. I remember trying to help a ecotourism business in Belize, and they wanted to do tubing down the river. And everyone was very excited about this and the tubing, they were going to float tourists down the river and the tourists were going to pay them money, and nobody bothered to check whether everybody in the community was happy with this and it turned out that the, the tourists were going to float through the women's bathing area. And so that very quickly put a stop to the business so have you, have you looked at social and cultural issues, and then research and technology issues. It doesn't really matter what categories you choose, as long as you look very broadly when you're assessing risk and it's useful to have a framework for that. So, for example, here is a cooperative business in Java, and it's growing. It's, it's, you can see the nursery for teak production and there's a mature teak tree. And one of the risks they faced is that they weren't able to get a very good price for their timber, so in the financing section. And then they looked at their business relationships and all of their business relationships were with these traders for single sort of teak logs. But they also noticed that there were new factories springing up that were able to cut teak into very small pieces and glue it together and make furniture and other things out of smaller pieces of timber. So they developed new business relationships because they did this risk management approach, they identified this risk with selling the same thing to all our buyers, could we sell different grades different qualities of products to different people. And so they, they developed a new business relationship with a furniture factory which would accept much smaller dimension timber. So that some of the timber that the their regular buyers wouldn't buy, they could use and sell that to this new factory. So, identifying your risks. So let's take that first area of finance risks. And then I've on the, in the financial health. I've put five different bits from the market analysis and development framework. So what, what challenges do we face financially. Are there issues of finance to do with our market. And sort of one of the risk of that teak business might be we don't know if customers will pay enough for our timber to cover our costs. And there might be natural resource issues, which are, which are affecting our financial health. We don't have enough land to grow our teak on. There might be legal or institutional issues that are affecting our financial health. Maybe the taxes are too high for us to make a profit. There might be social and cultural issues affecting our financial health. We can't afford to pay our staff enough to keep them in our business they keep going off and working for other businesses. Similarly, there might be research and technology issues that are affecting our financial health. So we don't know which portable sawmill to buy to improve our profitability. So, what I suggest that you do when you do a risk assessment is take the six areas that I outlined and just think through in detail. What are the challenges to do with financial health the main area. Do we face in in each of these other areas it's just a way of being very thorough about identifying all the challenges that the business faces. You could do that for the second area so here's natural resources what what are the challenges or risks facing us in natural resources. So, what are the financial issues. We can't find enough timber to meet a large order from a buyer. So we've got a buyer, but we, we, we don't have enough natural resources to meet the order. That means we might need to develop a partnership with a neighboring community to meet large orders, or our timber is growing crooked when we plant it on the field edges. So should we plant our timber in a different way, so that it's more valuable, maybe plant it in a single block. There might be institutional legal issues to do with our natural resources. We can't get a legal title for our community forest area the government have made so many steps to register a community forest area that we're struggling to to meet all those steps. And there might be social issues, the people responsible for land registration keep changing in the local government and then we have to explain it all to them again. So the research issues we don't know what pesticides to apply to our trees to keep them free of pest and diseases. Do you see what I mean so we've taken the main area. And then we've used the other areas really to tease out all the different challenges we're facing. It doesn't matter how many challenges you're facing because in the next phase we're going to rank them and just focus on the really important ones, but at this stage it's important to get a list of all the challenges you're facing. Here's another example, this time from Ecuador, and the company here, the producer organization here were planting Guayusa, which is a, which is a tea, it's like tea. And at the start of the project, the producers you can see in the top slide, they were just planting and caring for the crops and growing the crops. We did a risk assessment and realized that they really weren't making much money selling just the leaves to local traders, and particularly to a company called Runa Tapuna. So they decided they wanted to do more of the value adding. They wanted to plant the crops to provide technical support for fertilizers and pesticides. They wanted to do the purchasing from all their member farmers, and then they wanted to pre dry the tea and pack it for wholesale so they wanted to take on many more elements of the business. And because they'd done this thorough thing of challenges, they then developed a series of challenges and let's just talk about, you know, the left hand side. The main risks, the main challenges they faced were that the business relationships they had, there was very volatile demand, they were only depending on one company to buy their product. The staff, their staff were farmers and they didn't have any capabilities for processing the tea. Then they had internal tensions between the farmers disagreements about how the business should