Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for joining us today for the launch of enabling micro small and medium sized enterprises to participate in legal timber production and trade transformational changes generated by the value you fled to program. First, some housekeeping while we wait for everyone to arrive. Today's webinar will be approximately 75 minutes long, which includes time for a Q&A after the presentation. Please post any questions you have in the Q&A box at the bottom of the screen throughout the session and we'll endeavor to cover as many as we can. I'll also note that our session today is being recorded and the recording will be sent to all participants following the event. Now, without any further ado, I'd like to hand over to Bruno Khmer for some opening remarks. Thank you, Bruno. So again, thank you everybody for joining us today for the launch of this publication called enabling micro small and medium sized enterprises to participate in legal timber production and trade. So a bit of background to start with between 2016 and 2022, the FAO EU Forest Law Enforcement Governance and Trade Programme or called FLEC T program provided technical support and resources to help tropical timber producing countries establish and implement measures to tackle illegal logging and to promote trade in legal timber products. Ultimately contributing to sustainable forest management and poverty reduction. Micro small and medium sized enterprises produces as well as processes, as you know, play a critical role in meeting the growing demand for forest products worldwide. You have likely read that MSMEs provide over 50% of the total forest related employment, and that they are also the main supplies to domestic and regional markets in tropical timber producing countries. So the domestic demand in these regions is growing significantly significantly, making forest sector MSMEs central to ensuring that forest resources use is legal and sustainable. In other words, if we want to achieve good forest governance and realize the full economic and developmental potential of the forest sectors MSMEs have to be included and support it. So central to the FLEC T strategy is the development and roll out of what we call these national timber legality assurance or verification systems. These systems are aiming at containing illegality above all promoting legal value chains and improve market access. These systems do not impose extra or external requirements as they entirely are entirely based on national laws and regulations. In fact, on the contrary, their development the development of these systems represents an opportunity to get small holders together to review, simplify, clarify or improve national legal frameworks governing the wood sector, especially when it comes to these smallholder and community producers and small scale traders and processes. Despite legal reform in favor of these MSMEs, implementing timber legality assurance systems can result in exposing and therefore penalizing informal activities in the forestry sector. Helping MSMEs towards formalization and legal compliance is therefore needed to avoid negative impact on jobs and livelihoods while pursuing the objective of substantially to substantial reduce harmful and unfair illegal practices. However, many sectors, not just the forestry sector, grapple with the question of how to effectively reach out and support MSMEs. We know the challenges of MSMEs and what we struggle with is enacting effective and scalable solutions to these challenges. So the paper presented today is the results of an exploration into identifying the how, how offering a meta analysis of over 100 discrete projects implemented by the program in 20 tropical timber producing countries between 2017 and 22. So these projects piloted solutions designed by stakeholders themselves to promote legal timber production and trade, which created a nice sandbox of experimentation that we have been able to draw lessons from. What makes this experience capitalization rather unique, in my opinion, is that we choose to do this internally within the FLEC-T, FAO FLEC-T program, we did not hire an outside consultants to review the results of all these projects. And as a result, we built our own teams capacity to identify, understand and act on preliminary lessons learned while the program was still being implemented. So our initial vision was not to publish a paper but rather to develop a toolkit of products developed by our service providers, so people we work with in countries, a toolkit which could be adapted or used by others. While we have made some progress on this toolkit and my colleague Tom will present it later in during the webinar, our ambition is to use the experiences and lessons from these hundred plus initiatives to help others avoid reinventing the wheel through the establishment of best practices that allow future innovation. The strategies found in this paper when deployed appropriately can help to achieve multiple international agendas and contribute to the development of social forestry, biodiversity conservation, climate change mitigation, and the many other things that the NFO division is involved with. It is not just about FLEC or things that the FLEC team does. As such, I hope this publication will help and hopefully inspire other NFO colleagues in their work going forward. So I will now hand over to Erica Pornand, lead author of the paper to share some of the key findings with us today. Thank you very much. Okay, thank you very much Bruno and to everybody who is joining this call. Good afternoon, good evening or good morning. I'd like to ask Tom if you can bring the presentation on the screen excellent. So as we get started. For the next 10 minutes, I'd like to share some background and the three main findings or highlights of the report that's being launched today. As Bruno mentioned, we're essentially sharing the results of a meta analysis of 113 projects that in some way shape or form sought to enable micro small and medium size enterprises to participate in legal timber production and trade. The findings draw from interviews with over 75 service providers beneficiaries and program staff, and a deep dive into the documents and deliverables associated with all of these projects. In this overview between 2016 and 2022 the flag team program distributed over 100 grants in 20 countries. 42% of the projects were in Africa, 30% were in Latin America and 27% were in Asia. All the projects in some way shape or form sought to support MSMEs to produce or trade legal timber products. For about five years of funding these projects, we sat down to look at what strategies had worked and didn't work and why. Next slide please. Thank you. We asked ourselves a lot of core questions. For example, many of our projects supported capacity building to help MSMEs achieve legal compliance, but what capacity building practices actually worked. We knew that strengthening associations was a critical avenue for supporting MSMEs, but what kind of strengthening yielded the best results. When we succeeded in helping MSMEs to formalize. Why did we succeed. And lastly, how can we design interventions to reach MSMEs at a larger scale. Excellent. So before we go further, we have to answer two questions and the first one, of course, is what do we mean by MSMEs, because after all here at file we are an agency that loves definitions. Well, simply put, for the purposes of this paper and this webinar today, we are using MSMEs as an umbrella term to refer to both small scale producers and processors of timber and timber products. And 1% of the projects we supported targeted producers, referring to the six types of producers you see on this slide. I would say that community forests and agroforestry cooperatives were the most common producer beneficiary that we supported. Next slide. Thank you. In the