 And if I may just go back to the original question, key question that we want to explore with you is how can we better support business incubation functions in a way that's sustainable and effective. We heard from other speakers that the aggregation of those businesses is very important. And we've just heard from Juan Carlos that the idea and the co-operative that we work with is instrumental to making the model of business working really well. So how do we also, how can SIPP also provide support in organizing community group-level income generating? An analyzer with the product which is taking to scale means two business incubation skills and a market scenario. So for example, as in our previous case, SIPP supports some of the development of vital APEX-level organizations for small-scale producers in the House. And the last question that many of the speakers also spoke to that is about de-racing. How can SIPP provide a more support for de-racing investment in small-scale producers so that those organizations can attract the finance? And I'm going to go into the good example, but actually live with the contractor and the innovative way to monitor some of the activities to really help de-racing for the financial providers but also help build up the credit for small-scale producers so that they can actually be able to attract more finance. So all those great questions are quite amazing and I hope that you can also think about coming up with questions for the speakers. But I know some of the audience here also have quite a lot of experience to share with those questions. So do feel free to use that question for a detailed box to make comments and share your experiences and a box on how SIPP can tackle some of the three areas. And now if I can go back to some of the questions that are already on the screen. First and Mark, if I can just ask you to address the question, two of the questions. When it is on the S3 system would also work with the conditionality based on forward restoration, not just climate smart agriculture. That question is from Duncan and the follow-up question on that is that then in that case for the trees, can we use that collateral with your bandage in the design of people? And then there's another question from Achille about how would a farming practice is effective and are they based in local practices or simply include specific practices? And to link that question probably back to the climate in a better way, thinking about Mark, probably elaborate a bit on how you can use the climate system that you are developing on the S3 life to incentivize some of the farmers to adopt batch of practices on their land that can be conducive for a simple business model or for a specific answer. So I have to use to answer that two questions. So I'll take those questions in order. So the question from Duncan, yes, our system would work on the basis of forest restoration. I think I guess there's always a question around what is forest restoration. But sort of skirting around that, just a sort of caveat. The limits to the S3 life system are that it's only suitable for farmers who are sufficiently sophisticated to take and repay commercial debt. And this wouldn't work with smallholder farmers who are conventionally unbankable on the jargon. And that's actually the majority of smallholder farmers. So the S3 life system is only going to work within areas where farmers are considered credit worthy. To get around that problem we've actually launched a sort of sister business called Greenfy and you can look at the website for that, greenfy.org. And that allows NGOs or similar to place funds within a community managed revolving fund. And the community to manage the loans themselves and for environmental condition, we place that on those loans and then our system allows for a community managers monitoring system as well. And that is applicable to the larger number of smallholder farmers or small scale producers who are not conventionally bankable. So we've deployed these two different systems. The second Greenfy is in partnership with two organizations, IUCN and PAX. Absolutely a big climate smart agriculture is only one of the ways in which the system can be used to adjust to small scale producer behavior. And actually the language of climate smart agriculture is very much sort of there because that's where the funding opportunities are or were at the time. And then the question from Akile or how the farming practice develops local best practices of scientific practice as well actually a little bit of both. We take the off the shelf, I guess practices, and then through participatory discussions with farm focus groups, we adjust the requirements to suit what they're used to and capable of doing. And as an example, in Kenya, the requirement was for grass contour strips in the first instance, and then as loan sizes increased for the planting of trees to reinforce those grass strips. And the farmers themselves were allowed to choose both the grass type and the tree seeding according to what they knew best and wanted to use. And we just got informed that one house unfortunately will need to leave us a bit early. And we were the whole region one house. So first to ask a question about the recommendation for fit on upscale investment with more medium enterprises in Mexico. I have a question about company VELDA. And it's because of VELDA to know that Akile is engaged in some of the activities in Mexico. Could you probably explore a little bit on that question? Yes, of course. We don't have right now currently an investment in Mexico, and mainly because we didn't have a project developer we know for a long time. And it seems like to be too risky for us. If there is a jurisdiction for fit, then fit will be interested to promote investment. We can, for example, agree into a co-financing initiative, fit having a catalyzer role for us in terms of, let's say, first loss of co-financing under a grant base to the project, which can reduce the cost and also de-risk a little bit our position. In that case, investment decision will be faster. What I think is very important in representing a fund is why a private fund, a specialized private fund can do a lot of things in short periods of time. Just as an example, we deployed 100 million euros or committed it in just four years, which many, many funds, institutional funds are not able to do is because we have a specialized team, we have boots on the ground, and we're going to spend a lot of time on co-building the opportunity. So I think that fit as a, you know, probably as a recommendation, we could