 Can we please say hello to our guests, Akeen and Grace Adoshina? Yes. Can we have that one? Thank you. I want to go straight to the most pressing question that I know is on the minds of at least most of the men in the audience. How do you tie those perfect bow ties? Every time I try, I waste half an hour and give up like I did today. It's a signature, apparently, because each time we're together, you have it, and it's perfect. Thank you very much, President Dampley-Daniel. You're going to be back at Purdue campus. Thank you very much for inviting me to be here. You're going to be back with Grace and talking of Grace and bow ties. Actually, I got into bow tie because of Grace, and she buys all the bow ties, and she actually taught me how to tie them, so credit goes to her, but I'm a pretty good student. Well, all of Purdue, all of Purdue, here and everywhere, we are so proud, and those of us who were fortunate enough to be present the other night for the ceremony will never forget it, but you've been always been, and the other night, again, in Des Moines, very generous about your experience here. Could you just reflect back a little bit about your Purdue experience? How did you wind up here, many choices, and what do you remember best? Well, you know, that's a very good question, because how did I come to Purdue? I came to Purdue because I was a very stubborn student. I had a professor at the University of Ife in Nigeria who taught me mathematical economics, and I had been given scholarship by the University of Ife in Nigeria to actually go to Oxford University or Cambridge University. And so I got into the class, and he was teaching those mathematical economics, and he set up all those functions in the air, and he will solve all these functions and invite matrices and so on in the air, and he had not written anything on the board. And so one day in class, we felt this was torture, and he looked at me and he said, I can't solve this mathematical function. It was in the air. I said, write it on the board and he said, no. Then you look at me and he said, well, they said you're smart, but I can tell you, if you go to Purdue University, you will fail. He had gone to Cranard. He got his PhD in economics from Cranard. And so all of a sudden, I left the university, I mean the class, and went to the library, and I picked up the United States Information Service booklet, and I looked for the school, and I found Purdue University West Lafayette, Indiana. And so I applied and I forgot about going to Cambridge, Oxford. And then I got here and I found out that Purdue professors never taught like that. They were better teachers, and they made me to learn mathematical economics so well. And so anyway, when I finished my degree from here, I did very well. My professors here, both of them are here. Phil Abbott is here. And John Sanders died. My PhD professor, both of them are here. So I went back to Nigeria. I had finished. I got a standing thesis award. So when I got to the University of Ife, of course you could see my delight, President Daniel. I went to see him, and so I could say I survived Purdue. So that was how I got here. So my experiences here were pretty interesting because I came here on government scholarship. And my first semester, the funds just ran dry. The government wasn't paying my scholarship. And I was living on Cumberland, and I used to walk all the way to school. I didn't have sweater much. I didn't have gloves. It was very cold here. And one day, I had only 25 cents left in the world. And I prayed that day. I said, God, you've got to do some miracles today. And I went to school. And I went, I saw John Connors, who was one of my professors who taught me price analysis. And John Connors, I said, well, to John, well, look, I have only 25 cents left. And John Connors opened his drawer, and he wrote me a check for $100. And he said, you pay that back at the end of your PhD, right? And then he said, well, when you're going, you're going to the fifth floor, and go see a guy there whose name is called Phil Abbott. And Phil is here. And, you know, he was from MIT, you know, world's mathematical monks and stuff like that. Did he write on the board? No. Well, he wrote on the board. He was pretty good. So I enter Phil's office, and Phil, of course, he will back you. You know, he was more concerned about his computer than you. So I walked in, and he said, well, you know, are you the Nigerian student? I said, yes. He said, he told me you were smart. I said, I don't know. He said, but he told me you don't have money. He said, that one is absolutely correct. And then he said to me, you have an assistantship. So I got an assistantship my fourth semester because of him. And I said, what does it really mean, assistantship? I said, does it mean I get paid at the end of this month? That was the first time he turned. He turned his chair. He looked at me. He said, well, look, this is United States of America. When you walk hard, you get paid. I said, don't get angry. I just want to get paid at the end of the month. And so that was how I got my master's training. And when it was time for my PhD, John Sanders did the same for me and got me on an Insomil project. And I was able to do my PhD. So the point I'm trying to make to you, President, is that I was glad to have chosen Purdue, but I also have fantastic professors. I got a lot of love out of here. So many of my professors are all here from Aggicon who pulled themselves into me. So this is a world-class university. I think I wouldn't be who I am today without a world-class education I got out of here. Hakine, I've always said that the greatest of many, many joys in my present assignment is how often I get to hear somebody say that. Thanks to Purdue. It started at Purdue. And it's a special joy to see someone who's gone where you have gone. And just to add something, President, so that you don't think I didn't pay back the $100 lecture. I actually paid back the $100 to John Connors. And I remember John Connors giving me a handshake and he said, congratulations, doctor, because I just finished my PhD thesis then. So, you know, I did pay back the money. He didn't make you calculate the interest? No, he was so full of love, he didn't. It was also so interesting the other night to hear you reminisce a little bit about the very special opportunity you had to know Dr. Norman Vorlog, who was the inspiration for the World Food Prize, which you just won, how proud he would have been that someone who was a protege of his came so far and won that honor. But could you share a little bit of that with the audience? It was very moving. You know, Dr. Vorlog did a number of amazing things. He's the only person I know of that quit a job twice and already hired back by the same organization twice. He was in Rockefeller Foundation and he was in all this great work in Mexico with a short stature of wheat varieties. And, you know, the Rockefeller