meantime, about 65% of projects targeted processors within a specific focus on artisanal chain saw millers and saw mills and primary processors. Some projects did support both producers and processors. And there are a few reasons why there is a slight bias towards supporting processors. I think that processors have a double challenge. They have to both source legal or sustainable raw materials, and they have to find a market for their legal or sustainable timber products, which means they sometimes need much more support than producers that are harvesting once a year or maybe once every few decades. Next slide. The second question answer is, why are we talking about legality? Because much MSME support work that FAU engages in is generally focused on the idea of that we want to improve the viability of livelihoods that both steward natural resources and provide a decent living. So you might be thinking that helping MSMEs to achieve legal compliance sounds like a very niche goal. I think it's often the most targeted type of intervention if you fundamentally believe that it's not worthwhile to fold MSMEs into systems or governance structures that aren't designed for them. But this brings me to finding number one of the study. Next slide, which is that achieving legal compliance is, in many cases, the first step towards addressing a number of challenges that MSMEs face. The first component of legal compliance is usually official business registration. This can increase an enterprise's resilience by providing access to credit, access to government support programs, access to the legal system. Our partners we spoke with cited the third and fourth points on this slide as the most important to them, which is that when you're legal, you're safer from having to make informal payments to government officials, and also you're safer from law enforcement operations. Next slide. Continuing with legality, our partners has also emphasized that being legal builds their credibility in a way that allows them to get a seat at the table. To join official dialogues or become members of roundtables or technical working groups. And ultimately to engage with government in a way that they listen. You see a quote from our partner Kiko Pobat and Cameroon, who sees that legality is necessary to be heard, and to be credible in front of other stakeholders. Next slide. And thirdly, legality is good for business. We found that it allows MSMEs to sign and negotiate contracts with better terms. It can protect them from canceled orders because they have all the documentation needed. And it can help them to stay ahead of the curve on future market trends that are increasingly demanding proof of legality or sustainability. Okay. So finding number two is that after we analyze all of the interventions that we supported, we realized that many of them interact with each other in a way that mirrors the way a tree is structured. And so with this realization we developed a framework for MSME support across three interlinked peers that mirror the cross section of a tree. I think many of us are foresters so please put on your forest hats. Number one is the heartwood in the center of the tree. And in this framework, the heartwood is our direct targeted support to MSMEs to ensure that they, like real heartwood, remain strong and function as the valuable economic core of the forestry sector. And surrounding the heartwood is the sapwood. In our framework, the sapwood refers to strengthening the institutions that support MSMEs so that they, like actual sapwood can channel resources where they are needed. And the external layer is the bark. Our bark is the creation of an enabling environment which protects MSMEs from external threats, disasters and shocks. The pillar includes certain types of project interventions. For example, for the bark, here stated as creating an enabling operating environment. We found that 27% of projects focused on addressing the regulatory framework, and 15% focused on fostering domestic market demand for MSME products. For the heartwood, 41% of interventions focused on strengthening private sector associations, and 21% specifically increased the capacity of non private sector stakeholders like government and civil society to support MSMEs. In the framework of our heartwood, 67% of projects focused on capacity building for legal compliance, and 32% work to integrate MSMEs into markets and supply chains. Now, this leads us to the third main finding, which is that most interventions struggled to be able to reach MSMEs at a larger scale. To crunch the numbers, we found that we were only able to train an average of 107 MSMEs per project. This is insufficient relative to the sheer scale of MSMEs that need and want training. And when we analyze all the different interventions that have been piloted by projects, we found a few that address the issue of both scale and being cost effective. These include number one, offering virtual open access trainings. Number two, offering options to certify legality at the jurisdictional level, meaning being able to certify large groups of MSMEs within an entire district or an entire province. Thirdly, training local institutions to provide long term supports because they are the ones who will remain in the landscape over the long term. And four, to focus on creating more demand for legal timber products through educating markets. We ran a number of very successful communications campaign based on the idea that when the market demand is more clear, then it provides more incentive for MSMEs and private sector actors to change their behavior. So now I'd like to be able to focus a little bit more in the detail. So we're going to illustrate some of our main findings through a case study speed round. In the next 20 minutes, you're going to hear four case studies where each of my colleagues is going to do a deep dive on a particular initiative they've backed out related to a number of key themes. So with that, I would like to call upon my colleague, Christiana Orlandy to present the case of Ghana and the best practices we discovered there for building capacity for legal compliance. Over to you Christiana. Erica, thank you everyone. Again, good morning, good afternoon, good evening, depending on where you are. And welcome to this webinar. So for the next five minutes or so I'm going to present to you the case of Kumasiwood cluster in Ghana. Why are we talking about Kumasiwood cluster because Kumasiwood cluster or KWC for short set the standards for capacity building support for MSMEs in the country. So, but before let me give you a brief introduction and background information about what Kumasiwood cluster is and why it was founded. So Kumasiwood cluster KWC was founded in the early 2000 with the as a result of a market development training, whereby six small and medium sized force enterprises decided to group together and join forces to support fellow MSMEs in the timber industry to overcome the issues and to be able to utilize the wood that was legally and sustainably produced and create new markets for the products. So, KWC started out as a six member organization, it now includes many more MSMEs and association, ranging from forest concession holders to primary and secondary wood producers and manufacturers, all committed to sustainable forest management and responsible forestry. Next slide please. Why was Kumasiwood cluster founded KWC was established to address several issues that the timber industry was confronted with in the early 2000. First of foremost fragmentation of MSMEs, which prevented the the actors along the timber supply chain to group together and achieve that critical mass that was needed in order to enter especially the export market and retain their position in the export market. There were also difficulties in accessing raw material, especially legally and sustainably produced wood. And