Youth is the driving engine to transform food systems. FAO, through its Small Holders Support Programme, has designed Apta, an entrepreneurship program designed according to international standards that tackled the two main constraints faced by Syrian youth, access to capacity building and access to finance. These sets of workshops allowed us to enhance the capacities of rural youth and women on how to design their own agribusinesses. Under the completion of the workshops, we identified the most suitable business proposals to be awarded with financial grants. With the financial resources we are going to provide them, they will be able to start up their businesses and contribute to the transformation of their local food systems. Today, on the occasion of the Youth Day, FAO is launching the Community of Practice for Young Entrepreneurs. This community is a platform where our grants beneficiaries will be able to share experiences, knowledge, good practices and face challenges in a collective way. This platform will allow us to have continuous feedback on the Apta program and to keep improving it in the long term.


From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE Conversation. Hi, and welcome to a CUBE Conversation. I'm Stu Miniman coming to you from our Boston area studio. Happy to welcome back to the program, one of our longtime CUBE alums. Travis V. Hill, he is the senior vice president of product management for storage and data protection at Dell Technologies. Travis, nice to see you. It's great to see you, Stu, as always. All right, so Travis, while we aren't at Dell Tech World, you know, this May 2020, that's gonna be handled in the fall. There are a lot of things happening in the storage world. Your team's announced Power Store just a couple of weeks ago and many other things happening in the storage world and we're gonna get to dig into it. So I guess, let's start there with the new mid-range solution. I had a great conversation with Caitlin Gordon. What's the initial feedback you've been getting from the field, you know, and from customers, of course? You know, Stu, it's been a whirlwind of a couple of weeks with the public unveiling of Power Store. This was a major release for us, you know, simply put, I've referred to it as probably the most important and strategic launch that we've had at Dell since the combination of Dell and EMC. I personally have been involved with the program for a little over two years and we have had significant investment in bringing this product to fruition, over a thousand engineers across Dell Technologies, including engineers at VMware put in tireless time, hours, innovation into bringing this product to market and we're extremely excited about it. The press has been very positive on the launch, on the capabilities, but more importantly, customers and partners have been extremely positive on the launch and the capabilities. Stu, we've been talking for multiple years now about the fact that we are going to be simplifying our product line, especially in the mid-range and the release of Power Store is a major milestone in that simplification and I can go into speeds and feeds and what differentiates it, but to me, the biggest part of this announcement is that we have a product in the market that is resonating with the field, resonating with customers, resonating with partners and feedback from the largest beta program that we've done as a part of a mid-range storage launch ever gave us early indications that things would be, the feedback would come back this way and we're very happy with the initial traction that we're receiving. Well, Travis, definitely a lot of work. He said over a thousand engineers working on that. It's interesting, you think back to the storage world, for a long time, it was growth of product line through acquisitions. Of course, Dell made a couple of acquisitions you're quite familiar with over the years, EMC over the years made many acquisitions Tell me, what does it mean for a thousand engineers to work on something? Often you'll hear, oh, well, a startup of 50 people, they built some new thing and that rocketed them to the next thing and by the time they get to a thousand people, oftentimes, they're talking about have they been acquired or are they going public? So why is that investment needed and what's the outcome of that kind of, starting from the ground up solution? Yeah, it's a good, it's a good question, Stu. I, when I think about it, what we set out to do with PowerStore is something very ambitious, which is to simplify the product lines, to bring the best capabilities of the current shipping mid-range products into a next generation architecture. And when we looked at doing that, we quickly determined that in order to be flexible and to be able to innovate quickly, in able to be able to provide the features and capabilities needed to bring all of those customers forward, we had to make significant investment. And I don't know of another example to your point of a company having done this internally, especially with a heritage of acquisition. And so getting to build something from the ground up that is optimized and modern for the workloads of today, but also able to bring customers from previous or current generation products forward is something that's been really special. And something that I think that Dell will be able to continue to innovate and lead the market in mid-range, from the investment that we made for well into the future. All right, so Travis, one of the other discussions we've been having with the Dell team quite a bit over the last couple of years is how storage fits into the whole discussion of cloud. So there's some recent announcements, you've got recent products. How is Dell thinking about that world of storage and how that integrates into the customers overall? The cloud discussion. Yeah, if I think about cloud, I think about a couple of things. One, there's sort of the cloud operating aiding model, which is things need to be really simple. Things need to be autonomous. There's this concept of being able to provide private cloud functionality on-prem. And so when I look at the cloud, when I look at some of the capabilities that we've built into PowerStore, for example, it's delivering that cloud-like, simple to use, simple to scale experience, but on-prem. Then I think the other aspect of cloud, which is just as important is how do on-prem products integrate with leverage and really allow the capabilities that they provide to be used both on-prem in a hybrid cloud environment or directly as part of a service in a public cloud. And we have seen that customers that are looking at us, customers that are in specific industries or looking at specific workloads are really looking for that flexibility, that burst capability, if you will, to be able to leverage certain capabilities across on-prem and in the cloud. And specifically, we've seen that demand with customers that utilize our Icelon products, our 1FS products. Those customers, some of them are corporate, using them for kind of traditional file workloads, enterprise file workloads, but there's a big chunk of customers that are in specific verticals like life sciences, genomics, like genomic sequencing, media and entertainment, things like collaborative video editing or wanting the ability to burst to the cloud or video rendering, use cases like autonomous driving, where the massive scalability that we have in 1FS for those customers that are using it in an on-prem solution, they want to be able to also utilize it in a public cloud as a public cloud capability. And so part of what we're announcing is the ability to utilize 1FS as a native capability in Google Cloud. And lots of interest from customers of the type that I just spoke about to be able to leverage that capability. And it's really like the capabilities we're bringing are like nothing else on the market. I'm not exaggerating to say that the scalability, the performance, the capacity are orders of magnitude better than what competitors can provide with their cloud capabilities. Yeah, well Travis, absolutely. If I think about the word scale, Google's one of the first companies that comes to mind. Right, right. Google has the global reach and the networking capability. It's been interesting watching, Dell has partnerships and the Dell family has partnerships with a lot of, pretty much all the cloud providers at this point. So what's special about the Google solution you said, unparalleled there, bring us underneath the covers a little bit and help us understand what really differentiates the 1FS solution that you're doing with Google Cloud. Yeah, so I'll take it back to the workloads. The Life Sciences, Media Entertainment, Autonomous Driving, they need massively scalable file solutions from a performance perspective and a capacity perspective. And the solution that we've engineered, co-engineered with Google Cloud provides massive scalability and massive capacity. In particular, versus one of our closest competitors, it's 46 times higher in terms of read throughput, 96 times higher in terms of write throughput and 500 times higher in terms of maximum file system capacity. And these workloads require it. I mean, these are massive file-based repositories and it's not just the capacity, but it's the performance of that capacity that is extremely important. So much like the value we bring on-prem with 1FS, we're bringing that value to the cloud, to Google and because you're utilizing common 1FS, whether you're on-prem or in the cloud, you have native replication capabilities available for customers that want to do that bursting. Yeah, it's been fascinating, Travis. My background's a little bit more on the block side of the house than the file side of the house. But from mid-range storage where we kind of put block and file together to get unified, then you saw the huge explosion of the scale-out NAS-type solutions. And then one of the things the whole industry looked at is what's that gap between object, which is what is typically underlying the cloud storage and files. So many of these solutions are really blurring those lines, pulling these things together. So ultimately, customers don't need to think about some of those underlying storage networking architectures. They can just solve their problems. Yeah, no, I think you're exactly right. And I actually come from a mid-range background as well. And I've been associated with 1FS and Isilon for a couple of years now. And the amazing thing to me is the growth of data. You know this stat better than I do, Stu, which is 80% of all the data generated in the next decade will be unstructured. And so that's not to say that traditional storage arrays aren't gonna continue to grow. Those workloads are growing as well. But the massive growth and the reason that there is such a desire to do things in or close to the clouds for file-based workloads comes from that underlying growth. Yeah, so Travis, I guess one of the other things that's interesting to look at as with the global pandemic going on, automation is front and snuff for customers. I can't go touch my gear. So therefore, I need to limit how often I would need to do that. So how does that just overall usability, autonomous nature of these type of solutions fit into everything we've been talking about? Yeah, it's core to solutions going forward. Whether you're talking about the 1FS Google solution or whether you're talking about Power Store, more and more customers need to be focused on the business outcomes or the IT outcomes and not the care and feeding or tweaking of the equipment. And so I think the best example of that is what we've done with Power Store in terms of that ground up architecture that's really built with machine learning directly into the platform and the ability to take multiple Power Stores and look at them as a single logical unit and make recommendations about where things should be located and best configured. And so we know because of the fact that we're taking in all of this IO, whether it be on our file solutions or our block slash unified solutions, what the underlying workloads are and the fact that we're building in this knowledge, this intelligence into the system is part of why we designed the architecture from the ground up when you're talking about Power Store. And if you go back and look at the original design of 1FS and that highly scaled out architecture, you know, it's been a calling card for 1FS since almost day one, which is this concept of simplicity at scale, right? And, you know, the fact that you have petabytes and petabytes of data shouldn't mean that you need tens or hundreds of people to manage and feed it. You should be able to administer it with a small number of IT professionals.  You know, it's a very interesting time to be part of a technology company with everything that's going on.  I look at Dell Technologies and the fact that, you know, basically over the course of a week, you know, we went from very few people or a minority of people working remotely to almost the entire company working remotely. And the thing that made that happen was our underlying IT systems and the fact that they are built on capabilities that are resilient, that are autonomous, that are modern. And so, you know, I'm extremely bullish about the capabilities that we're bringing to market. I'm extremely bullish about the cloud capabilities that we're building in to our solutions, especially on the unstructured side of the house. And I think that the, the next wave of, I would say the thing that this pandemic has highlighted is the need to be a digital business going forward. And, you know, I think that speaks very well for the prospects of Dell Technologies going forward and for infrastructure solutions going forward as well. All right, well, Travis, pleasure catching up. Thanks so much for joining us. Thank you, Stu, it's always a pleasure. All right, be sure to check out thecube.net for all the upcoming shows as well as you can search through the archives. I've got interviews as Travis and I mentioned on Power Store and many of the other Dell announcements. So be sure to check those out. I'm Stu Miniman and as always, thank you for watching theCUBE.