move forward. And finally, they had diseases affecting their tea plants. So those were the main risks that they identified when they did a risk assessment process. We'll come back a little bit later to talk about some of the solutions that this business this business group came up with. So I think I've talked probably for for almost long enough about identifying risks. And I wonder whether you would now just like to discuss anything to do with identifying your risks and the process I've suggested for identifying your risk. And also don't forget that before we identify the risk we have to define our business objectives very clearly so we know what we're trying to achieve. And the risks may not be to profit. The risks may be to some of our other objectives like climate resilient landscapes or something like that. So let me stop there. And I'll stop sharing the screen but are there any questions or comments on on identifying risks and setting business objectives. There was one question from Hosea in the chat. He's asking whether in cooperatives associations can both management and the board do business risk assessment together. That's a very good. That's a very good question. Who does the risk assessment. What we found is if that you just leave the higher management people to do the risk assessment. They may miss many of the practical challenges of faced by the workers in the business. But if you just have the management or the board doing it, you may miss the fact that the person who's running the shea butter processing machine has a major health and safety concern. Because they're not there to tell you about that risk. They might say, we know if we don't fix this machine somebody's going to get hurt in our business. So what we found really helpful is that it's it's good in a risk assessment process probably not so much the board, although you could have a representative of the board. And not just the management, although you should have a representative, preferably the manager themselves, you should also bring in people from every area of the business to talk through this risk assessment process. And you don't have to have everybody, but you just have to say we're going to look at all the risks facing the business so all of the people who are packing up. Whatever it is our tea into packets, find a representative to go and speak because we're going to look at all the risks and challenges that you're facing to try and make the business work better. That's a very useful question has anybody else. There were a number of comments. I'm still also referring to the topic. You had presented earlier. There was a comment from Isaac saying that there was a risk, if there are only a couple of group members who really engaged and active risk of abuse, which could then lead to frustration eventually abandonment of other group members. Yes. And I think that that's a really true of a lot of businesses and business ideas that you get one or two people who are entrepreneurs and they're really keen and they're, they're forging ahead. And everyone else is feeling a little bit left out they don't understand what's going on they don't really understand what the business is trying to achieve. And eventually they, they withdraw, because they think I'm not sure about this. And so I think the two steps that I've just outlined of having a group meeting to really agree what it is that our business is trying to achieve. So it's not just about making profit but it's also about offering opportunities, developing formal registration for our community forest area it's about building up our staff capabilities it's about training and learning. And, and it's about, you know, all of these other things that a business might try and achieve. Once you've had that discussion, people are able to say well actually, I really want the business to make sure that we've got a saving and loans fund. So that if I, you know, need to pay my school fees I can borrow some money and pay it back. And those become those get included in the business objectives, and that makes it much more likely that people will stay the course and belong to the group in the long term. And similarly, once you've set your objectives. If people have a chance to voice what what's giving you a headache. Well, I'm trying to process elephant foot yam, which is a root crop in Asia, but actually, when you use a peeling knife on elephant foot yam, the sap and the skin is toxic. And if you do it too much it gives blisters on your hands. So that's giving me a headache I'm a worker in this business it's a challenge. It's, and it needs to be sorted you know, and fortunately it's very cheap to buy a set of garden gloves for workers so they can do that. And then their, their work is much, much improved. So, by having a risk process that involves all of the different sorts of things that people do in the business, you can quite quickly make improvements to people's lives and how their work functions. And that can also help them to stick with the group so thank you for that question, Isaac. There's also an interesting remark from Sophie, linking back to yesterday's topic, saying that business incubation services can help to reduce, or address the risk of the business for example and apex FPO, providing business incubation services can support one of its member organizations to link to better markets, marketing linkages and provide specific business trainings, useful for staff of the produce organization. Yeah, I think, I think that's so important thank you Sophie. Yeah, we're gathered together as part of the forest farm facility family. And I guess one of the things that makes us a little bit different is that I don't know how best to say this but I guess we try we're trying to put love and care for other people at the heart of the sort of businesses that we create. So, we're working together in groups, and we're supporting farmers to achieve things for themselves. And it's very important for, for the higher level institutions the apex level organizations to have that business incubation, where they support the, the lower level groups to overcome the challenges that they're facing. And that sort of creates a climate of