a lack of representation among MSMEs which prevented small and medium sized forest enterprises to take part in participating in forest governance processes. And finally, most importantly, there was a recognized shortage of technical knowledge and expertise among the industry, which prevented them to achieve further efficiency gain and higher profitability and also enter new more rewarding markets. Next slide please. So, as a result of this analysis Kumasiwood cluster had devised a sort of standard best practice for capacity building to provide capacity building support for MSMEs. And they've been quite successful in implementing this approach this capacity building approach if we consider them more than 200 companies have been able as a result of this capacity building intervention to comply with the national requirements for legal and sustainable timber production. And this approach, these best practices of standard for capacity building of MSMEs, it revolves around five main, five main pillars or key components that I'm going to quickly present to you today. The first pillar is this emphasis on practical methods, practical application of theoretical training, because for Kumasiwood cluster was important that these MSMEs were able to fully internalize the concept provided and imparted through this technical training. They stress also the importance of practical application of this, of these trainings or this context, through field demonstration on site trainings, practical ends on exercises, more code it's which also included raising inclusive capacity corrective action requests so a lot of emphasis on ends on work. The second pillar of this approach included a careful, careful selection of trainees, because KWC was convinced that physical proximity among MSMEs would have enabled project that would have amplified project achievement, because it promotes cross organization and more opportunities for sharing information and lessons learned. So this is why when they selected the recipients of this capacity building intervention, they really choose companies that were within the, well, the physical proximity within the same cluster. And they also decided to focus on head of companies and business champions because they really wanted to work with people that were fully committed to this learning and growing process and there to stay. The third key component of this approach is kind of a no brainer, but the use of a local language meant that really a lot of operators and MSMEs were able to fully grasp the content of this capacity building intervention and technical training. And then another key components was this emphasis on follow up coaching, which meant that for KWC, it was not only important that these MSMEs fully acquire the technical knowledge through this capacity building intervention, but they were also able to retain this knowledge throughout the project duration and even beyond the lifetime of the project. This is why KWC made a point and asked their staff to fully committed a certain number of days throughout the project duration and after the project ends. Because they really wanted for them to check in with the companies that received the training to verify whether they were able to keep the same level of knowledge or to a certain whether there was a need for further follow up training or a fresh training. And finally, a key component of the approach included this issue of credibility. This was achieved by inviting governmental official to join the trainings as participant, but also as instructor, and this really put a stamp of further reliability and credibility of the KWC training program. Next slide please. So how has this approach to capacity building benefited MSMEs? For sure, by increasing the capacity of MSMEs to operate and advocate for policy changes and be more active within the forest governance space, MSMEs voices have been strengthened. Second point, by inviting governmental official to join these training programs, there was an opportunity to create a direct channel, an open channel of communication between MSMEs and government representative, which further enable collaboration. So much so that Kumasui cluster is now a member of the Ghana Forest Regal Mission Board, and is able to speak up for MSMEs also in that forum. And then this emphasis by by increasing the availability of long term extension services and support MSMEs at now access to for sure like tailor made capacity building solution and a provider of the solution. I have also access to a body of knowledge that is physically there for them to consult that has been produced throughout this all these capacity building intervention. So their their access to long term capacity building support has been announced. And finally, this logic of clustering has really enabled and foster trust and collaboration among MSMEs. By facilitating networking opportunities, but also promoting concrete establishment of business to business relationship among MSMEs. Next slide please. And we come to the final. So what can we learn from this case study. So capacity building is a long term process and require sustained change and sustained engagement. Therefore, if we want to, let's say, if we want to ensure that our capacity building intervention are sustainable in the long run, we need to invest in a local service provider, a local partner with a strong presence on the ground and connection with MSMEs and local institution, because we will have a vector that will allow us to further grasp the benefits of this long term support and capacity building support. Second point is that local solution works best to address local problems. Therefore, to have a local service provider, a local MSMEs association that is deeply entrenched within the local context and understand from within what are the capacity gaps and the knowledge requirement of these MSMEs and can provide customized solution is definitely better than any external adopt solution that a project can bring forward. So investing this local provider of customized capacity building solution. And finally, when we talk about capacity building, we are really talking about adoption of new practices that eventually will bring about transformative change. What is essential to this adoption of new practices is trust and trust comes with reliability and is built over time. Therefore, to have a local partner that makes itself available, not only during the project duration but also after the project ends through in repetitive occasion, it really builds that trust is the core pillar upon which this trust is built and is therefore key to ensure successful long term capacity building efforts. With this I conclude and I'll pass the floor. Sorry if I was too long. I'll pass the floor to my colleague Naidu for the next case study. Thank you. Good morning everyone. Again, I am going to present the case of Ferre Maderas in Colombia. Next slide please. Ferre Maderas is a strong girl with action at the national level with more than 700 associates, including forestry local communities, furniture and timber industries. Ferre Maderas has been developing action for its associates for more than 15 years. It has also been very good at executing resources and is an excellent partner for developing joint actions with the government and private forestry sector in Colombia. It is also recognized by the national government as a serious organization and it provides input for new policies and new regulation on forestry. The experience with Ferre Maderas influence for support to other associations, with Faisan, Apopros, Indomash and others. Next please. How does strengthening associations enable MSMEs to participate in legal timber production and trade? With Ferre Maderas by increasing capacity to support MSMEs and it serve as an example to another associations to strengthen their capacity to support MSMEs such as