So, actually, I'm not sure if I've talked about Plasma in the past, at least Plasma specifically. Well, let me introduce myself first. My name is Aleish Paul. My description is much more different than before.  Well, that's my email. I'm on the KTV board. I've been developing KDE for over 10 years. I put over 10 years here, but it's actually 12. I'm starting to feel old, or starting. And I'm employed by Plasma. Actually, my realization that I'm starting to feel old was that not only I've been for 10 years a KDE developer, but I've been more than half working for Plasma Systems, which is a weird milestone in my life. Anyhow, I develop things. And actually, the project I'm going to talk about here has been something I've been doing for Blue Systems specifically. Like, I do KDE stuff on my own time as well. All right, so I'm going to talk here. Well, first of all, I'm going to talk about what I did for Blue Systems, but it's not only me being working on this. Actually, not only in Blue Systems and not only in KDE. There's several people who have been worried about performance in the past. It's a recurring subject for software engineer, I guess. And well, I'm going to talk a bit about where we come from, the tools I've been using because, well, talking to you guys about a success story, I mean, it's kind of a nice hard feeling, but it's not that interesting, maybe. So we'll be talking about the tools we used in case you want to optimize something. And we will end up talking a bit about the stage we're in now and where to go from here. For me, I didn't really look at that Plasma startup ever. Like I said a bit earlier, or maybe hinted at, I wasn't that much of a Plasma developer until this thing came into the official woohooer of, until this device came into, well, I would say my hands, but actually it would be my boss's hands. They talked about it before on the other talk, basically, well, because they're coworkers, so they had the same problem. And also, it's a very interesting product, right? Like I said, it's a very cheap laptop, and well, we do a lot of, have a lot of laptop users. And well, in general, you develop on, I mean, this laptop is probably 2,000 euros. I cannot extrapolate every experience I have with my laptop to what other people, other users are going to have, right? For example, I remember, I am not hearing that much anymore, but some time ago, you would get these people coming with a spinning disk on their system and saying, well, something takes a really long time to start. And yeah, I mean, my laptop cannot reproduce that. And I wouldn't, I don't know, get a super old computer to do that. Maybe that would have been the nice thing to do. In any case, the big problem with this device was that, well, IO was super slow. Actually, it was even slower for us, because since we needed to iterate on the device, we were testing mostly from the SD card, which actually wasn't that much slower than the internal disk on the device, because the internal disk of the device is also really slow. But it was quite slow, super slow. Definitely much slower than any other laptop. So the profiling we did, the improvements we did, probably were only seen mostly on the IO part. Actually, that other laptop, it was, or is, dual core and several gigabytes of RAM already. So I mean, it's decent hardware. It's just that it took a long trip to just get things from the operating system and back, right? One thing, for example, we started looking at was K-Package. K-Package, you will know that Plasma has been using, it's a framework that we use for having small plugins that people contribute. Maybe old Plasmoids, for example, come from K-Package, but it's not only that. There's several pieces of our architecture that will be using it. And for example, we found in this case that we were reading some of the metadata files several times. And like I said, reading from this was super slow. So while cutting down on that was a huge advantage. In this laptop or the laptop I had back then while reading, I mean, it obviously is slower, right? But it's very different if it's a slowdown of 1 millisecond or 100 milliseconds when your laptop is doing things super, super quickly. What we did there was making sure that we don't read too often. We don't write too often because when we write, we have to read again because, well, it's desktop files. We have another problem with K-Package, which is that it doesn't depend on K-Config because it's a tier one package. In K-Config, we have the good desktop file puzzle. It relies on a bad K-Config puzzle we have in another framework, which is slightly slower. So we actually started converting these metadata files into JSON, which is actually what we're using for the rest of KID plugins that we have all over KID. So we will see that if you have K-Packages, which we're installing right now, the desktop files and the JSON files is actually because of that. And if, well, just make sure that you're installing the metadata JSON file for your systems because it will help a lot the loading, although it's not technically necessary. We fall back into desktop file if it's not available. Something also started looking, which is what's a Star KID. Star KID is a script, or was a script, actually, from, well, back in March 1999, which is a long ago. And it grew all over the years slowly, but slowly. When we started looking at this, it wasn't super old only. But it also was, yeah, somebody forked it at some point because we started working on Weyland. And I mean, adding ifs, especially in Bash, was boring. So it was much easier to duplicate all of the code. So