trust, and, and goodwill and everything. And so it's, yeah it's, it's, it's a, it's a cooperative way of doing business where you're not just interested in yourself. You're also looking out for other people. This comment was also very interesting. I thought Duncan from a question from Jeffrey saying that analyzing policy related risk might require some specialist knowledge skills. Yeah, I think that's right. And that may be one of the things that you don't feel you've got the capability to do within your own group. And so you might need to hire an expert out there. And sort of NGO types tend to have an interest in, you know, seeing what the policies are what they're saying and how they affect businesses, and what needs to change in the policy so maybe, you know, developing a forest and farm producer and develop a kind of partnership with an NGO in the area and say well, go away and find out what the trade rules are for this and what the forest legislation says on this, and then come back and give us a, give us a talk to help our business. Yeah, so Elvis, please I can see your hand. Thank you Duncan. Just following through all the stages and trying to see where Ghana fits in the situation Ghana where we don't have the usual FSPUs that's, you know, a strongly representative of the various value chains. We have their apex in their nature but not national in character, you know, but some in a number of communities and number of regions or a number of districts. So we now have the national network, imagine out of these smaller apex organizations in the different ecological locations that that also seem to have specific type of products based on the ecological zones without interest to the members. So the base seem to be very strong at this ffp was level it seemed to be very strong they have their value chains they are engaged in. Had your lima mentioned the share they are in working on you have come back to doing the baoba bulletins and you have the cashew the mango so at the grass rule level all these value chains are going on and quite strong. Now we're trying building this up to a zonal and national level in terms of the business incubation structure which you have some bit of idea about starting is from the grass roots true to the national to have done to not have the national character. Looking at the risk and some of the fallouts on issues the tradeoffs that are emerging, you know, very usual with new networks that that emerge and asking myself, if we were to do a risk assessment of that nature in the context in the context of gaffer, what would be your recommendation, the most appropriate approach to use, whether to start from the gaffer level down or start from the grass rule level where, you know, each ffp is still like holding onto the boundaries. Right, but part of the street is a strategy is that they want to be able to jointly aggregate products. So if you have ABCD into share, can they put them together at the Savannah ecological zone level to have higher quantities so that the national business incubation team can look for, you know, market with better prices for such. But those barriers still seem, you know, not opening up. And things like that and I see that to be a real big challenge to the big business incubation strategy that ffp is supporting gaffer to emerge so it will really be happy for guidance on how do we proceed to ensure that the very sensitive issues are really addressed so that the individual members will begin to open up their borders and boundaries so that they can be a collective agenda to to make more profits from these valuations. Thank you. I mean, I, I don't have a monopoly on wisdom on this, but I suspect that the way a process like this would help would be for you to start at the grass root level, and then maybe go upward so pick a representative producer organization of say baobab or, you know, mango or sheer butter, whatever, and go through a process accompany them through a process of risk assessment what challenges they feel they're facing, which will throw up some things that you can't solve. But some things that you can solve and it so it'll give a direction for what sort of support they, they might benefit from, and, and it'll also help those grass root groups, consider things like would they benefit from a more collaborative working with other similar groups to open up the market and and to to begin to shape the policies of the country. And then if you then went up to any second tier, you know, a representative group of cocoa farmers or so on. I would start the risk assessment by sort of saying, well, when we did the grassroots level analysis. Here are some of the challenges they're facing. Now let's look at you as a second tier organization in meeting the needs of those members. And that will throw up another set of sort of challenges, which, if you've accompanied it from the gap up level from the apex level will then give you a little bit of a direction as to where you need to focus your attention in in the future. And it's never possible to solve every all these risks and challenges at once. What I think this process should be doing a little bit like Johnny said is giving you a direction we can really do something about this this and this in the coming year. So let's not try and do everything but let's make sure we make progress towards this. And if one of the barriers is people sort of putting up blockages between cooperation, you know, maybe one of the things an incubator could do was just host a sector specific meeting to discuss about trade or something, and find ways of stimulating people talking to one another, because it's often those informal interactions that that then lead to people saying let's work together. Okay, we've got the same sort of problem we need to solve. Let's work together. Whereas if they're in their own silos, they can sometimes think more I don't trust these other people we're competing with them. Thank you though for the point. I think maybe then I might. I think maybe I need to move on unless there's, I think probably will will stop there, because I, I, I, I've got one more session to run, and this will talk to you about prioritizing the