Apopros. The Productive and Sustainable Forestry Association with 135 members working in micro and SMI small enterprises in Bogota. This organization improved their capacities in implementing resources. In 2021, Apopros implemented the project strengthening the legality of the timber forestry chain in the city of Bogota. One of the key results for this project was that 70 of the partners were supporting to register their book of operation with the environmental authority. Next please. How does strengthening associations enable MSMEs to participate in legal timber production and trade? With Ferre Maderas by increasing capacity for MSMEs and it serve as an example of the association to strengthen their capacity to support MSMEs such as Apopros. Sorry. How did MSMEs benefit from Ferre Maderas work? From with Ferre Maderas confirms that the strengthening of association promotes the development of the forestry sector joining efforts to achieve better results. Exchanges of experience between Ferre Maderas with Peru and Guatemala managed to improve the capacities of small companies on issues of associations. Inventories and gender in the forestry industry. Training was conducted in person and via webinar at the time of pandemic. Under the leaderships of Ferre Maderas, the Ministry of Agriculture, the Ministry of Environment, the European Union and FAO created a wellness campaign on legal and sustainable timber for the general public. Build boards at both stops were located asking the question, do you know where the timber you use comes from? By influencing a smaller association such as Red Fire Sun, a Ferre Maderas member, Red Fire Sun, a luteer guitar maker association that demands timber for the music industry. We also serve a bridge to bring Red Fire Sun closer to the Juno-Mangi community and Afrodiscent community that implements the community forestry model in the territory. With these approaches, we achieve purchase and sale of legal and sustainable timber with fair price for both parties and without any intermediaries. New partnerships were also created. Carpenters of the city of Kipdo in Dumaj, an association with companies operating for more than 20 years, was created to strengthen administrative organization practices, compliance with labor law issues and registration of its book of operation with the environmental authority. In conclusion, FAO's work with federations such as Ferre Maderas can generate reliable resource and greater impact. Continued support by Ferre Maderas and FAO without being present. A federation can work with members and non-members and inspire creation of new association. Next please. Thank you very much. Thank you Nadu for this presentation on Columbia. So far we have seen that trainings are not just about curriculum development and delivering trainings, they're also about the way training and capacity building is organized as we saw in Ghana. Now we also saw that the case of Columbia where we see that paying attention to federation and the special role they can play at national level can be also very beneficial to smaller associations. So we need to pay attention to the different levels and the subsidiarity between the different roles that associations and federations can play. In this case we are looking at Vietnam and this is about services provided by an association and are related to IT services. I will illustrate some of the support we've provided to Haua, the handicraft and wood industry association of Ho Chi Minh City. So located primarily covering membership in the side of Vietnam where a lot of the wood industry is located, at least the export oriented wood industry. So they have about over 600 members, 50% of which are MSMEs as defined by Vietnamese law of course this varies from country to country. But these SMEs also buy from many smaller companies that are not per se members of Haua. So the impact or the trickle down numbers are much bigger than the 600 hour members. So this membership 600 company membership accounts for 60% of Vietnam's total annual wood export. And as you probably know Vietnam is one of the most important wood processing hubs in the world with a turnover annual turnover of over 2 billion US dollars. Now the key services provided by Haua so far where the organization of trade fairs and to boost market access and to transfer technology to improve competitiveness and efficiency of the industry. These were the traditional Haua services so far. Next slide please. But increasingly with Vietnam negotiating a VPA and and and trying to boost its export. Vietnam had a problem with its domestic wood supply. A lot of it is originates from small holders. A lot of small holder plantations and it's often of unknown origin and the documentation of the sources but also the intermediary products bought by Haua members were not well documented and sometimes of unknown origin. This is problematic for the Haua members who are export oriented because it's difficult to provide the information or the evidence of timber legality when they export and it's quite a substantial amount. The result is that many companies in Vietnam started importing timber from developed countries. So that of course was not so efficient. So Haua decided to improve domestic supplies or the documentation around domestic supplies. This of course I mean the lack of documentation of the domestic wood supply affected their ability to access these auto to increase access to these international markets. They also realized that the Haua membership was not well prepared compared to what was the commitment under the VPA between the EU and Vietnam requiring legality and full documentation of timber supply. Next slide please. So the solution that Haua came up with is an IT based solution but not just IT, not just the software but services related to this software or platform. They call it the Haua due diligence system or Haua DDS. This is an association level electronic due diligence support platform to improve the availability and reliability of supply chain documentation. So this is a new service that they have developed for their members. This is a rather complex platform but in a nutshell, it includes a legal timber source database, which allows to document this domestic plantation timber sector, and it has within the registration module of the Haua DDS. It provides a legal standard document list which farmers or plantation owners can use to document a reference list to document the legality of their timber. It's also a mechanism for Haua due diligence support and risk assessment. So behind the platform there are a number of Haua staff who assess risk because there remains some level of risk and it's not just domestic, it's also imported timber. So they flag risks and they inform Haua members of risk they didn't have to deal with and even certification services, verification services are offered through the Haua DDS platform. Everything is regulated through a set of standards, DDS standards for the different transactions, responsibilities and services within the platform. And of course, the key element of the whole service is this actual platform that is accessible to as much as you need to the different users, it's secure, the data is secure, and it's also reliable, it's very impossible to change the information as you go. There are currently 100 members registered up and down, not just members, suppliers and clients registered through the DDS platform. Next slide please. So how does this benefit MSMEs? There are of course Haua DDS members who are SMEs, but there are many downstream MSMEs supplying raw materials and semi-finished or finished products to Haua DDS members. So these people can also register under the platform and in many cases these MSMEs don't have the staff or the IT equipment or knowledge to process all this information or make it available. So being able to access or to participate in