Foundation wanted him to write an honor report, you know, such a report. And Norm said, well, look, do you need a report or you need some high yielding varieties? So I don't care about your report, but I will keep working on the high yielding varieties. So he tried to quit, they asked him to come back, tried to quit again, they asked him to come back. But of course the rest is history. You know, he was a man who fed a billion people. Just a mind-boggling thing. And I think his determination is commitment. And he saw it as a mission, not a job. And that's what drives me, actually, is I share that and I think that, you know, God put me on the face of the air for a reason. And I believe that our reason is to help to leave millions out of poverty, which is also the same reason that, you know, Dr. Bullock and I had a good relationship. But our relationship came to a particular interesting moment in 2006. Now, I had wanted to organize a fertilizer summit in Africa. And the reason was I woke up one morning. I had worked on that John Sanders and we were looking at the time at the use of, you know, Ghani fertilizer and how little that amount was. And... But when I became, you know, in Rockefeller Foundation, I said, but look, we've got to be able to make sure that the level of use of fertilizer in Africa, on average, can move from eight kilograms per hectare to something at least 50 kilograms per hectare to give us a chance to be able to feed ourselves. So, but at that time, all the NGOs were saying the fertilizers were bad. They're bad for the environment. They're bad for water. Overused during the Asian Green Revolution, blah, blah, blah, blah. But I said, well, look, it was not the overuse of fertilizers that was Africa's problem. It was the lack of use of fertilizers that was Africa's problem. But I needed to get the political leaders to get to... So, I went out to mobilize, actually, to try the world behind that in Africa. And I went to Dr. Bolag. And I said, Dr. Bolag, I would like you to help me with this. And he agreed to be on the committee to organize this landmark event. So, we went to New York. I was in Rockefeller Foundation. We're walking on Feather Avenue. And Dr. Bolag, you know, he was 90 years old and he put his hand around my shoulder and he said, I can't... Do you play soccer? And I wondered, why in the world will he be asking me about soccer? And I said, yes, I play soccer. He said, you see, in soccer, unless you score the first goal, you would never have the confidence that you can win the match. And he said, well, I wanted to score the first goal for African agriculture. And so, for me, it was like a call. It was so spiritual for me. It was like, wow. This is the man who was the Nobel Prize winner. A man who fed a billion people. Tapping me on the shoulder and telling me I should go do something. Then this is it. So anyway, we went over that to Nigeria. We organized the Fatalizer Summit on that president, but the thing with Norm was that he did things in extraordinary ways. So we had all these heads of state, 40 heads of state and government. And Dr. Bolo walks up to the front of the stage and he said, I don't need all of you to change Africa. I don't even need 20 of you. I don't need 10 of you. I only need two of you. And then he banged the lecture. He said, I want to see the real revolution in Africa before I die. This is now, he was now 92. And President Abbas of Nigeria got out of his seat, ran straight to the lectern where he was, but he forgot his shoes. And so his security detail ran after him thinking the president was crazy. And got to the front and then he held Dr. Bolo's hand and said to all the heads of state, Dr. Bolo has been telling us that we've got to get a green revolution going in Africa. We were not listening to him. Now Dr. Bolo is threatening us with death. And nobody wants to be responsible for killing Dr. Bolo. So all of you in favor of emotion to adopt the African green revolution put your hands up and all the hands went up. That was how Dr. Bolo got us to approve the African green revolution at the Africa fertilizer summit. I miss Dr. Bolo. But that's a part of him that's inside of me. The commitment to what he actually stood for. And I have every confidence that by God's grace we'll be able to feed Africa. It was the last thing on Dr. Bolo's mind how to feed Africa. He doesn't have to worry. By God's grace we'll get it done. Well let's talk about getting it done. You're the point person for this as much as anyone on the planet and talk about the state of the effort to eliminate hunger and malnutrition in Africa and in particular about the banks so-called high fives program to address it. You know it is actually quite mind boggling that Africa is not able to feed itself. And for me it's certainly not acceptable at all. Because I think God has given Africa all it needs. We've got lots of land. Lots of cheap labor. Lots of water. And we've got great sunshine. We don't have snow. It's just a fantastic place. But I think the problem has always been the way in which we looked at agriculture. So I'm starting from the point of we have to change the lenses with which we look at agriculture. We will look at agriculture as that primary sector. Even the economic theory would teach you that agriculture is that primary sector industrial sector and move folks out of agriculture into that sector. As a result of that African governments wanted to start building planes, aircrafts and they forgot all about agriculture. So the first thing for me that I decided to do was to help African governments to understand agriculture is a business. It's not a social sector it's not a development activity. It is a business. It's a private enterprise. Every farmer you see is a private enterprise person. But the key is how do you unbound the constraints around them in terms of access to good technology to information, to markets to all the things that they need to be able to thrive. And so I think that a number of things are important. I really believe that if technologies to feed Africa, they are there right now. And the technologies need to be taken to scale of millions of farmers. So at the African Development Bank when I became president we launched a strategy which is to feed Africa and we are going to be investing 24 billion US dollars in the agriculture sector over the next 10 years. And we just in front of our board right now going to our board to consider an initiative that's called technologies for African transformation. Essentially what it is is we're going to take the technologies right here at Purdue. You have a great technology with the Purdue PICS you call it the improved storage systems here. Well that technology or the extruder that is being walked on here can go to scale of millions of farmers. So what we're trying to do is the African Development Bank, the World Bank the Villa Melinda Gates Foundation and Rockefeller Foundation where I used to walk the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa want to take technologies to scale of millions of farmers. That's the first part. The second part is we've got to unlock the potential of Africa's savannahs. You know, you were saying president just a while ago about the potential Africa has. Dr. Bolog used to say potential is important but they don't serve it on the menu. There's nobody eats potential. You have to unlock the potential. Africa has, you won't believe a mind boggling 600 million hectares of land in the savannahs. 