Rydyn ni'n gweithio i'n gweithio ysgolion sy'n gwneud hynny o'r gwleidio. Rydyn ni'n gymryd Jim Robinson, byddwn ni'n gweithio'r gwahanol o'r gweithio'r llyfrnwyr a'r ddefnyddio'r gwahanol. Rydyn ni'n gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio. Thank you, Jim. Hello to everyone. Good morning from Rome and good evening or afternoon to all of you. So my name is Davide Rossi, I'm very pleased as well to co-facilitate this webinar with you, Jim, and thanks to the Food Security and Agriculture Team in Afghanistan and the Protection Cluster and the Child Pitech Task Force for inviting us and giving us this opportunity. I work with the Global Food Security Cluster. I have been deployed previously as a cluster coordinator in various countries and now I am a focal point for the region of Asian Pacific for the Agriculture Working Group but that we have a global level and for the partnership initiatives. Over to you, Jim. Thank you, Davide, and just by means of a, we're going to offer a brief introduction from our perspective from the sort of a global level of the Food Security Agriculture Cluster and the HRP cluster and then we'll move quickly into hearing from colleagues working on these issues in Afghanistan and from a more regional global perspective as well later on. So just as a brief bit of background, this webinar is co-hosted by the Housing, Land and Property Task Force, which is a really active and engaged group of HRP practitioners working in Afghanistan and doing some very inspiring work. At the global level, the HRP of responsibility, we worked to support colleagues like those in Afghanistan, support the Housing, Land and Property Coordination Response, and we also want to enhance the awareness of inclusion of housing, land and property issues and considerations at all phases. So, whilst the AOR is part of the protection cluster, we work closely across many clusters and sectors and it's something we're really keen to develop. We work with shelter colleagues, CCCM, livelihoods, food security and agriculture, wash, and then of course durable solutions and nexus wherever there are challenges with recognition of rights and around housing, land and property, that's who we're trying to sort of develop and relationships with them and work with those colleagues. Looking at this topic in Afghanistan, I mean, as we know secure land rights can be the foundation of social and economic equity. In many countries, interventions on land rights require a real joined up approach between those legal approaches and livelihood partners as well to ensure durable solutions that will enact meaningful change. Global best practices show that when legal recognition of land and housing rights are combined with complementary investments in land, housing and infrastructure, they can lead to more secure rights for vulnerable groups over the long term. Due in part to COVID-19 and seasonal labour changes, disruptions to livelihood profiles for people living in urban and peri urban spaces are a recurring case of vulnerability and that's something that's been seen in Afghanistan quite a lot. This has effects on health, food security and intergenerational poverty. People who are dependent on market purchases and fragile livelihoods can be forced into ever deeper cycles of debt to meet their food expenditure needs. Having access to alternate food sources is an important way to provide subsistence level solutions to meet basic, calorific intake and to mitigate additional exposure to negative coping mechanisms. This webinar today, we looked at that intersection between housing, land and property and agriculture and livelihoods opportunities. If you have one without the other, you don't get as complete and as full a solution as you need. More specifically, we will highlight the ways that investing in urban agriculture can provide an opportunity to integrate HRP with food security and the agriculture sector priorities that will create a more diverse sources of food for household consumption. And this is all about building in that resilience, allowing people to get what they need to survive and to build their lives going forward. There are some risks in this whole area, in this thinking about urban agriculture and land rights, and I want to leave you just with these thoughts on these topics. Often subsistence urban agriculture can remain informal and has trouble connecting with like essential utilities such as water, and that can lead to informal tapping which can waste water in a water scarce country, and it can also have legal protection risks as well. So that's something we need to really think about. There may be further links that can be made beyond land to include property in this context of urban agriculture. For example, maybe there's something to think about in terms of assets to improve storage of food and other consumables to avoid spoilage. It could be around subsistence only or it could be something more ambitious. There could be the development of assets for processing and storage to add value to the food that's produced. There could be something around access to high quality market stores and retail locations that will also have a land rights dimension. And for each of these are questions of control and ownership of assets, given the relatively high capital costs sometimes maybe collective control and management, it could be an interesting thing to explore. And here I think there are linkages to concepts of owning and controlling businesses either formally or informal that are going to all kind of depend upon that, that different thoughts of around land rights and about how we consider what property means in this context. So now I'd like to pass over to Davide, to give some initial thoughts and then introduce, yeah, and then I'll come back and introduce the next part of the webinar. Thank you, Jim. I think you had already introduced quite a lot. You told me before that you didn't know too much about food security, but it's not true. Thanks for that. Now, I believe that what is important is we welcome very much from the global perspective also from the global food security classes this initiative and we understand that also we have, and we can do much more also with our global, with our colleagues at global level. So I think it's a good opportunity also for us to trigger our teams and to have new ideas on that. I think that the HLP rights are key to food security, generally, and in this case we see how much are important in urban agriculture. In Afghanistan and elsewhere, I think that the most important reflection is that to understand that when, for example, urban agricultural opportunities comes and control may put a lot of risk, which are social risk, risk related to the environment. And to the health of the people. When the opposite, those are well coordinated and take it into consideration, that can be an improvement, not only from the food security side of the people, but also from the social cohesion and what we call the peace development, especially in countries and especially towards this group that are actually the one that are more most vulnerable. We always have to tell ourselves, are we reaching the most vulnerable, are we reaching the one that are in the remote areas. And sometimes the remote areas is not just a geographical kind of thing, it's really also urban. The other population on certain urban centers make our life much more difficult in terms of reaching the most vulnerable with food security. We know it also this issue was raised very much during the COVID time. So I believe that urban agriculture in particular, there are a lot of, you know, technical people that can tell you much better than I, how much is important food security, but a couple of reflection is that urban agriculture increase for sure food security along the three main pillars, which is access, availability and sustainability. Then there are, let's say some, let's say five kind of issues where urban agriculture is proved to be very much key on food security, which is again access, economic access to food. It is to boost the fresh food supply when we are talking about urbanization, lower cost in terms of startup, and a shortened production cycle. There are many techniques that are proved that urban agriculture can really have a very, very high and important production cycle. And then creates employment, creates employment and create a lot of cascade effect on the food systems within urban centers. Last but not least, I would say that also one of the most important thing for the reflection of today is also the woman role, which is very important in agriculture. We know that there are many studies and I'm curious also to know more because I know that the HRP rights are very often denied to women. And so this is also, you know, some background thoughts that they would leave to the audience. Thanks again and over to Eugene for your reflection. Thank you Davide. Thank you for some really interesting points to highlight then. And I think we will hear a number of those perspectives engaged with from colleagues. We're going to have some fantastic speakers today looking at both the context in Afghanistan and some of the innovative responses to challenges there as well as them finishing with a more global perspective before we're going to open up for questions and and discussion. So I just wanted to say a few words on that. Just some housekeeping, a short practical comment. So just that unless you are speaking please could you kindly keep your microphone on mute and your video off just to prevent disturbances but also to reduce any strain on the bandwidth and our streaming capacity. But please as you are doing please use the chat function for comments and for questions and to introduce yourself to the group if you would like. When it comes to the discussion, you can raise your hand and we can invite you to ask a question or use the chat function again and we will gather together myself Davide and some colleagues can gather together questions. And if your question is for one of the presenters specifically please do put their name at the beginning of the question so we know who it's for otherwise we will open it up to the panelists and then then host the discussion in that way. But yeah thank you again for being here we have about one hour 15 1617 minutes left so a good time to hear from the panelists and then to have some discussion. Davide, I'll pass back to you to introduce the panelists. Thank you Jim. And thanks again to all. I think we are we are taking the question at the very end of the all presentations so feel free however to write the question in the chat as Jim was a lighting and and maybe you can write the name before the question the name of the person you want to, you want to approach or to ask a question to. And, or if it is a general comment feel free to to put it into that. So, we will have six speakers, we will be having this bad role of time keeping as well you, we were thinking we will have in between seven and 10 minutes. So up to you, but we will remind you if you're going to be to far. So, we'll have six key speakers, which are from six different organization with vision action against hunger CRS made that you and a bit of and the energy. So, we will call