 Hi, everyone. Thank you so much for joining us in this session. We are really excited to be here to talk about inclusivity in global value chains, especially commodity value chains, and to also examine how impact investing can play a key role in advancing inclusivity in value chains. To do this, we have a really qualified panel bringing in diverse perspectives. Please join me in welcoming our panelists. We have Isufu Isaka joining us from Western Ghana, and he represents the Sefui-Bekwai Farmers Union in Ghana, and he is also a smallholder cocoa farmer himself. We have Anne Park joining us from the Bay Area, Anne represents CIF, which is a global impact private equity manager that supports small and medium businesses to not just grow, but also contribute to climate resilience, inclusion, and food security. We have Yasmeena Zaidman joining us from Acumen. Acumen uses patient capital to scale market-based approaches towards social impact and inclusion. My name is Madhyama. I represent Solidaridad. Solidaridad is a global nonprofit organization. We focus on building resilient and inclusive commodity value chains globally, and we do this by working with all the actors along the chain, so smallholder farmers, companies, governments, impact investors, and other stakeholders. We have a lot to cover today, so let's jump right in. Our first question is for Isufu. Isufu, we all are aware that the concept of inclusion is now gaining center stage thanks to COVID, thanks to several other global social movements. I think a lot of us are also aware that the cocoa sector in West Africa offers one of the starkest examples of global inequities, where a smallholder farmer can earn really low wages, whereas the global chocolate industry makes giant profits. Now, from your perspective, both as a smallholder farmer yourself and also the leader of a cocoa cooperative, what do you feel are the elements that are missing? What does inclusivity look like for you? Thank you very much for the opportunity. Inclusive supply chain as a farmer or a cooperative chairman. What we have identified is that cocoa farmers are not allowed to partake decision in the international level. What we only do is production, and after production, it ends there. At least there should be a communication barrier that will link cocoa farmers who are the producers to the regulator, to the government, and to the international bodies, that's processors and then chocolatiers. If you do that, then we are able to involve the farmers in decision making. It will help the farmers to understand and know what actually goes on in terms of cocoa trading. But as we speak, farmers don't know anything about cocoa trading. In terms of cocoa pricing in the international level, they don't know and they don't have access to it. So I think the element that is not seen here is that at the cocoa sector, farmers will know that at a hundred percent gains, only five to six percent goes to production and the rest goes to the other traders. That's the LBCs and then the chocolatiers and the processors. So if you're able to accumulate about a hundred billion dollars gains in a year from cocoa, at least there should be a fair sharing or fair gains among the supply chain. In this case, you have to have a mandatory body that consists of the farmers, the regulator, the government, the processors and the chocolatiers to make sure there is a mandatory law that will bite all these supply chain game players to know what is really happening so that farmers will get to understand the business of cocoa in the world. Thanks, Isufu. Let me turn to Anne. Anne Sif has several years of experience in investing in small and medium enterprises, which in fact also ultimately have an impact on smallholder producers. Based on your experience over the years, what are some of the key lessons that you have learned in making high-impact investments and specifically what do businesses, co-ops like Sefi Bekwai need to do to be more attractive to investors like you? Well, with over 30 years of experience supporting SMEs in emerging markets, we've learned a lot about what is needed to help companies grow and scale. We've adapted our due diligence process over the years to ensure more consideration is given to downstream impacts on smallholders and to ensure that we're really thinking through all the issues of inclusion. That being said, we're still an investor at the end of the day with a fiduciary responsibility to our LPs and all the regular aspects of due diligence still apply. We review the leadership teams and their governance structures. We look at audited financials of the organization and we analyze market opportunities and sector-specific risks. So what companies can do to help us assess risk is to provide as much data as possible around revenue, such as proof of contracts, yield data, other measures to address risk or the perception of risk, such as insurance. So we also look at how our investments can be catalytic to the growth of the company and how we can add value to help that company have more impact as it goes through the impact we look at either on the customer side or via the value chain side. And I think really the best way to understand the types of companies we invested in the agri-space is really through examples. So I'd like to point to one investment we've made in Morocco in a company called SOET, which is a technology company which provides farmers information about how to better run their operations and to optimize their use of inputs. They use drone satellite images and other proprietary images and their proprietary image processing algorithm to gather data which can serve farmers and help them optimize irrigation and fertilizer. So for all agribusinesses, we really think through where in the agribusiness value chain we can really have the most impact and we focus on companies that really do serve smallholder farmers. Right. And just to expand on that a little more, what are the kind of services you feel based on your experience that these businesses need to be able to engage with investors like you? Really oftentimes it's just getting their financial books in order. It's really building the case for how they can