 Good morning or good afternoon to all attendees and speakers to today's ICSD plenary session, which is on regenerative agriculture for the SDGs, leveraging ICT to improve sustainable agricultural development. My name is Uli Keita, I'm the Executive Director of Youth Connect Africa, and I'll be your moderator for today's session. At the margin of the UN General Assembly and International Conference on Sustainable Development ICSD, Millennium Promise Alliance would like to showcase organizations that specialize in sustainable regenerative agriculture initiatives. These organizations provide solutions to development's challenges and support in the acceleration of the achievement of the sustainable development goals, especially those that are at the intersections of SDGs 2, 4, 8, 11, 12, and SDG 13 through financing, strategizing and deploying targeted interventions. The panel will feature projects and innovations which provide sustainable agricultural methodology and provide an opportunity to mobilize continued action to achieve the SDGs through cross-cutting strategies. Our plenary session will showcase sustainable and regenerative agriculture activities in developing countries that leverage ICT and leading-edge approaches to grow nutritious food, promote improved agronomic techniques, maintain health of our planet, and sustain livelihoods of our communities. Our panelists and their organizations provide solutions to development challenges and support in the acceleration of the achievement of the above-mentioned sustainable development goals. As we all know, across Africa and beyond, agriculture is a primary source of income and the majority of households consume locally produced foods, yet all too often. However, the way food is produced, distributed and consumed, is at odds with the natural capital and renewable and non-renewable natural resources on which people, the environment and wildlife depend. Farming practices and food security have also exacerbated the societal impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic. As we begin the process of rebuilding, we must seize this opportunity to assess our land usage, evaluate farming practices, and re-envision value chains as well as pursue agricultural food systems that encompass the betterment of people and the environment at their core. Today's session objectives are threefold. The first one is showcasing sustainable agriculture interventions in developing countries. The second one will highlight agriculture innovation, which benefit the environment, increase yield, and also improve agribusiness. And the third one will highlight the impact of teleagric to enhance farming practices and strengthen extension services. So to get us all started, our distinguished speakers for today's session include four eminent personalities, each in their domains. Our first speaker today will be Mr. Laxen Inali. Mr. Laxen Inali is a Senior Vice President of West Africa for OCP. He joined the group in September 2017 and served since March 2018 as a Senior Vice VP for OCP Africa in charge of the West African region. He has a bachelor's in civil works, a master in rural engineering and executive MBA. He has 37 years of professional experience, including 19 with the African Development Bank and 18 years in the public-private sectors. With the African Development Bank from 1998 to 2017, he was holding several managerial positions, which include six years as the bank's resident representative in Mali and in Gabon, as well as advisor of the operations vice president in charge of agriculture, water supply, sanitation, human development, governance, and natural resources. He's done this from 2014 to 2017. So Mr. Laxen, please you have the floor to entertain us. Thank you. OK, so thank you very much. I want just to say for the ones who don't know. Thank you, Oli and thank you for inviting us to that conference. I want just to for those who doesn't know OCP. OCP is the group OCP is founded in 1920. We now have, I mean, 100 years. We celebrated our center of existence. And we have OCP founded in 1921 to main force factor in Morocco. But now our operations span to entire cycle of plant nutrition and food system. We are aware, of course, of the role that the digitalization can play as a lever and as also factor that can not only enhance our efficiency, but also to help, I mean, boost the agricultural transformation. I want just to give you some, I mean, achievement of some decision that has been made by OCP group to move that work. The digitalization is really one of the pillars of our group during this last 10 years of its transformation. We have launched one initiative that's called movement. OCP put an emphasis on diversity, flexibility, agility and autonomy. And that movement is the expression of that emphasis, new way of working and organizing our company, employing individuals and groups from different background to experiment, initiate, new project, innovation. And this bottom idea generation has had to the creation of no business like smart smart fertilizer or aggregation, just that movement that brings some lot of idea and most of them has been in the, in the, in the, in the domain of digitalization. We have put in place a GV with ABM is one of our strategic partner. So you can understand that our really, our really putting all the, the means and all what we can do to make sure that we are really in that way and that we are really, we can really have all the capabilities that we need to improve our, our efficiency. We, you know, also, once one knows that OCP is in providing an university, university, and this, of course, university is focusing on innovation and digitalization. It is, I can say that the technique is connecting with African university to promote