the first one is a far I don't know, but I was the senior zonal manager manager for the world vision. So over to you far I don't know. Hi. Good afternoon, everybody's let me share on my screen. Can you see my screen. What somebody confirmed that. Yes, we can. Yeah, see the screen. My name is Faisal Mborexey. I'm the senior zonal manager for world vision. I have a livelihood. I kind of like working a lot of you. My, my area of. Of professionalities livelihoods. Okay, I'm going to because we have for the sake of the limited time and I'll be a little. I need to be a bit faster in order to to be able to to present all what all the content of the my presentation. Thank you. Just before I'm starting with the presentation, I'd like to give you some background on background in terms of the soil background for for finding a solution for access. Of the soil and water conservation. But first water and soil or in Afghanistan water and soil are most important resources in Afghanistan in Afghanistan providing a livelihood base to the majority of the Afghan peoples 80% 80% of the Afghans residents livelihood depend on some some form of agriculture activities and it's domestic product traditional natural resource management coping and mitigation strategy have broken down under growing population pressure as well as the collapse of the rural economy. Despite all this dispute over the management of natural resources such as land, water, timber, mineral and underline and driven many of the local conflict that the many local conflict that the main drive of the local conflict is all. Over the managing the resources and also under utilizing of the water resources. Also that the total irrigated area for Afghanistan is 3.2 million but out of this only, we are able to to to irrigate 111.2 million hectare of. The remaining 1.8 million hectare is they are new to us due to lack of infrastructures infrastructures are also using the traditional way of traditional practices of irrigation also done the amount of available water should be enough to cover current and future use. But but this under under utilization out of a total of the 35 billions cubic meters of available water only limited amount are being used. Just that we as a world based on our experience we identified some of the challenges towards sustainable use of soil and water reservoir. The main reason for resource degradation in album and pre album sitting or this is based on our experience working in Afghanistan. Unaccelerated unsustainable overseas of natural resources, especially in album and pre album areas rapid album developing an expansion of housing settlements, increase soil and water erosion, decline of ground water table or grazing deforestation, increasing plant nutrient deficiency and loose in soil fertility lack of knowledge on soil and conservation. Techniques improper crop rotation flood drought and economic pressures increasing urban population resulting in the competing to access and utilizing these resources community infrastructure related to agriculture production such as irrigation system and water. Improvements bridge and route or badly damaged the lack of prioritizing access to benefit from natural resources and also a limited access to water for irrigation are also the lack of prioritizing access benefit from the initial resources. Also landmine is another issues and so I'm clear to your lease this whole right is another issues gender discrimination and lack of access accurate land use land distribution and resource data is weak legal mechanism and coordination at the different level for resource management. But overall overall our conclusion is that the challenge for everyone involved in the development of Afghanistan is very clear improve the land and water resources which can provide immediate income food security foundation for new lifestyle practices and much more water on soil or central to all of this. But what we should what should be should be done based on vision experience and also application of all these these activities we found out these these are these the proposal intervention which you are going to to propose that we will really all those things and then we found it very beneficial in order to tackle some of those challenges. The first things in the world visions based on the experience from the fetus is work with the government in formulating the national land policy in it is a we are experiencing lack of national there's no national policy or. What land quality and building a related institution structure for land administration especially delineating boundary of just short on re establishing agreement on use improve produce procedures for identifying legitimate clients to our bond properties and documenting legitimate clients to rural lands. And also improving system efficiency by reducing what are loose at all level level of the irrigation systems improve irrigation scheduling of different crops and restrict irrigation at the critical growth stage of the crop to mitigate the effect of dry spell and ensure reasonable good yield particularly with the urban agriculture. Because we have a very limited land with the limited resources and also does that our farmers they they don't know how the scheduling of water scheduling of all water cropping the water water for each crops improve the management of upper catchment by reducing the for station and better ring land and water water should management. Initiate recharge program to manage depleting ground water aquifier to delay delay action down rainwater harvesting and order of the artificial recharge programs and also prioritizing women empowerment in the agriculture sector. I'm also promoting of I'm also finding alternative income generation activities to reduce poverty and this courage seasonal migration. Finally we we we are recommending to establish community lead benefit driving national resource management is key to solving environmental economy and social issue related to the sustainable use of water and soil resources. And also stabilization of the urban agriculture sector especially horticulture we are encouraging for particular for the urban agriculture for the people to start kind of like a. Grow. Use more on on horticulture in horticulture is is as a culture is economy fuel social economy cycle economy development helps eliminate poverty and also reduce violence and also the sector therefore has been a principal part of the peace process, especially in light of the fact almost 80% of Afghan. Proceed poverty and unemployment at the major cases of conflict. And also we say that improving the urban agriculture sector for the job creation sustainable developing food and initial scale. Nutrition security and women economy empowerment is then vital for the long term security of the nations. Thank you. Thank you very much for a very clear and not too much some sometimes you are cutting a bit but they think people could follow so thanks to your slides and and very good timing. So, as we said already, let's write question on the on the chat, while we pass through the next speaker. So, I would leave the floor now to Thomas nobry, who is the deputy director of action against hunger over to you, Thomas. Thank you very much. Hello everyone. So I will share my screen quickly just like confirm that you can see my screen. Yes, we can and we can hear you. Thank you very much. So yeah, I will present like a one pilot project that we did for like multi sector intervention based on provision of drinking water promotion of hygiene and vertical gardening. So the focus, like for in the presentation will be on the vertical gardening. That happened like in Kabul informal settlements. It was like few years ago it happened like end of 2016 beginning of 2017. So for that, we will have a quick overview of the project. Describe bit like the activities implemented. Focusing mainly on the vertical gardening and finally to share also with everyone the lessons learned so best practices as well as the challenges in terms of projects. So the context of the implementation was in Kabul. So we selected like two camps in Kabul informal settlements. Which is like contain like an host many people. So I think in 2016 they were like number of people in the Kabul informal settlement were like over 45,000. And for that. So we decided like to implement wash intervention and also like a part of vertical gardening as a pilot. So it was integrated approach pilot also to draw like this kind of lessons learned for the position like future programming. In terms of activities, we are like on the wash side. So distribution of BSF training as well for hygiene and sanitation hygiene promotion, some distribution of hygiene kits as well. And for what would be like more interesting like for us today. We are like training and establishment of vertical gardens. So I put also like the main activities and the work plan because so as mentioned it was end of 2016 beginning of 2017. So quite short project. In fact, and we'll see that they will be also like some impact on the lessons learned because of that. And I think the duration of the project is part of the potential like improvement to increase the impact. Also like with the current project, we are like a part of the project. So we are like a part of the project. And so we are like a part of the project. Because of that, and I think the duration of the project is part of the potential like improvement to increase the impact. Also, like with the crop season, the real like implementation after the code, all the coordination starting really like in December. So it was mainly like on six, seven months implementation. Roedd ar hyn datblygu Some Fold to give you a idea more concrete, you can see different type of structure, because the plan also was to identify which one could be like the most relevant to try to identify and the production to? Be able to fill out it with new products, which one would the most appropriate? If we start now like regarding the project with lessons learned in terms of like best practices and success that we saw during the implementation, we had like three main success. Maybe like the most important one was the fact that beneficiaries had access to vegetables when the prices in the market were quite high. So I think the implementation as we saw in the work plan starting in December with distribution of seeds, then after like all the training also for like cultivation, irrigation, also of the gardens, happened to have like after like the results around like July mainly and the following months. What allowed us like to have like this success was the distribution of different types of vegetable seeds also to have not only like one vegetable to really like improve the nutrition also situation of the household. The second like success was yet to increase like the knowledge to really like have a focus on trainings to have like good results and appropriate like production according back to the work put like in the in the gardens. For that, it was a lot like it was necessary to have like practical training sensitisation and one part important was the monitoring visit to be sure also that the practice and the training were well understood after by all the participants. A one recommendation would be like also