risks. Oops. Yeah. Okay, well let me try and share the screen again. And share. Last one. Thank you for staying with us. I know it's quite a long session. But let's finish today by looking at ranking risks. And we're to do that we're going to look at how likely is a risk to occur. And the severe would it be if it did occur. And that's the way we're going to rank risks and choose how to approach them. So this is the fourth module in the securing forest business toolkit. What we're aiming for here is to prioritize how we're going to improve the business in the year ahead, which challenges we most need to fix in the year ahead. So we need to decide which risks have the most serious consequences for the business. So for each risk, you think, how serious would it be if we could not fix this very serious, high, low risk, low, you know, low, or medium or no impact. So how serious would the consequences be. And then you think, how urgent is it that we solve this in the next year. So maybe you, you know that the government might be planning to introduce a legislation banning plastic bags, but you know that it's not going to happen this year. So is that something you need to, you know, is that less urgent than some of your other things. So the way we prioritize risk is we think how serious are the consequences, and then how urgent is it that we solve it straight away. So here's an example of a community that is producing an essential oil called patchouli oil in the island of Sulawesi, and they were looking at at their risks. And one of the risks was to do with the, the natural resource in that the quality of the oil was was variable. And so some of their buyers were saying, unless you fix the quality of your oil, we're going to stop buying from you. And you can immediately see that that risk that they're facing is the consequences if they don't fix that are very high, they'll lose the buyers. It's very urgent because the buyers have said, if you don't fix this, we're going to, we're going to stop buying for you. And because of that they developed they bought some new equipment for processing filtering and refining the patchouli oil. And they did it as a group because it's quite expensive equipment. So all of the group members agreed to put in some money to buy the equipment and they all use the equipment at the final stage to refine it so that the buyers will continue to buy their oil from them. That's what I mean so. And essentially, you can think of risks as you see this diagram. So, on the left hand side, the higher up we go, the more likely something is to occur this year the problem is to surface this year. At the bottom, we have what would the scale of consequences be, would it be very, very tragic for our business on the right hand side, or would it not really matter so much on the left hand side. If you rank each of the risks like that how likely is it to occur this year. What is the scale of the consequences if it did happen. You'll quickly see that your risks fall into different categories. And the ones that are down the bottom left of this diagram are minor risks that either are unlikely to occur, or would have little consequence. If they did occur, whereas the risks at the top right of the diagram, they're things that are almost certain to be a problem this year, and they would have a really big negative impact on us if they did happen. And so we look at the urgency of addressing the risk and the scale of consequence if we didn't address it. And that's the way in which we prioritize which risks we need to tackle in the year ahead. I was asked a very interesting question about, well, how do we know how to approach risks, different sorts of risks, how do we know whether to manage it or avoid it or accept it. So you can see that risks that fall in the bottom left hand side of this table, probably things we can accept or live with. So, yeah, this might be, you know, maybe there's a problem of, I don't know, a small problem faced by some of the people who are planting the crops in that the fields are a long way from where they will process the product. But actually, it's a fairly small risk and we don't have to do something urgently about that. There's nothing really we can do about that. So we accept those sorts of problems. Whereas, if you're in the red, then we either have to manage it, find a way of managing it or avoid it. If it's not very likely to occur, but it would have a huge impact if it did occur like, I don't know, like a drought or a flood. So it's not very likely that next year will have a major drought, but it would have a really bad impact. If it did, that's the bottom right. We might transfer the risk to somebody else. So we might pay an insurer to cover that risk. And if it's very likely to occur, but doesn't really have very serious consequences, then we need to just find ways of living, of bearing those consequences. We have to put new things in place to make sure that we do a little bit better in the future. I hope that diagram will help you understand that, you know, there are some things you have to manage, and there are some things you can just accept. There are certain sorts of things that you can transfer, and there are certain things that you can mitigate. So that's essentially the way in which we prioritize and rank risk. Now, if we go back to those tables that I talked about, this is the same table where we're looking firstly at financial health. We think about the problem that the tick business raised to do with its market. We don't know if our customers will pay enough for our timber. So the scale of that impact is quite high. But maybe it's not something that we really have to worry about this year because our tick is only starting to grow. So maybe if this is tick businesses at the beginning of its business, we don't know if customers will pay enough for our timber. Well, its scale would be quite high, but it's not really a problem for us this year. Or we don't have enough land on which to grow our tick. Well, that's a big problem for us because we've got one buyer who's asking for a lot of tick this year, and we know that it's quite likely to be a problem for us this year. So we have to give that a higher ranking