have a conversation or fit could do it with other funds as well as the Moringa fund. For example, how to agree in a jurisdiction, the impact both fit and investor are looking at and then create an element at the top level that then will allow the fund manager to deploy the investment. I think it's very important to overcome sometimes, you know, these barriers of communication in Peru, we know the door of the fit that has been managed by IDB at the moment. We couldn't co-invest in this project because I think the area of eligibility didn't match, but of course we would be more than happy to collaborate with fit. And this is what this the Risking or Co-financing initiative could be catalytic. May I just ask probably a follow up question on this. When you mentioned that it's being considered a truly risky and it will be useful to have this healthy risk, could you just expand on what are some of the specific risks that you can see? You obviously mentioned that you want to rely or attract your local partners and what are some of those risks that are clearly and your investors will consider when they look at some of the financial resources related to it? Yes, of course. First, we love the risk and this is why what we are designed to be additional not to be like other financial institutions. This is our mission, so we are really risk, not risk adverse, but really we have a big appetite for risk, but we need to know how to manage that risk, which is different to avoid risk. The way we manage the risk in terms of project implementation in Peru to be in Madrid-Edeos far away with a lot of trollies to the project developer. Project developer, grassroots, well-established, 30-year-old operations, very reputable. That's how we manage the risk of, let's say, performance of the project. The market risk in terms of the cacao, what happened if the cacao didn't work well, and also what about the fluctuations or things related to that? We actually manage that risk through a hedge or let's say a coverage through a USA warranty. The loan we provide for the comparative, the operations of the project was under, actually was warranted by USA through a 50% loss warranty by the development-crate authority of USA, so that supports a lot. If it can do things like that, it will be great for us to catalyze, for example, investment in Mexico. We couldn't make it on the first fund we had, but we can do it. So the question is not if there's a risky place, we go to risky places. You know, the deforestation are in these risky places, deep on the forest, different land use types. We just need to know how to manage it. The implementation risk, you can manage quite well with a good project implementator, and then things related to market could be implemented through these market enhancement instruments, price warranties, off-takes, first loss as well, and I think we would be more than happy to do that with them. And so having said that, as Shekin said, I really need to run, but I was very happy to participate in this webinar. And please, you have my contacts, which Shekin can share as well, and let's keep in touch. And thank you very much. Thank you so much, Juan Carlos. And yeah, please, the audience, feel free to send a question directly, or you can keep putting your comments and questions in the chat box, and we can pass it on to Juan Carlos as well. And the, probably, while we're under the risky topic, may I probably go to Paul now, and Paul, in your presentation, you did talk about the importance, and in the Uganda case, where you actually worked with those small holders in managing reducer risk and a generic federic tent. Could you please help elaborate a fit on some of the risks that you be working with people on the ground, and how you manage to reduce them? And then we can go to some of the questions that other audience have posed for you. Thank you. Talk about risk. I listed ways of reducing the risks for small growers. They apply to all growers, but particularly for small growers. And what happened was they fell into two categories. One is the actual growth of the trees, the silvy culture, which you see. This has just come up. Now, basically what we're saying is quite often growers, small, medium growers in particular, have poor growth and poor quality. But there are ways, as we've shown through SPGS, of improving that. So following the best practices, not just nominally, but making sure the staff, the extension staff are well trained. Contractors, if they're used, must also be trained in these practices. Sometimes you have to bring these in from outside, whether it's from Southern Africa or Brazil, the countries with the big plantation history. Okay. Secondly, fire protection is a big issue. Again, for small farmers in particular, your investment can disappear in an hour or so. Simple protection methods, measures can be taken. As you get bigger, you have to certainly plan and invest in infrastructure, train the people and get some equipment. You can reduce these risks substantially. And the pest and diseases is becoming increasingly important, particularly in exotic plantations. Pests coming into Africa into the Eucalyptus from Australia. We've got to keep abreast. We no need to panic, but good silver culture can reduce that risk by having, for instance, good weeding, reduce the stress in your crop. But longer term, it needs investment in research, particularly tree breeding. And this is really important. And then the second batch of risk is the markets and utilization of categorized map. And the fourth point there, you see a lot of small farmers have isolated small plantations, not realizing the implications of transporting their product to market. So it's very, really important to be realized within a year or two how important in the saw log scheme about the location of growers. We stopped supporting people in isolated places and started this aggregation that everyone's talking about. That also brings about the fifth one, the lack of scale. When you have a few isolated growers, you have very weak negotiating powers. And in theory, the clustering can help you. But I have a sort of rider attached to the timber grower associations, because what I'm seeing particularly in East Africa is some good and bad things really. The expectations can be very high on these timber grower associations. Or they can be more like maybe the Uganda one is now developing into a more business-like approach. What tends to happen is if the donors fund these TGAs, the grower associations, they can sometimes have expectations are far too high. So if you let it come from the