to provide a bit more. A clifflet to allow like maybe like communication also after to have kind of training of trainers to allow like people to have some materials to conduct training themselves for other people. As mentioned before it was also like the purpose of the different photos you saw that we use like different structures. I think the different structure came from different sources so it was also to test which one were like the most stable and also to protect the production so to avoid like any damage doing like the production. Coming back now on coming on the lessons learned but the challenges that we faced during the implementation. One was really to the fact that it was as mentioned before an integrated project and in fact like the vertical gardening components were a bit like smaller than the wash. So the wash parts dictate a bit like the selection of beneficiaries and the camps where we went which unfortunately didn't really allow like some time people to have enough time. So I think they were like good results in terms of production but I think one of the feedback was the fact that yeah people were lacking time also to really work on the gardens. So I think the potential like future programming would be really like to work on like the identification and we mentioned like I think during the previous presentation it was mentioned also like to empower women. So it could be also one of the things to work on for like women in the house to work on the garden and also one component that could be merged with the activity could be the cash for work to really like allow people to have time to produce and potentially generate income for like the second phase of the project. The second like challenge faced with the access to water. In the case like it's quite difficult to have good wash infrastructure allowing like access to water. So I think the priority was for like drinking purpose and any like potential infrastructure to implement phase was rejected by MRD due to the fact that it was like an official status of the case. The third one, the third like challenge where the beneficiaries didn't have access to seeds for the next season. And that's why before I was mentioning the fact that it was like quite short term project. So we were not able to work also on potential like new seeds distribution to allow to increase maybe the income for the second phase that would provide like more impact and be like more sustainable also on the future. On long term. The final like challenge didn't defy is the fact that. Please if you can wrap up in 30 seconds. Thanks. Yeah, it's the last one. Perfect. We just go quickly for the last challenge. It's all the other difficulties to manage vertical garden in summer. I think like the different structures that we mentioned before. I think some that the one that work the best where quite the height and the soil was quite deep that allow also like the better irrigation and to avoid also in summer to have like three, four or five times irrigation during the day. So I think the structure recommended was just to be quite deep to have like more soil allowing like to keep the irrigation for the production. Anya, that was like the last slide. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you very much Thomas and really appreciate that you also put the challenges. Sometimes we don't see it at the end of the presentation so it's good to have a good parties but also challenges and how also you were coming just for the audience. Let's think also about your, your presentation Thomas was very good in terms of technical detailing also on the food security side vegetable. Let's think also about the intersection between the food security and the HLP rights so maybe some question will come later also for you in this cable informal settlement kind of project. So thanks again. I believe that the next one will be Syed Nasser. So the Agricultural Technical Advisor for CRS Syed Nasser Serapt. I will leave you the floor. Okay. Thank you all and thank you for the presentation. If you can share the slide. If you are able to speak a little bit louder, I think will help. Okay. Yes, better. Yeah. Thank you. Mustafa. Sorry to share the. Syed Nasser, if you have trouble sharing your screen or you can share and you can explain. Okay, so thank you all and I am going to briefly explain the service agricultural behavior change approach and that we are doing currently in rural area about some with some idea of that how to speech this to the urban area. So the CRS has done some focus on social behavior change that already used by health and war sectors. I think that the scale agriculture development and for targeted group adopted the promoted practice with some criteria of the practice and technology and also training that we are introducing to the community. So on the theory, most of the former or easily and quickly adopt for that technology and practices and through this practice that have the criteria like to be responsive and to be simple, low risk, low cost and quick result. Evidence shows that most of the former in communities member and beneficiary widely applicable and replicated such a practice that have this criteria and this criteria. Also we use the fusion of innovation graphs that it show the different category of people living in the community like. I know what early adopters early majority majority and which means that always in the training and introducing of the technology and introducing of the practices through our SBC approach, we always consider all community and we are we invite all community members. It's usually one man and one woman from each household to attend in the training and also to later practice improved practices of the approach. This woman and woman together when they attend to the training and also the other upcoming practices it contribute to have a decision together and also it increase the woman and then participation to the intervention and also the for doing that practice. So also the invite all community members because the inverters in every adopter have very specific influence to other that they are slower adopting and they can move influence them to do the practices. If you go to the next slide. So, in addition, after each training we conduct monitoring and also former feedback session and conducting some specific session. I think moment that to make sure we receive the former and the beneficiary feedback for the training for the improved practices and the approach and then the redesign our approach and training based on former and beneficiary feedbacks. So here, I'm going to share some experience of theorists working in the urban area which is the first thing is improved household data in diversity focus that we introduced. We stable home gardening greenhouses in kitchen garden and different provinces of Afghanistan, Iraq, but especially here we put it some information about the bombing in the urban area that it was very successful. We established greenhouses and kitchen gardens and also serious format, some former producer group men and women to produce onion and garlic and they produce together and sell it to the market. And also, we did some very important, introduced a very good important technology, potato and onion storage that working very well in the rural area, but for sure it is working for the urban and free urban area as well that is good for storing potato and onion. And also, we did some with poultry package, particularly women to sell and for nutrition of children and mother in the household. Another thing is that a smaller scale, a lot of suffering, having good for the milking to produce milk and especially it is good for the consumption and also using of the manual for the wish table production of kitchen garden. Here is another issue that in the urban area, one of the things that is, you find it out the type of density of animal population increase with human population, which is very related. And also in the individual approach that I've done for my life in the community, which is recommended that is also important to consider. Okay, so from the next slide. Here we have some intervention that in part of some of our intervention in the past as an example. For example, in Bormian centre in Priarchon area, CRS format 13 produce a group million family, they produce garlic and onion, and they made a profit of $3434 USD as a net profit during one agricultural season. The activity was that each family produce separately, but they come together and they select a collective marketing representative to sell to the market. One person transfer it to the market and then take the cash back to the each member of the group. The potato education storage that we are recommending for the urban area is really important that it decrease the spoilage and potato loses from over 30% to less than 5% that was very important. And here also there are some table that show the differences that in 2011, in 2013, there are the losses of 4.50% and 2011, in 2013 for some other villages about 2%. And as well as recently two years ago, we piloted another kitchen page that we store onion and potato that all people are facing with challenge. We also tested that that there is very big losses for onion and also for the potato. So in general, it is some short example and experiences from the past working and hopefully it is contribute to the station. If you have any question, please stay to us. Thank you. Thank you, Sayed. Very nice presentation and thanks also for highlighting the issue of food utilization and storage, which is very, very important. Produce the food loss maybe with something that we can see also later within the question. So I'll give the floor to the next presentation, which will be from Meder, and I will leave the floor to Wahedulla Wahdat, which is the senior food security supervisor for Meder. Okay, thank you. Thank you. First, Sayed, can everybody see? Yes, we can see your screen and we can hear you. Yeah, thank you everyone. Maybe if you want to put the presentation on your screen so that we can see it. Is that okay? Okay, is it already better like this? Yeah. Just a reminder for everyone, we can share also the slide and the presentation on the chat after you give your presentation for the benefit of everyone. Please go ahead. Yeah, thank you. Before I share the experience and also the challenges we may have faced during the past two or three years, I want to describe the activities and also the intervention. It was the project which we are now implementing. It's a multi-sector intervention. So this project is currently we deliver, delivering in Central Highlands, in Daikundi and Bamian provinces. And also in South region, we are implementing this project in Kandahar and Rosgaon provinces. This project has food security wash in nutrition sectors. And in Daikundi province, we are implementing this in Miramur, Hedir and Shaharistan areas, which are urban and rural areas. And also in Kandahar province, we are working in urban areas. The total beneficiaries for the project of Kitchen Garden are 2,935 families, which are female or the beneficiaries. And this project is for 15 months. First, I want to describe, talk about the activities which we done. When we start the project, we distribute 12 types