on the likelihood of occurrence. Maybe the taxes are too high for us to make a profit. And when we look at that issue we think actually, you know, the taxes are not really the main issue. The taxes are a fairly small percentage of our profit. And we can't really do anything about that this year anyway. So let's give that a low rank. I mean, so you go through each of these, and you try and think, what are the really big blockages and how likely are they to occur in the year ahead how, how necessary is it that we fix them in this year, or can we leave them to later. And by doing that, you can make a short list of the red risks, those risks that are very important challenges that we address in this next year, and then anything that scores three to four. Well, these challenges we should remember, but they're not going to be the first things we try and deal with. And then the anything that scores two or less. They're very low priority. We can deal with them later or we can just live with them for them for the meantime. And I hope that makes sense. So, if you look at the if you remember the example of the why user T growers in Ecuador, they had these four risks. They had this very variable demand for their TV for their T from their main buyer volatile demand. They had a problem with their business relationships, and they had very low capability for processing the T, and they had some internal tensions and they had some disease. When they looked at the, the risks, they, they begin to think well. Some of these four sets of risks are things we need to do something about this year, because they've all ranked up as five or six in our risk ranking. So we, we have to develop a plan for making our business more competitive. And they came up with ideas where we're going to find clients, not just runa tapuna, the one company we sell tour, we're going to investigate the feasibility of producing the final T products ourselves so we're not dependent on that company. We're going to get capacity building from a local NGO and from the company. We're going to have a special project committee and and assembly to try and deal with some of the conflicts in our business. And we're going to get in touch with a research center that can help us with our pest management. So, what they've done is they've had a set of business objectives. They've identified the risks they've ranked the risks and these four risks classified as high priority for them to address this year. They had a much longer list of challenges. And but they said we can deal with the other things later, but we do need to address these four things. And so, let me, I think, stop there. I've raced through that particular session. But have we got any questions about ranking risks that we can deal with now and I'll stop sharing. So would anybody like to, is anybody unclear about the risk assessment process so that I might need to repeat any of that. Or are you all clear on how to rank your risks so you, you have what is the likelihood that it'll happen, how severe would it be if it did happen. And then you give each of those two, two things a score. And then you take the top scoring things as the things you really need to address in this year. Are there any messages coming through cat are on the chat. No, not on this topic. Okay. Donald, please. Yes. For the explanation I don't, I think maybe it's just a reflection on the ranking I go to very well. And I think also you also respond to the question which I asked you later. But now my concern is in the ranking, do you know how many people do you need to go or who are how many people have to be involved in the ranking because sometimes you might think maybe this is risk is really urgent but that could be according to your own perception. But other could not see that all the situation could not be like that how many people do you think maybe could be involved or is it the whole management or we can you say something about that so that I can be very clear about that. Yes, thank, thank you that's really helpful. So, what was what we would suggest in the toolkit is that you have a team of people who do this risk management exercise. And that would involve somebody from the management team, maybe more than one maybe the whole management team if there's only three or four of you. And maybe somebody from the board, if you've got a board, but also representatives of the farmers themselves, anybody who does the processing, anybody who's doing the sales unit so a group of maybe seven or 10 people would be a good developer to do a risk assessment exercise. And when you get to ranking the risks. One of the really useful parts of the process is that people begin to discuss whether this is a high priority or not. Somebody who's doing the is running a processing machine might say well, you know I'm, I need earmuffs as this is the highest priority for the for the business. Because if I don't get them, I can't carry on doing this job. And then other people might disagree and they might say well why, why what's the real issue here you know what, what, why is this a real problem for you. Maybe, you know, you might have two or three buyers, and somebody might say well I think a really high risk is that we've got too few buyers, and other people say well actually you know, we've, we've got, we've got three. So we don't need to get so many new buyers maybe we need to focus our attention instead on increasing the quality of our product for those existing buyers. And so, in the group you have an interactive discussion of how you rank each of those risks, and it helps people to to learn about other people's perceptions of what's going well and what's going badly. So the real problems in the business are, which problems are not so so important. And it also enables some of the less often heard people, maybe the people in the fields to say, you know, I'm telling you, there's a real problem with a pest outbreak on our main crop. You don't see it because you still see that we're bringing in this tea from the fields, but actually, if you don't do something about this, you won't have any tea at next year. And so that discussion process between the different people in that risk