I am very honored to be here on the grounds of Irish aid under the auspices of the Institute of International and European Affairs in what I understand is a series called Development Matters. I spent most of my professional life witnessing that development matters in places as close to my own country, Bulgaria, to China, Indonesia, Africa, Latin America. But now I am Commissioner for Humanitarian Aid and my job is to witness the devastating consequences of when development fails and take action to compensate for it and give hope to people. My first order of business today is to say thank you to Ireland, to you Minister Costello, to the Irish authorities, to the Irish people for sustaining your commitment to development, to helping the most needed people even when there is hardship at home. How many here are Irish in the audience? Irish? I'm not Irish, but Irish? Thank you to all of you.  And this leadership I am sure would blossom when Ireland holds the presidency of the European Union next year. So why is it that in a world of plenty we still have the famous bottom billion of Paul Collier not shrinking? Why is it that again the trend of reducing those going to bed hungry, that was with us for some time, we reached a number of 800 million, is now reversed and it is going up again? Why is it that humanitarian needs are actually growing? I mean there are two drivers and Minister Costello talked about it.  And what you see on the map here is a very clear demonstration of where the problems are more severe, red and orange and yellow, this is where the frequency and intensity of disasters leads to loss of lives, leads to tremendous human suffering. And what the map tells us is that unfortunately these are primarily the poor countries of the world, but also some of us in Europe are at risk. And of course we know from last year in Japan and Australia, so no country rich or poor is spared but most of the danger zones are in countries that have low income and poor people. And if you put on top of it where famine occurs, crop fails, drought hits countries, population growth is so fast that it adds more difficulties on already burdened populations where coastal areas are at risk. And more importantly where conflicts happen, you get a picture of, actually this last one is Libya and now we have a new star which is Syria. What you see is a picture of the world that may have become richer, but it is certainly also a more fragile world today compared to the one I grew up when I was a kid. So I opted to put on this map something that we need to put on the back of our mind that shocks can be dramatic even for rich countries. What you see is where in 2011 the most devastating natural disaster happened, making 2011 the most expensive year in history, $380 billion in damages. And of course there is logic in that because when you have more wealth and you are hit by a disaster there is more to lose. But it is also a reminder to all of us that we need to think of solidarity as a global concept not solidarity of just the richer world toward the poorer world. Last year for the first time the European Commission provided humanitarian aid to a rich country to Japan because of the enormous disaster the country suffered. So on that background what I want to talk to you about today is why principles matter and why priorities underpinning humanitarian aid have to be clear and drive us to deliver more to people at higher risk. Principles the minister talked about it. humanitarian aid in Europe is based on a very strong consensus that it is about humanity, neutrality, impartiality and independence. What does that mean? It means that we strive to leave space for care for the victims of even the most devastating conflicts, that there is space for humanity even when everything else affairs, that we are blind for the ethnicity, religion, color of the skin, sight of the conflict of those who need our help, that we don't sight with anybody. The humanitarians are there to help people, whichever side they are, and that we do not mix up our politics with our humanitarian action. So all of this boils down to two things. When I make decisions to help people my team and I are driven by only two considerations are the needs profound and can we reach people? Do we have access to those who are in need? Nothing else. And just to give you a sense of this following the needs, here is the map of where the dangers are of the world. Here is where Europe is present, where our work is, they match, these two maps match exactly one another. So to make it more concrete, I will talk about the principles on the basis of my experience over the last two years. I will give you a couple of, actually four examples of things that I was part of and they made me appreciate these principles day in, day out. The first story is from North Korea. We know about North Korea of being a difficult state and the political dialogue with North Korea is totally stalling. The population of North Korea suffers from this more than the rest of us at this point. And what happened last year was that on top of a structural problem of people going to back hungry because bad hungry because agriculture, agricultural productivity is pathetic because distribution is tilted towards feeding the army first and not the people. On top of this, there was a failing of harvest, bad weather, and then foot and mouth disease and children, women, elderly were at the risk of dying. This is a picture taken in North Korea. We had to make a decision in European Commission, are we going to help, are we going to try to help? And we base this decision on these two questions, are the needs profound? Yes, they are. And secondly, can we be sure that the sacrifice of each and every one of you, of our taxpayers is actually going to reach these kids and not turning to foot for the army? For that, we needed to have a verification mechanism. I sent a team twice to North Korea, the World Food Program, we set to the World Food Program, we want you to monitor from the arrival to the kids we are helping your food.  So my team can go there and say, tomorrow we want to visit X and they would be allowed to go to X. And on the basis of these two things, we provided assistance to North Korea. It wasn't a non-questionable decision. There were some that were saying, don't do it, but we had needs and access, we did it. In this particular case, the U.S. opted not to. And I would say this for the pride of Europe. In the U.S., they do have humanitarian aid as part of the State Department. And actually I think this is wrong, because it throws a shadow. As much as you struggle not to, it throws a shadow over your decisions. My second example is actually my, I keep saying this, but it's true. My most memorable trip, my favorite trip of the year, not because it was easy, but because it was such a strong proof of why neutrality and independence pay off. This is a visit to Yemen in the north of Yemen in Houthi controlled territories. How many of you know who are the Houthis? How many? Oh well, okay. I mean, I didn't know until I went there, so you're in good company with me. The Houthis are a rebel group in the northern part of Yemen that had seven wars in seven years against the central government for control over their territories. The people with me are Houthi commanders. We've had a real serious problem, because the war led to some 250,000, 300,000 people being displaced. But no humanitarian organizations had access to these people. So Antonio Guterres, the High Commissioner for Refugees, and I went to Yemen and we requested to meet with the Houthis. And after a lot of negotiations and yes, no, yes, no, finally we were taken on Toyota trucks with guns and in a cloud of dust we arrived in a house where the Houthi commanders were. A big room like this, big room, many of them and few of us, all the Houthi commanders with their big Kalashnikovs. And Antonio Guterres and I, we were armed with our neutrality actually. And our ability to say we are here, we are here with no political agenda, we do not represent your government or any other government, we are here to ask you to help us to help you. And we negotiated an agreement that a year later today still holds. These people, actually they send me a fax and I will hold this for as long as I live. In which they signed that they agree on three things, to allow the humanitarian organizations in particular across Red Crescent to bring assistance, to guarantee the security of humanitarian workers and not to interfere in the distribution of help. All the principles we hold dear. Were we political representatives with political objectives, this would have not happened. My third example is from Libya. And Libya was a very difficult crisis as you all well know. There was a responsibility to protect the city of Benghazi, the