grow their revenue and how they, we as an investor, should be assessing risk differently. So as I mentioned, if you're giving us data for how to curb that perception of risk or oftentimes smallholders, there are a lot of exogenous risks, right? Associated with weather and things of this nature. I mean, what they are doing to address those risks really help us understand how it will affect the investment in the longer term. Great. So more data, more transparency, I guess makes it relatively easier for groups like Seth V. Bekwai to engage with investors like you. Let me move to Yasmeena. Yasmeena, Acumen's inclusive business playbook has this marvelous quote, which says, market forces are not invisible hands, they are our hands. I thought that was an extremely powerful quote. Also, the playbook then goes on to illustrate practical ways by which both companies and impact investors can embed inclusivity in their business models. Now, as Solidaridad, very often, we run into a situation where when we are engaging companies, we see that you can either have people in the company who are socially minded and are keen to make investments to further inclusivity in the value chain, such as by supporting smallholder producers. While on the other hand, you can have people, let's say in the procurement teams who are probably just more pragmatic and cost conscious. Based on your experience, what are the ways by which we can bridge this divide between social impact and profitability and what needs to be done to get greater buy-in regarding the benefits of patient capital? That's a, it's a great, and it's a big question. In some ways, I think that we're seeing more and more the business case for sustainability and inclusion. And you see that in trends, in terms of the number of funds that are looking at ESG, the ways that investors are expanding the pool of capital for the kinds of investments that could ultimately help us build a more sustainable and inclusive world. So that's a very positive sign, but I don't think we can really get away from the fact that we still are living within a capitalist system that seems to be better at exploiting people in planet than building sustainability and inclusion. And so we're looking at examples of disruption of that that are coming from the private sector, the public sector, and certainly from entrepreneurs. So we talk a lot about leadership and investing in character. And likewise, who we partner with and sources of capital, policymakers need to have that same commitment to thinking longer-term about what it means to build a more inclusive and sustainable planet and environment that allows everyone to thrive. If you have that in place, you still are, we're working with market-based approaches. And to Ann's point, we are looking for models that can scale, that can become self-sustaining and can interact with public and private markets in really smart ways. So for Acumen, since we operate across the spectrum of capital, working with early-stage ventures that might need seed funding or go through one of our accelerators or using philanthropy to help catalyze new business models that we think can help solve problems like off-grid energy access or innovations in the agriculture sector, and then ultimately launching commercial funds. Today, we're managing about $160 million in commercial funds, funds we've launched just in the past four years to really recognize that capital gap continues to exist even after that kind of early pioneer gap is sort of faced. So we think it's about looking at the full spectrum of capital and the full ecosystem of business models that are needed to tackle these deeper systemic problems. So I think that's kind of where the buy-in comes from, is people recognizing based on what they view as success, where they really want to make a difference, whether it's on climate change, empowerment of women, inclusion of smallholder farmers, and then where on that spectrum of capital they can make the biggest difference based on sources of capital. And in our view, there isn't one type. You need that full ecosystem. And so a lot of our work at Acumen has been in that investment readiness. So it's really helpful to hear and talk about these are the things we look for because those are the strengths we're trying to build, particularly in that sort of pioneer stage company, helping them build the internal financial systems, helping them think through their longer-term growth strategy and building those strong internal systems of governance that when they go to the next stage of investor, they're fully prepared for that next round of capital. And so for us, with our philanthropy-backed investing, one of the big measures of success is are they tapping into new sources of capital? Are we crowding in capital from not only impact investors, but even commercial investors that are starting to look at ESG? So yeah, I think it's very much this idea that it will take all of us. And if we are able to collaborate in that way, we can move towards shared goals where everyone might have the same vision, but they may have different kinds of capital or different assets to bring to the solution. Great, thanks for that comprehensive list, Yasmeena. A question for you. Who do you think are some of the other actors in the ecosystem who can play a pivotal role in supporting access to finance for smallholder producers? Yeah, I feel like this is such a great question because one of the things that we've been reflecting on is that there's a huge opportunity for large corporations to play a much more proactive role. In some ways, the investing landscape is further along in recognizing the potential to combine both returns and impact. And we've seen in some ways, through this community at Socap, the real burgeoning and growth of this community with that diversity, what we're seeing less of and need to see more of is on the market side having corporations, and to some degree, the public sector as well, play their role in helping to really create that market access. So we just launched a report with support from Soledadaridad in partnership with IKEA and others to really tell the story of where entrepreneurs are successfully