of improved table sheets for all the beneficiaries. And also we give them some tools for cultivation, training about how to make hotbeds and seedling transplantation to the plots. Beside this, we provide beneficiaries with trainings about cultivation of vegetables and also how to make hotbeds in technical ways from seeding to harvesting. We have a change in communication. We are delivering trainings about BCC, IYCF and also about kitchen gardening. Different sectors teaching component under BCC. It's IYCF hygiene and sanitation practices and also about kitchen gardening. This year because of COVID-19, we were not able to conduct assembly meetings in the villages. So we gave them separately for the promoters to conduct some trainings about hygiene and also about food security, about health. What media, the sexes and learning we learned during the past years and also this year. In rural areas, most of the women learned and used the local pest and disease management techniques with us. We are not actually recommended chemical, so how to manage pest and disease. So again, they give them some local pest and disease management trainings for the beneficiaries. We had to work with bigger garden spaces and the women were not able to cultivate all the seeds close to their houses. As I mentioned, we gave them 12 types of vegetable seeds and the people beside their houses, they have no enough land. So they cultivate some of the seeds beside or inside their houses, but the other seeds they cultivate in the irrigated lands. And also we, as I mentioned, we distribute some hygiene materials, hygiene kits and also drying racks for vegetable harvesting and drying. In Central Highlands, the irrigation land belongs to men and the women also can cultivate together and help the men. They are helping in cultivation, weeding, irrigation and harvesting. Mostly the land belong to men. The women were able to collect seeds from some vegetables in Bevel continue for next years. Drying vegetables and making tomato paste for using during the winter. The challenges which we faced, the context of Birmingham is good and there is no any limitation for women to work with them. The main problem was not enough property land for kitchen garden beside their houses, irrigated lands or far from their houses. No enough irrigation water during the summer season. And also COVID-19, we didn't conduct assembly meetings this year. In Kandahar province, as we work with the people in urban areas, so we faced some challenges implementing the kitchen garden activities for past several years. The context of Kandahar is a bit different. There we had more limitation and could only work with women whose families agreed for her participation and she also was willing for the time energy needed. Where the household had a lot enough central country earth that received sunshine, the gardens were also grown inside the compound in the center of household. So many women did not plant all the vegetable type because the plots inside the household are not that large. In Kandahar, some things which we found, many women struggled to make sure the plants were well watered because there was 100% recall of message on using household water for irrigation. The same women were also reached through care groups with IYCF messages. We saw improvement in these important indicators, especially management diversity for children under 2. And also many women struggled with seed serving. Thank you. Thank you very much Wahidulla. Very good and very interesting to see all this point also related to the gender issues and access to the land. And also to the resources but also to the agricultural input when it comes to to women farmers. So the next one is UN Habitat is Balaji Mohan. I hope that I pronounce the name Balaji and other to you, you're the urban planning specialist of UN Habitat. The floor is yours. I don't think just in case you're still on mute. I be heard. I hear you now Balaji. Okay. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, David. Yes, my name is pronounced correctly. I'll just start sharing my screen now. Can my screen be seen clearly? Okay. Thank you. So I won't go into the importance of having urban agriculture as a security for food and land rights. I think that is sort of already understood in our group and it is going to be, it is not something new. What I would like to talk about and introduce is the program that we are currently working on. My name is Balaji. I'm an urban planner. I'm an architect and urban designer. I'm currently working on the SHURA program for UN Habitat in Afghanistan. SHURA program is an incremental housing program. Due to its scale, it's almost a large township program for returnees and IDPs. I have been myself on the program for almost a year now and the program has been going on for almost two more than five to six years now. In the following slides, I will briefly introduce the program and then how I will also try to introduce how we are trying to integrate urban agriculture into our program. The SHURA program is a multi-layered incremental housing program. It involves multiple government agencies from municipalities, CREDA, Ministry of Urban Development. It is primarily based on the presidential degree of land allocation, which was formally 305. And recently it's been renamed as 108th. We are currently at the process of already gathered all the land through the land bank and Arazi's help. There is enough land for everyone, I guess, in various provinces. And through the program, we also have, at least until July, we have close to 14,000 head of families who have registered for the program. Currently, the program is ongoing on a site in Herat at a little more advanced stage and then on a site in El Tafath, which is near Kabul, comes under Kabul. And between the two sites, almost 14,000 families are registered. There are 10,000 male families, that is male-headed families, and almost 3,000, more than 3,000 female-headed. We are at the current process of beneficiary selection, which is ongoing. So what we have is an incremental housing program just to give you a brief. There is seed money which is given to the families along with a plot of land which varies between 250 square metres to 300 or 350 square metres. The majority plot size being about 250 square metres. And using the seed money and using the techniques that can be taught to them in terms of construction. We are hoping that the beneficiaries would settle down and manage to grow both in terms of wealth and health. But it is not a very easy thing to do. All most of our sites are greenfield sites. They are very close to about half an hour away from existing urban centres, so that is a good thing for us. But at the same time, a lot of sites that we have identified, or that has been identified by the government agencies, are empty greenfield sites. So it's good and bad. The negatives are basically because most of them are barren land. And hence why for us urban agriculture can be a very, very key program to include. In terms of why it is good, because it also gives us an opportunity to design and develop from the scratch and not make all the mistakes that other settlements have made and try to include urban agriculture from the beginning itself at multiple scales. The program organises the families as a CDC and a few CDCs make a GOZAR. The settlement design follows the guidelines from the CDC structure. This is actually one of the most important slides where the main... It was really interesting for me to see the earlier presentations and how they were talking about different scales and they were talking about more of a backyard and plots and a few of the houses coming together. So we have an opportunity to include all of those scales in the program because we are dealing with thousands of households and plots. And if we are able to address it, think about it in the first step of the settlement design, then we can ensure that urban agriculture is not just used as part of a backyard or maybe a few houses, but it is almost integrated with the settlement itself along the lanes, along the streets, along the public spaces. Then it becomes a whole culture of agriculture. It is not something that is isolated. It is not something that is sort of segregated from other development. It almost becomes a lifestyle or it almost becomes a culture. And the fact that it is in the public domain also would also encourage other people to pick up easily versus agriculture happening in a more private backyard sort of a setting. So we are trying to look at it in terms of multiple scales. Just to give you an example of the block scale. Block scale, which is basically about 100, like the CDC level, which is about 120 houses, 240 houses, and we have realised that almost 10 to 15% of these areas can be allocated as the central space. Now it is up to the people to use it either as a playground or a children's park or just a park or whatever they want to use it as. But in case there is the adjoining block already has a park, maybe the people will have an option of choosing this space not to be used as a park and they can actually use it as urban farming sort of a space. And the idea we are also trying to provide water infrastructure for between a series of plots. Now the idea instead of providing those water outlets between the plots are closer to the house. If you provide them actually in the central neighbourhood community level spaces, there would be more opportunities for people to kind of come together mingled with each other and also use the water to practice urban farming. At a plot level, again going back to one of the earlier presentations I found the vertical farming very interesting. Now the Afghan house farming involves a courtyard sort of a house and it also involves not many people want to have the house in the front. But if they have to make a plot boundary with the walls, why not make it with a cheap system where the plot boundary can also become some sort of vertical farming system. So we were trying to look at all of these options and by making a small change it could even double up the area available for farming within a plot. And also it has much better effects towards the outside so because when you're walking along a series of these plots instead of having this dull compound wall you can actually have greenery on the vertical surfaces as well. And we are also trying to see if we can include it in the at the street state level. Usually if you notice the Afghan streets are mostly with the conifers forests, which are not more than just mere windbreakers. They add no value, they don't add much value to the street itself. So if we change some of those tree lines into maybe fruit trees or we can even use the trees that are aligned along the streets into an almost like an orchard. So if we start with something like this, maybe in a few years it could. Balaji, why don't you go please. Yes, yes, thank you. And it could actually change the whole urban environment into a much more green and livable sort of a space. So the challenges for us is how do we transform one of the sites that we have that looks like this into a workable community or a happy settlement that could look like that. And I welcome any comments or advice from people