an IT platform and benefit from these services is something that is beneficial to MSMEs, they don't have to do it themselves. They can, and in the case of suppliers, they don't pay, the members pay for the maintenance of the platform, so the suppliers don't pay. So it reduces the burden on the MSMEs, no, because they don't have the staff time. So, as I mentioned, the standard document set that is provided by the platform helps compliance. A lot of people, a lot of suppliers are informal. So to have a set of documents to be provided helps farmers to formalize their production and to participate in these supply chains. For the Haua members, it facilitates the sourcing, some of which are MSMEs, it facilitates the sourcing of domestic wood supply and processed products by some of the larger, or leading to the larger export-oriented businesses. Again, it helps formalize the MSMEs, improve their VPA, thermal legality assurance system compliance for when the systems become compulsory under the VPA process. That in turn increases their capacity and their chances to participate, not maybe directly access international markets, but participate in these supply chains. Next slide, please. So what can we learn from this case study? A technology platform, and in this case, it's support to due diligence or to information gathering and processing and forwarding information to clients. This is not so much about a trading platform, even though it's related to trading. But with this service, you can reach enterprises at scale, because you make it available to so many MSMEs and producers. Of course, these things take, and it took time to develop and secure the update from the participation of the private sector. It's a long-term and relatively expensive, not compared to the overall turnover of the industry, but still, from an FAO perspective, it's quite an investment both in time and resources. So what we also saw is that the private sector is keen and able to adapt to new market requirements and is capable of auto-regulation. So it means in this case it's the association itself that took the initiative in anticipation of what would be required under the legal or the compulsory timber legality assurance systems coming in Vietnam. So this initiative also illustrated that it's important to facilitate the ability and the willingness, and this platform helped with this, of course, of larger businesses to support their suppliers, especially these small holders and producers. So this platform provided the ability and of larger companies to bring in to support their own suppliers and MSMEs. I think this is the main points I wanted to make. Thank you. Thank you. So I'm conscious of time, so I'll try and keep this quite tight. I'm going to just give a quick overview of the toolkit and training, toolkit of training and support materials for forest sector MSMEs, which is a repository of materials produced by our partners supporting forest sector MSMEs from across Africa, Asia and Latin America. The idea for the toolkit emerged during the program's experience capitalization process where it was realized that the products and documents produced by our partners could be useful to other stakeholders working on similar issues in other countries and regions. I'm strongly aware that many times these products are produced by our partners and end up in annexes to reports and not used beyond the scope of the project and we wanted to do something about that. As such, the toolkit serves as an information point for projects supporting forest sector MSMEs offering a source of templates and lessons which can be carried forward into future MSME focused project programming. The toolkit was established in collaboration with the European Union's capacity capacity for dev platform, which is a global knowledge sharing platform for development professionals and stakeholders governments civil society NGOs international organizations and the private sector. So what's in the toolkit, the tool kits divided into six sections based on the type of products, those being association specific materials, audio visual materials, communication materials, guides, studies and training materials. The toolkit currently hosts 63 documents from across five language in five languages from across Asia, Africa and Latin America, and then includes forest management guides, gender mainstreaming manuals and timber traceability training modules. The commissioning toolkit was selected based on both their quality and their potential usefulness to others. The latter was an important distinction, as well as some of the products that were produced were of high quality they were very context specific. We didn't want to create a space where everything and anything was dumped, so to speak, and rather we want to ensure that there was a carefully curated selection, providing maximum value to the user. So it's been a strong response to the platform. Since it was established, the materials have been downloaded, downloaded over 5600 times, each averaging 90 downloads. The most popular items have been from the studies and training materials section. The capacity for development has also been extremely supportive of the initiative sharing information about the toolkit on their homepage and on the homepage of their site and through various social media channels on multiple occasions and this helped the materials reach new audiences from across the broader development world. To ensure we can intend on continually identifying new materials that can be shared through the toolkit and using knowledge sharing platforms to promote the work conducted by our partners, all of whom have shown a great appreciation for the additional visibility offered. I'll now hand you back to Erica for the second part half of her presentation. Thank you. Thank you very much Tom. So so far, we've heard some general findings, we've heard some detailed case studies, and now comes the part of the webinar where we're going to have an honest look at what worked and what didn't work. After this is going to come the Q&A session. It's going to be a bit shorter than anticipated because some of the presentations have run over time. We're all entirely encouraged during this presentation to start typing some questions into the chat box so that when it's done, you can dive straight into the Q&A. So, next slide to start. Here's an honest assessment of 10 things that did not go well over the past six years and 113 projects. We've divided them into operational points, common sense and technical points. On the technical side, you'll see a theme start to emerge, and the theme is sustainability of results. Because we found that even when projects had very good results, like forming a new business partnership, like developing a new IT tool, or establishing a new association. It was difficult to sustain these results in the long term, mostly due to a lack of financial resources amongst our service providers. So, many of these points will reemerged in the next few slides. As we looked at what worked and didn't work across the six experience capitalizations themes related to the core research questions that I shared earlier in the presentation. We're going to start with the first theme, which is capacity building and formalization, which was, as you saw, the most common type of intervention. Next slide. Here is what worked. You heard from Christiana about best practices for effective capacity building. But to build on that, a bigger lesson that we learned is that what works is offering a training package that simultaneously improves business skills and legal compliance, because these two elements mutually reinforce each other. We found that improving business skills can catalyze changes in thinking patterns, because when MSMEs open up to think about changing their business to be more effective, more cost efficient. Then they start to become more