building business partnerships with corporations that can help them scale their impact. A lot of these enterprises already have access to capital, but what they need is that market to achieve the real growth potential. And so that to us is kind of the missing piece of the equation and it is starting to happen, but we really want to see that accelerate because the best kind of money for a fast growing enterprise is revenue. Investment is a really important catalyst, but their ultimate goal is to grow revenue. And so we're excited to see how corporations in the public sector could play a much bigger role when it comes to procurement and really proactively looking for ways to source from businesses that have social impact at their core. I also feel like there's a responsibility for impact investors to really think about the financial products they're offering to the market. Yes, Meena, you were referencing the gamut of financial products Acumen provides and also really thinking through where the gaps are because the last thing we want to do is displace market activity and really create a distortion in the market. And I think this is something that Acumen does really well. That analysis is really critical. Also, the corporations allow for investors like us. So for example, Isufu, if he has a contract with a large corporate, that signals to us that there is less risk in investing in a co-op such as his. But then how does he access capital to fulfill that contract? So CIF has really been very thoughtful about creating financial products that really meet the needs and really fills a gap in the market. That working capital loan is really critical in order to fulfill that contract so that that corporation still continues to work with smaller actors along the value chain. And I think impact investors really need to think about those interventions and when to deploy them. Couldn't agree more. Agreed, thanks. Those are fantastic points, both of you have brought up. Let me turn back to Isufu. Isufu, both Yasmeena and Anne have shared some really good points about how enterprises like CIFB-Bekwai can be more investment-ready. Do you agree with what they have shared? Do you think they are still missing something? It's good to consider other factors that influence an investor to do an investment in an area. But if you come to our area, where cocoa farmers are grouped, they don't necessarily put in a financial reporting and then, so what I can see is that for cocoa sourcing in our area, farmers have been well educated to go about because there are other cooperatives who do cocoa sourcing in some area, whereby we have gone to them and put experience to make sure that any time investors come to our aid to make sure we do trade with them, we can be able to organize ourselves. So in our area, farmers don't put that record into being or into implementation, but as time goes on, if you're able to get an investor who will be likely to invest in the cocoa sourcing, you make sure all the right information about revenue and other things that will compare the investor to come in will be done. Great, thanks for that. Isufu, can you also make a business case as to why businesses like Sethwee Bekwai can be of value to investors or how such businesses can be a great investment in order to strengthen inclusivity in value chains? Sethwee Bekwai is a good area to do investments because cocoa farmers in this area have been able to come together to team up, to form an association or cooperative. It is very reliable, very strong and very, very, very understandable. This association have been there for about four good years. So currently the association have trained farmers to alternative livelihoods where some farmers are into poultry farming and others too are into cash crop farming. So what we want to do is that we want to do a cocoa sourcing as an association, as a group. We have to source our own cocoa from members and not allowing other people to come and take the cocoa from the farmers, but the farmers themselves buying the cocoa themselves to gain extra income apart from the production of the cocoa. Great, thank you so much. That was an incredible conversation. Let us now turn it over to the audience for questions. That was wonderful, thank you so much. I'm really glad that we were able to bring in Isufu's perspective. Just for all the audience who are tuning in, it was a little bit of a challenge. We were very keen to bring in a smallholder farmer's perspective directly from the field, but given that there were very severe power outages and internet issues, it was a bit of a challenge. But yeah, we're very glad that we were able to bring in his voice via video. Before we turn it to the audience, one of the questions we had in mind was having Anne and Yasmeena when she comes online to respond to Isufu's pitch as such when he makes a business case for a group like Zephy Bekwai to get investments from Impact Investors. Anne, what did you think of the pitch and linking back to your experience again? What do you feel is missing? He did say that maintaining financial records with a great level of detail and which is what you had mentioned that is very critical for investors. And I think groups like Solidaridad are in fact trying to play that role of bridging the gap. But yeah, it would be lovely to hear from you as to what you think about that pitch that Isufu just made. Yes, I agree with Isufu in that processors are oftentimes the ones that benefit the least when commodities go to market and when there are processing components where value addition happens upstream. What we would like to hear more about essentially is the governance structure of his co-op who on his team would be in charge of ensuring that they have a diversified pipeline in terms of their sales. Who are his current off-takers? Is it just one large corporation? Does he have more than one contract? All of these things would give us a better understanding of his business so that as he's raising capital as he's pitching the opportunity I think many other investors would want to know. Okay, what does your team look like? How would you spend that capital? And are you able to scale to the degree that you