United Nations Security Council came together unanimously with the resolution to protect Benghazi. And then there was a very tough time on to what extent military is part of the provision of humanitarian aid. We hold dear the principle that military comes only as last resort. And we kept proving that humanitarians can reach to needed people in Benghazi, in Misrata, in Tripoli, elsewhere. And so finally we managed to have a humanitarian operation inside Libya but also in Tunisia, in Egypt to help the migrant workers get home. That is actually a plane that participated in evacuation of migrant workers. Where inside Libya it was strictly humanitarian organizations delivering help to people. And the military contributed aircrafts for evacuation of migrant workers leaving Libya into Tunisia and into Egypt and actually Algeria and Chad so they can get home. We had the U4 that was a military operation to deliver humanitarian aid. It was not necessary, we never called for it. If it was to be necessary of course we would have used it. But here is a case when last resort meant last resort, it didn't come to it. And my last forth and actually most depressing example is from Sudan, Sudan and South Sudan. As you know this is a very dramatic environment and two parts actually of Sudan, South Cordo Fan and Blue Nile are not accessible for humanitarian workers. We have no access. They are needs, they are dramatic needs but no access. And here is the question. Some would say and there are some who are saying that, well let's just cross the border without the permission of the authorities in Khartoum and deliver assistance to these people, cross border operations. We discussed it and we decided categorically, no we won't do that, why? Because it is disrespect for international law. It is disrespect for the sovereignty of Sudan. And in my mind two wrongs don't make one right. And we will not go for a cross border operation. We will continue to press for access because what we have in this case is the worst of our cases when we have needs and we don't have access. People suffer, we cannot help. But helping is actually more damaging. Why? It puts at risk the humanitarians everywhere else in Sudan, in Darfur. Puts their lives at risk. It puts our principles at risk. As a result more people may suffer because organizations are thrown out of where they currently have access. So one has to measure, one has to think of the unintended consequences of good action. Because once you, in other words you undermine the principles yourself, you pay a price if you do it. You pay a price and this is where we are. It is the story that makes me actually more depressed than anything else. Let me go from principles to priorities. And I would try to be very tight in summing up where we are headed. For me and my team our number one overwhelming priority is to anticipate crisis, act swiftly, target the most vulnerable, do as much as, as much good as possible within the resources and capabilities we have. To do so we have placed the majority of our staff actually not in Brussels but in the hot spots of this planet. In Juba, in Darfur, all these places in Yemen, in Syria, we have 140 Europeans that are our eyes and ears and it is their job as well as our partners to be sure that we are not slow on the uptake that when a crisis is to come, I mean basically when you look at the crisis horizon you have the crisis you can predict. You know today these are Sahel as the minister said and actually minister thank you very much for the announcement of five million, much, much needed Sahel, Syria, the Sudanese, Somalia, DRC, Democratic Republic of Congo, Yemen. This crisis we know they are there and they are the crisis we don't know but we know they will happen. They will be an earthquake, they will be floods, they will be a devastating drought, well droughts actually we can see early, earthquakes we cannot, sometimes floods we cannot. But we have to have the ability to anticipate and mobilize our resources deployed quickly and for that having this team and having our partners is absolutely essential. Every action is also critical because this is the only way to do what the minister told us we need to do, which is to do more with less. Because if we anticipate, I keep showing this, if we anticipate this is the upper arm measurement. You put it on the upper arm of a kit from seven months to 59 months, if it is green the kit is well, if it gets into yellow or orange this is the dangerous art and if it is red, I mean this is the one centimeter the distance between life and death for children. We know we can catch malnutrition before it kills a kit or before it damages forever the development of this kit. But not only we can do good, if we catch malnutrition before it happens it costs 20 euros, costs 20 euros to save a kit early. It costs 100 euros to treat this child when there is already severe acute malnutrition. And just think of the good you can do for the same kit with additional 80 euros to immunize, to educate, to give a chance for development. Our second priority and this is very important for us is to what we call smart aid to try to do with the same euro both help life saving action and development. We cannot prevent humanitarian catastrophes but we can cut the future humanitarian costs if we invest in prevention as the minister said and if we invest in linking relief to rehabilitation and development. One example, instead of bringing food we can fund, we can give cash for work for people to grow food and reduce their dependence. We can't do it always but there is no excuse when we don't do it and of course we can do much more in increasing resilience of communities to droughts and floods to the natural hazards. Our third priority very similar to what the minister said is to work for the professionalism of the humanitarian system, professionalism of United Nations, capability of United Nations to provide the leadership we need, the transformative agenda that Valerie Amos is taking. But also we are urging our partners and I see some of them in this room from the humanitarian and from the NGO community work together, figure out a way in which we can do more with less collectively. One of the things we get criticized and I'll be very, very open on that is that sometimes when there is a disaster the outpour of good will is also a march of many good wishers who may or may not be well qualified to do the job and as donors we have a responsibility to keep the bar very high for professional humanitarian service because we do nobody a favor if we don't hold the standard high. Our fourth priority is to work with new donors. It's very simple with more wealth comes more responsibility and we need to bring Turkey and China and India and the Gulf States and Russia more on board and Brazil more on board. Not easy but we have to do it. We owe it to our taxpayers. More importantly we owe it to the people who need help. Last but not least, we have to be equipped to look in the future and identify the problems that are growing in front of our faces and deal with them. One such problem is the refugee problem. Not very well known but the refugee, the high commission for refugees was created after the Second World War. Why? To help Europe. There were 3 million Europeans at that time who were displaced from their homes and the idea then was that the job would be done and the high commission for refugees would disappear. Today we have 44 million refugees and internally displaced people, 44. The vast majority of them move from one poor country to another poor country from Somalia to Kenya to Ethiopia to Yemen and as this problem grows we have to address it for what it is. It is a very different problem than the one that we have been dealing with in the past and yet we are still treating refugee situations as if they are simple temporary 3-6 months. The second largest Somali city, do you know where it is? The ambassador for Kenya of course knows. Where is the second largest Somali city? It is in Kenya. It is in Dadaab. 460,000 people. Next to the regional city of Dadaab which is 120,000 people and I am asking because the Europeans, how many of our countries are prepared to have a 460,000 population next to 120,000 of our cities? How many of us can deal with this? So there are problems that we are bound to address in a different way and that is the task that we will have for the next years. Let me finish with saying that one thing that my team is very much aware of and this is what brings me here is that it is not good enough for us to do a good job. We also have to tell you what we do. We owe our taxpayers information on what we do because it is a matter of accountability but also because when we do it, you will raise the bar for us and we will do a better job for the people we serve. Thank you.