receptive to ideas that they had previously dismissed, such as taking on all of the paperwork associated with formalizing. And then when MSMEs do achieve legal compliance, several beneficiaries told us that it improved their feeling of self-worth and made them think about taking their own business more seriously and thinking about it as something that can become more than just a household business, something that can grow to become national and contribute to global sustainable development goals. And that's what worked. What didn't work with capacity building was simply evaluation and follow-up. And this is extremely important because it takes time for MSMEs to adopt and accept new practices. And we would have loved to be able to present statistics for you all about the number of MSMEs that formalize or achieve full legal compliance. But simply put, this was very difficult to monitor. So we recommend for future MSME support work that sufficient resources are allocated for training follow-up and long-term monitoring. We recommend that backstopping officers work closely to design effective evaluation instruments. And we recommend that when you have the opportunity to have a phase two or a phase three with a service provider, that these projects go back to monitor the results of previous phases. Dashing forward to the next topic. Next is what worked and what didn't work with facilitating market access and integrating MSMEs into supply chains. We found at the beginning of our phase three that most projects adopted what we call an old generation of strategies for integrating MSMEs into supply chains. Namely, they would either post a business network event, they would painstakingly mediate a contract between MSMEs and a company, or they would three conduct trainings on how to reach markets. We found in general that these interventions were time intensive, and they did not always have guaranteed outcomes. And when we did have successful outcomes, like in negotiating partnerships between MSMEs and large companies, these often turned out to be one-off transactions. Meaning the business of the trade, like the purchase of timber, sale timber only happened once, and it did not lead to a long-term business relationship. This is for a number of reasons, which generally all boil down to a lack of infrastructure and incentives on both sides to create a healthy business partnership. Towards the end of phase three, projects started recognizing the limitations of the old generation, and instead focused on creating conditions for the private sector to make their own business arrangements. And this has given rise to what we call a new generation of solutions, such as forming cooperatives to achieve scale and making purchases themselves. Through launching e-commerce platforms, our program supported the launch of about eight e-commerce platforms in Africa, Latin America, and Asia. And also with exploring the feasibility for establishing legal timber depots or log yards to make it easier for people to access legal raw materials. These new students in general are still a bit too new to be completely evaluated as successful, but they share a common theme, which is cutting out the middleman. So we anticipate that they will have some benefit for MSMEs simply by virtue of cutting out the middleman. Next, we're going to look at the regulatory environment. It is generally common knowledge that regulatory environments tend to disadvantage MSMEs and revising regulatory frameworks seems like a good way to reach millions of MSMEs at scale. So what we wanted to see were projects delivering wins in a number of priority areas, through helping to negotiate more favorable tax regimes, through improving access to credit and loans. And also identifying business registration processes, through reducing permitting fees, things like that. But what we actually saw was that only 45% of the projects that focused on improving the regulatory environment were successful. This is less than half. Most of the results to this day even are still in process. That when projects were successful, it was usually because one of three factors was present. The first factor is that the reform process was led by a government or partners that had been deeply involved in pursuing a particular reform for a long period of time. The second is when the policy change was pursued at lower jurisdictional levels, such as at the provincial or municipal level. The third is when a window of opportunity for reform opened. When we say window of opportunity, we refer to when there is sudden unexpected political momentum to undertake a regulatory change. And when this happens, several of our partners were able to take advantage of the momentum by contributing inputs and experiences they had gained from previous projects. Well, we noticed that many projects didn't even attempt to pursue regulatory reform but instead chose to design customized tools and mechanisms to help MSMEs comply with existing legal framework requirements. Developing tools in general we found to be a bit more effective because they are generally custom designed for local challenges, and they can be reliably developed and rolled out in the course of a project. So let's look at our work in strengthening associations. We interviewed many associations to find out from their perspective what strengthening measures had the most impact for them, and which strengthening measures they still needed. Associations overwhelmingly said that they benefited the most from being able to implement projects and showcase that they had a partnership with FAL that enhanced their credibility with government and with their members. They also valued having resources to communicate with their members, which enabled them to better understand their member concerns and represent them better. They benefited from developing project management skills because for some associations, the work that they had with our program was the first time they had ever implemented a donor funded project. What didn't work was mostly financial sustainability. Many new associations and federations at the end of their project still had no means of assuring long term financial sustainability for their continued operations. And this is after we had supported them to develop business plans and to develop amazing tools that they could use to develop fee for service models. The issue is that associations that have high MSME membership sometimes are less able to collect member dues or payments for services, and this leaves them more financially vulnerable in the long term. Moving on to a bit more positive, we'll look again at scaling up and the main takeaway of how to scale up effectively is to build what we've decided to call an ecosystem of support. What do we mean by an ecosystem of support? If you remember my colleague Christiana's presentation, she described to you in Ghana a scenario in which governments and civil society were attending trainings of observers. And in the process, these trainings actually wound up building the capacity of government and civil society that they were able to use in their own work. And at the same time, having government and civil society at the trainings enhance the overall credibility of the training. So in other words, we find that involving a multiplicity of actors and MSME support work can create interaction effects that synergize each other with each other, and create this supportive ecosystem in which everything is more than just the sum of its parts. This is especially important because 60% of all the projects we looked at were not implemented by the private sector. This shows that engaging CSOs, academia and government in MSME support activities does have knock on benefits for when they engage MSMEs in other work. It builds the technical knowledge of CSOs to better understand the private sector. It improves government awareness