would want to scale given your goals? Great, thanks Ann. With that, I guess we can now turn it over to questions from the audience. So I'm just going to go through the list that we have here. And our first question which came through was from Joanne and she asks, and that question is directed to you Ann, as to how does the information really funnel down to a small cocoa farmer who cannot take a debt or equity on his or her own terms as against a larger co-op? What is your take on this, a larger issue? So we primarily invest in those processors, that's the level of SME and that's typically we would play along the agribusiness value chain. So we rely very heavily on those smallholder businesses, those SMEs to relay that information to their smallholders because the smallholders are a part of their business model. We also rely very much on technical assistance providers on the ground to provide that information and to help with those investment readiness programs. We at SEAP also have an investment readiness program called the SEED program because we have also learned that entrepreneurs need more than capital to really scale their businesses. And oftentimes they don't need capital to scale their businesses. When you take on the outside capital, really there are a lot of strings attached that folks don't often think about when they look to fundraise. So a lot of that information really even can come from investment officers like ourselves but primarily through the SMEs that we work with that we invest in. Hi, Asmina. Hi. Hi, Asmina, welcome to the live Q&A. Perfect timing. I was just asking Ann if she had a response to Isufu's pitch. I'm not sure if you were able to listen in on the recording that just played. Yes. Okay, great. So would you like to share your response to Isufu's pitch? Yeah, I mean, I was also trying to figure out how to get into this link. But my general sense of part of what he was talking about was just increasing not only transparency but the potential for direct access. And that's something that I think is a really important growing trend to do direct trade. I think that there's a lot of issues in doing that in COCO because in some cases it's not even legal or allowed but they're starting to make inroads in allowing cooperatives to do direct trade and supporting cooperatives like Isufu's. So I think there's a major regulatory issue but my hope would be that investors and corporations will do what they can to build the capacity of organizations like his to directly trade in as much as the regulations permit that. Great. And would both of you, Ann and then, Yesmina would you also be able to speak to your experiences in the for-profit space and to also probably draw some lessons from other sectors? We specifically have a question about social impact healthcare startups. And I definitely know both of you have experience in working with different sectors. So what are some of the lessons that you can draw from these other areas as well? So the beginning of your question really focused on the social impact. And I think a lot of entrepreneurs need to understand the values of the impact investor and what impact they're trying to achieve and match the not all impact investors are the same, right? Some are trying to meet certain targets around carbon reduction. And if your company really can articulate those metrics I think that that is the right investor for you. For us, we are sector agnostic. So we really invest in SMEs because our theory of changes about the effect those SMEs have on their local communities primarily through employment and primarily through the trickle down effect of the increase in the revenue through our investments. So our social impact metrics really focus on climate resilience, on inclusion. And as we define inclusion, that includes all of the issues around gender inclusion and really serving marginalized people. So lessons learned they vary quite a bit depending on sector but for us it's really trying to fill a gap in the market where entrepreneurs that want to scale aren't able to scale because capital is the primary constraint. And every investment we make the metrics are custom to that company because every sector it varies quite a bit in every region the target's very quite a bit but we really think through what are the downstreams effects such that we can really focus on climate resilience and issues around access to just fair wages and increasing the number of employees really is one of our key metrics in getting it towards that. Yeah, and just adding to that I think for Acumen we've found that in because our lens has been less on employment and more on the sort of impact of the products and services of the company which I think is a very complimentary approach I think both are tremendous in creating more value at the community level. So we've looked at sectors like off-grid energy access or agriculture specifically where we see there's a huge opportunity to introduce business models that can really help move people out of poverty. And some of those models are huge employers as well and others are more targeted for example in the tech space they're creating economic opportunity but they're themselves may not be big employers. So the metric we tend to focus on is are we actually reaching low income people and how are we helping move them out of poverty around some specific issues? There was a question I think also around how we choose a sector and we think that there are issues that are we don't think real barriers for people coming out of poverty such as access to energy, access to dignified work and access to agricultural kind of services and platforms that enable farmers to increase their incomes. What's been helpful for us is having that kind of sector focus within a regional context that's really driven at the local level to understand how do you find the right business models to address that issue at scale in a market like East Africa versus a market like West Africa where you might see very different barriers and needs or India or Latin America. And so having local teams has helped us to get that perspective on which sectors to focus on and which metrics are gonna be the most meaningful