This is the next hour, I'll introduce Lenard. Sure, thanks, Ian. So we have with us online from Mexico, Lenard Walter Ring, who works with CIMIT and is also part of the group of ISED scaling community, which embeds people in various CG centers. So he has two very interesting perspectives for us. One in his role as overlooking scaling and scaling approaches in one of the CG centers and another coming to it from the GIZ, one of our donor communities and how they look at the issue of scaling. He's also the co-author of one of the tools that we're looking forward to hear more from him on, but I'll also mention tomorrow when I present the proposed ILRI function, it's one of the tools that we are looking to embed into our processes, the scaling scan. And so hopefully, Lenard, in your talk today, you'll be able to give us some of the broad views on scaling, but also a little bit of an intro to the scaling scan and your experiences at CIMIT and elsewhere. So we have about 10 or so people in the room here in Nairobi and we have another 15 or so people online with us and we very much appreciate you making the time and looking forward to hearing what you have to say. So over to you, Lenard. So thank you, thank you, Ido. It's a pleasure and an honor to present to you and thank you for the opportunity. I listened in on the last few minutes of Larry's presentation and yeah, what he said is true. I think getting more clarity on what scaling is and how to do it, I think is of great importance and anybody who is interested in that and is interested to hear more or different kind of viewpoints, I think that's something that we should really try to support that as much as possible, no? So yeah, so I was happy to do this and my title of the presentation is Scaling of Agricultural Innovations, the what, why and how and then this morning I added or coming to terms with scaling in the context of CIMIT, C-J-I-R. And I've been with CIMIT now for, as you said, as a GIZ integrated expert, I think you have, no, you don't have integrated experts of the task force on scaling within Ilri, not yet. I mean, I'm part of that. So I'll focus a little bit on really, let me see if I can move, yeah, okay. Basically, actually, I could summarize many of the things that I was trying to do is saying, what is actually meaningful scaling? And then I will talk a little bit about scaling scale and then there's a lot of time for Q and A, which is of course an interesting part, right? So I think one of the things that we are faced with, the clarity of scaling is really not matched with clarity on the concept.  And this is of course risky because people are using it in a superficial way. And also you could also do a lot of harm with it. So it's important, I think that we have a clear understanding or at least a clearer understanding of what scaling means. And in the environment, I think the CJR environment, especially of course, but also other development actors, it's very much about maximized adoption during the project. And you can see this is coming from, I think, a history of doing discovery. Some kind of amazing seed, of course, this is a summit example. You do the proof of concept. You do the piloting in some locations and then you go to scale, no? Like a very linear process and it's all about getting that seed all the way through to the end, no? But what it appears to be is that this transition from piloting to scanning is really a black box. And I think Larry also talked a lot about this. And that's why you have people saying pilots never fail to scale or you have also another one here recently, many pilots, but there are no planes taking off or something, there are many jokes about it. But this one, I think, sounds nice. And actually there are two major problems for that. So the first one is that even though the project would maximize adoption, but the world actually needs sustainable system change. They don't need ex-adopters on the last day of the project, right? And the second big problem with this is pilots, they happen in very controlled environments while scaling happens in the real world. And I'm gonna go a little bit deeper into those two major issues. So scaling up versus going down to Earth. Most of the pilot projects operate in very, very controlled environments. Expensive external experts, they come in, often parallel to a local system. It's a bit of a black-white picture I'm trying to push here just to provoke a little bit of discussion now. So there's heavy support for partnerships, right? Often a very transactional feature. You do this for me, I do that for you, et cetera. Expensive and intensive capacity strengthening, relying on grants that can end also, they have a fixed start and an end date and they're often shielded from politics and market forces. I mean, the donor is behind it or is basically finding their own market forces or shielding it from corruption, et cetera, right? So it is kind of like this picture where, oh, of course you don't see my finger if I pointed it, but you can see the fish in the bowl at the environment, there are no waves, and the water is clean, et cetera. And we say, well, it works here, let's throw it into the sea, but in the sea, there are, of course, many other things and actors going around. There might be other external factors that you didn't have in a pilot environment, right? So there's no guarantee that this fish will survive, right? And I think one of the major points and also Larry is articulate in this is to say the context is the king. So context is king, not only in the environment where we want to scale, because I think that the clarity is there, but also in the pilot environment that we basically create, right? So both environments are determining basically for the success of those innovations. Another element is that scaling is actually been quite complex. I think the people from IIT, they formulated it nicely. So they said the successful scaling of an innovation requires as much, at least as much attention to complementary, non-technological requirements. And that's actually actually also what I just heard the last few minutes of Larry, even 10% technology or 90% non-technological, right? And all these processes and all these other innovations need to scale kind of in a coherent way. And maybe one example, this is an example also from Mark Schoet, I think he's gonna speak to you tomorrow. And I think the long-term discussion on electrical vehicles has been around technology, right? It's about the battery strength and how many kilometers can you go, et cetera. But really without any innovations in infrastructure, how do you set up charging stations network?  Subsidies for clean vehicles, like for example, in Beijing, in China, but also in many other places. Innovations in the value chain, innovations also in design. And that's a picture I think how an electrical car looks like if it was designed by engineers, much less attractive, of course, then of course what you see on the right. But there's a lot of other innovations and of course one big one managed to fossil fuel low. So it was not really the limiting factor has not been, it might as well be in the other elements, right? And they all somehow come together and they all take time and resources. And I think that's something that we at CIMIT and I think it's quite a general for the CGR. We focus a lot on improving the technology and really tweaking it to a state of perfection almost. But we forget about percent of innovation that is also required to support such an innovation to basically have the impact that we want to have. So scaling is a bit more complex than just pushing something out. And well, basically if you wanna really simplify it a lot, you can get quite far if you just talk about scaling up, scaling out and we use here the analogy with the pyramid and saying, well, the scaling out is really reaching more people, right? You multiply, you disseminate extension, et cetera. These words come into the discussion. Scaling up is really having others support that process and do basically scaling out for you kind of. So it's really, and also lift it up to another level. So it's basically making a scaling out much more efficient. And then one of the things which I think is very important in our context and that I think doesn't get really enough attention. It's always attentional more on an anecdotal level or on a sideline. But I think it's really core to what we do is the scaling deep is really to change the behaviors, changing the minds. And I'm really not focusing only on the farmers because that's what we like to do. It's very much is also changing the mindsets of us, the scientists, the people in development projects, the donors, value chain actors also, I mean, convince somebody to provide services to a poor farmer. This also changes the mindset, no? And kind of that scaling deep basically provides the stability of that pyramid. Because I think there's a lot of projects that go and build up very nice pyramids, but really they never made it into kind of like a new normal for all the players in the value chain to keep doing this, right? So then the one the project is over, basically the pyramid topples over. So looking at those three elements and basically every intervention should have, pay attention to all three of these dimensions. Why scaling? So it is all part of the meaningful scaling. Why scaling? I mean, the CJR was set up in the 60s. I just had a shot at it to have development impact, right? But of course we are not a development organization and you get into long discussions and I think useful discussions, like where are we on the R4D spectrum? And maybe in the questions we can come back to that, but let me continue with this story. I'm getting distracted already because of this. So we're not a company, we're not like Coca-Cola that says, okay, we need to have operational scale and growing market share. That that's, it's not wrong, I think for what we do, but it's not enough. I think we focus on social impact and public good. I mean, we contribute to the SDGs. We cannot, let's say have adoption of a fantastic innovation if thereby the whole environment is going, you know, is being destroyed or something, right? So we have to go a step further than thinking on this industrial way of scaling or this commercial success factor of scaling and how scaling is used in, let's say the startup industry or our scaling is used in the industry in the 1800s or in the 1900s and the pharmaceuticals, just getting bigger market share. I think for us it's a bit more complex and I think also more useful. And people from the IDRC, I think they formulated it very nicely. So I might as well just use what they said and I adapted it a little bit, but like an organization like Ilri also, we want to optimally scale the impacts of innovation. So we don't want to scale the innovation. We don't want to scale, basically the innovation program. We won't want to scale the sales or the coverage of the policy. Often they don't really correlate with the good change that people endorse actually, right? So there's a difference there. What matters is the positive impact the innovation creates for the people and the environment. And also more complex and far reaching look at scaling than I think, like I said, the commercial way of looking at scaling, right? But I think this is more appropriate for the kind of institute that we work for. And I think actually the mandates of many of our donors and development partners. And just one example, I mean, it's a graph that I've been using, but and every time I say, I'm gonna make it nice, I never did it. So it looks a bit shabby, but I think focus on the message please. So let's say we have an irrigation project and we have many irrigation farmers and they're doing great. But at a certain point in time, of course, let's say the water runs out and of course the benefit of the irrigation farmers goes down, right? But if you look at the fishermen already from day one with this project because the nutrients came into the water and people were putting pumps everywhere, et cetera. The community was happy with more vegetables, but they had let's say less fish and maybe less drinking water. And of course then when the lake ran dry, of course they were not happy at all, right? And I think many