who have already been part of some similar programs. It will be a very good learning experience for us. These are some of the policy recommendations in terms of how land rights and urban farming can actually encourage people to settle down and feel empowered. Thank you. Thank you very much for your time. Thanks. Thanks a lot, Balaji, to also to put the perspective of urban planning into that. I believe it's a very important perspective, especially if we look into not only into food security, but also in the part of the social cohesion and environmental kind of approach to our intervention. So thanks a lot. I think we have the last presenter now, so I would invite Evelyn Airo, who is the Information Counseling and Legal Assistance Advisor at the Norwegian Refugee Council, NRC. Evelyn, over to you. Okay, thank you. I'll share my screen shortly. Okay, thank you. So my presentation is focused on land tenure security and women's economic empowerment, specifically focusing on economic empowerment of displaced women. So we'll start with a quick background just to kind of give you a snapshot of what it looks like. So we all know that the fulfillment of economic rights of vulnerable populations are directly linked to sustainable livelihoods, economic inclusion, and self-reliance. So broadly looking at my presentation is based on experience from Africa and looking at the East Africa region. In Sub-Saharan Africa, access to land and resources is mostly insecure, and it's threatened by increased pressure on land and also forced displacement. As you know, the displacement context in Sub-Saharan Africa, particularly in the East African region, has had implications on land tenure security. And also this pressure has been related to the growing land market and national policies that favor privatisation and agribusiness. Then you find that women are particularly disproportionately affected, and the majority of them have no ownership or secure access to land and other vital resources. And so displacement actually makes, complicates this further. So within the context of displacement, we know that it's very important that beyond the emergency during the protracted displacement and when we come to care and maintenance, self-reliance remains important for us to be able to discuss options around durable solutions and also create avenues for local integration. So I have a case study that is from the East Africa region that kind of highlights these issues. So if you look at the screen, you'll see that in East Africa there was a lot of focus on the security of land tenure, but a lot of it was mainly looking at securing land tenure for accommodation for displaced populations. So we focused a lot on ensuring that displaced persons had security of land tenure for their accommodation in the place of displacement, and we also moved further to ensure that households headed by women were offered special protection, ensuring that they're included in occupancy certificates where the land is actually donated, their tenure was secure, but little was done to secure their livelihoods and security of tenure for their livelihoods. So we know that most of our livelihoods interventions also have income generating activities, small businesses that are always done in groups. So little was being done to ensure that these businesses had security of tenure. So what happened is that we saw increased evictions of business groups, but specifically women who are owning businesses were mainly targeted. Once the businesses began to make profit, rent was increased, or if they did not have a proper document and had a receipt to prove payment, they were evicted or their tenancy was terminated, and that affects the continuity of business. So in order to ensure equitable participation of women in economic activities, we offered legal assistance that provided businesses with more administrative support to ensure they had the right documentation, also ensuring that beyond business registration, they also had their tenancy clarified. So the tenancy arrangements needed to be clarified. We needed to go through due diligence for the business premises to establish ownership, ensure they either had a rental agreement or they had a lease and that the terms and conditions for termination of the lease were clear and that also it met all the standards before an eviction was conducted. So that is an example of the implications of tenure security when it comes to economic empowerment. You cannot empower them using just income or business investments without looking at the security of tenure because it can be used to disenfranchise vulnerable people. So some of the obstacles that we have come across when you look at women's economic empowerment within the context of land tenure security. There are several, but we've looked at four main ones that feature a lot that I'm very sure may feature in the regions that we have had presentations from as well. One of them is literacy levels. Where literacy levels are low, it affects the ability to understand land tenure arrangements, and it does impact security of tenure and actually affects the economic empowerment of these vulnerable groups and specifically women. We know that in most of the regions where we work in or in most of the communities we work in and the groups that we work with, the literacy levels of women are usually low compared to their male counterparts. And so most of them easily enter into arrangements or tenure arrangements under duress or they may not understand the terms and conditions of these agreements. And this effect has implications for economic empowerment. It also has implications for the sustainability of any of any business. The other is equality versus equitable distribution resources. We need to understand that displaced populations have understood our arrangements when we are responding to displacement.  They also know that when women are in the documents as head of household, then we will actually select them as a beneficiary and will prioritize that. So we need to also understand that having equal rights is different from the equitable distribution. In most of the cases, sometimes the head of household is female, but the decision is actually being made by the male member of the household. And those dynamics do affect economic empowerment of women because much as the business or income generating activities being managed by a woman, but the power dynamics based on the way we distribute our income generating grants and the way we secure tenure is based on the head of household. And that may not be the reality. So those are some of the obstacles. The other is cultural practices and perceptions. Cultural practices and perceptions within the community affect women's ability to generate, use and control resources to support their economic well-being and that of their families. We know that in displacement, a lot of women are involved in actually looking after the economic well-being of their families, and yet we know that cultural practices and perceptions does affect this. When a woman's income base begins to increase and when she's using family property that does not have security of tenure, what does that mean culturally? What perceptions do the community begin to have? And how do those cultural practices and perceptions affect economic empowerment? What dynamics do they present within the context of security, of land tenure security? The last one is access to credit and documentation. When we are looking at accessing credit, for economic empowerment, you need to have access to credit. You need to have finances as a resource to engage in economic activity. So access to credit and documentation is sometimes a barrier to financial inclusion. Do women have the ability to use family property as security to access credit? Do they have equal rights as men? All those issues are obstacles to women's economic empowerment. So I have also highlighted some key considerations, challenges and recommendations as we look. Evelyn, just if you can close within one minute so we leave also space to the question. Yes, this is the concluding. So you will see the perceptions around tenure security and land access rights through customer structure need a more in-depth review. The lack of knowledge by communities on the dynamics of ongoing land tenure reforms and implications for livelihoods and specifically when it comes to women. Women's needs and preferences in productive activities and also the role of local leaders and customer structures in land distribution and the resolution of disputes. So this is the last slide that looks at key recommendations. One of the recommendations is to plan for livelihoods that reach beyond agriculture, but also ensuring that gender is mainstreamed to support women access credit through more inclusive and participatory approaches informed by community action planning and adaptive learning, meaning that communities actually involved in action planning and adaptive learning so that we can actually hear from the affected populations. And then to mainstream land rights in livelihoods interventions to ensure that the women's land rights issues that are usually addressed through a human rights based approach are also incorporated in our livelihoods interventions. And this really needs to ensure the economically empowered and self-reliant. Thank you. Thanks, thanks a lot Evelyn and thanks for for highlighting this obstacle that prevent a woman economic empowerment and but also tenure security and related issues on the HLP rights. Jim, I would you like to take some question from the chat. I think there were a couple. Yeah, I mean, yeah, I mean, yeah, I think this is we have, you know, 1012 minutes just to have some questions so if people have things that they would like to ask please do. One thing that did come up as a question that was sort of raised I think was around how to make these solutions sustainable so you know is cash for work component and supplying seeds could that create dependency what are the how do we make these solutions so that was a question that came up. And I mean I personally slightly, you know, to take advantage of my position as facilitator would like to ask particularly some of the earlier presenters just how they see the issues of land rights and security of tenure impacting their work. It was amazing to hear the innovations around how to encourage different ways to to grow food and create that. It would be really interesting to hear how your work had encountered those issues around land rights, and whether or not that had been something you'd faced was security of tenure having an impact were you working on those issues. So that would be, there's there's two questions in there I don't know if you wanted to ask something. No no I think it's good we can go also for around. I think of experience on what you just mentioned because I believe it's very important that also the aim here is also to check how we, we deal with them with the land tenure and experiences related to urban agriculture. So, any colleague from, from World Vision, ACF, CRS or MEDER, you're an habitat that they've presented wants to give some insight of it. Yeah, maybe like just for regarding like the distribution of seeds. It's Thomas from from