of MSME challenges, which can make them more receptive to working to address these challenges. And ultimately it supports the scalability and sustainability of MSME support by engaging actors who will remain in the landscape beyond a project's given lifetime. I want to close now as a final message. We asked one of our most successful service providers, Absi and Cote d'Ivoire, who was able to train over 1200 MSMEs in a single project. We asked them to give us their advice on what kind of MSME support will be needed in the future. And their message was simply to stay the course. They said, we must build on strategies that have been developed and continue with good technical support, substantial funding and strong motivation. So from this we take that continuity is critical. And even when change is slow, it's continuity and staying the course that can help to deliver the results that we're working towards. I'm going to close here and hand over to my colleague Daniele to facilitate a few minutes of question and answer session. So over to you, Daniele. Thank you, Erica, and thank you all for sharing this presentation and your experience on supporting MSMEs. That's what's very, very interesting. I noticed that there are no pending questions in the chat box so please if you have any questions do not hesitate to write them in the box. In the meantime, I will will pose a couple of general questions to our presenters. The first question is the presentation of paper contain a lot of different strategies for intervention. But are there any any particular strategy that should be should be pursued first when working to support MSMEs in a given in a given context. I don't know who would like to reply to to reply this question. Erica. I just want to provide an initial answer and then I welcome my colleagues to jump in with their own experience. I think that this is entirely context dependent on the country but a very safe bet is that whatever intervention is designed first. It should be something that is developed together with the MSMEs, because we find that when you're starting a partnership with MSMEs for the first time. One of the most important things you need to do is build credibility and trust, and this takes time. This is one reason why many projects we support begin with awareness raising and training, because they're just trying to earn the trust of the MSMEs so they can continue to work with them later and develop more sophisticated solutions in the long term. One of the ways to earn the trust quite quickly is to talk to MSMEs about what they need and then just start with that. Thank you, Erica for explaining that anybody else would like to add something on this subject. Yes, Bruno please. The floor is yours. Yes, I think in terms of reaching out to MSMEs and reaching them reaching out at scale. And I think it's linked to this financial sustainability that projects like ours would need to look at the services that these nascent associations or cooperative provide. Because that is what is going to make the association grows, the quality of these services beyond representing members, quality of services and responding to the needs of the MSMEs that are members of these associations. That builds this trust, builds a need for these services and builds the potential for members to pay or being willing to pay for these services. And this is how these associations grow. Thanks. Thank you very much Bruno. Anybody have something else to add? If not, I will move to the next question, which concerns the value of legal compliance. This was the presentation provided a detailed overview of the value of legal compliance, but it ultimately did not explain what factors motivate MSMEs to formalize. Can you please elaborate a little bit more on this? Thank you. Who would like to reply to this question? I can take a first stab and then again colleagues are welcome to jump in. There are a number of factors that motivate MSMEs to formalize every single case is different. I would say that when we interviewed MSMEs, a big factor for them is that they just wanted freedom from the informal payment structures that they're trapped in because when you're informal, sometimes you can't move product unless you're making informal payments at various types of road stops and markets. And so when you explain to them that formalizing will free them from that, it's a big force of motivation. But ultimately, I think that one of the most important things we can do is just to improve and simplify the process for formalizing. We had a few projects in Latin America that were very successful in registering companies. And all they did was, when they had trainings, they brought the government official responsible for business representation registration to the trainings. So that people could just do the paperwork on the spot. And the government official responsible for checking their paperwork was there to help them and just get it done. So I would recommend this is being a key way to help MSMEs to formalize is to just make it as easy as possible. And when you're going to see them in the field bring the paperwork with that they need to do to save them a trip to the capital. Thank you very much, Erica. Anybody else would like, yes, please Bruno. Go ahead. Yes, I hope I heard the question correctly, but to help MSMEs or producers to formalize. So I would recommend a legal reform and sometimes there can be this reform can be very impactful. And I have long reaching consequences for formalization. For example, in Thailand, there was a dating back from the timber exploitation from natural forest where a certain amount of species were restricted. And it requires, I think I seem to remember 17 steps of registration and permits from harvesting to marketing of these species, including teak, which is a very common plantation species on private land in Thailand. So this reform that we supported through the VPA process, what moved from a situation where they had to do 17 steps to a situation where there was the move towards self declaration of timber produced on private land. So that is a way to formalize or to help formalize things that would have happened under the radar, so that people find it easier to register and to sell their timber simply because the requirements are simplified. And that formalizes. Nothing changes in reality is the law that adapts to the needs of the farmers. Thank you very much Bruno. I do not see that there are other pending questions but unfortunately we are very close to the end of the webinar so it's okay for you I will close the Q&A session now, and I will give the floor to Gerardo Segura for the closing remarks. Gerardo please, the floor is yours. Thank you for inviting me and it's been a pleasure to be a part of this process because I think I provided comments previously but this is a very important piece of work, not only because this is one of the first attempts to try to understand how small organizations, small companies, SMSEs work and what they need and where they are and all that when it comes to compliance and when it comes to engaging with markets. So I think the lessons that you provide, the cases that you highlight are all very enlightening. And I think this needs to be disseminated as much as we can. But let me just give you some quick reflections. Yes, MSMEs are critical and they will become more critical for the growing demand of timber. But they are also the weakest of all actors in their capacities to manage resources sustainably and to comply with laws and regulations. I'm talking where we know we're talking about the poor or we're talking about the most remote communities that are in the middle of this wonderful resource that they cannot really benefit from it. And the choice that they have as we know is to convert that to other uses and to the pleat, you know, step by step, the natural forests or other already affected ecosystems. So my major concern is, you know, we're only starting to address the tip of the iceberg. I mean, we owe to this, you know, world of remote indigenous poor marginalized actors to try to benefit from all of this too. And that's the biggest challenge that we have, I think.  