sharing experience, feedback and effort, mutualization on common problematics. OCP via university is also supporting the startup ecosystem via its program impulse, I will present it later. It is an African startup incubator dedicated to innovative startup in the fields of aggregate, biotech, mining, technology, material science and nanotechnology. And the last, just my son is the digital OCP has created a whole new executive direction, the digital office to better prepare our company to the field with an up in house capability area of expertise like data scientist. I want to give you some examples of what OCP Africa programs in the domain of digitalization Africa, of course, is aware of the challenges of the digitalization of African agriculture and is doubly committed to facilitating access to it for as many actors as possible. On the one hand, the subsidiary of OCP group developed a digital solution to bring value to the farmers directly. Some examples that I will share with you, the first one is the soil mapping. You know that we are really putting a great emphasis on that factor because if we don't really master that factor, we should solve to make sure that we will use it efficiently and also we will preserve it. So you can guess, I mean the negative impacts that we have on on the agricultural transformation. So the digital soil fertility mapping approach is one of the avenues to achieve its ambition goal for supporting millions of small agriculture farmers across the continent. Digital soil fertility mapping represents the creation of spatial soil information system using field, file and laboratory observational method, complete with special and no spatial soil inference systems. OCP Africa digital soil fertility mapping are used to estimate the spatial distribution of soil property and can be employed at various scales and have proven valuable for developing more quantitative, more accurate and more precise soil maps. From 2016 to 22, more than 25 million hectares of agricultural land have been characterized and using this approach, this digital soil mapping and a new fertilizer formulation have been developed and 20 orders are being tested because we are using this soil mapping of course to develop the formula, the customized formula that are adapted, that are customated, adapted to the soil to plant the sites, the ecology to make sure to increase the efficiency and also and also increase the productivity. Another initiative that I want to show you is also OCP Africa, I've mentioned it's an OCP School of which provides mobile soil testing lab services to rural smallholder farmers in real time to help them understand their soil needs and also a recommendation based on the soil paste report. The testing is done in the farmers plots and everything has been shared with the farmers. It consists of traveling school mobile laboratories from village to village to provide not only the soil testing results but also to provide them the training on the best agricultural practices. So that program, so far the program has reached 420,000 more hardware farmers in nine countries. We also developed a digital platform that we call Odongo because it has been, the pilot has been developed in Nigeria in 2019 that promotes the agricultural value chain to various services while placing the farm at the heart of the system. The digital solution allows farmers to access the agricultural market and local support through agri-extension agent network. Odongo offers educational and practical content on best practices specific advice and recommendation of the farmer and this initiative will be developed in the group strategic presence companies while integrating new services. We plan to move now to use that platform to come to Ghana and to Senegal. A woman in Agribusur, Agribusur is a global offer that provides a solution to the farmers related to measure, constrain the pricing like access to finance, access to inputs, access to education and access also to the market and did that experience related to women in Agribusur has been launched in Ghana and it benefited to 5,000 women farmers and within the context of COVID we have been able with MPI and thanks to Chief Nat who is here with his leadership we have been able to I mean to provide the virtual training to the 5,000 farmers. It's just an example because Agribusur we don't use to use digital training but within that context so it was really the solution that we have found to leverage on ICT to continue the wind training even in the context of COVID. I discussed about I give you an example of Ampels startup accelerator program that has been launched with the University of Polytechnic with this challenge and with the support of Osepi Group. It was a program that targets innovative startups in various scientific and industrial fields as agritic, biotic, mining, technology and material science. Ampels aims to support the rapid growth of this startup and support fruitful and lasting links with Osepi Group, Mohamed 5 Polytechnic University and all our ecosystem. The platform creates crossroads between several suppliers in an ecosystem working together to provide startup with access to different resources with their business, training, workshop, fab labs, lab labs, incubation and acceleration. And one of the startups has been also a service of one of the startups has been involved with one Agribusur in even that Oman Agribusur to provide the mechanization services to the pharmacy. We have a platform where they give access to all the tractors available in the region so it links the the pharmacy to the mechanization service providers and it has been used it has really and not only it give access to the mechanization but it's also it give access to an affordable