of the projects, they focus basically on what happens in the yellow box. They say, well, let's do for three, four years, look great project. Our target is our these irrigation farmers and look Yacuba and look at Miriam. They're having so much more vegetables and doing great. Look, so many more people are now irrigating. And I think what basically follows a lid from that previous slide, I think our objective should be to look at, what would be the optimal scale for that community and for the environment there? And not only focusing on those irrigation farmers. And I think that's something that many projects are basically kind of like a problem if you really focus so much on reaching more and having more is better, et cetera, you might lose out on this perspective. So trade-offs and negative consequences happen and there are beyond for target population as well. And even within your target population and beyond the project boundaries often, right? So you could even question, is it maybe a blessing in disguise that we have not been very successful in really scaling? Like, I think Larry probably showed that, no? Like 5% of the project normally maybe go to scale, right? So what we are working on, and also with Larry and also with S&V from the Netherlands and colleagues here at CIMIT is how do we actually in the agenda of these SDGs like this social impact into what we do and into basically definition of scaling or working with scaling. So the title of that article is From Reaching Many, no? I think that's a big focus of many people, scaling, okay, just go for many. To sustainable systems change at scale and I will say a little bit more of what I mean there. So one thing about the element of sustainability and it's not the same as reaching scale, right? You can do a project where you hand out a lot of seeds or machines or whatever you want to scale. Doesn't mean that it's sustainable, right? I mean, if you just give it away. So there's a difference between reaching scale and sustainability. And I think in the frame of scaling, sustainability refers to kind of like a change that perpetuates itself. That's basically the new normal beyond the project, right? By the local actors. And also, I think that idea of okay, the reward for a successful project is another project. I think also this means that projects, because the scaling process is so complex, one project cannot scale something. It's a process, it's accumulation of different projects and many projects you're probably not even aware of that contribute to something going to scale and things that are not within projects, but just happen within the country, right? The element of system change. So I just talked about the element of sustainability. The element of system change. I think it's important to realize that, like we said, I mean, if you introduce a technological innovation, the whole system needs to operate differently. The system can basically, what is the system, right? Do we talk about a household? Do we talk about a supply chain? Do we talk about the every food system? This whole system of actors and rules and regulations and relationships and history, they all need this in some way, some way or another, right? And therefore, I think this instead of like or adding maybe in that spectrum of discovery, proof of concept, piloting, scaling, maybe between the piloting and scaling, I think we can insert kind of like this framework, the sector transformation framework where you basically think about, okay, something happens, first movers, critical mass, and then you get some kind of institutionalization, which then lead to scaling. So rather than like a linear process, it's more like really people coming together, relationships being for networks being built, things becoming, demands coming from society, et cetera. And then basically the change kind of happened. So I always find this a very useful, basically framework to show, okay, how can change kind of happen, right? Another thing is also scaling is not a linear process. And I think a lot of projects or colleagues also think, well, this works here, and then we just extrapolate it linearly, and then we make a log frame, and then everything we can plan out for the next five years, and probably some impact in 10 years, et cetera. I think that's a thing that we have to accept, that it's not something that we can control so much as we can control pilot environments. And I think that's maybe also one of the elements why we love to do pilots and control the environment so much, because we kind of predict what we can do, right? So scaling is not a linear process, and you'll see that I'm from the Netherlands pull up this picture.  But if you have more people, you need to switch to a car, right? And there are also limits to how many people you can bring, but that transition, it's not a linear process. You basically need to get a driver's license, you need to go from the small bicycle lanes to the big road, you need to learn how to park, you need all kinds of new things, new regulations come into play and a new environment and new actors come into play. And the same continues, of course, if you again reach the limits of that, you have to move to learning how to drive a bus and follow those rules and make sure that you're not getting into fights with other bus drivers, et cetera. So there's a whole different range of rules, processes, relationships, but also just technology that you have to have the money to buy the bus, of course, right? So the thing is not linear, the growth is not linear, it goes in kind of like phases, you might also fall back, but every time, sorry, the point is basically the rules that apply to the woman on the bicycle are not the same as the driver of this bus, right? And when you put this all together, the last month, actually, we did a lot of interviews, like 36 interviews with colleagues here at SIMIT, all the program directors and other colleagues here, we asked them 10 questions about scaling and this was, well, I think this was the first three questions were about this. And when you ask people about scaling, basically everybody says, okay, well, you have to do more, it's more adoption, it's more, more, more. So basically 100% of the people really focus on this element of scaling out and included in their responses. Only half of the colleagues here say, okay, well, it also has to do with scaling up elements, like working with partners, also making things up to another level, et cetera. Let's of course talk about the scaling deep, like we add value to people's lives, create positive impact and at least ensure that we do no harm. That also has to do, of course, with the responsible scaling. So very few people have that actually on the radar. If you ask them, okay, what is scaling? What are success factors? What you would do describe as successful scaling? Half of my colleagues were referring to, okay, scaling is also not only about more, but it's also really something that continues beyond the project, right? And letting go, sharing success, making other people do different choices and then basically that continues after we go. And then we compared a bit, okay, are people really focusing on outputs? Like, okay, the adoption of my innovation is kind of like what we want, or are people focusing on basically the impact that we have? And really what basically one person says, okay, it's really reaching the vision and the vision, right? And going from outputs to shaping outcomes, et cetera. So I think this was a nice overview from my colleagues here on what scaling is and what basically comes to mind immediately. And I think it's probably not very places. I think people scaling, they jump immediately to, okay, it's something more. People, yeah, some people focus still, okay, it's something that has to go beyond the project, but few people think about this, okay, maybe more is not always better, right? And so I think maybe we're probably even linking to what Larry said, it's kind of complex what we're doing, right? It's making it much more difficult than just getting things adopted, right? And doing a big project. So we try to simplify it as much as possible. And I think that that is so important because scaling is really important. I think a lot of projects are happening and things are good initiatives are happening, but they're not the level of where they really have an impact on their own, right? So I really think it's very important that everybody, colleagues, collaborators, probably have a bit of a better understanding of scaling or have a bit of a greater own understanding of how we're, but understand a little bit what actually we're looking for because I mean, after all, the scaling is done by local actors, no? I mean, we can push something, but in the end it happens in those countries that we work. So the first one would be the case, scaling should be attractive. So the business case in the sense for all value chains or value chain actors. So I think the innovation should not be only interesting for the farmer, but maybe it's more important that it's even interesting for the service provider or for a policy advisor or somebody in the government and that I think what's happening, right? Not always the best innovations get promoted. It's many other things come into play. So I think we should be aware there. I think the other one is the entry strategy is the exit strategy and keep asking, what if we pull out tomorrow? And I think the idea of a project should be, okay, we wanna change the normal.  So really think, okay, what do we pull out tomorrow? What are all the benefits that we provide to those people in the pretty? What if they've all fall away? What happens?  I think of course the right place in Africa. And it has to do with the scaling up, no? Do scaling up to be more efficient than scaling out? Work with collaborators, make sure that other people are excited or even more excited than you about going in this direction. And the science of scaling, I think, go beyond what works. So a lot of pilots, okay, this works, but really go and understand the influence of the context and how can you make things work because that also inform even the design of what we're doing, right? And also one very important point, which is I think often overlooked, scaling for me, it's not a hard science. It's very much also an art. It also requires pulling and pushing and making things work because in the end, the local actors have to do it, right? And you have to convince people, you have to work with the existing system. So that's an art also, right? Now I'm coming to the last part of the, and that's the scaling scan. So we developed it together with the PPP Lab, Water and Food, their consortium of Wageningen University, SNV, the Netherlands, Aquafrol and the Erasmus University in Rotterdam. And I like really working with them because they're very hands-on and they're very practical and they're all the time like, okay, don't make it too complex. Let's make it 80% right for everybody rather than 100% correct for only a few. And I think that was an important guiding principle and I learned a lot from that process. And I think that's maybe kind of to the success of this tool, keep it simple basically. So we basically have three steps and three steps for people to come to terms with what scaling means in their context. How can you work with scaling? How do you get your partners on board in discussing about scaling, right? So the first step would be defining a realistic scaling ambition. It's kind of like a project objective, but now maybe looking a little bit more ahead. Then we assessed the critical scaling ingredients and then you look at actually what are the next for your project or your intervention, right? So getting a clear idea of what the desired impact is, who is involved and why is it relevant, right? So really asking the question, what, why, how many? And we thought, okay, it's kind of, let's start the workshops and just jump straight and give maybe 10 minutes for this. Turns out it takes a lot of time for people to really agree on it. And if you have a diverse group of partners, to collaborate or even in your project team, many times people, I was shocked to see how many times people have a different understanding of actually where they work or why they're actually