growers themselves and support it, then they're much more likely to succeed. Number six, low-value markets for trees. This is really to do with, as we said before, checking your market before you plant, getting the intelligence. A lot of things can happen between planting and harvesting in forestry, but still you can reduce the risk by going for markets which look good. So 10, 15 years time there will be a good market for transmission poles or saw logs, whatever. And the seventh point is inefficient processing is a big issue. Particularly we see it in East Africa a lot. You get these little mills running around paying peanuts to some of the farmers. And the reason is they have very low recovery. If you have this sort of equipment and you're getting low recovery, you can't afford to pay the grower very much for his log. So this whole area of the sort of primary processing in particular certainly needs technical and possibly financial support. This area also have a question about the timber export restriction. And there's more decreased or marked here. That means that some of your growers can't get these in the log price. And is that something that the project could have foreseen? And if so, do you think it could have been addressed in tandem with expanding the planted area and if so, how? Good question, Darius. And if you know the answer, please let me know. We are dumbfounded. It's a mystery why the prices in Uganda for saw logs are depressed. We've tracked the prices of them over the years and used to publish it every three months in the newsletter. And certainly at the moment, the last number of years, they haven't gone up anything like you would have expected from the demand projections. So it really is... And I don't think the export restrictions is the answer. There is the reason. It's quite a strange phenomenon there. We don't know how much timber really is coming in, say from the Congo. But it is a strange. Really, I think it's the... We sort of accept in SPGS that when we started, we didn't do this market intelligence enough. But I think we realized it after a few years and started to do that. And in a more general comment to this question, I think it highlights the importance of doing these sort of sector studies in a country. Looking at the main products, the supply and demand and the forecast in each country, we did one last year in Tanzania. And it really does show you surprising things sometimes with markets which farmers think they're going to grow. For instance, the transmission pole market in Kenya. Everybody's growing for this. And of course, at some stage, it's going to be saturated. And there are going to be a lot of disappointed farmers who won't probably replant their crops. So these things, you need these sort of fundamental studies, I think, to back up whatever project, whatever financial support is going to be given to the sector. Thanks. Darian, can you feel free to comment in that question, Bob? I think the key, it will come back because we're focusing on some of the three key questions we've posed about this. And I really have used for a reason, one of the common issues that I think are probably all the speakers including Tommy Towns, who's found a speak to, is about the barrier for more producers. One of them is obviously the collateral as some of the speakers spoke to. And I guess we're monitoring off some of the more holy activities by financial institutions. So in your understanding of this activity and your experience in this, how can this issue be resolved? So should I probably hand over some of the three questions at first? Yeah, I agree. I think there's some really interesting discussion around this. Certainly in Ghana we had some useful discussion with small and medium tree growers who were very keen to get engaged in producing trees. There was land available, but they lacked two key things. One was effective technical support, which Paul has talked about very clearly. And the second thing was financing. The two things were just not available. It was effectively people financing it from their own savings, from families, borrowing from within their family. But they were unable to go to formal financial institutions and leverage financing because banks just weren't ready to look at small scale timber production. It was too risky. It was too long term. Questions of land tenure, uncertainties, fire risk as well. It just was impossible for people to get started. Now, I'm aware that in Ghana the Flip Programme House is very aware of this and in discussions with the National Ministry they are exploring opportunities through additional financing to see how some support could be provided. But I'm not entirely sure how far that discussion has come. So I think that's really key. If I may, I might also just add I think there's some really interesting discussion as well about the degree to which there's two very contrasting models. The one where you really adopt the value chain approach. The kind of model that we saw certainly in Uganda actually in all of the speakers where there's a very well-defined sub-sector or value chain that's being supported which is well known. The barriers, the incentives around that are well researched and support is provided around that. And then there's this more extended community bottom-up type income-generating activities and support and financing to that that we've seen in a number of their projects. And obviously both have strengths and weaknesses but I think perhaps one of the challenges with the highly-participated bottom-up community-identified initiatives is that you effectively have a huge number of value chains which start to emerge. It could be small-scale, livestock could be agriculture, could be tree planting a whole range of things. So any particular project's ability to provide the needed technical support around that sort of wealth of emerging income-generating areas is extremely difficult. So I think there's a really important trade-off there about the degree to which projects support specific value chains and sectors and effectively say that this is what we're going to do, this is where we have expertise and this is where we can support you and those that adopt this more sort of bottom-up community-driven approaches which have a huge number of strengths and also provide opportunities to build in good will and so on but maybe less focused in terms of business integration and market support. Great, next time. For the rest of the speakers now you can address two questions now. One is still about how can this help with that natural challenge that small-holder