400 million hectares of that is actually cultivable. But we only cultivate 10% of that which is 40 million hectares. The savannahs of Africa are not different from the serados of Brazil. And in fact it's better than the serados of Brazil because the serados of Brazil were acidic soil so you had to climb to reclaim them. So if we can unlock the potential of Africa's savannahs I believe that not only can Africa feed itself, Africa can contribute to also feeding the world. The third part of it is what you do with a lot of things. We are number one in southern production, in millet production in cocoa production in kola nut production in big cooking banana production. We are number one in so many things. But we export raw materials raw commodities. And actually President Daniels for me the secret of the world of nations is very clear. The nations that are very rich are the ones that process and add value to oil and gas, minerals and services. The ones that are poor are the ones that export raw materials. So I want African countries not to be at the bottom of the value chain I wanted to be at the top of the value chain for the things that have competitive advantages. So process and add value to it. Now let me just see in this hall by a show of hands how many of you like chocolates? Oh great, that's fantastic. How many of you know that Africa is why you have chocolates? Not many, you see. Actually 75% of all the cocoa produced in the world comes out of Africa. And Ghana alone I count for 65% of it. And so the key is what's the brain surgery in making chocolates? But we export raw chocolates. The size of the chocolate industry is $100 billion a year. Africa get 2% of that. Recently when the price of cocoa declined Cote d'Ivoire lost $1 billion, Ghana lost $1 billion, but the chocolate manufacturing companies were declaring all-time profits. So what I'm saying by that is Africa must process industrialized agriculture and add value to everything that it produces. The last one I want to make about how to unlock this potential is just the number of young people we have. Africa today is the youngest company. We've got about 420 million people, young people who are 25. By 2030 or 2050 actually that will go to 840 million people, young people. But they don't find jobs. They don't get jobs. And so we face a major problem with a big demographic shift but without our village create jobs for us. And I think agriculture is the coolest thing you ever found. Agriculture is cool. When I was in Nigeria, even now as president of the African Development Bank I want people to understand that agriculture is really sexy, it's very cool, it's the coolest thing that you can have and we are getting young people into agriculture as a business because when they do they will bring new technology, they will bring innovation, they will bring entrepreneurship and they will make Africa to be a leading player in the global food and agriculture so that was giving me confidence. In addition to your great reputation you have built as an economist and as an analyst of how to move your continent ahead economically you've also built a reputation for integrity and for someone who is intolerant of corruption and has dealt with it effectively in many, many places where it has been a serious inhibitor of progress on the continent can you talk a little about this and how can the bank, how can your new the tools you have in your new position enable you to help reduce the burden of corruption that's too often afflicted African countries? Yeah, you know first the monies of countries all the resources of countries don't belong to individuals they belong to the collective they belong to the country and so property, accountability and transparency and the management of public resources is very critical for me Africa is not a poor continent at all Africa just happens to have a lot of poor people that's because the resources are well managed and so for example when I was minister of agriculture in Nigeria I got in there and I found a really terribly corrupt fertilizers sector which for decades more than 40 years the governments have been buying fertilizers and distributing fertilizers to farmers but only 11% of the farmers ever got the fertilizers bought and sold by government and so a lot of forensic behavior in it I know that fertilizer is you have nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium but in the case of Nigeria at the time the fertilizers actually had hands and legs they could walk just walked away and so I figured what was the way in which we would use disruptive innovation to end corruption in this sector and you know we began to use the power of the mobile phones and so I started by saying if you cannot register your farmers you don't know your customer and you're in a business, you're in a bad business so we started Africa to have a biometric information on farmers register them, know who they are know where they are and I turned to the power of the mobile phones then to say well I can send the energy to the farmers directly why do I need an intermediary between government and the farmer and so we began to send electronic vouchers subsidized vouchers to farmers via the mobile phones and in four years we reached over 15 million of them directly via the mobile phones it caught off all the middlemen I woke up one morning and I told the whole country effective from now you will not sell any more to government if I can find Pepsi Cola and soda water in a village and it's not sold by government why can't I find seed and fertilizer in the same village not sold by government so we invaded it completely and I can tell you it was a powerful thing one of the things that really for me was the gender aspect of ending that corruption of 40 years it took us exactly 90 days to do that and I remember my wife telling Grace I said Grace I'm doing this thing I'm not sure how long I'm going to be alive for to do this because I told the president of the country that we're not just going to be walking on people's toes or stepping on people's toes we have to be walking on people's heads because it's a real a big friend of mine asked how good is your security but I think I had God for protection so we were able to do that but I was telling about the women the gender part of it I walked to the north of Nigeria where we were having a lot of insecurity and I went to this irrigated