doing this, right? So this is an important thing to get the noses in the same direction. And it tells you, okay, what actually do we want to, what is our ambition? Then we look at, we say 10 ingredients, what you basically need to pay attention to if you want to scale. And it's just ingredients because in every context it's different. Some people might like yellow curry and some other people like green curry. Sometimes you need to go to the shop to get an ingredient. Sometimes you already have something in your cupboard. So we can pull this ingredient analogy very far. Okay, look at the status of these ingredients and see to what extent this is gonna hamper or promote kind of like the scaling, right? So the 10 ingredients are the technology, the practice, which I think a lot of people focus on and a lot of other tools also focus a lot on this element, like kind of like the Rogers, okay, is this comparative advantage, the use of the technology, right? But in scaling, I think nine elements are as important or even something more important, right? People should be ready to use it. There should be a active proposition, not only financial but people can also be interested in it for social good or even like sim it, we're not necessarily in it for the month. We have our mission to do that, right? Does it actually also work in reality, just there and are the roads there to make this happen? Finance, of course, this is one of the major bottlenecks every time we do this, even though people focus, all the work focuses on the technology and practice tweaking it, but the finance is often the weakest link. Knowledge and skills, of course, collaboration, collaboration, evidence and learning, especially in our context, I think super important to be providing this kind of evidence that really get the support for this, kind of like to create a movement towards people for people to support the solution. Leadership and management and that's something that is also very important. I think the effective coordination and navigation of a process, it's a complex process and people have to basically coordinate all these kind of elements and more and this requires coordination, right? And of course, a public sector governance. So how it works, basically, we have, this is kind of like still the long version, but for each ingredient, we have four questions and each question goes a little bit into those principles that I showed before, okay? Do you go beyond the project? Do you think about the sustainability?  So those elements kind of come back into the question. So taking it a little bit out of the cocoon of the project. So that's how the questions are designed and basically people then score with one to five. So very simple, one is okay, no, and five, yes, this is definitely the case, no? And what you can, what you have, for example, this is an example from what we did in India, I think this is a rush shoot. And basically we had a lot of people doing the assessment of one team, so a team of like, say 20 people and they all filled it in and then we put the averages together and even the standard deviation is a complex example I have, right? But they had a very interesting discussion because they said, okay, well, we all tend to agree that the technology is not so much the problem, it's very high, but there tends to be, the issues tend to be around knowledge, awareness, but also finances is kind of like the bottlenecks, right? But then again, you can have a discussion saying, well, a lot of people tend to disagree about the value for finance. Let's have a discussion about that here, why is that there? And then basically you can guide a discussion and chop up the discussion into important elements for that scaling. And I think that's useful and that's the feedback also we get otherwise people keep focusing on the technology. People like to talk so much about the technology, but here they're kind of forced to talk about other elements and say, well, actually we don't know enough about this. And then of course the next steps would then be interesting. So you look at the strong weak ingredients, also look at the questions that were interesting or that stood out for you. Maybe you just take through all the questions and then by the end say, well, this question was super important actually. And then you focus on that, right? You don't have to always follow the overall structure, but then then the question is of course, okay, what can we do? What is in the sphere of our control? What can it collaborates to? And what actually can we not do? Because many times in most projects, I think, we are geared not really to scale. We are really limited in what we actually can do. And we are so affected by the environment that we're in that we also have to be realistic in what we can do, right? And getting that realism is, I think, also an important step. So what we've done, we know that barrel, what we like to do in workshops, we let teams of four or five people then draw up their barrel and then explain to the others why it's going on and what they're thinking that they can do to make the barrel a little bit fuller by fixing, let's say, the weakest links. In Nepal, we also used it to have a discussion among different groups. What we've been doing recently, which might also be interesting for you, this is what we set up for a CSAP project, the Big Pillow McGates project. We put all the questions of the scaling scan in Google Forms, and people can then just do it online on their own and then come together actually next week. And then we help analyze the results and you see standard deviations and then they have a useful discussion about, okay, let's talk about finance but this is really the major bottlenecks or let's talk about collaboration and have a talk about this. So this is, we do this as a preparation for a workshop. Here on the bottom, we have a picture of a workshop we did with Ikarda. And we also use it as a framework, kind of the scaling ingredients. We use it as a framework to compare projects, we say. Here we used, in this article, we used to compare project in Africa, Asia and Mexico, as in, okay, well, how are they doing if you look at it from a scaling perspective? And then we basically had people score it and then compare a little bit, okay, well, in Latin America, it's like this in Asia or Mexico versus Bangladesh. So discuss more, I think, well, we're active on Twitter and we have a blog research page, we're also active. And of course, this paper describes a little bit kind of what I presented here. So thank you very much. This was my presentation. I'm thinking a little bit over time, but I'm really happy to take some questions. Thanks very much, Leonard. And I think what you've just said and presented is compliments very much to the introduction we got from Larry in earlier on this afternoon. And it's good that you were able to highlight particular, you know, the scaling scan tool as an example of some of the tools that are available that might help us. So let me open up for questions again, as we did last time. Let's see if there are any questions here on Nairobi and then I'll come to those of you online. Anyone in the room here? Steve? Hi, thanks. This is Steve Kemp in Nairobi. So both you and Larry made emphasize that the technology was only a component of what's ultimately needed for delivery as if you imagine that we imagine a magical silver bullet. That is true in some cases, some other stuff we do. I mean, inventing a vaccine or inventing a transgenic cow, but a lot of the stuff we do, that's not true. We're looking at bundles of technologies and we're looking all the way around that circle there. And so for us, I think it's fair to say the scale. Scaling is not qualitatively different, but quantitatively different. So I mean, for instance, we engage with farmers about asking them what should the breeding goals be? We don't, so I think we engage pretty much all the way around that circle, but on a pilot scale. I don't know if that's a fair comment. No, I think you're right, of course. There's much more going on than that. And of course, it's a bit of a provocative way of presenting, okay, we focus on the technology, but it is, I think, a strong culture that I see here. I think that what you're mentioning, I think the bundles of technologies, yes, that's also a lot what people do. I think that the challenge really is the pilot environment, the control environment that we're in or the limited focus that we have. I mean, in the case of SIMIT, we say, okay, we do breeding for the farmers, but we do that for a particular group of farmers, right? Are they really the target group at scale? Are we also including the whole system, the people that basically have to support adoption or make changes that are required in the real-world condition? So I think in that sense, that discussion of the control environment versus the real-world environment, I think that's something that is really the key of what we're trying to say rather than, okay, it's kind of like a technology focus, because I think even within that patrol environment, we still tend to focus a lot on the technology and the other elements around it, but still in that control environment. Is that a little bit of a response to what you're... No, I think we would agree. It's true, we do tend to work with tame, tame sets of farmers in a controlled environment, but it would push back on, it's not completely driven by one magical technology. No, exactly, yeah. Okay, anyone online? Please just go ahead if you've got a comment or a question. I see Peter, oh, sorry, go ahead. I'm Helen, I'm in the area in this. I was just interested in, you mentioned in the pilot environment, there's a lot of emphasis on partnerships and on kind of stimulating partnerships, and I was just wondering if you could say more about that. I mean, my assumption in our program is that if you do put emphasis onto partnerships or working with stakeholders at the developing stage, then that means the initiative is gonna be more sustainable after the end of the research funding. Yeah, I think you're exactly right, and that's also kind of like, I think the point. I think what we're trying to picture here is that in these controlled environments, in these pilot environments, we work with partners that are basically paid to be a partner for the duration of the projects, and often these are the transactional nature, right? I mean, it's not necessarily their vision or mission to actually contribute to what we're trying to do here. Also, they're often, what we see is like, other research institutes or universities, right? Whereas what we're trying to say is that in these, try to mimic as much as possible the real-world condition at scale. So you would need partners that can actually reach the kind of scale that you want to have. You need to have partners that have the mandate to do the kind of thing that needs to be done. You need to have partners who have the same kind of drive or motivation to do this without your project intervention. And of course, they should then be part in the project phase where you're starting this, but on those kind of terms, right? And it means also preparing the ownership of this coordination to those actors that will take it up later. And I don't see that often. I see it often like, okay, we're leading this from now until 2023.  