in that context. So hopefully that answers the question. Great, thank you. And just going back to you, you do have some experience in terms of facilitating access to finance for co-ops in particular which we had discussed a few days back was a slightly different entity from a more established small and small or medium enterprise. Are there any lessons you could draw based on your lessons with co-ops in particular? The main translation we need to do really is around the governance structure. When you're working with a private entity it's really clear what the ownership structure tends to be and that tends to be a little bit less clear with co-ops. So a lot of what we're happy to do is translate some of the roles into kind of what we would see traditionally as who is the general manager, who executes on sales, who really focuses on driving revenue and then really trying to understand where the levers are in terms of decision making so that as we have discussions around how can we increase inclusion or how can we make sure that even those within the cooperative are all being heard equally that we have a clear understanding of how, what the parity is with some of our due diligence processes for private sector, for just traditional private companies. So I think that's why there is a little bit more difficulty into investing in the co-ops because you do need to do a little bit more of that translation and again, because the governance structure isn't consistent across all co-ops it's difficult for us to necessarily make blanket statements about, well, this is the type of co-op that we look at versus this is the type of co-op that we don't look at and it also varies by crop. Great, thank you. We have a question about the role of companies and supply chains and so Yasmeena, I'll first turn that over to you and feel free to chime in. The question is how can we evaluate big companies making supply chains more inclusive or the extent that they help to facilitate inclusivity? What's the data and validation that we need? And I think based on Acumen's even recent experience with the corporations, I think you would be very well placed to answer that. Yeah, I mean, it's an interesting question because I think it gets us to the fact that inclusive can mean different things. And again, I think that, Anne makes a really good point about being clear about the metrics for success because I found that inclusive can really mean anything from working with diverse communities, working with low income communities, working with people with disabilities, people who've had traditionally faced barriers to access to jobs and the market. So I think it's important to really narrow in on that definition and where I think companies are doing a good job is recognizing where in their value chain, they can be more inclusive, where they see actual vulnerabilities that are being exacerbated by a business model. For example, having children in the labor force or the incredibly low wages of farmers working with certain crops. And to really take those head on rather than kind of going for the low hanging fruit, where can you easily make things more inclusive from an optics perspective, but leave behind folks that are in fact made most vulnerable by that value chain. And companies are finding really important ways to address that, whether it's from the original producers of raw materials for a value chain or all the way on the other end in terms of distribution who's distributing products and how much are they earning from that? So we did an inclusive business playbook designed for businesses that want to embed inclusivity into their model in partnership with EY. And it seems to us that there's places throughout the entire business model where that inclusion factor can come in. And again, you have to really pinpoint what you're trying to address and then hold yourself accountable for that. So you don't look just within the walls of your company but you look really beyond that at suppliers, at distributors, at producers that create the materials that you might not even be buying. They might be going to suppliers and then helping to set those targets. But what we've also found is that inclusion as a concept really only seems to take off when you have it embedded in the purpose of the company. And we've talked a lot about that today at SoCAP that it isn't just about having a metric or one that people are paying attention to but really defining your core business as one that is creating benefit for all and then looking for ways to drive that benefit through your business rather than mitigating the harm that you might be causing. So I think it starts really at the top in terms of values and then it can really move through every facet of the business with that real accountability for who is being impacted and how they are included in the economy and frankly in decision making in ways that haven't been the case. Great. And would you also be able to offer some examples? Yeah. Yeah, go ahead. The one that's been on my mind is Azahar Coffee. It's a coffee company that we work with that's based in Columbia. They work across Latin America and they are really a fan of radical transparency about the wages that coffee farmers receive and they build their pricing model around living wages for farmers. So they've created a sustainable coffee buyer's guide that they think is really about changing the coffee market and putting farmers at the center. They work with Stumptown Coffee and Blue Bottle Coffee and a number of companies that find that there are customers who are really excited to consume a product that is not only of a really high quality but has inclusion embedded within it. And so if you look at their business model the farmer knows exactly not only how much they're paying but how much the company will be making from the coffee that they sell. And that's really empowering farmers with information that makes them a part of the process rather than keeping them sort of, I think to Isufu's point really in a place within the value chain where they have very little access to information and very little agency. They're price takers in almost every case. Here farmers are actually