mechanization in terms of the price. So I will leave it here and I just I mean for the sake of the time I don't want to go through all the other initiatives we are working on our program in the next year but we believe that the ACT is really I mean an excellent I mean lever and we cannot continue we cannot I mean achieve our strategy our ambitious I mean targets without leveraging on ACT. Thank you very much. Thank you very much Mr. Lassen. You have touched on the digitalization of of agriculture through the work that you are doing with OCP which is very useful using the capabilities of the new technologies you underscored the importance of universities the roles of university in this digitalization of agriculture is key it brings lots of value addition to the farmers and to communities. You've talked about the technology on soil mapping which is functioning in nine countries helping many many farmers in having access to the digital solution so that they can improve the way they do business. You've talked about the new technology you're developing in Nigeria which will be scaled to Ghana and Senegal as well as the 5,000 woman farmers who have actually benefited from this new technology that you're developing. So thank you very much Mr. Lassen for touching on those things. I want to remind all the speakers that you please have 10 minutes because we would like to have more time for question and answers. So our second speaker is Mr. Momodou Lamin Sisei. Mr. Sisei is the global lead rural development specialist at the Islamic Development Bank. He has more than 35 years of work experience in various agencies including eight years of working with UNDP as UNB program officer in Angola, Yemen and East Timor respectively. From March 2008 to November 2010 he served as the operations manager with the Gambian Woman Finance Association GAFWA. He is a holder of master's degree in rural development management from the University of Cancun in Thailand. He holds an advanced diploma in modern management and administration from Cambridge International Institute in the United Kingdom and a bachelor's degree in integrated rural development pen African Institute for Development West Africa from the Republic of Cameroon. Mr. Sisei please you have the floor for the second intervention. Thank you. Thank you very much Oli and thank you for giving me the opportunity to come. I just want to quickly share my screen with you. Let me just do this quick. Just one minute. Be here with me. I'm not sure if you have seen my screen. Yes we see it. Okay great. Thank you all once again and this is just a brief presentation for me from the perspective of Islamic Development Bank on sustainable sustainable agriculture and the use of ICT. First of all I think our partnership with the Millennium Promise Alliance goes a long way since 2011 if I can be precise and during this period we have various interventions in different aspects of agricultural rural development and this has covered our member countries mainly in sub-Saharan Africa and even part of the GCCI countries including Pakistan but what I just want to focus on now is what is a productive sustainable agriculture. Sustainable agriculture I would definitely we would define it as giving the working definition is a cultural productive that produces high yield and that is diversified so when you look at the the screen here we say what is sustainable agriculture in terms used for that including generative agriculture low input eco and organic agriculture and this can be categorized in three main goals one it has to be environmentally healthy two it has to be economically profitable and three it has to be socially and economically equitable again in sustainable agriculture we need to put focus on the ecosystem the interaction between energy environment and the living organisms these are very very key in sustainable agriculture the agro ecosystem an ecosystem that is managed to produce food and fibers and then the food system a system that produces processed and distribute and consume food all these is just towards sustainable agriculture an integrated system of plants and animal products production practice that will definitely save that will have the safety and I mean human there will be safety for human and food fiber needs enhance environmental quality make the most efficient use of renewable and I mean renewable resources sustain economically viable and enhance quality of life moving towards sustainable agriculture uh we as I as I gave in my introduction it has to be productive it has to be highly productive for that matter and it should be diversified now um when you look at this we need to take sustainable agriculture into account in the context in the context of fragility is so important to IDB member countries considering that more than 65 percent of our population live in rural areas when I say our population I mean the 57 member countries of IDB and more than 70 percent of the poor in those countries live in rural areas I recall your agro processing therefore accounts for 30 to 60 percent of their GDP and even at light share of the employment we also know that despite the fact that there is rapid urbanization there is still more than 50 percent of the poor who live in rural areas and there would be I that would be by 20 to 35 and depending significantly on agriculture there is no doubt about that therefore sustainable development principles has to be to consideration that is correct and in appropriate use of the resources by using that all environmental services are correctly valued to establish projects and policies on appropriate levels committing national regional and global generally with corresponding corresponding implementation by this finance and financing mechanisms