state and then at the same time the very interesting question Tom has also posed about how do you manage that balance and a trade-off between the well-designed sub-factors managing the approach and a bottom-up indigenous approach with the community and again all audience please feel free to comment as she experiences in the chat box as well. Paul, maybe can you start and then we can test Mark the question. Okay, Mike, well looking at or listening to Tom's questions there a little bit I think for me the thing is you've heard about the background to the Sologue Scheme in Uganda of course it's not the model that you talk about and the model for the other projects sometimes they're very country-specific and I think from what I'm seeing there's some basic information you need on land the situation and the forest sector the agricultural sector and you apply these to a particular country and I think this is what we're finding that you can take lessons learned I think this is really important across the board of things that work and yet still many projects start and fail for the same reasons they have for many years somehow sound very cynical Tom, maybe if you're still online can you sort of address or let me know what you'd like my input on beyond that I think one of the really interesting things that you've touched on Paul is this whole question of the Tree Grows Association, the APEX organization this is something that's really come out in actually quite a number of the discussions and the presentations that have come through that and I notice Duncan has put a question into the mix here about support to Tree Grows Associations in terms of providing ongoing market intelligence and business advice and as well as this sort of broad question of incubation services to growers so I suppose it's a question about you touched on it in your presentation I think a little bit about the degree to which we shouldn't put too much into these organizations we should let them develop their own support and define their own objectives but I suppose it would be interesting to know what you think would be the long term objective of the Tree Grows Association well do they currently provide and what do they provide I frequently turn to as a vision is the South African one, the Forestry South Africa which is a growers organization that represents growers from the huge companies, Monty and Sapi, right down to small growers now you look at what they do, they're involved in forest policy very strong lobbying government on land issues whatever support to the sector organized training committees that decide training and even research, fund research of course they give advice to growers to get to that level of course takes many years it's a very mature commercial forest sector in South Africa so rather different I think to what we're seeing in certainly East Africa and West Africa but it's a vision and I think it's always important to have a vision you look at my Uganda example it was always the we were always asked of course by the donors what's the plan for the future the exit strategy for SPGS and of course the sustainability of it was to build capacity in the Uganda Timbergrows Association I think sort of looking back that's really not happening quick enough and again it comes about this reluctance I think to let go and you know SPGS seen as a successful project and seems to be a reluctance to let go to build up the capacity of this private organization I think it really should happen if they want it to stand on its feet and what I see elsewhere where you force TGA Timbergrower Associations we really do just raise expectations too much sometimes I think it's not easy making a profit on a low quality timber and it needs to be said I think to growers but you know we've got to do what we can to make it profitable for growers if they've got the right quality and assist them in building up some of these value chains Thanks and now we can probably move on to Mark and Duncan I think in the response to Thomas question for also I can address some part of your question in terms of how they can found some of the trigger of those agents if you have any follow-up of specific questions please put it into the chat box and now we move on to Mark to address some of the two questions So your first question as I was saying is how can FIP contribute to resolve the issue of absence collateral among small scale producers but I think it kind of needs to sort of look over the fence what's happening in the I guess sort of the smallholder credit financing world where there seems to be a lot of innovation over the last four or five years particularly in the direction of some unsecured credit through value chain financing through USSE lending through the creation of credit reference and improvements made in the credit scoring of low income borrowers I think what the FIP will have to do is start to sort of collaborate more closely with that world it's almost as though they're operating in two different silos but actually they're often talking about the same things and the same problems the second question is how to manage the trade-offs between a value chain approach of financing and a community-based bottom-up approaches and I actually wonder whether the two are mutually exclusive sometimes concerning reality is that small scale producers live their lives in debt and actually from what we see from our research there are many obligations to many many different sort of lenders both forward and forward or the bank something their family something their local loan sharks they're only ever sort of underwater to more or less an extent over time so within that reality I think you can actually have two approaches to financing one is through the sort of the value chain and through the I guess the commercialization of certain of their growing activities and then others that doesn't preclude more community-oriented financing schemes such as that's provided by Greenfy and IEC and ECROS and RU and we're doing something similar as well so I think that would be the answer to that I think we're running out of time now so the last round I'll just let everyone have a final remark and especially if you feel like you have any specific last words that goes towards that great question that's presented on the slide and again the audience too is really also to put some of your feedback on thinking all the two questions in the chat box yes to tell the presenters for sharing these interesting experiences and for me it was instructing to learn of the different initiatives and efforts that are being made