perimeter and all these women in black order they were rushing towards where I was and so the my security staff got scared because of terrorist attacks in the north of the country and they said well let's just whiskey off I said look I'm very comfortable on farmers fields they called me a farmers minister I was very comfortable I didn't feel threatened just leave me there all of a sudden the women got to where we were and they were all in this black order they put their hands into their pockets they took their hands out and out came the cell phones and they said minister we want to thank you because we get our fertilizers and seeds now in the village and the men can't cheat us anymore and I was like wow so I really think that it's really important and today that same technology we at the African Development Bank we are scaling it up into 30 countries Afghanistan there was a student from Purdue University I don't know who was the professor he worked with but he was from Afghanistan and he had looked at that system in Nigeria and when he went back to Afghanistan he actually wrote me and said well I want to use the system in Afghanistan and so this year the World Bank is taking the same electronic water system that helped to develop to Afghanistan to be used for one million farmers this year so that tells you how much transparency that brought a lot of transparency I think the critical issue is sometimes within the corruption is one way but I find that corruption has the demand side it has a supply side as well so if you deal with demand side of corruption you got to also deal with the supply side of corruption what I mean by that is that the international international institutions international companies sometimes they have tax lawyers who are more than a whole country has so when it comes to gold, diamonds oil, gas, negotiation there is an asymmetry of power in negotiation so people just sign away papers but they sign away assets of the country for a long time so the African Development Bank has something called the Africa Legal Support Facility which we deployed to help countries that negotiate current contracts in terms of taxes and realities or renegotiate the bad stuff that you've actually gotten yourself into we just did that for Guinea-Bissau and we saved them over 96% of their debt just by helping them to renegotiate a lot of things so we have that facility that we do the other thing that we do is that capital flows out of Africa is mind-boggling Africa loses today over $60 billion a year from illicit capital flows so I think being able to monitor that being able to have chief penalties for companies that extract without paying what should be paying back is the key and also just getting civil society involved for the citizens to be able to know how much resources they have how much money they've been used is a very big thing of course one of the things with corruption is that if you let people get away with it they will do it again so I think there has to be a very high bar of punishment for those that misuse resources of states because it's actually worse than modern because it's the resources that you send kids to school hospitals that people just suck it away like that so I really think that from the African Development Bank transparency accountability is very important e-governance is a very good way that citizens actually know what's really going on so at the bank we're doing quite a lot to help to improve the management of Africa's resources in a more transparent manner it's just a fascinating story we're about to go in a moment to questions from the audience we're going to start with four students who were who earned the right to be here through their scholarship but then the rest of you can be thinking about questions you might like to ask let me just ask you then one more before we go to the floor you just talked about the security problems that are still prevalent in some parts of the continent and we do read heart-breaking stories about warfare and even genocide are there things the bank can do over the course of time you think to bring peace to these areas so that they can participate in the progress too or do you just have to work in the peaceable places and hope that some other agency will finally bring some calm conditions you know this is one aspect that actually always breaks my heart in development because I think fragility is something that we all have to take very seriously and to recognize that fragility is not a permanent state even a similarly peaceful country can be fragile if a giant can have a feat of play you know take my country in Nigeria we suddenly have a terrorist attack all in the north of the country you look at Kenya that has been doing very well in terms of economic growth rates having terrorists in the north of the country as well so what we try to do as african developing bank is to help countries to build more resilient economies because the economies are growing very well and you have high levels of inequality then you have a lot of problems you know that leads to instability one of the success stories in Africa actually maybe two is you look at Rwanda Rwanda was a real genocide situation and Rwanda is a poster country for Africa in terms of how the economy has roared back the other one the bank invested heavily in where the headquarters of the bank really is they went into war they came out of war and today you know GDP growth rate is about 8.2% one of the highest you have in the world so what I'm trying to say by that is that it's important to build very strong institutions it's important also to have strong macroeconomic management to make sure that the countries can have robust growth because without growth it can't distribute anything and so I think that's one area that we invest quite a lot in but I'm bothered about three factors whenever you find these three factors you always have terrorists everywhere and that is what I call disaster triangle that is high level of unemployment in rural areas among the youth high extreme level of rural poverty and also areas of climate and environmental degradation whenever you find these three factors it's almost a perfect correlation with you're going to have terrorists there now so when we want to think of how we help to bring security but you think beyond just oh let's say a bunch of Apache helicopters around to help deal with that we've got to deal with problems at the root so we have to create jobs for the young people right otherwise you know the terrorists just recruit them easily I'll give you one example and it's a real life example it's a young guy in a country I will not mention but it's in the one of the Sahelian countries went looking for a job couldn't get a job went to the first place they told him well sorry you don't have the qualification so you walk into a store trying to walk in a bakery actually and they say look sorry we can't hire you because we don't have