 I'd like to share a story about Peru with you today. A few years ago, a friend of mine in Lima named Pepe took me to visit Lake Titicaca, right on the border with Bolivia and Peru. This is right near two cities. One you may not have heard of, Puno, and the other you probably have, Cusco. The point of the visit was to learn more about the experience of a medium-sized trout company there called Pici Factoría de los Andes, run by a man named Joaquín de la Piedra. Joaquín and Pici had changed the area's economy in recent years for the better. And I wanted to learn how. Quickly, you may know that Peru has seen a great deal of growth in recent years. The last 15 years of cut poverty and the country's grown dramatically. But most of that growth has been limited to the coastal areas, Lima in particular. Growth in the highlands has been much harder to come by. And poverty much tougher to move the needle on at the same time. Pepe was managing a USAID-funded project called PRA, short for poverty reduction and alleviation that had been using an approach called buyer-led development to tackle that challenge. Pici Factoría and Joaquín's expansion there was one of their principal success stories. Joaquín and Pici's had been operating in Peru, other areas, since the late 1970s. And they'd grown dramatically. They'd started to export to the US and Europe. But they had also quite a great deal of unmet demand that they couldn't fill. In fact, when PRA met Pici's and when Pepe met Pici's, they had orders from more than 30% beyond what they could fill in a given month. At the same time around the lake, trout knowledge and expertise was passed down through generations from father to son. And people knew what they were doing around trout and around fish. But generally they sold locally because their fish were not up to the quality of international standards or exports. PRA's purpose and Pepe's purpose was to bring groups like these two together so they could both benefit from what was an obvious opportunity. The project's buyer-led mantra meant that they worked based solely on market demand. Not an abstract concept, but a buyer with a purchase order. A purchase order that meant a name, a number, and an address. In this case, that purchase order was from Joaquin and Pici's for a quantity of trout that meant that fish farmers would have to come together around the lake to actually deliver on it. And at a quality that they weren't used to delivering. But the purchase order also made clear the incentives in the equation too. Pici's and Joaquin would meet their excess demand. And fish farmers would sell for a higher price once they reached the higher quality. So based on the back of that purchase order, PRA and Joaquin and Pici Factoria each committed to getting this deal done. Pici Factoria took out a loan for more than a million dollars to invest in modern technology and equipment, modern floating cages for the lake, and they would invest in the skills training to raise the level of quality on the fish in the area. PRA would help defray the costs of all of that skills training, and then they would provide the crucial organization side bringing the different fish farmers and the associations around the lake together to deliver at quantity. But before all that could happen, there was a crucial challenge and that was trust. Local fishermen, local fish associations were used to doing business the way they'd always done it, and they distrusted outsiders. Outsiders included Joaquin, people, businessmen from other areas of Peru that they hadn't worked with in the past, in fact they considered them foreign investors. But PRA and Pepe, with no financial stake in the deal itself, were in a good position to actually convince local farmers, local fish farmers, that this was a good deal for them, that Joaquin and Pici would make this happen and that the result would be worth it for them, and the result was worth it. As the relationship with PC Factoria took off, it yielded more than $24 million in sales for PC Factoria, which in turn meant more than 1,700 jobs for local fish farmers, as well as the more than $1 million in private investment for the area. Now, why did this work exactly though? Oh wait, back up for a second. You might think from these numbers that PRA and Joaquin had somehow created a trout monopoly where none had existed before, right? But that's not the case at all. What was good for one firm and good for a number of fish farmers in the area was also good for the fish economy as a whole. Because as people saw their neighbors selling for higher prices and producing twice as many fish as they had in the past, they saw more money in their pockets and they started to leave behind what they had been doing, the lower wage agricultural work, whether it was artichokes or avocados, and they started turning to fish. Some of them even cut PC Factoria and Joaquin out of the equation entirely. They started selling directly, tens of thousands of trout themselves to markets like the US, Canada, and Norway. Now, why did this work though? Why did buyer-led development work? Joaquin chalked it up to the relationships. That was the crucial element for him. He couldn't build these relationships with farmers around the area and convince them to do business with him unless he had an intermediary like PRA. That's because buyer-led development fundamentally recognizes that a lack of linkages to market are a major cause of rural poverty. They have plenty of potential in small producers, but they lack those commercial linkages. So with that in mind, what it provides in response is essentially a public good. It corrects that market failure by generating those deals. The key player in that relationship though, that relationship and deal generating process, is not Pepe sitting in Lima, but it's a regional PRA Economic Service Center. It's housed in Cusco and in this case led by a woman named Ana Maria Andrade. Ana Maria, right here in this photo you'll see, has a small team and they serve as quasi-regional economic development officers. But there's a key difference between the work that they do, serving as champions for the economy of Puno and Cusco and the lake area, and that of a public servant or someone employed by a public bureaucracy. When you think about what a public bureaucrat does, when they're a development officer, they do a great deal of promotions and campaigns, right? They go around and they sit around on competitiveness councils and they talk to a lot of folks, represent the state or the city to outside investors, true. But there's a singular focus here for Ana Maria and her team and that's sales. That's because bio-led development focuses on how the state relies on setting the right incentives. USAID outsources when it wants to attack poverty in Peru, nationwide, to a company like Kimonix, ours, responsible for aggregate, higher level sales and jobs targets. We in turn identify regional service center operators like Ana Maria's and Cusco, responsible then for their region's sales and jobs targets that are incentivized to deliver on those. More sales equals more jobs for their neighbors, yes, but it also means more pay for their staff and their firms. So the Kimonix team in Lima, or the Prague operators team in Lima serves as a hub generating relationships with buyers and clients and generating those purchase orders as well as hosting a monitoring and evaluation unit that verifies the results, the sales numbers, the regional operators deliver. Now you might question the wisdom of outsourcing, but I'd say that it's pretty clear from the numbers that it injects a level of accountability that's absolutely fundamental to the management equation here to getting the job done. So as you see, bio-led development over 15 years linked more than 54,000 small producers with more than 300 clients and buyers, this led to $400 million in new sales for Peruvian businesses and more than 100,000 new jobs, all on the back of $30 million in public and private investment. But this is all about poverty, right? At the end of the day, the project's name was poverty, reduction, and alleviation. So we wanted to know exactly, particularly given Peru had seen a great deal of our great reduction in poverty over the last 15 years. We wanted to know what portion of that was attributable to PRA in the bio-led approach. So towards the end of the project, 2009 to 2013, USAID and Kimonix contracted out an independent impact evaluation. And what that found was a 3% reduction in monetary poverty over just those four years, those last four years of the project, was attributable to bio-led development, all in the areas of operation that the project worked in. So I think the takeaways here are that 3% certainly gives us something to think about as we walk through the grocery store and look for frozen fish, yes. But it also tells us here at Socap that we can do great work at scale by focusing on the right incentives, aligning those incentives around market-based principles, sales, and getting deals done. That matters, and it does so in a way that changes people's lives. Thank you.