ACF. The question I think it's part of the risk, like to have like cash for work and seeds distribution in terms of sustainability could be like the risk and that's why I also I think it could be one of the things could be to really like increase this part of the training in the trainings to explain also how to make it sustainable and to link with the different markets after to have access to seeds later on. But yeah, I think it's part of the risk also that that we discuss and just regarding like the other question regarding like the land issue, I think it was with what we faced also with especially like the wash access. So yeah, in terms of like urban centers activities. I think there is one working group or so that integrates this part or so for wash to see how which kind of infrastructure could be used. And for that, yeah, we are like trying to work also it's like one topic that came quite again like quite recently in the working group to try to overcome like this challenge of the impossibility to install like infrastructure in informal settlements. So to continue on the integrity approach. Thank you. And also for sustainability issue. We experience it that especially about the city issue that in the past, we also find it out that always the distribution is not a solution. We take the. So we use some approach to, for example, especially which table seat in Afghanistan. Always it is challenging and most people cannot purchase that and also for other quality seat. We try to introduce seed production, for example, many of our beneficiary are currently in addition of producing with the tables in the greenhouse and which table they produce the seed by dancing that do not go to the market because it is difficult then as well as for, for example, for other crops like potato or wheat, which are staple crops are always be also teaching them how to select the seat in produce quality seed by themselves. So, yeah, there are something that we can think that are controlled and more sustainability for the country. Thank you, Said. Did anyone else want to speak Evelyn? I thought I saw you on mute, but I don't know if you were going to speak or. No, I had seen a question from Shazad. Yes. So just in response to that, one of the maybe we can draw learning one of the things that we have the approaches that we've used these to place a conditionality on the income generating grants that we offer. So whenever there are groups we we are very specific about gender considerations in terms of the income generating grants that we provide to groups so if we have a group of comprising men and women and we know that women are facing a specific barrier. We ensure that the conditions of that women and men in the group of equal rights and that this is documented and it's a condition for providing the grant and we have a post distribution monitoring that looks at these gender considerations and then makes recommendations for improvement or for an additional grant or top up. So that is one of the strategies we've used to mitigate this. Thank you Evelyn. I had a question. Balaji, I noticed that the end of your presentation you mentioned some policy recommendations around HLP but you weren't really able to talk about them. I wondered if there were any key recommendations you would make around HLP that would relate maybe to some of the other presentations or some of the issues that we've looked at today. And if anyone else wants to add questions to the chat please do. Thank you, Jim. So my recommendations are more from the spatial point of view because usually whenever we intervene in a site there is already an existing scenario and that leads to a lot of challenges in terms of land being available or whether the people are not able to come together. The way we are trying to progress in the SHURA program is because we have, we are able to, we have these large empty lands for us to sort of start this green field kind of development. We are at a sort of a unique advantage where we are able to think of all of these aspects from the beginning, the first step of the planning and design as well. So it gives us this small leverage to ensure that the urban farming can be incorporated at a multi-scale sort of level. And just to give a few recommendations, so that was the first point of the first recommendation. And the second one was usually in these housing settlements. It's easy to actually give the land to people and make a house for them sometimes, but it is very, very difficult for them to actually remain in the space. And I feel that one of the ways in which urban agriculture can help the people is when they start using the land not just to live, but also to start farming. Because a lot of times their labour markets are very seasonal and they are fluctuating most of the time. And having a backup of agriculture is something that they can have as an income when there is no regular income from their other jobs. So in that way it helps as well. And again, we have the beneficiaries. We have almost as much as men-headed households. We also have women-headed households. So we are hoping that that would encourage gender equity. And one of the final points that we are trying to make is also recommend is to not just for the provision of such infrastructure, but also training and enable dedicated market space, which can link all the CDCs and the GOZAs and the people who are in the production of it to link it all the way to the sale of the product as well. Thank you. David A, did you have any questions or things you wanted to highlight? I'm aware of the time. Maybe I see a comment in the chat box that can open to a quick question. So there is, I think, Matthias wrote in the box. In many countries, if somebody plants a tree, the ground will be for him. Would this be a problem for your habitat project and it's also the case in Afghanistan. But maybe to give a broader thought is maybe if you can share from the previous presenters a couple of examples on the impact of urban agriculture and on the social equation issues would be great to see how this has prevented conflict. Someone, for example, was venturated before and or the other side, the thing that we need to avoid in order to do not create conflict. So maybe if someone who presented before can answer to that. Just to address the trees being planted in public spaces, we are at a position where we are not just working with beneficiaries who are the private people. We are actually all our time so far actually has been spent with working with the government departments like MUTL and the Urban Planning Department of Afghanistan. So they already have these street designs or these different kinds of road designs in which they have like this very simple coniferous forest kind of coniferous trees sort of this thing. And in our settlements, they will be anyway engaging in making the streets. So what we are trying to propose is infuse these sort of urban agriculture principles, not just for the beneficiaries and their private plots, but also in the public space where if we just change the species of what the trees that MUTL and the housing department would be using. That itself will change like almost close to 3000 to 5000 trees from being a simple coniferous trees that are merely just wind breakers. It can actually change into something like an urban orchard or something that would produce fruits. Okay, anyone want to add any experience on the urban agriculture and land issues that create good impact in terms of social cohesion. Otherwise, I'm a bit conscious of the time, Jim. I don't know if. Yeah, I mean, I think. Yeah, we'd sort of allotted an hour and a half and I know people may well have things they need to get to so. Yeah, I think in terms of drawing things to a close, if there are any last points or last questions that people would want to raise and then we will wrap it up for now. So just to say this is such a welcome conversation and as David a said earlier it's fantastic to see the joint discussion this joint event between food security and agriculture and then housing London property task force and the protection cluster and hopefully we will have many more of these as we as we continue on. Does anyone have a last comment or brief question to make before we wrap up something I posted in the chat was a link which initially was the wrong link but I've corrected the link to a joint publication between physical security and agriculture cluster and the HP task force on urban agriculture for sustainable IDP and returning settlements in Afghanistan so that that may well be of interest to you. I'm also going to just paste in the chat. A link to join the HLPA or mailing list if that would be of interest, no pressure, but in case you interested to hear more about about work related to HLP and and as I say we're really keen to kind of build relationships across clusters and sectors so that's something we're keen to do.  Yeah, I mean I mean I think that again I would reiterate the issue that these are very welcome conversation from our side from the global perspective as well. And I would really encourage you to share any, you know gap in terms of information or technical issues that we can feel from our side. We have both clusters at global level different working groups that can help on this and we can even use this opportunity to start some good work together. I would say that there are a few things that were were raised by the different presenters few let's say key issues. In terms of, I think poverty and and relative relation to the conflict and the dependency versus longer time solution. I think that the involvement I think it's also a very important issue when it comes to urban spaces and and also I believe that one of the big issue is that came in all presentation was the access to resources, especially water. And also reinforced the fact that it's very important to coordinate. I don't say that because we are from the global cluster coordination team. But because the simply I believe that there are many, many, many literature and documents already available, which can be of use of everyone. It's better also to, you know, I think to look at this intersectorality is where sometimes we are too much working in silos. So I believe that with that, I think it's important for us to hear your points, your challenges and we'll do maybe, you know, we'll be available to also share whatever is important in terms of, you know, a way to find out where to or how to ask or where to ask if you need any technical support or to develop it from our side. And thanks again for the organizers to give us this opportunity, we're very pleased and Jim last work to you. Thank you to the Housing, Land and Property Task Force in Afghanistan and to the food and security and agriculture cluster in Afghanistan for making this possible and bringing together these presenters. As I said, the beginning this meeting has been recorded so we will look to share that recording so you can have a look again at what's been said. You've seen a number of the presentations and other resources in the chat. I'll leave the meeting open for a little bit of time in case people want to access some of those resources. I just want to say thanks so much for being with us and have a good rest of the day.