incorporate institutional development and new technologies has to reduce risk and vulnerabilities of farmers of farming communities diversify cropping system for economic and environmental resilience the weather forecasting but to air planting date and management decisions under the weather and price cropping insurances now our strategy for sustainable interventions in our member countries at both global and regional levels includes the development of global guidance to the development of agriculture and world development policy to make sure that you are effective in agriculture there must be a defined policy that an institution must work through if it is to better serve its member countries so this is why in IDB our first and foremost step to do is to ensure that policy is in place and develop the development of a policy tool to strengthen the food security and nutrition contributing to maximize rural development outcomes by operationalizing the linkages between fragility and nutritional resources and resource management interventions there should be an evidence-based policy high priority to development of solid evidence to guide policy advice and pragmatic support strong partnership with lead actors in agriculture development using valuation approaches we cannot continue agriculture on the rudimentary style we cannot continue on agriculture without traditional style therefore agriculture valuation is a necessity if agriculture must grow in Africa particularly and even if it is to serve our member countries we have to increase awareness of resilience linkages in global and regional levels these are very very important to agriculture sustainable agriculture as I said before in IDB we have sustainable agriculture advisors framework of agriculture and rural development sector strategies and this strategy just to summarize we have the objectives we have the pillars we have the guiding principles I don't want to go through all this but we can always make this a strategy our agriculture policy available to any interested partner now examples of some of these interventions when we look at it we have our interventions in Uganda we have our interventions in Mozambique we have our interventions in Mali where ICT innovation in agriculture has been used and this is a technology generation to fill the gap and a technology dissemination information needs for our farmers when we talk about ICT definitely we need to make sure that the farmers have filled that information gap starting from proswing post pre-havest post harvest and market information it is only through the application of ICT that this can be used and I mean as I'm speaking those of our colleagues who are from the MPA they definitely understand this they really recognize and appreciate their intervention in some of our I mean flagship programs like the millennium village program which is now transforming to sustainable development programs and also the our sustainable village programs whereby the MVP have been using the use of ICT to ensure that our baseline surveys are properly conducted and then farmers have been identified and recognized regardless to their location in those communities um again ICT use in sustainable agriculture we are talking about the though the farmers have grown uh the same crops and uh for countries they ever change in weather conditions swell fertility test and disease exactly affects the final outcomes MC our member country farmers need reliable agricultural information and alternative marketing channels information technology can bring an overall quality improvement uh information and communication technology permits exchange and collection of data through interaction and transmission the latest and most promising area of ICT is cloud computing the digital initiatives also that takes to reach the farmers directly so uh these are some of the various areas that I have here I don't need to go much on them uh hence this presentation is available to you at any time but these are some of the things I just wanted to highlight here and as I said we have examples of these interventions I mentioned Senegal I mentioned Bali I mentioned Uganda where this ICT the use of ICT has definitely been used to empower our member countries uh to scale up the in Uganda because of the success of MVP phase two the government has scaled up the program to another phase whereby instead of the initial two districts this time around 17 districts have been involved and these are based on the success of the millenium village program that have been implemented in the western region of Uganda and the ICT has been used whereby farmers have been connected to Sukus with the help of the Uganda Microfinance Support Center uh I mean these are some of the examples we could give and then undoubtedly the dry land program was part of that also which has been also implemented in Uganda uh Djibouti and Somalia for that matter on this note I would thank you so much because of the time for though but I really appreciate and thank you for your attention over to you thank you yes thank you very much Mr. Sisei you have defined sustainable agriculture as environmental healthy economic profitable and must have social and economic equity very very important um you've mentioned that it's critical for farmers to have the information needed real time to enable them to really leverage on ICT and new technologies make this possible and IDB is doing a great job at this thank you now we're going to our third speaker our very own Chief Nat um Chief Nat Chief Nathaniel uh circle is commonly known as as Chief Nat he is the executive director of Millenium Promise Alliance he is a fellow of the American Academy of Project Management AAPM he holds masters in project management MPM MBA