I mean, that's what we end up finding. Here, I moved something. I'm missing something in my slides. Ah, oh, it was, all right, well, whatever. I had the, yeah, spoiler alert, right? All right, let me see if I can, no, oh, for fuck's sake. Well, I fished the URL where somebody started it in SVN. Actually, I think that it's not even the first version. It's just the first version I could find because it was coming from CVS, like even longer ago. Can I add a new tab? Oh, it's in the wrong screen. Well, this is the first StarCaddy I could find. Can you read anything? Well, what it was doing back then was doing some K-Control in it, starting an audio server, starting a WindowManager sound, WM sound. I don't know what would that be. Then it had a slip, which was forked because there's an ampersand in the end, but it was still a slip, and it was launching the KFM, which was the KD file manager, which is what we use back then as what we use right now as Plasma Shell, and then the K-Panel, which was a different process. You can see it there. Well, that's a script that evolved into weird Frankenstein over Monster, over like, well, 20 years essentially, even even even forked. Basically there, my task ended up being, back when we were doing the, when we were doing the Pinebook was making sure that, I mean, it was like super long script, setting a lot of environment variables, launching processes, checking the result of the launch process. Obviously, like, all of these calls, since it's batch, it needs to wait for the, well, first start the other process, which would, one would think it's fast, and actually it's fast, but I mean, it's not as fast as just sending something to the processor like we do in C++, for example, right? It needs to, well, load a bunch of libraries and make sure that things happen. Then it was doing a lot of that. What we did that time was add a bunch of ampersons, for example, on things that we needed to make sure that they were launched some point, but, well, not necessarily, not necessarily, we didn't need to know if it had succeeded or so, whoa. Then we also looked at Clazy. I don't know if it's a tool you've looked at, but it's super useful to make sure that, well, we're making the best use of Qt that we want, it has a bunch of plugins that we will check whether something could be done better. It's a Clang plugin, so it uses all of the knowledge that Clang has about our source code, which is actually like much more than ourselves.   We did a lot of, well, like I was saying before, making sure that we don't read too many files. One thing we do, which is very powerful in KT config, every time that you open a config file, it will fall back to KT globals file that may be installed by your system provider or by yourself, there are some global variables that will override the values that the user is getting. This makes a lot of sense in many cases, and it's very powerful, but there are some other cases where we're just using KT config to read a specific file and we don't need to check globals or check something else. Every time that we load the KT globals file, we'll have to actually read an actual file in the file system and we'll see the values, put them on a map. This is not, I mean, it's cheap, but it's not for free. So if we can save that, well, that was quite useful, especially on a device where the IO and the disk IO specifically was low, and like I said, sync. Like you will imagine there were a lot of cases where experiments that say this improves a lot, but then they didn't end up in production. Well, one thing that I tried that actually we never ended up merging in the end was having the KT globals file always loaded in the background in KT config, and actually this had some, like we could have proved that it was better, but then we would have had to make sure that the cast information was up to date all the time and I mean this had some kind of complexity which would have mean more code than possibly things not working. So we didn't go there, maybe we will want to go there. But in general, if you see these kind of things, well, consider if it's worth it or not and well, do it.  And what you do when you're using these formats is basically starting to read several files that are inside, you will have the metadata, but then usually some QML file inside or JavaScript or whatever. And something that we found that in this specific case improved performance was putting, well, those packages in separate RCC files. For those of you who don't know RCC files, they're kind of like a zip file that is more or less transparently integrated with Qt, so you can tell Qt just load this RCC file and then use it transparently. This was an improvement and actually at the moment you can tell K package when you created to create an RCC file instead of just installing all of the files, just something that you have to obtain on because I think that it had some kind of regression on some platforms, but for example, on the Pinebook it was definitely better. This whole Pinebook thing happened, I think it was late 2017, maybe 2019, like I said, I'm getting old, so what do I know? But in May 2019, we had a whole new effort into improving startup for Plasma, coming from a whole different context, it wasn't because Pine or anything like that, there's a company interested in Plasma who said this is too slow and I don't like it, here's money, Mr. Blue Systems, and Mr. Blue Systems said, yeah, sure. So, and since I had been working on it kind of while I started working on startup again, well, yeah, me too. And well, first of all, this time, what I did was create