Hi everyone, in this lesson we want to write simple program Hello World in Rust programming language. You could go to the website rustlang.org and you can install Rust on your machine. But instead of that, you could also go to the site play.rustlang.org and we have Rust Playground where we can type our code and run it. As you can see in this editor we have already written main function with mandatory need to print Hello World to the command line. So if we run our program, our program prints Hello World on command prompt. You have here on Playground a lot of other options. You can see your code into assembler or you can see it in finally production version as LLVM file. So we can print Hello World to the screen by simply making function with keyword fn and call function print line with exclamation mark that's mandatory printing and inside it as an argument will put text Hello World which will be printed to the screen. That's all in this lesson. Thanks for watching.


I do know I'm doing the same things that you're doing and I want to show you a clip of today, some of my activities so you know what activities you should be out there doing right now. All right, today what we were working on, we have here as you may or may not know, I have a new client that I've been working with and they're up in the northeast United States and we were looking at contracts over in Rhode Island and we were looking at those contracts, we noticed something and what we noticed was that here if you look at FPDS, if you look on top 10 contract agencies, we noticed that there was the Department of Navy. What I did was I went ahead and I looked up Navy and I already knew because we have some ports near us, some naval submarine ports and what I did was I went to the actual Navy's Office of Small Business program's website. If you dig down a little bit further than FPDS, you'll see there's Naval Aerosystems Command, there's the Naval Submit Atlantic Register Main Center, but if you dig down and you put in your actual NAACS code, NAFAC was the organization that did all of the construction for Navy. So when I reached out to NAFAC and I gave them a call, I was calling from this particular list right here and I didn't have, you know, when I went around and I looked on their website, this is what they gave for the regional small business deputies. So this is my list and this is what it looks like what I called. So I went ahead and I called and if you look here on the screen, you could follow with me on the screen over there, but I went ahead and I called the Mid-Atlantic region because I determined that the Mid-Atlantic was our region that was covered in the Northeast United States. I called Mid-Atlantic region and then I called the Atlantic region. They gave me two numbers from Mid-Atlantic. I left the voicemail and then I sent them a follow-up email letting them know that we're a small business and that we were looking to do business with their agency. Afterwards, I called the actual Washington DC office and I called the director from Washington DC and left her message as well, sent her follow-up email. The very next morning, the director of the Office of Small Business Programs was over in the entire NAFAC, which is not only in the continental United States, but it's outside the continental United States. So NAFAC, the way that they're broken down, if it says NAFAC Atlantic, it's anything that touches the Atlantic Ocean. If it says NAFAC Pacific, it's anything that touches the Pacific Ocean. And when they say Atlantic, that means even like Asia and Europe as well. But nevertheless, the reason why we're making this video today is because when I called them, they were so supportive and so cooperative that I felt like I had to share this with you guys out there because if anybody is in the industry and NAFAC or the Navy is one of their clients, you've got to deal with these people. Do not be afraid to call because I literally, I'll now show you right now on the screen, but I called and the very next day, I got a call back from their director of Small Business Programs out of Washington, D.C. She called me first thing in the morning and then she let me know that her team was very responsive and they were supportive of small businesses and they encouraged me to reach out to everyone in her organization and that they would, they, she guaranteed that they would respond to me and they did in a big way. So the follow-up email, I'm going to show you now. This was actually the email that I received from this gentleman Keith over at NAFAC. He said that we could definitely meet and he gave me a bunch of time slots to meet in conference and then he sent me a whole slew of marketing materials. I mean, he sent me literally about 14 attachments. I'll show you what those things look like here, but he literally sent me all these attachments. You can see here, some of the attachments will pull them up on the screen, but I mean, what the wealth of information that he provided, he spent over an hour on the phone with me today and I mean, I was exhausted, but he went ahead, he sent me all of these resources. He gave me a list of the Small Business Specialists that handled the errors. My region, he walked me through their actual, this PDF document, it's like a slide presentation that was given at a SAMI meeting. If you don't know, SAMI Society of American Military Engineers, he walked me through this. He showed me how everything was done. He broke it down for me. They have a lot of money and they really are actively wanting to work with small business firms and I mean, it was excellent. Like I said, he spent, he took the time to go with me. For those of you out there who are interested in becoming subcontractors, he gave me in my particular area the list of all the contract holders, all the primes. He gave me their contact numbers, their emails, everything. When we walked through this document, literally he showed me all these projects, their range of projects and he said there's anything that I was interested in to reach out to him, let him know, and then he would follow up on it to see who I need to talk to and to get more information on that project. They do do 8A contracts, they do 8A sole source projects as well. For those of you, they have HUBZone Max, they've got Service Disabled Veteran Max, they've got 8A Max, they run the whole gamut. In fact, like I said, they do work over in Europe, they do work over in Asia.  This call that I left was to share it with you guys because it's fresh on my mind. It just happened. My call was at 10 a.m. this morning, Eastern Time. Today is the 18th to 18th. And so like I said, they have IDIQs, they have Maytalk, they have everything. NAFAC handles the construction, but like I said, they handle the entire country and their small business specialists are really key. In fact, I would say just to, because I know a lot of people out there, they're attempting to make phone calls and talk to people, they haven't ran into much success, but this particular organization is one that if you, you know, and he was willing to schedule an actual one-on-one face-to-face meeting, but they're in North Fork, Virginia, I'm in Florida, and then my client's up there in the Northeast United States near Boston. So we decided I would just do a teleconference and it was well worth my time. And I think that any one of you out there, if you see them on the horizon as a potential client to definitely set up a one-on-one meeting with whoever is the small business person in the area, I will make any and all of this information available to anyone who requests it. I will also probably put a link to all of this stuff in the page below on YouTube. So if there's anyone out there that needs this information, I'll put a link below and I'll put all these documents in the file. And then that way you can just click the link. You don't have to subscribe or anything like that. You click the link and then you can download all this disinformation. You can have a list of resources for NAFAC. So that was that's today's video. I thought was definitely well worth the time and it was worth so much that I had to make a video to share it with you guys out there. By the time this comes out, hopefully I will have had some more success. I could share some more stories after I follow up with the small business specialist and the people that he referred and recommend it to me. Thanks so much for watching as always. We'll see you next time.