PH MCH BFA DIP NTEC he's the chief advisor to the UN youth Ghana and the president of the Coffee Federation of Ghana Chief Nat has over 17 years of practical field experience as community health and development communication expert with various managerial positions at the national regional district and community levels in Ghana as a communications and sustainable project concept designer Chief Nat has been a social development consultant to Morehouse College Atlanta Georgia in the US and has demonstrated high level of commitment in his career his rich experience has earned him deep involvement with ministries of health employment education gender local government in the Ghana over the years he has worked directly and indirectly with five successive sector ministry of health in Ghana over the years Chief Nat's extensive knowledge and practical experience is in parallel his understanding of social cultural dynamics in Ghana great negotiation and loving skills paired with his project implementation skills is verified by his new dual position as the executive director for MPA and country director of the one million community health workers campaign he's also the advisory on the Ghana on the in terms of Ghana as a country to professor Jeffrey Sachs the special advisor to the UN secretary general on SDGs so please I give the floor to Chief Nat for his intervention thank you very much Uli and thank you once again to our very good friends and partners in development from IZB Mamodo Lamin and also my very good friend Lassen and to our wonderful participants all over the world and to IZB our partners SDSN and to your good self Uli for your wonderful support and family ties with us and our other panelists I think leveraging on ICT to enhance and ensure that we have a very solid development in the agriculture sector goes without saying look at these pictures as you can see the degradation that is occurring on the continent is quite fast depleting almost everything that we stand for and on that score research has revealed that we if we should continue on this tandem there will be left with just about 60 years of farming as a continent this is as a result of the fact that we generate I mean the top soil takes about a thousand years and so the degradation that is going on with the illegal mining and all kind of activities as per Chris Assenauts accession it means that we need to really set up and the courses include a chemical intensive farming flowering tailing approaches deforestation global warming lack of communication between researchers and academia as well as the farmers and it is on this call that we have to be very frank with ourselves and make the fact that there has been a strong communication gap between agricultural aspects and farming as a practice I say so because I mean likely the literacy rate of the average farmer is quite low and as a continent in the south Saharan Africa we know that I mean we have about just 992 million hectares out of just about 25 percent of it is cultivated 75 is lying fellow simply because of our cake approach to practicing this agriculture and therefore ICT is very important in this year farmers lack information on current farming practices especially during the planting period the harvesting and post harvesting and also we know that inadequate information on crop diseases and how to manage it has been something that is really affecting our farm practice as a continent we also see that insufficient information on the weather patterns and when to apply farm input is something that I mean is impeding our progress and lack of information on the improvement of soil health would determines the I mean animal health and crop health human health ecosystem health and even the health of the economy is something that is lacking therefore we see that there's a need to create a bridge that can really help us to connect the information flow from academia and researchers to farmers and that is what really led us into coming up with what we call the teleagric consultation center and teleagric consultation center I would want you to just listen to uh watch a very short video just about two minutes of my time after which I will conclude farming undeniably is one of the strongest pillars and important economic activity in Ghana I have a cassava and a pineapple farm I cover a long distance before I get to my farm every day and the road is very bad I can't work better because of tiredness I am almost 70 years I have a cassava farm I have really worked hard all my life as a farmer but there is no better market out there for my farm produce farmers require new technologies to be able to improve their yields and their income or too often most farmers are disadvantaged in variety of ways poor road networking poor road connectivity poor advisory services lack of access to ready market among many other factors prevent these farmers from fulfilling their true potential ICTs have important role to play in this regard introducing the first ever teleagric consultation on the continent and at the center of the world Ghana West Africa teleagric leveraging on the communications revolution to bridge the agriculture information gap to transform the lives of hundreds of thousands of our farmers in Ghana is one of the greatest opportunities of our time teleagric is an information and communication technology through video voice internet geographic alert and information systems and mobile fields to connect to smallholder farmers to agriculture researchers best farming practices and a wider market in real time as well as to trade options at the click of a button teleagric leveraging ICT to transform small scale resource based livelihoods from subsistence activities into viable agribusinesses to improve