engaged in the process and can negotiate because they have visibility into the margins at every step of the process. That's a really powerful... That's a hard coffee. And do you have any examples of innovative ways of working which can support not just the businesses but by extension also the small older producers? Well, Tiaz, Mina's point about really starting with the values of the company. When we make our investments we talk with our entrepreneurs and we've talked with the management teams about what their goals are from a business perspective. And we really try to build the case around how collecting some of these social impact metrics really are not about doing a separate exercise but really thinking through how having focusing on some of these areas and they naturally do it in the stories that they tell about the businesses but really helps them from a material standpoint in terms of growing their business either through marketing and the halo effect that they get when they do focus on genuinely tracking the number of women that they serve. They could say, hey, my industry, there are a lot of women that work in grocery stores but really we create benefits for these women because we've created a daycare on site. And we say, okay, let's actually start tracking this and let's say, is this really material to your business and how has this helped you in terms of employee retention? So that it is a sustainable solution. It's not something they do for a period of time just to tell their impact investor that they did it but really so that they see the benefit in the long-term from a business perspective. So when you, Majama asked about business models and how to have lasting change really for us, it's about building that case with the entrepreneur. Inclusion for us means really inclusion, serving those that are marginalized and really serving those that are currently not being thought of in a systemic way. So an example of a company that we've invested in recently is one called EcoFlora, which produces a natural food dye using the hogwell plant. And we are working with smallholder farmers in a rural part of Columbia. They currently do not grow the hogwell plant 100%. Some of them are doing just doing it subsistently but because they are now working with EcoFlora and we're looking to scale the business, we can in a more systematic way have more guaranteed income for those smallholder farmers, increase the number of smallholder farmers that are growing the hogwell plant and moving cattle farmers away from cattle ranching so that it reduces the degradation in this area. So inclusion to us in this example is inclusion along the supply chain. But it's also serving the greater good of creating a blue dye, which is natural and not carcinogenic because all chemical forms of blue dye currently are carcinogenic. Great. We'll drill in a little more into aspects of innovation and challenges. I just want to bring up the next question. This is about new regional currencies that create more credit for farmers to use within the ecosystem but outside of the local national currency. Are these innovations that you have tried in your business models have you experience with them and what's your feedback on such payment for impact models? Well, it's something that we're looking at not at this stage in the context of agriculture credit but credit for energy access where we've seen that energy access products, especially those that are not just small low-cost products for lighting but slightly larger systems that can actually power a household or energy products that are used for productive use. And this also gets into the question of sustainable value chains and supply chains because it's essentially a way to help localize value addition. Things like milk chillers or small-scale mills enabling people to participate in value addition for agriculture using solar power even if they don't have access to the grid and doing it in a way that's better for the environment and climate change. So what we've found is that being able to distribute those products really does require access to finance. You're helping people to create assets but they also need to find a way to finance that. And the reality is that it's just much harder to get access to finance the less a part of the formal economy you are. So we would love to find ways to incentivize people to extend credit to either through distributors or directly to customers in markets that have not been well served through off-grid energy access. And we see across the continent of Africa some countries where there's relatively widespread access to off-grid energy and others where you still see rates of electrification of 30% or 40% leaving most people out. So that's I think a real opportunity for investors to think about how to create incentives for entrepreneurs and for businesses to extend credit and maybe mitigating some of the risk they might face by extending credit to low-income customers. So where are you creating access for the first time reaching customers that have been overlooked and recognizing that that might create a higher cost or higher risk and not forcing the company to bear that burden because if they are, they will stay out of those markets just simply may not make sense. So I think there's a lot of room for financial innovation in trying to reach difficult to serve markets and something that we're really excited to start exploring particularly in the energy access space. Great. Anne, would you have anything to add to that? Only that, see if everything we do is hyper-local and our local teams really manage the investments because they understand the ecosystem best. We have an investment into a company called FACTS where they on-land to smaller businesses because we realize that our risk assessment tool only brings us to a certain level but there are those with needs that are much smaller than what we can provide from an economic perspective. So FACTS we use working capital factoring so that really we reduce the collateral needs for a lot of our small holders and people can say, hey, I have this contract and they can use that contract with a larger corporate as something that we can assess their