space to hire somebody else in the bakery so the guy who was listening in on the conversation and he said oh you're looking for a job we can hire you and give you a job so the guy got excited and we don't even need qualifications for the job so he said what kind of job is it he said we recruit terrorists we try to get young people into that so what I'm saying is that if we don't create a lot of jobs for young people it will worsen social economic and political fragilities in our countries and that's why at the African Development Bank we've launched a major effort which is called jobs for Africa's youth is to help to create 25 million jobs in Africa over the next 10 years and impact about 50 million young people we've focused on the ICT industry the smaller million sized enterprises and of course on agriculture so I think that this is a very very important area when it comes to dealing with the issue of insecurity the last one I want to say about insecurity is what has happened with the issue of conflicts and women in particular because at the end of the day when you have all this insecurity is the women and the kids that suffer the most you have a rising refugee population as a result of that in many of our countries you have a lot of stunting you have a lot of problem from malnutrition because of lack of enough food so I think that to have development or to have let me say a green revolution that we were talking about you have to sow the seeds of that on regions of peace so you have to really invest a lot in stronger institutions reduce inequalities create a lot of jobs and maybe if I can add one more thing it's electricity when I came here to United States one of the lovely people here who took me in from the airport to welcome grad students and international students was a family Chris and Barbara Melby he was a professor in nutrition human nutrition department so I stayed in their home for about three weeks and I remember my first day I took out all my clothes and I began to iron them I spent over an hour trying to do that and Barbara came to me and said well you've been ironing for an hour why? I said because they might just take the electricity off at any time and she said in United States they don't ever take electricity off I said that's a crisis or something for me that was strange I was from Nigeria you have 945 million Africans that don't have access to electricity and so when you don't have electricity you can't even use drones to trace terrorists and so the terrorists prosper where it's dark and so I think that we've got to link universal access to electricity to how we also deal with the issue of the conflict so as a bank we are investing 12 billion dollars in the energy sector over the next 5 years to try and mobilize we're going to mobilize 45 to 50 billion dollars from the private sector because we must have universal access to electricity for everything what can you do without power? you can't develop in the dark so I think these are all very much related items that if you have them and people feel the quality of life has improved I think you'll be able to reduce the amount of conflicts that we actually have wonderful we have two doctoral candidates with us each from Nigeria and each I hope prepared with a question Kenneth would you go first thank you president for the opportunity and on behalf of the Nigerian graduate students we want to congratulate our world food prize Lauret once more congratulations sir to put this in perspective we know what the trade of poverty malnutrition and disease is doing in countries within Africa we also know that currently a lot of governments are having debates on legislations as it concerns genetically modified products foods that people have to eat we know recently in the Nigerian Senate there was such a debate and it was almost thrown out we also know that many countries are facing the same debate currently cattle for instance in Nigeria the local breed of cows would give you about 10% of milk of what you will find from a cow in netherland for instance you know that if you modify certain genetic components genetic components of this cattle you probably get close to what you find in other parts of the world my question is this what is your take and indeed the standard of the African development bank in terms of genetically modified food products for knowing of course that as part of your high five policy feed Africa is number two on your list if it's like the most important agenda on your list and if the answer is yes what is African development bank doing about making sure that governments within Africa allow this to come to see are you going to tie it to loans of course knowing that you are the guy that has got your fingers on 24 billion dollars will you tie it to loans will they be tied will they be tied to some other incentives will the African development bank consider using education as a tool to actually educate governments, farmers people to understand that when you say genetically modified it's not there are good aspects of it and with proper regulation this can be taken care of thank you now thank you very much for your question you know I went to grad school here where everybody eats soybean which is genetically modified and I ate a lot of corn here and I don't have any horns on my head it's quite interesting that you have the United Nations in New York and everybody comes there all the heads of state from around the world come there and what do you think they are eating right food provided in the United States and I don't see anybody complaining but when it comes back to their home countries people say no we don't want to have this technology look my view is that it is not ideology that fits people it's science that does that and Africa cannot and should not be laggard when it comes to science technology and innovations you know I used to go to the CS used to be down there yeah and we used to take the pictures we used to take our pictures there I was talking to Kathy just before we came on stage that we'll get over there and they would say to you oh you can get it back in one hour that was fantastic all of a sudden Kodak was gone Akva was gone everything was gone we got this thing called iPhones and everybody become an automatic photographer even the profession of photography is in risk now what I mean is that technology always evolves and so we must always evolve with technology everything you do in life has risk in it there's no risk-free thing in life you get on a plane you are flying at 35,000 feet above sea level how many of you like to watch movies on the plane see I like to watch movies on the plane and they say oh enjoy your steak enjoy your wine enjoy all these things my goodness you're just taking the greatest risk of your life enjoying wine it's the same also when it comes to food they've managed to risk so much that you don't even notice it and I think that technologies can do so much