farming practices in Ghana for example targeting 700,000 farmers throughout the country and using six major local languages addressing SDG one no poverty zero hunger industry innovation and infrastructure decent work and economic growth and with SDG 17 partnership is the best way to get this done so what we we we started to do with the introduction of the teleagric was to ensure there's a clear communication flow between the various sector players that is ministry of food and agriculture researchers research institutions academic institutions and then to the farm through the expansion agents to the farmers and so the teleagric consultants are able to really communicate from the make sure that they share information from the respective players as I've shown to the farmers and vice versa and we do so by using the local language that the farmers do understand to ensure that we don't impede the communication process now you can see here they are there are several players and each one trying to stand alone like the private sector service providers like the government sector policy makers and all so what we try to do is we create a communication link between these players on the left side and then the aggregators the farmers the unemployed youth even the fishermen the traders livestock the agriculture workforce using what we call the ICT and in this case the teleagric platform so mpa beavis teleagric technology to improve farming in Ghana as it were and we operate currently in our assisting regions of Ghana and we have registered about over 110,000 cocomays rice oil palm farmers and for livestock farmers we have over 62,000 of them subscribing to our teleagric platform now we receive several calls and from the partnership between us and ocp where we have the agribusta project we saw that I mean we registered about five thousand and two hundred and forty five farmers in six districts and eight community extension offices to ensure that we are able to break the communication gap and as you can see on the screen we receive several calls coming through in the blue the ones that come through and then the orange are the ones that goes out so we don't only wait for the farmers to call but we try to call them from the teleagric center to ensure that we communicate new farming practices to these farmers on on the field so that they feel at home and they feel obliged to also share their experiences with the center and they are able to try out their call to aggregate aspects who may not be at the center but can be anywhere in the world it's just a matter of telephony and that is the power of ICT so the ICT in order to ensure that it is sustainable we believe that we need to partner with the educational system to strengthen our ties and to make sure that it is incorporated into the curriculum and taught in schools as to how best people who come out of the fall also the school can see the need to interact with the farmers who need the information they have been schooled on and not let the research that they do gather dust on the shelves and so we've been able to partner with major institutions in the country universities, agri-colleges to ensure that we create areas of collaboration such as research, academic model for students, student-intensive capacity building for the farmers, development of the tele-agric protocols for respective crops and livestock and then also to have these students also participate in agri-cestation services to transfer the knowledge that they've acquired over the period of their education. In conclusion, we believe that the use of technology in agriculture is very critical in our development considering the fact that we have about 75 of arable land uncultivated and the inclusion of in technology and mechanization can really help us to meet up this particular challenge and be able to provide enough food to meet the SDGs want to leverage online to achieve this particular result. The adoption of ICT in developing countries can help better protect the environment and increase the crop yield and can also enhance businesses, agribusinesses and we also believe that policymakers and international organizations should invest in developing such technologies for sustainable agriculture. I say this because I mean we initiated this tele-agric concept about four years ago and as we speak the tele-agric platform is able to do what we call the farmer's field school where as my good friend Lassen mentioned in the difficult times of the COVID we're able to virtually train these 5,000 farmers to be able to advance and implement the farm techniques that has been advanced through the experts who couldn't travel as a result of the travel ban and all but through telephony and through ICT we're able to organize such and it's it was very good and they all benefited so well and they were all so happy and we're able to transcend all barriers to get them practicing and doing what they know best to feed us because I mean with COVID it doesn't mean that we shouldn't eat so there was a need for us to support the agric sector and this ICT platform really helped us to do this but we haven't had we haven't seen a lot of investment in such areas and it's very important that we take a critical look at it. We also believe that policymakers and international organizations should invest in developing the technology like I said and strengthen the capacity of small scale farmers with the use of ICT some of them are not too exposed but when you look at the mobile penetration rate it's so justified itself that yes it goes without saying that almost everybody's having either a phone or two and it tells you that we should be able to leverage on this expertise and the opportunity to advance ICT to these farmers. We also see that key