risk and then provide a loan against that contract. So I think there are a lot of innovative ways to be inclusive, but again, it's just about matching the right financial product to the need. Right. And to answer Jay who brought up this question, this is something that we are in fact experimenting in Solidaridad as part of our programming in Southern Africa where farmers in fact, through a suite of digital tools and these have been developed by Solidaridad. So whenever farmers sign up and show up for trainings or they adopt good practices, they input the data in the digital tool on the basis of which they get tokens and these tokens can be used in a local system, let's say in a local input shop and the farmer will possibly get a discount on the inputs that he or she needs to use which will again be used for, let's say improving soil health and by also providing data back into the system in terms of improving soil health and providing data on how much carbon was sequestered, the farmer can earn more tokens. So this is something we are building as a way of providing both incentives to farmers to adopt better practices but also have it as a way of funneling finance and credit to smallholder producers. And this was a relatively small, I would say, initiative that we had started a few years ago on the basis of which we are now in fact, developing a much larger payment for impact ecosystem and hopefully we should be able to talk more about it maybe in the next OCAP. So stay tuned, we should have information on our website about this initiative was called Zawardi and that should be available already as well. Let me go on to the next question which is about how can we get stakeholders to better collaborate? I think each of you have touched upon different stakeholders and you've spoken about local teams on the ground. You've spoken about groups that provide quality technical assistance but which also speak to the market needs. Who are these stakeholders? How can we strengthen collaboration? And are things moving in the right direction or what are some of the big gaps that you still see holding on which need to be addressed? I can take a crack at that. I think one of the founding ideas of the impact investing movement from the beginning was that if you create the right financial incentives that the right stakeholders will come together. And I think you've seen that to a large degree. I think a lot of capital has been mobilized and I think there is a lot more collaboration now. We see it certainly in the development sector between development organizations, development finance institutions and investors. But I also just think it's worth acknowledging that financial incentives in some ways only take you so far. And there are still gaps. And so for us, I think bringing stakeholders together more and more can be around these bolder visions that have again are sort of values based. So looking at issues like climate change or gender equity and saying we're coming together not because all the incentives are aligned but because we have this bigger vision and then you bring the best minds to the table. So again, innovations and finance that allow people to bring the capital that they can bring is really smart. But I think what brings them to the table isn't just an opportunity to invest or make returns. So I find that those coalitions that come together to advance a really ambitious vision which is what's needed now in the face of the challenges that we see whether it's around global health, around inclusion, climate change is really, really important. And it's been exciting to see that in the business community, these coalitions emerging around net zero commitments or around racial equity. And then again, bringing the tools to the table but using capital as a means and not an end, I think will ultimately drive us faster towards those goals and recognizing that for some, they are still dealing with a set of constraints related to the kind of capital that they can bring and having a lot of transparency around that. Great, Anne. And I would say the coalitions are an effective tool because they tend to be an honest broker in the conversation. Impact investors, they are still trying to prove that you can get a certain return for the risk. So it may not be market return, it depends on the goal of the impact investor, but you can't start... The impact investor is one of many players in that ecosystem that really can contribute to the conversation. But I agree with Yasmeena in that when you have the honest broker facilitating the conversation, really looking at the big picture issues, it allows for people to contribute in a way that makes sense rather than relying on the capital markets to just work the issues out on themselves. Yeah, and again, I think that is one aspect that Solidaridad is really well connected with. I think across the board in all the countries, across all the different commodity supply chains that we work in, I think the core innovative piece that really drives long-term change is the different multi-stakeholder platforms that we coordinate and facilitate. And as you were speaking, I think what could take those to the next level is bringing elements of innovation within those platforms. And again, we are seeing that as well, just as part of one of our projects that we are developing for addressing deforestation in the Amazon, I think a few of the tools to monitor deforestation of indirect suppliers really came out of, and this was not directly our work. This was also our, this was mainly our partner's work, but which is going to be included potentially in a much larger initiative. The digital innovations that were developed came out of the challenges that were brought up by all the stakeholders in that multi-stakeholder platform. So yes, it's really important for sector stakeholders to really get together and work through these challenges together. And within that, yes, you can see what are the different solutions that really are needed to make that shift. Is it a policy solution? Is it a digital tool? Is it sector-wide research? And I think, yes, there's a lot of possibility when you have groups coming together. Speaking of