and we shouldn't be afraid of technologies let me just give some examples in the case of Africa if you take president Daniel the case of drought today we have in Africa what's called water efficient maize for Africa it allows you to actually have yield almost 100% yield in the face of drought it saved farmers in Zimbabwe but at the same time you have east and southern Africa going through all swaths of drought well if you had the same water efficient maize for Africa and you can scale that all across the east and southern Africa you won't be in that particular situation the second thing is let's take a look at a whole issue of bio-fortified sorghum or iron-fortified beans or orange-flavored sweet potato that allows you to deal with the issues of vitamin A deficiencies and stuff like that those things are there and we as African Development will push those things because that's what technology allows you to do you cannot force countries to do anything what is very important is the knowledge and to have the right policy and the regulatory environment that allows people to assimilate technology test technology measure and assess the impact of different risks and then decide what's good for their population but I think that sometimes this whole debate gets locked up in ideological debate not so much on the science part of it when I was in Rockefeller Foundation a decade we actually helped to support the creation of what's called the African Agricultural Technology Foundation the AATF which actually takes proprietary technologies and uses some of those for genes that can actually help in several things so all I'm saying is that I'm a big believer in the power of biotechnology I think we're a big believer in genetic engineering but we must allow countries to test things properly in the case of Africa I think it's only Kenya and South Africa that are currently even allowing the use of BTcon but it takes time it takes time for people to get used to things so there's no need but I also believe that we have not even scratched the surface of conventional breeding in Africa so I think that's a lot of opportunities to be done with regard to that we see far too many examples of what people have come to call anti-science these days in the world I think this is one of the most damaging and if you'll permit a personal observation I think it's not only anti-scientific bad policy for rich people from rich countries to tell Africans that they should deny themselves these technologies or affordable, reliable electricity by the way, another example when these are the essential steps up that would make the lives of Africans more proximate to those we're fortunate enough to live and I think that science has to try on the African continent so good science policies are very very important to make that to try but I think that having the private sector also involved in a lot of these areas can also make a big difference next let's hear from another doctoral candidate Bhuni Babajide a concise question please it is I promise thank you so much for having me my question is a lot of us youth are very excited about the opportunity your decision to allocate your world a food prize to the African youth development in agriculture brings we're very excited about that, thank you my question about that now is how can we take advantage of this opportunity as members of the Purdue students community doing work in Africa thanks very much Babajide I wouldn't be where I am today if there was no Insomil at Purdue if there wasn't a Filabat or there was no John Sanders and all the other professors that I have so when I was awarded the war for price I couldn't think of anything more important to do with it than to devote it entirely to encouraging the young generation of scientists I want those that are going to be in agriculture as a business I really believe agriculture is very very cool and I want Africa to be a global player in food and agriculture so we're going to one of the things that also happened was immediately I announced I was giving this $250,000 to set up this fund to help young people we were having lunch I mean dinner actually it was just 30 minutes afterwards and a gentleman walked up to me and said well you know Akeen I was so excited by what you did to dedicate your fund to helping young people in Africa my name is John Harrington and I've decided that I will match your award and so he provided said he would provide an additional $250,000 so it became $500,000 within 30 minutes then the next day in the morning when I was actually getting the award from Mr. John Ruin Mr. John Ruin was so excited about it as well so he gave me the check for to get to $2,000 for the waffle prize award and he said I will add on top of that a personal gift on it of $100,000 because of what you've done so it became $600,000 and what I'm trying to do now is to actually set up a structure in which you'll be able to do that I had a great conversation this evening just before coming here with Dean David from the School of Business with Jay Akrich and Gebisa Ajeta trying to figure out what we can do in terms of creating firms that can help the businesses or the ideas of young people to try I was excited today and I must commend you president on the what he called the Foundry the Foundry, yeah I met with the students today coming out of that and I saw that the number of you know startups that Purdue had used to average 8 and now it's gone to about over 22 and things like that since you started here and so we are going to come back to you you know with that it will cover grants it will cover fellowships it will also cover depending for agri-pinners that are in agriculture as a business because that's really what I really think the continent needs also the injection of private equity into some of the businesses that people are and I know you in particular, you're very good at you're doing something with the ag what do you call it, ag rover you know which is that equipment for tractor for transport and so hopefully when all this is well set up there should be one of those that should get it as well I know there are many in our audience who are eager to also match the $250,000 we'll have a table right outside as you leave we have two more student questions, Dane would you please go next I know I don't look quite as dapper in my bow ties Dr. Adesina but if you need help tying your bow tie I can certainly help but my question is you mentioned value-added services and besides electricity what is the African Development Bank doing to increase those resources to producers to create value-added products and how do you think that's going to affect not only African agriculture but global agriculture excellent question I run into Dane you know just before we were coming here I like his bow tie very much and he's in US senior right and I was telling him that I could almost smell it's going to be a big business man so you can give a lot