to support the small holders but just a general comment I know we don't have much time to have a discussion but it's about breaking or looking at how to overcome barriers to financing SME and in our framework of analysis includes looking at what are the investments in enabling creating enabling conditions like capacity building that you have talked about both in terms of the technical capacity securing tenure and also the financial investment and it does attract me and I would like to have further discussion as we go along with this study on how do we use this notion of supporting sophisticated producers because they are credit worthy to bring other small holders and by using these sophisticated producers perhaps as the lead producers that can bring the relatively smaller ones who can be managing revolving funds or other means of producing that could increase not only the scale of getting the finance but perhaps addressing the objectives that the city is pursuing. I know that those initiatives were started with the different context and objectives but we want to have the lessons to see how synergies and leveraging of financing can be brought in by collaboration between these different initiatives with the field. I think also it's worth reflecting going forward on the issue of aggregation and clustering and what I'm hearing is working with APEX organization it's good but also not so good because of the unreasonable demands but I think perhaps here there has to be an investment on the negotiation because the small holders with one actor each they often because they like the knowledge on markets and even on the cultural aspects in the case of plantations but also like knowledge on processing other products that they can have from natural forest they really need to work in some sort of grouping and to have institutions that can strengthen their voice so how do we address the challenges that can come for organization and perhaps strong views on certain aspects to making sure that they're going to even place that can allow win-win situations in terms of channeling financing but also getting the results in terms of putting good products of quality to market at a price that is acceptable to all institutions that they are engaged and I think maybe I'll just stop here just because of time but I think we should pursue further discussion and also understanding how the low risk of institutions like Altaria are operating and working with cooperatives and how this can be the lessons from these initiatives can inform the potential partnership between financing to private sector by SIP with those ongoing initiatives so I thought I should just make that general comment not expecting an answer now but something that we should pursue to at least the wet coast so long Thank you so much for highlighting all those things in negotiations important of negotiations and all the other things reminding us that the webinar is not really and after the discussion we are only starting to throw a number of questions with you so if you also don't really want to directly respond to that three questions if you have some further thoughts on some of the key issues that you think that the learning and evaluation should investigate further focusing on some of the obviously SIP and SIP financing please feel free to share and keep your intervention in and then we'll go to Tom and then Mark Thanks I really don't want to use up more time other than to say I think this has been an excellent set of presentations and for me it's really highlighted the need to balance these two extremely complex areas of investment one there's financial tailoring the financial packages to meet the specific requirements of the end users in ways that is usable and friendly and appropriate but secondly this instead of enabling investments that's very clearly as well whether it's extension support in the case of the working Uganda or market assistance as well you know linking people to markets and providing all these enabling investments of course also including broader regulatory and policy aspects getting that mix in a way that provides opens up opportunities for private sector activities clearly a complex task and getting that mix right for me is a really critical aspect so I'll leave it there and see if others have any final wrap up comments I think it's been valuable some interesting lessons coming in particularly you know this interface between agriculture and forestry now as well which is going to be more important particularly as we all know the small growers small tree growers are going to be the future supply particularly in Africa given the land situation so I think we really need to maybe do a little bit more of this lessons learned from these and share them because one of the issues of course is that people don't like to publish bad results let's say you know but there are times where it's really good to lessons learn positive and bad and negative so we can drive these initiatives forward and I think particularly we need to think more carefully on these timber grower associations because I see approaches that are not working in East Africa and some that are working and a lot of a lot of different people competing for this as well which is crazy so I think you know the more that we can sort of address this issue the better it will be for the small farmers Just to say thank you very much and maybe to just conclude by saying I saw there was a big conservation finance conference in New York hosted by Credit Suisse a couple of weeks ago one of the conclusions of that was the importance of replicability and scalability now on scalability that's fine on replicability there's a big question about how replicable investments at local level in the difference of agricultural and cultural context are and so searching for these replicable business models is going to be sort of vital and that's what sort of FIP has to look for and the tools that can de-risk those I think few but possible replicable investment models Thank you all for being here and thanks to all the speakers they spent quite a lot of time preparing a presentation to ensure that we can maximize our learning and again this is not really the end of this learning journey we will send you the presentation not including our and then the audio recording of this by the end of this week and then that would include the contact information for all the speakers for you to follow up and if you have any further comments or thoughts about this webinar please feel free to contact us as well and with that I'll just close the webinar Thank you