Hey guys, and welcome back to another video. This video is really about appreciating you guys Subscribing to me and helping me grow my channel over time. I'm really grateful to all the support You guys have been showing me from helping me go from a zero subscribers to one thousand once again guys thank you very much for helping me out and The main purpose of this video was to gain some ideas from you guys whether I should be creating more videos based on Python or should we carry on to our web series on PHP? I've also created a discord channel where we're going to be carrying out most of our communication from now on I'm going to be active on that channel. So the link to the discord channel is going to be in the description Please join the channel and feel free to share any ideas you have there any videos You like me to make you can share them on there any problems you're having with the tutorials I'll help you out on there. Anyway guys Hope you interact with me on discord and I'll see you in the next one. Peace out


Welcome to Channel 17 to Very Mary Theatre's home space here at 20 Allen Street, now known as the Old North End Community Center. Very Mary Theatre is an organization that serves teenagers and children from ages 5 to 19. Our primary purpose is to be of service to our community, to provide opportunities for children and teens to express themselves through storytelling. Primarily we do shows that are a narrative with a beginning, middle and end, and we primarily do musicals. We partner with many, many schools in the area, some of them for over 20 years. We have summer camps at two locations, one here at 20 Allen and you'll see a little bit more of our space here in a second. We also have a beautiful barn that we rent in the summer down in Charlotte, Vermont, and we have a traveling wagon and our children rehearse for a week or so at the barn and then hit the road with the wagon and put on free shows at local parks and libraries in the area. The primary purpose, as I said, is to be of service for children and of all situations and backgrounds, we try to make ourselves accessible to everybody and so whatever obstacles might be in the way of a child being able to participate in one of our productions, we work with the family to help them overcome those obstacles so that they can be involved. We do 40 productions a year. We work with over a thousand children and teens each year. We do licensed shows and many Broadway shows, particularly with our teenagers and we're very proud of our teens. Many of them have stayed with us from the early years on, some jump on board during their teen years and they have really come to put on some outstanding productions for us. Speaking of our teens, we are preparing this weekend for King Lear, the Western and it's a musical that I adapted from William Shakespeare's King Lear with our music director Ashley O'Brien who composed music to lyrics that in some cases I created but in others were actually more sort of adapted or reworking Shakespeare's original iambic pentameter into the melody for a song. You can't do a Western without a steam train. We have a couple of exciting scenes that happen up there. If you don't know the story of King Lear, I can tell you that there's a subplot of a friend of Lear's named Gloster and Gloster has been duped by one son into making an enemy of the other and they end up finally meeting and recognizing each other in a very dramatic scene on top of this train. I'm going to bring you into our green room and our green room, if Micah could pan to the left over there you will see is our costume racks. There's actually a couple shows. We have King Lear and Hairspray costumes over here and hard at work going over their lines and songs and dances and having a meal prior to five hours of hard work are Hallie Newman who is playing Edgar who I mentioned a moment ago is reunited with her father, his father but Hallie's a girl playing a boy which happens a lot in the world of theater.  In our case it's more sort of a sidekick jester and Gabby loves comedy and Zenavia Wilcox is playing a couple roles one is the engineer of that train but primarily she is a troubadour and with three of her fellow cast members they come on in this really cool wagon and sing four different narration songs to help the audience follow the story. Zenavia how many years do you think you've been involved with Very Merry Theatre? Oh wow. Well I started in the fifth grade but I continued it since then and I picked it up sophomore year actually not freshman but sophomore year I picked it up again so I don't know exactly it's like a math question right now exactly but I've been here a long time it's pretty cool to see where it's been since. And where are you headed next year? Next year I'm going to Southern Connecticut State University so I'm really excited it's in New Haven so it's in the film. That is so awesome we love Zenavia at Very Merry Theatre and this is Gabby Boera. Gabby tell us your favorite story connected to Very Merry. So we are doing hair in the musical and we had one rehearsal it was dark out all the shades were drawn the entire room was like pitch black and we were spread out actually in this room like throughout the our little pods is what we call we had like little groups and Don like walked us through like one of the songs which one was it oh my god it was the walking yeah it was it was really it was incredible and I can never forget the Monopoly man the what is it the oil it was incredible I can't I can't go into depth or else I'd be here all day but it was it was a great time. And this is Hallie Newman Hallie has been with us in second grade and Hallie you were telling me the other day that your favorite original Very Merry Theatre adaptation is and then tell me why. My favorite Very Merry Theatre adaptation of a show is Peter Pan and that is my favorite because I did Peter Pan in second grade and it was like I'd been on stage before actually but I'd only been in like little little plays so I was like up with the big kids as a second grader and I was dressed as a star and like nothing has ever felt more magical in my entire life than like running across the stage trying to be flying and like watching all the older kids saying and I was just like this is like the place that I want to grow up so I'm really glad that I got to. And I'm gonna finish with Xenavia because I didn't think my questions were as interesting for her so Xenavia you you get to share a moment or a memory from your years of being with us. Moment or memory I think like I want to go back to hair because like I said like out of all the like Very Merry Productions I just loved hair so much specifically also because I was just starting to like get back into like the teen Very Merry world and like starting to everyone it was just one of those shows that was just so free and like directly portrayed like the view or like the vision of what Very Merry is supposed to be so yeah just like all of it as a whole. Because Very Merry is always doing multiple productions we are also preparing for hairspray with 30 younger teens next weekend so at any given point in the day our stage may represent three or four different shows. Right now it's mostly King Lear but beyond the the focus of the camera we have people working on our hairspray production right now. Our art director at Very Merry is Becca McHale and she is with us now and she's going to tell us a little bit about some of the choices that she's making and projects she's working on for hairspray. Well hairspray takes place in in Baltimore and so we're starting off with a set that is representative of Baltimore it has it's a series of Rick Roe Holmes and they're going to be up on stage the whole time and they'll have cut out windows that can be illuminated from behind and then it'll it'll really transform from being Roe Holmes to being part of a TV show dance set. How do you keep up this ridiculous pace of working on multiple productions at once and keep your sanity? Well luckily there's a leader at the helm who knows how to calm nerves and say everything's going to be okay and it's all going to get done so I definitely lean on Don if I'm starting to get a little concerned about things it's like it's going to get done and it does it always does with the help of other people if needed and somehow yeah it all comes together every time. We have an enormous amount of support in the community and Goodwill and much of it of the volunteer variety where people will come and play in a pit orchestra, paint a set, help with costuming, hair, makeup, playbill, intermission, house and green room support you name it and we have just an enormous amount of wonderful community members who help our children put on their shows. Micah is a cinema major is that right? That's correct and also minoring in theater which excites me very much because Micah's always been an amazing storyteller and Micah one of the things I thought maybe you could share with people is during your years here and we're continuing to do this to talk about how we use committees to help collaborate with sets and costumes and PR and hair and makeup and and how that you know informed your experience as an actor. Well just to to know that all these little things are going on in a production I I had never thought of that when I was in fourth grade but as I've been in more shows it's been it's been really cool to watch all these get together just to put together this one production that people come to see over a weekend but I think it's helped me become more involved with theater not just as an actor but just as a volunteer helping out with making all these productions realities but I've just enjoyed the whole process I I've never wanted to leave theater so I made it my minor in college because I never not want to do theater. Which is great for his old director to hear. Our goal is to not necessarily to provide a star vehicle for the children meaning that we try to adapt shows ourselves or we do and write our own musicals so that we can take on as many kids as want to participate in a given production and this allows us to really spread the wealth so that everybody gets a chance to shine. Alright thank you that's your tour we have one more space as I mentioned next door black box but it has new windows being put in it right now so we can't take you there but it's been a pleasure to share this time with you on channel 17


Okay, here's the deal. I can tell if you're a hard worker or not. All you got to do is show me your calendar. Show me what you do day to day. Show me what you have scheduled this week, next week, next month. I promise you guys you do not want to see my calendar. It is completely full and every single action is completely planned out.  But let me tell you something, you guys don't want to see my calendar. It is massive. People ask me how I get it all done and I have one answer for them. By doing it and when you care about something, you make it a priority.