So it's important to have stakeholders part of the pilot, but there should be those stakeholders who have a potential to continue this beyond the project. Hello. Yes. This is me again, impactor scope program, Elriadis Ababa. Thanks very much, Leonard, for the presentation. The more I look at this scaling discussion and making it happen, I continue to find it difficult to eat from the role of the government, their development agenda. In your experience, how much influence would you put on the role of government? I know private sector is very important, but government policy can influence the private sector to be in the value chain, to be partners in the value chain. The other is the cost, the cost of the innovation itself, the cost of its adoption. I would think that technologies, because many people, many of the people we are dealing with in R4D are considered to be poor, their resources are limited. Emphasis of how they use those resources are also conditioned by their priority scale. Would the cost be factor that researchers should be looking at when proofing a technology ready for scale? Yeah, thank you for that question. I think, yes, we should take into consideration all the design parameters that make a solution good for the kind of target users that we have in mind, and cost is a major factor. It doesn't mean that it has to be cheap, but it has to be affordable within the system. And I think that's what we try to portray also here, is okay, it has to be attractive for farmers, but also for the value chain. And sometimes you get into a kind of like a catch-22 is where the solution is so cheap that the value chain doesn't want to provide it, because there's no incentive for them to do that, right? So then you need to innovate in that area. So, yeah, you should design an innovation. Basically, I think our role as CJR is to design or come up with scalable innovations. And scalability depends also on the cost, but it also depends on the other factors that I put here on the screen. And that's for me your second question. This is just how you pick out, for example, the governance, right? A lot of people, technology, or people that work in the private sector here in the value chain group, they pick on the value chain is the most important. And I think that's exactly the point that we try to make and we try to say, okay, if you have a group of people, a project team, get a broad set of disciplines in the room, because everybody will talk like you know the governance is the most important. No, technology is the most important.  Because yes, in some cases, the governance may be the limiting factor. And you have to just check based on the context and the situation. And maybe even the time, maybe today governance is not an issue, but maybe in two years, it suddenly is a huge issue, right? So I would say, yes, but just as much as there's lack of evidence could be a problem, just as much as lack of the working value chain could be a problem. That's one thing, I think. So we have to maintain that broader view. Second point is, and I think Larry mentioned it because I think he shared his presentation with me. Larry likes to say, okay, scaling basically happens through two channels, either through the government or through the private sector, not through us, let's say the development agents, let's call it. And I think that that's very right. I think we, especially as a CGR Institute, we should not do scaling projects. I think what we can do is pilot the scaling or learn around the scaling and understand it and make sure that other people do the right things. But in the end it's the mandate, or it's a mandate of the private sector or some kind of mix between them, right? But it's local, it's local. And I think that's what we tend to forget sometimes because we think we are so important sometimes, no, it's us that. Okay, any final comments before we wrap up the session? Ian, I have a question. Bonnie here with Ilri Utopia. Thank you, Leonard, for your presentation. In looking at practical ways on the what, why and how of scaling, we're showing this process, the issues of attribution have come up and that's how we are trained as researchers we pay attention to this. So have you thought or have you had practical experience in thinking through some of the performance metrics that includes paying attention to all these other things that we bring on board in this scaling process? What are your thoughts about attribution? This is a great question and thank you for that because last night when I drove home I thought, oh, I forgot to include this in the presentation and then this morning I forgot about it again. But yeah, thank you, that's a great point. And I think the difficulty for people to think beyond scaling is adoption of an innovation and looking at it as a more, as a sustainable system change and the social responsibility that comes with it is because we are basically trapped in a system of attribution and we have to say, okay, well, Simet did this or Ilri did this and basically the whole success of what we're doing is based on that. No, donors say, okay, if you have an option of 100,000 farmers, you're a success and then it has to be you, of course, so let's filter it out. And I think that's exactly the biggest problem and that basically keeps the system in place and makes it difficult for us to really reach the impact and really contribute to the SDGs as I think we could and we should do more efficiently. So that is a big issue and that's why actually in most of the workshop we focus on one of the ingredients where we focus on is the leadership management but also the evidence and learning because that's an important role that we have. And what you can do and what we see more and more often is to measure things that happen outside of the project context. So I think a lot of the monitoring goes on the direct beneficiaries. But actually in scaling you should look at the indirect beneficiaries because these are real world people. They are not biased or they're not tempted about the project or they get some whatever advantages from that, no? The real people are adopting it. That's more important for me than the direct benefit. So people are looking at, well, of course, if you control environments, et cetera. But what you also see an example that we have in Bangladesh, a USAID project that they're supporting service providers provide machinery to farmers. But what they also did, they looked outside of the project areas to service providers and if they're actually changing their habits and if they're suddenly including the kind of machines that we were promoting in their portfolio and they did. And this was a very strong motivation for USAID to say, okay, let's continue with this because this is a real change in the system as such. So the monitor, the thing is it's very difficult. It's difficult to say, okay, this is because of the project or somehow related. But I think we should let go of that a little bit. And we should really say, okay, well, what is important is that this impact happens and it will be difficult to say because maybe the impact in a village came because of a health intervention that made people less worried about this and this so that they could put time on farming, et cetera. So the world is kind of like complex but I think we should also embrace that complexity by giving into that and say, okay, let's maybe look at some higher level indicators. So even household or livelihood indicators and do kind of like a hybrid of remote sensing data like looking at a bigger picture and then contributing ground truthing it with kind of things that we have been intervening in and the kind of change that we've seen maybe on the farm or at the farmer level. But it is, to me, this is really the holy grail and slowly the thinking is really going into that direction of how to capture the system change. And I think it's gonna be difficult and it's gonna take a few years. But once we get there, I think the whole issue about scaling is gonna flip over because we don't have to attribute it so strictly anymore. We don't have to draw linear lines but if the farmer adopts this, this impact is gonna be like that because that's also a very tricky thing that we're doing. Okay, on that optimistic note, there's two, a close, it's five o'clock East Africa time. So, Leonard, thank you so much for joining us this afternoon and contributing to this workshop we have this morning, sorry, this afternoon and tomorrow morning. And I'm sure this will only be the beginning of more interaction with you and others. So, thanks very much, everyone. To those of you online, thank you very much as well. And we'll reconvene tomorrow morning, Edo. Nine. Nine. Nine, really nine. We'll reconvene tomorrow morning at 9.45 to wrap up by about 12 o'clock. So, tomorrow we'll link up with Mark Shoot and then we'll have an hour to present some preliminary ideas about how do we begin to embrace some of this thinking within Il and have a more general discussion about that. So, thanks very much, everyone.


What does Pro mean in the world of portable computers? Well, it's not too difficult to figure out that the laptop is aimed at professionals. The VivoBook Pro 15 OLED K 3500 is one such device, which is affordable and has the hardware to satisfy a lot of users, from gamers to content creators of all kinds. Obviously, it comes with a special display, but before we go there, let's take a look at the design. Only for a VivoBook, you get a choice of color. This time the options include a blue and silver outfit, both of which look stunning. Considering the fact that it comes with a 35 watt Tiger Lake H35 processor and an optional dedicated GPU inside, it's pretty impressive that it only weighs 1.65 kilos. The lid is made out of aluminum, and its profile is reasonable, standing at 19.9mm at its thickest. It's good to see an HD webcam above the display, and more so that it features a privacy shutter on top. The typing experience is great thanks to the backlight, the long key travel, and the clicky feedback, while we find the numpad section very useful for number crunching. As expected, this VivoBook Pro also has the fingerprint reader integrated into the power button. Using the port selection, we see three USB type A's and one Thunderbolt 4 with power delivery and display port support. In addition, you get an HDMI 1.4 connector, an audio jack, and a microSD card reader. You have to keep in mind that the memory here is soldered to the motherboard. Choose carefully before purchase, but we think the 16GB option will be enough for the near future. On the bright side, there is one M.2 PCI-E X4 slot for super fast SSDs. And now, comes the star of the show, the OLED display. It has a full HD resolution, while the maximum brightness with HDR turned off is north of 400 nits. Expectedly, the viewing angles are very wide, while the contrast ratio is infinite. Needless to say, the true blacks are absolutely stunning. The laptop can display both the sRGB and DCI-P3 color gamuts fully, which results in a punchy and vibrant image. Also, we can't miss the fact that the pixel response times of this panel are blazingly quick, essentially beating every IPS and TN display out there. And don't forget that OLED screens produce 70% less harmful blue light, which is one of their key features. However, we measured some PWM use below 80 nits, which is not ideal. Thankfully, the pulsations are very weak when it gets brighter, so we can consider it relatively safe in this aspect. This device's rather large 63-watt-hour battery delivers more than 10.5 hours of web browsing or almost 9 hours of video playback on a single charge.  In terms of hardware, you can get either Core i5-11300H or Core i7-11370H with Intel Iris Xe, GTX 1650 Max-Q, or RTX 3050 graphics card. By the way, if you're an AMD fan, look for the M3500 variant which can be maxed out with the Ryzen 9 5900HX. Really nice! In order to cope with the high demand of the Tiger Lake CPUs, ASUS has implemented a dual heat pipe cooling solution. It also sports two fans and two heat sinks. This helps the Core i5-11300H in our unit to maintain a clock speed of 3.6 GHz, which is 15% higher than the base value. Here, the MyASUS app allows you to choose between three presets – whisper, normal, and performance. You should choose the latter if you need to extract every drop of the potential of the hardware. While the former two options provide a more comfortable and quiet experience. Without a doubt, the major reason to consider this device is its display. It produces true blacks and unmatched color representation, accompanied by pleasant sound experience thanks to the Harman Kardon speakers and the ASUS AI noise-canceling technology. The performance factor is fantastic, which puts the VivoBook 15 Pro side-by-side with more clunky gaming notebooks, while it remains stylish, lightweight, and blazingly quick. Yes, its memory is soldered, and this won't allow you to upgrade it down the line, but if you go for the 16GB version, your needs will be fully satisfied in the near future. Of course, we've done a lot more tests, and you can check out all the results in our in-depth review on laptopmedia.com. You'll find the link in the description below the video.