assessment team can really help build a stronger business because it helps people to understand where other people are facing difficulties. So I would recommend probably about seven to 10 people from if you get many more than that it becomes like very difficult to manage any fewer than that and you might get a single per, you know, a few people who missing really important things that they should be be talking about. So thank you very much for that Donald. Mark. Yes, hi Duncan, I think you very clearly have explained how the risk ranking should be done, but just have two quick reflections that I believe probably would also do alongside that, and that's to do with just similar to what we did with the challenges we identified. I would also begin to look at which of the risk we can internally address, and which ones we would require external support, and then also tied to that what are the cost implications of addressing this risk. So for instance, if we need to buy some new equipment, and how are we addressing that cost implication. Thank you very much. Thank you Mark. Yes, so, so yes you will you will find things that challenges that can be addressed. Often this process draws attention to things that the management team are just not aware of. You know, the management team might think everything is going really well, but actually the farmers or the group members might be really struggling. And so, you can often solve some of these problems really quickly like the example I gave of the gloves that the workers needed to do the the processing of the yam before they bought it it brought the yams into the store. And, and that's those things are easy to fix. Sometimes you might face a real problem so, for example, in the rat and business that I talked about yesterday, they, they identified that actually the buyers wanted to buy rat and that had been processed by boiling it in oil. And they probably wouldn't carry on buying the the raw rat and because it had too many pests and diseases that would then, you know, rat and can have borers and if you don't treat them before you make furniture, then your furniture gets eaten. And it all falls apart. So the buyers wanted the producers to do that processing step and they thought that's a red, red risk, because we won't be able to sell it unless we do. We don't know how to do this. And I noticed Isaac in your question as well you say are there situations where handling the risk in red appear to be on the capacity of the group business. How do you handle that situation. And it's a very good question. And sometimes it can mean help. We really don't know how to do this, but we can find out. People we know government people. Other businesses that do rat and production, and you phone them up and you say, Listen, how, how do you process rat and so that the buyers are satisfied. And where do you get the equipment, can you give us the phone number for the person with the equipment. And then you investigate what the cost is. You may be able to solve the problem you've wrecked you recognize that it's something you have to solve. And you, you then say, Well, let's use everything in our power to try and solve that problem. But like you ask Isaac, you know, maybe there are things that you can't solve maybe when you when those rat and producers had said, Okay, we have to have this piece of equipment. We have to have a bath to treat the rat and, and they think it's just too expensive. We can't afford it. And then the business felt it fails. And so those red wrists are really important to pay attention to because they may be an indication of was no use carrying on it's no use telling people to keep on growing this crop. And that's why we're here, because they should be growing something else, which is such a serious barrier to our, to our business that we're going to fail. So we better let everybody know that we're going to fail, and then we'll try and do something else that we can, we can make a business out of. And I think, so I think that's very good questions, Mark and Isaac. But you don't know, you often don't know whether you can solve something unless you have a go. And that's again, getting back to Johnny's point. It's very important that your business is led by somebody who is really proactive, who sort of who has a lot of entrepreneurial spirit, who sees problems as a, as a challenge that they want to solve. Because if your business is led by that you often find that they will be calling up their friends and getting advice and finding out how to solve this problem. And, and soon enough, that red wrist becomes solved. No longer a risk for us. We've installed the oil bath. We're now selling product to a buyer. We're not challenged this year. This year, maybe it's that we don't have quite enough rat and growing in our forest to meet the growing demand from the buyers. So this year, maybe we need to set up a nursery to grow new rat and plants and we don't know how to do that. Oh, how do we run a nursery. Well, that's a red risk now. Let's phone somebody who knows about nursery production, and so on. And you can see how helpful it is to have a business incubator who has, who's creating this network of useful contacts to solve practical problems from somebody who understands the technology of rat and production, somebody who understands the, the sales of it what's being produced, somebody who links to the government authority that's regulating it, so that you can pick up the phone or, or solve the problems that way. Any other questions. Well, in which case, and we've got just the right amount of time we've got just a few minutes left for today's session. And let me just share the screen one last time. Was that somebody wanted to say, oops. Let's go to ranking. Let's go down to the homework and see if we can put the homework up. So, um, I'd like you to try and do a little bit of homework today. Each of you will have some business that you're, that you're working on. And I think it would be really helpful if you could use your home. Oh, sorry. I said this idea of his was a good one. Lawrence, I think you need to mute your mic. Thank you. Um, so I'd like you to think of at least one or maybe two risks in each