information needs of the disadvantaged groups the small scale farmers can be met and should be met through such a platform as the tele-agric platform. Thank you very much and I'll be I apologize once again for the sound. We're going to share the tele-agric documentary for you to listen to. I appreciate the opportunity given. Thank you very much and over to you. Thank you very much Chief Nat. You've talked about leveraging ICT in agriculture which is key to sustainable development and you've mentioned the critical area where we are 60 years left of farming if we continue the bad intensive farming practices that are actually going on. We're not using our lens at full potential you've said and ICT will surely help us to ensure that we do it right. ICT bridge or will bridge the gap I love that. I think the tele-agric platform that you've talked about in Ghana should be actually scaled up to many other African countries especially with the inclusive process that you've mentioned with all the stakeholders you have government like the Ministry of Education you have the private sector and you have partners the private sector supporting this effort I think this is really a unique and inclusive process that should be scaled to many other countries and indeed ICT can certainly move the dial in improving agricultural in a sustainable manner. So we are now moving to our fourth speaker. Last but not least Madame Safia Touba. Madame Safia Touba is the country director for the International Fund for Agriculture Development. Madame Ba is a national of Guinea and was appointed as IFAD country program officer in April 2019. She joined IFAD and since she joined IFAD she has demonstrated technical expertise and credibility in country portfolio management in Guinea. She contributed to maintaining the standards for IFAD's competence in development at the field level in collaboration with other members of the UN country team by national development agencies and GOs and country program counterparts. Madame Ba is working with her colleagues in West Africa to establish and maintain relationships and protect the image of IFAD as a credible reliable partner striving for harmonization of development activities. Madame Ba oversees IFAD operations in the country through the implementation of the 120 million USD agricultural development project financed by IFAD along with the OPEC Fund and Arab Development Bank. The project AgriFarm aims to sustainably increase the revenues of rural households and build the resilience of external shocks. Prior to joining IFAD Madame Ba was head of private banking for Bank of Dakar in Senegal. Prior to this she worked as operations associate at Capital Fund Management in Paris, France. Madame Ba has a master's degree in management control and business performance from ESCP, European Business School in Paris. Welcome Madame Ba and you have the floor. Thank you. Yes, thank you Uli for the presentation. I'm going to share my screen for the presentation regarding IFAD's operations in Guinea. So basically on this first slide what I wanted to show was a quick view of the country context and IFAD's portfolio in Guinea. You should know that IFAD has a vision of inclusive and sustainable rural transformation. IFAD endeavours to improve and build livelihoods that are more resilient for the poorer world people with a strong focus on small water farmers, women, youth and marginalized groups. In doing this IFAD does not harm the natural resource base in the areas where IFAD operates. Today we are going to focus on its operations in Guinea that is Guinea is located in West Africa and IFAD has been operating here for over 40 years now. We have closed successfully 13 projects so far and we have one ongoing project that Uli presented earlier in her presentation. I would now highlight IFAD's interventions through the ongoing project and the one that has closed recently. The first project is family farming, resilience and market projects in Upper and Middle Guinea, agri-farm. This is a 120 million development project co-financed by IFAD. The goal is to increase sustainably incomes of 78,000 family farms and their resilience to external shocks including climate change and most recently the COVID-19 pandemic. Agri-farm also aims to improve nutrition, access to local markets, urban and regional markets in 15 localities of Guinea that are highlighted in green on the map on the top right hand side of my presentation. These regions are the most affected by food insecurity and we estimate that it offers great opportunities for export diversification since we neighbor with six countries. The chart on the bottom right hand side of my presentation illustrates the marketing opportunities that are available to beneficiaries of this project. As such the intervention will rehabilitate approximately 850 kilometers of rural and national roads. The project will also target as many IFAD projects throughout the member states. We mainly target young people and women as a priority. For SDGs one and two, this derives from IFAD's goal to transform rural areas and we have a wide experience in investing in small world of farmers. Interventions will empower rural community management committees for better water management and ensure that infrastructures are sustainably managed. You should know that due to the lack of storage facilities or road network and high post harvest loss, AgriFound will focus its activities on dedicated activities to train target groups, basically women on food processing that will cover vegetables and fruits. Interventions will also focus on market infrastructure while we ensure that natural resource base is preserved. The project will plant a variety of trees to preserve from oil erosion in certain regions of