of endowment back to Purdue when you Mr. President please note that yeah you know I think that in times of businesses I think the critical thing is how you support small and medium-sized enterprises you know over 90% of all the businesses you have in Africa are actually small and medium-sized enterprises what they like is access to finance in most cases their only source of money is their family to start their businesses and when they try to go to the banks the banks don't give them money I mean commercial banks even if they get it the interest rate is so high that they won't be able to do anything with it you know because sometimes the interest rate present that is someone else could be a higher 30% so even you know even if you are doing drugs you will not make that kind of money to pay back such a loan and so I really think that we must have affordable interest rate for small businesses and one of the things the United States does very well is a small business support institution that you have to support small businesses and in Africa Development Bank we set up a fund which is $20 billion to support small and medium-sized enterprises we've just set up another fund which is going to be about 200 million I believe euros with the European Investment Bank to support young people just like you entrepreneurs to be able to almost like put risk capital there to be able to make your businesses to grow now the other thing is we look at the local stock exchanges that we have only mega companies get listed on them so we want small size medium-sized enterprises to be listed on those stock exchanges as well as a way of actually getting access to capital that they need and so the African Development Bank is doing a major work right now to help to integrate the stock markets the stock exchanges actually from Casablanca in Morocco to Nigeria to West Africa and so on so make them more liquid so you can have a lot more financing actually coming from that but two other challenges that you find with small and medium-sized businesses which we think we have to deal with is the fact that we just don't have enough skills you know so if you're going to grow an industry you need to have the right skills there and so like today before coming here with Gabisa with J.A. Accreage and Dean Daniel from the business school we're talking about how is it that we can help to develop centers of excellence in Africa perhaps I mean linked with Purdue University where we can be able to train people with the right skills that you need to run industries and stuff like that so the Purdue has a wall-class program management that Downey used to run and then J.A. Accreage, my friend has been running it fantastically well we think that that needs to be linked also to Africa and the last point is structural and that has to do with the whole issue of lack of access to electricity because for me electricity is like blood inside of your arteries right if you have blood you have life if you don't have blood you don't have life no economy can run in the dark and so small and medium-sized enterprises their cost of doing business is so high because of electricity lack of electricity that's why you find that we are really pushing quite a lot into that we're running a little short of time but we've got I think two questions over there and Wes if you'll wrap up the front row portion of our program I don't have on a fancy bow tie so I'm going to defect to Dan on that but I'm very interested as someone who studies economics as well how do you really find the synergy that you can capture between public and private partnerships and how do you find opportunities to pursue those because it seems like a lot of enterprises here in the United States pursue them as goodwill projects as opposed to true enterprises in Africa specifically so what can we do to help to create an environment where public and private partnerships are successful and can be pursued from a business perspective as well yeah you know if you look at let's just take in the case of Africa for infrastructure so the gap in times of infrastructure deficit is roughly about 50 to 60 billion dollars a year now but the government alone can't fix that gap so the government needs the private sector and I think African governments are doing quite well with regard to private sector by the way if you take for example the of all globally in times of business and regulatory improvements globally 33% of those that were done last year were done in Africa so things are really improving with respect to that but one of the things that actually makes it very difficult for public private partnerships is the pricing of let me say electricity for example and so if you don't have the price of electricity or energy in such a way that the cost is a cost reflective tariff system so why would you want to invest in something in which you can cover your cost and sometimes the political part of it takes over and people don't price it properly so I think we've got to get the policy environment right and make sure that building roads in which it's a tall road that people pay the actual you know, tariff that allows a private sector to want to get in there the second thing has to do with risk some of it is project risk some of it is market risk some of it is financial risk some of it is political risk and this is where the African development bank comes in you know we help to do risk a lot of those projects so we can give a partial risk guarantee for example to defray the risk of non-payment by a public entity to you that is a private sector or a partial credit guarantee to do risk the same before the private sector to private sector transaction and they actually work very very well the other thing that I think it's very important is sometimes you just don't have bankable projects you just don't have good projects that people want to invest in and so we started at the bank an effort to help to develop pipeline of projects I chair a new organization that we helped to create that is called Africa 50 and so we mobilized over 850 million dollars for that organization it's a private equity platform that invests in infrastructure but it does a lot of public-private partnerships part of the organization is to have a fund that actually supports project preparation so you can have a pipeline of projects that people can actually invest in the last one that I just wanted to say is the fact that how do you mobilize financing for public-private partnerships if I take for example President Downey as the case of Africa or even globally the size of the global savings pool is 5 trillion dollars Africa's gap of infrastructure financing is about 50 to 60 billion dollars so if Africa gets only 1% of that we'll solve that problem and that's why I decided that the bank the African Development Bank we're launching something next year and you'll be invited to come only conditions you have to wear a bow tie to come this