But, you know, that's only possible in countries that are more advanced, I would say in middle income countries, not really in poor countries that, you know, where many of these areas are like in Africa or maybe central South Africa and other parts of Asia and Latin America. So it's, you know, that is a concern. And of course, you guys are not obliged to respond to all of these challenges, but I would, you know, I was thinking of three main issues that are very relevant in this work. One is the issue of scale and we've been talking about that all the time, you know, scale is critical. You know, small, small communities can, you know, either rich or poor cannot afford or are going to have a struggle in affording to pay for being legal in a way. You have to find ways to help communities to approach legality by precisely by trying to resolve this issue of scale.  The strengthening associations in Honduras. I mean, the, check the FECA for, you know, also it's working with, with small cooperatives, you know, FECA for is, it's a very, I've been to some of these areas in Honduras and it's just amazing what they can do when when they work together so. But, you know, these are small, these are together close. This doesn't happen when you move into the forest, and it's mainly agroforestry crops or ag crops that can make it because they're close there, they're, you know, they have very sort of more approachable issues to deal with. Okay, so the other, the other important issue, you know, one is scale, the other one, I think it's, it's.  To do in one, in one sense you need to, to, you know, approach things with an economy of scale to move to a larger scale to larger landscape, but you need to keep the issues local. I mean, you need to understand what is happening local, what are the problems, what are the, you know, the, the, the factors that are affecting legality or legality locally and you can only do that when you are there.  You know, the third issue is the issue of cost, I mean cost, you know, as I was saying, you know, legal work is always going to be more expensive than illegal work, no matter what you do. So we have to recognize that and we have to find ways to. If you want to call it, you know, subsidize this because if we don't do it illegal is always going to to cut the market and it's, it's, it's, you know, the nature of markets that dictate this. Okay, so those are my three major concerns observations, things that I would like to highlight. But then when talking about moving ahead. I have to two main issues that I would like to to present to you one is your proposition of networking of harmonizing of reaching out to other sectors. I think that's crucial. I mean we need to work together with other initiatives with other. donors and organizations and local governments, national governments into trying to learn from each other, because there are many initiatives, you know, certification like FSC certification or, I don't know how many charcoal this and that, no timber, no timber. I think we can learn from and partner with and work together in the landscape in the field in there. So that's challenging. It's not easy to work across sectors and, but it's something that sounds very promising in terms of what we can expect. And in this sense, your concept of ecosystem of support is very attractive as a concept is very attractive. But achieving an ecosystem of support in a requires a lot of negotiations dialogue with other sectors and with other stakeholders. So it's challenging but it's, it's very important. And then the other final point that I wanted to make is, is what I call the spillover effect, which you, you know, it's one of the things that I was exciting about the report that talks about this the pull out or the pool, you know, you know, the power that investing in one effort could benefit others that are not necessarily certified or that are working towards certification or recognition or legality by, you know, basically. So, but this means working with governments and this means working with the policy makers and Congress and all of that and that is also challenging. So, to try to, to engage with governments, I think it's important to think of, I mean, recognizing that we're working with very marginalized actors that are moving in the legal world. They're not legal and we need to recognize that, because they can afford to be cannot afford to be legal so we need to do something to make legality more affordable for them.  So, you know, a stepwise approach of, you know, like in FSC certification, for example, that you, you, you are in a track to, to be certified but you know, there are steps that you need to follow and that will be, you know, probably an option to put work here too. The other issue that you discuss is avoiding over regulation over regulation kills. Many of this initiatives, many of these communities just can't afford, you know, and also linked to the economies of scale, you know, if every small community is going to have to do a management plan and invest in this and that and it's just not possible. It has to do again with scale and regulations need to be very careful not to, you know, not to affect the small, right. And this, you know, also leads me into talking about preventing or fighting corruption because, you know, I was, I was telling a story from Mexico, I'm from Mexico and in in the 80s and 90s. The African government, you know, invested a lot of time in paying communities to get certified FSC certified so we, you know, in five years we had a million hectares certified. It was amazing, you know, communities were, you know, willing to do anything to get recognized and to be certified but what happened is that the government that had financed that in one branch of the government. There was another branch of the world and there was not recognizing certification to, you know, give advantages to, to those communities that have been certified in in not, you know, having to go through all the, you know, holes of bureaucracy. So it was very frustrating that, you know, these communities had to go through the government bureaucracy to, to, you know, have like a double certification. And that was, you know, it was killing everything that killed basically a lot of these efforts. So, and I linked these to corruption because, you know, the government did, you know, need the government works with, you know, under the table fees for building management plans and cutting cycles and whatever so when you certified a community with FSC standards then that becomes a community that you cannot break in. So, that's a problem. And then finally, and in the case of, of Columbia, and a view is very interesting how can you also tackle the thing from the consumer side. I was when I was looking at the posters in Bogota, you know, protect the tiger or the the job where by not buying legal paper. I mean, that's a very powerful message for, you know, at least for middle class people that that kind of for to to buy their furniture to buy what so I think that that is a very powerful. Also, on the other side, full full factor that can can help. Congratulations. And thank you for the opportunity again. This is what I know. Thanks for your words. And thank you all to all the participants for joining our event today and to our speakers for dedicating their time and knowledge to the event. As I mentioned, the recording will be sent to all the participants in the next couple of days, along with responses to any of the questions that we didn't get to. Once again, on behalf of the FOWE you flex program. Thank you for joining us.