Guinea. All needs have been streamlined and tailored taking into account the beneficiaries' needs and aligned to the national policies and strategies in Guinea. The project is part of the wide network we connect farmers. We provide market information prices and weather conditions to our beneficiaries. The project also uses an M&E tool called La Rueche to connect data on target groups, products, their yields and so on. And so there is still room to include ICT as to improve yields and market information. The second project that I wanted to highlight was this one has closed recently is the project national program to support agricultural value chain actors that operated in lower Guinea and a region called Farana in Guinea. The project was designed as a program with a national scope. It's different extensions gradually covered Guinea. The intervention was an innovation in Guinea actually and in all of EFAD's portfolio because the approach was based on financing agricultural producers associated through their action plans. And we focused on rice and market gardening products basically fruits and vegetables value chains. The intervention aimed to respond to the needs of rural farmers in the target areas expressed through their unions. After the project closed we had a positive impact on rural poverty, actually in that region where the project operated for a duration decreased to 47 percent against the 62 percent that we had initially targeted at design. The project had a satisfactory impact on food security as beneficiaries now have access to increased number of meals per day and a better quality. This also was another project that focused on infrastructure basically rehabilitating rural roads that enabled to link production areas to markets and facilitated market access as well as access to local facilities just as schools and health facilities. NAFA also provided opportunities for rural management committees to provide to sustainably use their infrastructure and specifically the usage of storage and irrigation facilities and bridges. This program NAFA also contributed to human development, capital development of beneficiaries through improved knowledge and skills in the domain of agricultural rural production processing thus reducing post harvest loss and providing nutritive food for the families that were targeted in the hunger season. The project also enabled storing and marketing facilities. This increased better water management, the use of improved seed varieties, production and market techniques as well as we provided also literacy trainings to many of our beneficiaries especially women that are now able to read and understand what they actually are doing. The project collaborated with rural community radio stations to disseminate information on how to use pesticides to give market prices and local goods. I'm going to now share with you a short video about the last intervention of FIFA in Guinea. Guinea in West Africa is one of the poorest countries in the world. For the last 10 years, NAFA or the National Project to Support Value Chain Actors has been working all across the country in an effort to unlock the nation's agricultural potential. The project's interventions have ranged from grassroots training in farmer field schools and the capacity building of producer and processing groups to large-scale infrastructural investments including the reclamation of abandoned plots which have been provided with irrigation systems, the construction of new processing and storage facilities and kilometers of rural roads and new bridges which mean that isolated villages now for the first time have ready access to markets. Rural financial services have provided the foundation for much of the project's work. For the first time many poor rural citizens can save and get access to credit that would otherwise be unavailable to them. NAFA finally closed its activities in December 2019. Over its duration the project has made significant improvements to infrastructure and helped to generate local empowerment through many of its grassroots community activities. Thank you very much. This was a very nice presentation about the work of IFAD and the great initiatives that you are doing over 40 years in Guinea and of course as you mentioned ICT is being improved in Guinea by a tool called LaRouche and as well as many other projects within the framework of the national program to support agricultural value chain actors in the country. So thank you so much for that. We are running out of time and I would like to give the floor to participants who are joining us virtually for a session of Q&A. Chief Nats do we have or Sam do we have people posing questions in the chat or are we giving the floor to attendees? Okay so I see that attendees have are going to be submitting their questions through the chat. Do we have questions? We do not have questions at this time but if you are in the chat and you are a participant please feel free to submit your question in the Q&A panel at the bottom of the screen. Yes so if we have no questions at this time as Sam said please feel free to write to us and we will be sharing all of the the presentations and please also tweet and retweet. I would like to ask before I thank our speakers I would like to ask everyone to please put your video on for 30 seconds so we can take a picture for the Twitter account. Sam and Shen please turn your videos on for a few seconds. There we go thank you just taking a screenshot. Here we go. Thank you very much everyone thank you to all of our participants for this great presentation on regenerative agriculture for the SDGs leveraging ICT to improve sustainable agricultural development across the continent. Until next time have a good day. Thank you. Thank you.