time it's called Africa Investment Forum where we're trying to get the global pension funds the sovereign world funds the insurance pools and similar funds in Africa to actually invest in infrastructure public-private partnership is going to be a big way of actually doing that and I think there are lots of lessons to learn of what works and doesn't work in public-private partnerships that one can share lessons with various countries but I think the way forward is for the government and the private sector to work hand in hand good policy legal and regulatory environment for that to thrive thank you for four great questions we'll finish with the two that have been waiting patiently thank you here in the US we hear a lot about the hungry people in Africa and the growing demand to feed them that's used as a justification for increasing US production of agricultural goods I was just wondering what do you think of that line of reasoning I couldn't hear sorry can you hear me now we hear a lot about the hungry people in Africa and the growing need to feed them and that's often used as justification to increase agricultural production in the US and I was wondering what you think about that line of reasoning well you know it's actually my boggling for me to also find that in the United States the nation on the face of the earth has so many hungry people you know the whole program of the you know the full stamp program or whatever it is a nutrition there's a name for it sorry yeah it's not a program maybe somebody snapped it out or something but I think that God didn't make stomachs of babies or anybody's babies to be empty they got to be fed when I was here as a graduate student I saw so many folks here that took their keys to school they'll get milk, they get a lot of things for them to eat and the kids were able to go to school you know if you have a child that's hungry a child can learn and if you have a child that's thunted what that really means is that it affects their cognitive ability and so when people look at nutrition even for a rich country like United States where you have that kind of problem among low income households we've got to start thinking in times of this as from the economics perspective not a social perspective because a stunted child today means a stunted economy tomorrow and so the perspective has to be for me about how you develop what I call gray matter infrastructure which is the brain infrastructure when kids are well nourished and they thrive they have good brains working they have their stomachs full they go to school, they perform and so I think that for me the United States itself has to look at any quality that it has and make sure it can feed its own kids and so for that you produce a lot more food and you're using school feeding programs and so on President Danny I went to Brazil to see the program put there by for my president Lula and it was a zero hunger program and I went to this school and they gave us the meal they were giving to the kids of course the surplus production that they were having and the food was better than the food that I ate in my hotel and when I became minister in Nigeria I said my goodness we've got to really work on this kind of stuff so the point I want to make is that it's not just about producing food it's about producing healthy foods it's about making sure that kids are well fed I am very passionate about this in Africa because if I ask my friend Gabisa, Gabisa can you please stand up I just want to say I'll tell you see Gabisa is a war food price winner so with Phil Nelson here so I'm here as a little kid on the block for them and so on but look at how tall Gabisa is Gabisa is a top class brain it's correlated with the height so I think that the point is we can't use that as an excuse or a reason for wanting to produce more you produce more because you want to trade more but you also produce more because you must look inward and look at the distributive policies that you have to make sure that even Americans at home can also be well fed I think that's very important okay sorry can you hear me no yet okay sweet so I'm here representing the Purdue Exponent a little bit more Purdue centric and clearly you've had a lot of things on your journey to become the food minister but if you had to give a piece of advice to students here who look up to you and want to be as influential and impactful as you have been what would you tell them what would you tell a Purdue student who wants to be as influential impactful and just as good as you've been well first and foremost you're in the right place first you know President Downey one of the things that Purdue for my education here is that Purdue gives you a global perspective you know the international programs here allow students to go to various parts of the world with some grants to tie our ideas to seek communities and to come back and have their perspectives changed I had that opportunity when I was asked to go to Nijay on that Insomil grant to actually see poverty and see that I could do something about it if I work on technology and so on so I would say that maybe three things on that first is take advantage of all of what Purdue has to offer in times of global perspectives the second is dream big dream really big and never be afraid that you fail because for me challenges will always be there but challenges are essentially like foundation stones on which successes are built so never be afraid of that you'll do some things that will work you'll do some things that wouldn't work oh my goodness you know you have to keep going on to do big things when we come to a war class universities like we are at Purdue anything less than big is not enough it was just an ideal question to end on you're I just think I'll just repeat that those who are not lucky as some of us were to be present the other night missed the great moment you can watch it on tape and I hope will have the equivalent effect but to sit there and to think about first of all that for the third time in a decade a boiler maker was winning this Nobel Prize and secondly that among all the grand challenges that we talk about surely the grandest of all is eliminating hunger and poverty and that the epicenter of that challenge is the continent of Africa and that the single person most likely to lead the next surge forward is of our own is an inspiration to us all students faculty all of us alumni everywhere we're so proud of you and so grateful that you were stubborn enough to choose Purdue you know so just one more moment we have a lot of recognitions here at Purdue and lots of ways to honor people who do extraordinary things the single highest of these been given fewer than 50 times in history it's called the Griffin award and those of us who huddled on this subject took no time at all to decide that if anyone ever merited the Griffin award from Purdue University it's you Dr. Adishina here it is and thank you