coalitions, a very interesting question we have is that ESG metrics are not, in fact, standardized. This is given the fact that many of these metrics, many of these frameworks do come out of some of these coalitions. Nevertheless, it seems like there are no standard metrics in the ESG industry and then there are the measurement costs as well. So how do you, Anne and Yasmeena see us addressing this issue in the near future? I think that's a great question, Nick. And you make a really good point about the cost of measurement because it is real and it is significant and nobody wants to bear the burden of that cost. So we have been trying to educate our LPs about the importance of having a separate facility to cover the cost of this due diligence and to really cover the cost of the technical assistance required to help our small businesses really adopt strong ESG forward strategies. So ESG for us in our due diligence process is really just getting to that do no harm bit. But we are leveraging an ESG forward strategy in that our entire SIEF impact framework is designed to help find metrics that the company is already leveraging for their own business purposes in order to really think through the impact. So for example, one of our investors, Soit, they are a technology company. They use drones to really collect information about the land so that the small holders can have that real-time information as they're leveraging inputs to maximize yield. So how can we work with Soit to make sure that the data that they're collecting for the growth of their company really is also helping till their impact story and how can we optimize for that in our ESG due diligence? And we hire auditors to do our financial due diligence but finding folks that can do that on the impact side it's not only challenging but it requires us investing in our investment officers who are oftentimes investment bankers turned fund managers to train them about the importance of looking at ESG as not only a framework for do no harm but as a means for them to develop an impact strategy. So I don't know if I answered your question but I think I'm validating the fact that you're touching on all the difficult topics for running in an ESG process. And really the, I think the LPs if they are able to and even the challenges that we have with DFI's are that they said, yes, we love that you have a hands-on technical assistance program to help support the entrepreneurs but we don't wanna give you that grant capital alongside the, they want all of their money capitalized but they're like talk to this other person at this other side of our organization that provide grants and oftentimes lining that up is very challenging. So it is a challenge but it's necessary. Yeah, I agree. And I think what's interesting with ESG is I think that E and the G part are much better understood in terms of having metrics that can be validated and looking at some of the best practices around governance and tracking things like carbon emissions or water use. The S is the real mystery. What does it mean to have something that is really having a social impact or mitigating harmful effects from a social perspective? So since for Acumen, we're really about the S and we're about poverty, we've been thinking a lot about this issue of measurement and it's hard to standardize, right? Because I think to Ann's point, a lot of different business models are gonna have different kinds of impact. So when we talk about impacting low-income customers, it's a pretty rough instrument to say how many people were impacted in some way and we're trying to go deeper. So we've developed and now have launched as a separate social enterprise called 60 decibels, a methodology called Lean Data. And the whole point of it is to engage directly with the end users or beneficiaries or customers of a model that is meant to have social impact and to get direct feedback from those customers. And again, not only to validate whether or not they're reaching the target customer, reaching them with the right kinds of impact, whether it's helping them move out of poverty, reduce health expenses, feel greater security, what those metrics are can vary, but also that we're really making sure that this data is material for the entrepreneur, right? Not only for the investor or source of capital to feel good that there's some impact there, but giving the entrepreneur real-time data about the performance of their business, whether their customers have high NPS scores, if they have feedback on the product or service. And so we're finding it's really changing the dynamic from this kind of compliance lens to more of the power of data and ways that you can align impact with your core business objectives, which again, I think speaks to Anne's point that these things have to be material and not something that you're doing simply to be able to tap into capital. So I think for us, it's not as hard as people think. I think it can feel fuzzy, but the reality is that if your goal is, for example, to improve economic empowerment of women, there are all kinds of resources to do that and to communicate that. And investors are starting to make decisions based on that, but I think it's as people prioritize, whether serving vulnerable populations, empowering people that have been excluded, that the market is ready to respond. When we just did this research on corporate-ready social enterprises, they're delivering tremendous social impact value. Most of their corporate customers never even ask, right? They focus exclusively on the end product, the price, if it's competitive in the marketplace. And I think those corporate customers are leaving value on the table because the impact is there. And if they can ask the right questions, they can say, not only are we delivering really high quality milk or coffee or inputs, but we are also doing it in a way that helps us achieve some of these SDG goals or helps us meet our targets for ESG. Wonderful. Thank you so much, Anne and Yasmin. I think it was a brilliant conversation. Leaves us with a lot of hope and I think it also leaves us with a lot of work to do. Thank you so much. Thank you everyone for joining. Hope you enjoyed the panel.