of these areas tonight. So some challenge you're facing on the finances, some challenges you're facing on the natural resources, some challenges that you're facing with your business relationships, something to do with laws and policies, something to do with staff capabilities and something to do with your brand and reputation. I want you to have a list of maybe 10 or 12 risks for a business you know. And then I want you to try and rank those risks in terms of the, how big consequences will they have what's the scale of impact of that challenge, and how likely is it to occur, or maybe it's better to think of that is how important is it that we solve it. And then come up with having ranked your risks come up with a list of the top three challenges facing your business. So yesterday we asked you just to think abstractly about some challenges and what services you could offer, and whether you could get support from outside to solve those challenges. I want you just to build on that and go through a slightly more systematic approach of looking at risks in these six different areas because you might find that there are other challenges that you face that you didn't think about yesterday. And then I want you to rank those. How big an impact would it have three is the biggest zero is no impact at all. And how like, how important is it that you solve it in the year ahead. Three years we absolutely have to solve this this year. Zero is we can leave this forever. And then come up tomorrow with a list of your top three challenges and why you think they are such important challenges why you think they're likely to have such an important impact if you don't solve them, and why it is urgent that you solve them in the year ahead. Do you think that that's something that everybody would be happy to do. And so I will, I will send have Ali send to you the presentation from today's training so that you can look back over the materials so that you can see all of these things. And then you have to try and download the risk assessment toolkit the securing forest business toolkit as well, and have a read through that, because that will explain some of the steps in a little bit more detail if you have any doubts. And, and, and come tomorrow morning for the homework just prepared to give an example of your three main risks and why you thought they were so important. Based on the the risk ranking that you've done. Any questions on the homework. Great. Okay. Well, if, if you're all happy with the homework, Ali, do you have any housekeeping matters. I think we've got, we've had sort of anything between 30 and 40 at different stages of the day. Are any people having trouble accessing the training. I'm aware of I had a quick suggestion I don't know if people would want to do this but a few people have shared their work either emailing me directly or in the WhatsApp group from the homework yesterday. I'll check with those people if they mind, if I update those bits of work into the shared folders so other people can also see them and then maybe to suggest if people are happy to. They can add themselves their work each day to the shared folder and everyone be able to see what everyone is working on. And you should all have access and they can reshare that link. I think that's a super idea. If people don't mind, we're not, we're not trying to judge you here. It's not a question of getting top marks but it is really useful to see how different people are solving their problems of business and risk management so does everybody agree can we have some thumbs up if you know how to do a thumbs up on this machine. Yes, Sophie said it would be good to share that link again so maybe share that link. Thank you all. There's the zoom, the zoom literate people have put their thumbs up. Thank you. Alan, I'll share the link with the email with the slides again from today and the recording from today. So you'll get you'll get all the slides and you'll get a link to the, to the shared folder in in an email. Are you going to put that up as well just now Ali. Shall I. Yeah, I can do that in the chat. Yeah, if you do that in the chat just so people want to copy it from the chat some people are working on phones I know. And tomorrow. We're, we're coming back so we'll start by listening to your top ranked risks, and then we go through a process of. Okay, well how do we come up with solutions for those risks. How do we assign responsibilities for that, and how do we monitor what what we've achieved by solving these risks in a particular year so that's part of business management. So this will be a useful session, and it will also be interested when you do your natural resource risks today in your homework, whether any of them are to do with climate change, because so think about climate change and the risks that poses, because the days of the training are all about solutions or possible ways of handling climate change in business. And so I hope that's good. I've got two people want to have a quick word. Thank you Kwame Paul, or if not Johnny do you want to go. Thank you Duncan for the session. I want to use the opportunity that the facilitators from the three countries are there. I think how we could strengthen in the capacities of the apex organization to provide these services. It is good that this business incubations are done at sub national level by the producer organization but the capacities to support and provide the services would be good to that the apex organization have that and we could discuss a country by country later but it will be very useful. Thank you and over. Thank you for the session. Thank you very much Johnny that's great idea. Did did Taki Kwame Paul want to say anything. Maybe it's a hand from before. Yes, we've reached just reached the end of our session. Thank you so much for for joining us. It's, it's, and thank you so much for doing the homework and contributing so freely in the morning. Thank you so much for the session. Thank you so much for making it animated and helps us all so so please do continue to do a little bit of homework today, and we'll see you tomorrow at the same time for another session on on the finishing the session on risk management.