 I'm Jared Gensel. I'm a researcher at the Center for Transprediction and Logistics, been here for about 13 years, and have focused in the last five years or so on humanitarian needs and developed a humanitarian response lab to do research on supply chains that meet human needs. So there's two lines of research in our lab. One focuses on the work we started with, and that is emergency response. How do you enable markets to be resilient so that they can respond to human needs in crisis, but also provide a backbone for ongoing needs of the population? Great. So tell us a little bit more about the motivation behind taking on this specific research line. Some of the assumptions we make in our typical supply chain models and our management approaches assume a well-established and mature marketplace with risks and financial flows that are fairly well regulated and understood. And when you change that in an emerging market, the management principles and the design principles for your supply chain change with that. OK, great. So tell us a little bit about the current projects that are going on in the. So we've worked in several aspects in terms of how local markets can provide for human needs. In the health sector, we've done a number of studies. And one of the recent ones we did was trying to understand how the private sector could provide for diagnostics from malaria. So the importers of these diagnostics, the local wholesalers and distributors, and the retailers had different business objectives. Therefore, these products, which could be a valuable resource for the population, didn't have a good business model across the supply chain to make them available and they weren't being stocked. So by studying the roles of different actors in the supply chain, we can help to identify how to set up better incentives so that the wholesalers and the retailers are then willing to stock these products for patients. Great. So what do you think the next step is for this research? Well, for that research, we can look at trying to design different kind of risk sharing contracts across the different partners. We can look at trying to understand what their specific needs are and tailor business models and services to meet those needs. So hopefully those diagnostics will be carried in the market. One of the issues in a lot of low and middle income countries is there's not electricity. The electrical grid doesn't reach population. There's new solar technology, solar lanterns, to provide lighting in a household. And so we studied markets for different manufacturers in providing these solar lanterns in Uganda. One of the things we learned was really interesting is that the sales channel is not just a distribution of products, but it's also providing for the financing so that people can buy these products. The markets to these consumers in Uganda really tightly link the material flows and the financial flows. You can't sell a product without having financing. So how do you design your supply chain and your financial partnership so you can actually meet consumer needs? You're also doing some work within the agricultural industry as well, correct? Absolutely, yeah. I grew up in Kansas, so I know about farming. But it's been exciting. The last year, we started really diving into the agricultural sector. We've got a new four-year project sponsored by the US government to understand how markets for farmers in Uganda are working. So what's the whole market for that? Providing the inputs they need to get a good crop. But then on the other side, giving them access to markets so that they can benefit from having better quality, for example. They want to have a good quality coffee and they want to make sure that the farmers can grow good quality. But this relies on middlemen, such as traders, to make those connections. And so we're setting what are the mechanisms for these traders, what are the business models, so that they can offer quality differentiated prices and set up good partnerships with farmers. So the magic question, if our private industry partners want to engage in this research, what's the best way for them to engage? The nice thing is we have a partnership with the US government where we're trying to understand these markets, but we want to work with the private sector. So any company who's looking to provide inputs to farmers, to provide medicine to clients and patients, to provide consumer product goods, we are learning how these markets work. And we're going in depth, especially in Africa. We have a lot of knowledge in various African countries about how these markets are set up and who are the actors and what roles they play. And so companies that are looking to sell into Africa need to go beyond just bringing it to a port and helping somebody can get it to the consumer. But understanding how to design the supply chain all the way to the end consumer. Thank you so much for taking time to share some information with us about your lab and about your research into this. My pleasure to. It's a passion I have to make supply chains work better for people around the world. And I'm really excited about engaging the private sector in doing that. Thank you. Thank you.