Thank you, and I ask all of you to please try to stick to a 10 minute so we can catch up a little bit of time and still have time for discussion. Okay, so hello, my name is Fabien MacArthur. I'm the founder of OpenIRP. It's a company I started when I finished my study here in Luwana Nerve in Belgium. And it's a complete open source enterprise management software. So we do accounting, stock management, approaches, manufacturing, lots of boring stuff that companies need to have to run. Just to start, here is what we achieved in five years. So five years ago I was a student. I had no money in my pocket. I started with nothing, with a lot of patience and motivation. And five years later, now, we have partners in 60 countries. I have 185 employees, three companies. We are self-profitable. We didn't lose so much money, only a very few. And we have big customers and blah, blah, blah. And the thing is that I'm convinced that that was possible due to the open source and the business model we chose with OpenIRP. So it was really a key for the success of our company is the way we succeeded to reuse the open source community, build things that we were not able to build by ourselves and that kind of things. So my story of today will be to explain to you how we did from nothing to that level in five years without money, but with a lot of motivations and work. And only a few nights. So I will explain your business model. Traditionally when you want to build the software, the growth of the software is directly depending on your R&D budget. The more you invest in research and development, the best your product will be. That's the common sense in most of the industries. But with OpenIRP and with free software, the growth of the product cannot anymore be related to the research and development but can be related to the number of people participating in the product. For OpenIRP, we are an accounting system and we do accounting in 35 countries, which is a lot for an accounting system. Only Sage succeeds to do what we do. And to do that, it's very complex. You have to recruit accountants, you need years of experience working with customers and that kind of things. So what we did, we made a free software that does a generic accounting system. Then we gave it to the world. Everyone was using it and then someone in Poland decided to use it but the accounting of Poland was not in the software. So they just had to do this customization to use it for themselves and then it gives back everything in the product. So the great thing with OpenSource is that it allowed us to grow depending on the number of customer or user using the software and not depending on the budget we had in R&D. So it was very good when you are a student and you have no budget. It allowed to create something because people use and contribute to what you do. So that was one of the reasons of the fast growth of OpenIRP is that we had very small investment in research and development. Today we have a lot of investment in research and development. But at the beginning it was very slow but very big growth of the product. So OpenIRP does, at least for the midsize company, all the things that ACP are doing which is a lot. They required 30 years to build this. It also works for the marketing and the sales. One of the biggest cost of a software publisher today is the sales and marketing department. If you check at NetSuite, maybe you don't know NetSuite because he's a leader in the US, in the ERP market in US and not very well in Europe. But NetSuite is our main competitor in US for what we call a cloud ERP. The budget in sales and marketing of NetSuite in the US is 80 millions per year, which is a lot. And the budget of OpenIRP for sales and marketing last year was 200 key euros, which is very small for a publisher. And as you can see on the left, I compared NetSuite with OpenIRP on Google Trends and you see that no OpenIRP is more famous than NetSuite. Why? This is really due to the open source nature of OpenIRP. As people can download the software they download, they use, they talk to their friends and it grows like this. Another example is that today most of the universities of Belgium and a lot in France are giving trainings on OpenIRP, which is great because it gives visibility. For ACP, which is our main competitor on the market, most of the universities do not do training on ACP because they don't have the budget to buy licenses, because they don't have the time to train their trainers because the students cannot download and use that home and all that kind of things. So we succeeded to have a very big visibility and a strong brand without very huge investment in marketing to create a brand. So that was a very good effect of the open source nature of OpenIRP. Just being in the Linux distribution, being in Ubuntu, Red Hat and that kind of things, it gives you visibility in every bookstore when you buy a magazine with a free software on it and you have a CD like in the old days. In the CD you will have OpenIRP because it's free, so they take a lot of software and put it in there. So you get a distribution of millions of samples of the software for free, which is very good. And it's especially good because when you are a publisher, most of the publishers have a cost of sales and marketing. In the SAS one, sales and marketing, sales force, sales and marketing are 60% of their budget, of their charges. So if you succeed to crunch that cost, then it's a very good competition. I lost my word. But the most important here is how do we get money? So I explain to you how we do not spare too much money, but how do we get money? The first thing I will try to show you is how the others are getting money on this market. I'm just talking about the ERP market. So on the left you have the profit and loss of ACP, which is a classic proprietary business model. We can say it's a mature company, which is on the market since several years. And the revenue are in red. Sorry about that, I should have chosen green. And you see the revenue structure, they do 30% in services because they sell consulting and that kind of thing. 45% of their revenue is the support and the maintenance. And 25% of their revenue is the license. So when you buy a software, you pay the license, which is the one shot to get the software. And after the maintenance is the yearly revenue for the help desk, the support, the migration. So that's a service. So if we want to compare OpenERP or any open source product to a classic ACP model, the difference is the license.  We use the AGPL license in OpenERP in all our modules. So we just lose 25% of the revenue per customer. But in the other hand, we divide the cost of the sales and marketing by 400. We divide the cost of the R&D. I have 120 developers working for me. But I think the community is more than 1,500 full-time developers working on the product. So we have a factor of 10 between what you spend and what you get in the result of this. And what's important in the market today is not to make the biggest turnover. What's important is the margins you can get in a company. And as we decrease the cost a lot, but we reduce the revenue by 25%, we succeed to have very good margins. Since I started, I rarely do less than 60% growth a year. And my average is 100% growth a year in the company. So every year I have twice more employees, twice more, everything. So it proves that it can work. And it's great because everything we do in research and development is building more free software. We produce modules, we give this to the world, the world gives us back what they change on this. So that's very great because as it works and it generates revenue, we can sustain the business and the growth of the product at the same time. So this is a model I trust. I like it. Maybe it will not work for every market. It works very efficiently for the ERP market because the ERP market is a market of service today. I don't think we can apply this kind of business model for office, which is a commodity right now. So yeah, and that's what we sell. That's the organization of OpenERP. So on the top you have OpenERP essay. One thing which is very important also is that we succeeded to have a classic publisher, editor, partner and customer relationship. So we have the classic, we are a publisher, our role is to develop a product. Then we have the partners, their role is to deliver services to the customer and then there is the customer, their role is to be happy. So we have the classic structure of a traditional publisher, resellers and then customers. So it's great because we can focus on the R&D, building product, creating brand, marketing, that kind of things. The partners can focus on doing services, implementation, importation of the data, first level of training, support and that kind of thing. So it's very productive in terms of creation of value because more than 50% of my company develops things that have a great value. Actually it's something around 75% of the people working for me developed. So they create value and the rest is for marketing administrative. So here is the structure you have OpenERP essay. We work with partners, partners are free software companies or proprietary resellers that change their mind and now are moving to the free software. We have 400 partners all around the world and then we resell the maintenance, which is the 45% of the revenue of ECP, a bit of consulting, which is a yearly recurring revenue so that the customer can cry, call us if they have a problem, if they want to migrate, if they have a bug to fix and that kind of things. But the license of course is free so we run OpenERP with a thousand of installations per day. Yeah, that's the marketing slide. The marketing department forced me to put one slide about this. It works. So you have lots of great customers that are using OpenERP. OpenERP is beautiful and the brand is growing very quickly. Thank you for your attention.


The adult classroom compared to the adolescent classroom Both adults and young learners are different age groups Therefore, when working abroad and teaching adults there are both advantages and disadvantages when compared to young learners Advantages of teaching adults Adults tend to have greater levels of motivation than adolescents which is an advantage over young learners Teaching and learning in an adult student classroom behavioral problems are minimal as they are not always completely absent because of their enthusiasm This is shown through their maturity and concentration This shows that adult's attention spans are higher than children This enables the classroom to be more relaxed and pleasant In addition, adults are closer in age to the teacher which gives them the ability to form a closer bond as they have more of a similarity This results in the teacher and students having a closer bond than young learners and teachers According to Unit 2, teaching and learning When teaching adults, they get more of a grasp of the topic without the teacher having to give a lengthy explanation This is the opposite for young learners as they do not have prior knowledge and life experiences like young learners Disadvantages of teaching adults However, there are disadvantages when teaching adults compared to young learners Adults have greater life stresses and responsibilities in life on top of studying This can cause problems to arise in classroom discussions According to Unit 2, teachers and learners there are more personal issues discussed in the classroom of all adults Adults can then bring this up in a one-on-one discussion This is not ideal when the teacher needs to stick to the lesson plan It is stated in Unit 2, teachers and learners that when adults are in different groups and management levels adults can be more self-conscious This can be a result of some adults having difficulties adjusting to being a student again Whereas young learners don't need to make this adjustment Adults may be learning in everyday life which means when they are in a classroom it is quite a different experience for them If adults are working full-time and also studying English, this can cause them to be quite stressed and anxious However, young learners can just focus on the business English course without job responsibility Adults may want to come home and rest instead of going to the business English class In addition, they might have a work meeting that makes them unable to attend the business English class This is not ideal, as they will get behind in their work and miss crucial information provided in the class To prevent this from happening, a planner could be used, so that the adults are organized This is something young learners don't have to worry about Are you ready to teach English to Vata Sage groups? Overall, working aboard teaching adults and young learners have the opposite advantages and disadvantages These can be seen when comparing both groups When teaching young learners, they tend to have less stress and responsibility than adults which is an advantage However, when compared to adults they have a lower amount of care, which is a disadvantage Therefore, both age groups have separate advantages and disadvantages Speak with an ITTT advisor today to put together your personal plan for teaching English abroad Send us an email or call us toll free at 1-800-490-0531 to speak with an ITTT advisor today