the script, if you're curious, you can take a look at it. Basically what it does is it compiles a tool that comes from SystemD equals, SystemD boot chart, which basically tracks all of the startup chronogram and presents it to you in an SVG file. It does a couple of other things, like installing a file that you can use from SDDM afterwards that will let you choose to start with this thing. And it will help you profile the Plasma startup, it will give you a beautiful SVG file that I will show you in a second, what it looks like with how much time it was spent doing what. And actually, yeah, we're gonna look at the first differences we have there. Here, oh no, in here, and it's in the wrong screen. Oh, I have three of them now. So, actually, one of the first interesting things with it, I mean, the script itself was just to see myself what it looked like on my laptops, but well, nobody would trust me if I said there's improvement in my computer. So we installed it on Neon's CI so that, well, whenever there's a new ISO or something, we would generate one of these graphs. And, well, that's from May 8th, no, 2023, it says over here, well, on the URL, it says 23. What you can see here, for example, is that, for example, there's a lot of big spike here. Most of the CPU usage is at the beginning, of course. And actually, not at the very beginning, like there's some kind of idle time that the computer is actually starting to, well, see the light, but not really anything's happening. And here below, we can see all of the processes. For example, one of the limitations of this is that CasePlus QML is using a spinning thing that is not really supported by the graphics driver of the VM running on the Neon CI. So basically, it's rendering the spinning thing and, well, it shows a lot of CPU. But on any laptop running a normal graphics driver, you won't get so much spinning CPU usage. But other than that, it's completely quite accurate. We also see these weird things happening. This is coming from Ubuntu somehow. But in general, the plan was, let's see if we can squeeze this whole thing a bit into the start. A bit after that, we changed it. For example, you can see that this was moved a bit after, well, quite a lot after. Actually, this is the Discover Notifier while looking at the database to see, well, if there's updates on the system or not. For example, here we moved it a bit later so that it wasn't something that we needed. So the user can wait to see if they need system updates or what. We can see that here it's starting a bit, doing things a bit earlier. I will show you a bit now why that was. But in general, you could have seen that having nice tooling, it gives us some kind of edge on knowing if the improvements we've been working on are useful or not, or we are wasting our time. One of the tools we use that are most important is Divas. You will hear about it a lot. One of the ways of seeing visualizations of Divas is using the Bustle tool. Installing it in your distro is a bit complex because it's also a bit edge. But there's a really nice flatback that is maintained by the owner or the maintainer. So you can just install that. Basically, what it gives you is a nice chronogram. It's a chronogram, as in the time increases vertically, but you can see how every process talks to each other. And if there is some process that is blocking, you will get to see as well with the little arrows. This, for example, showed us how we are doing a big load of network manager calls.  And then actually it wasn't. I mean, there were some improvements we could have. I did there, and we could do some more. But actually there, the problem was that actually Qt, on the start of every application, it starts querying about all of the different networks that are available on the system. And actually, it's blocking on all of them. I have a tiny patch for Qt Network Manager so that it doesn't block anymore. But we will have to look into why is it needed to have all of the network manager state copied into every Qt process. But in general, I mean, it's very nice to be able to see who's asking what and what's happening. It's also useful for you, if you want to improve the battery on your system, see if the applications are waking up and working up other processes to ask for things. Well, then you can get to think about whether it makes sense or not. And if it doesn't, well, fix it, right? This is something really weird. Maybe somebody here knows is that I do have some kind of process that keeps asking Resolve for the hostname of my system. It happens every five seconds. I mean, it's fine, right? Like my laptop is not going to hurt because of that, but it's weird, and it annoys me. And it only annoys me because I've seen it on the thing. If I hadn't seen it, I would be happy. In general, also, looking at whatever is blocking. To fix blocking calls, what I did was, using GDB, adding a breakpoint to the Qt function that says, let's do a blocking call and see why it was blocking. And if it's possible to remove it, then you remove it, and life is nicer. And Network Manager, and LibNegra Manager, Qt actually does a whole lot of blocking there, but I don't know if there's much we can do there. And grouping. We had, actually, Kai, he did some improvements on, while querying APIs, it's not very powerful. If you have to keep asking things one by one, you can actually say, give me all of these objects, and it returns you a big XML file that you can just pass at once. I mean, in this case, for example, it's so much more powerful or much faster to ask for a lot of stuff and processes locally than do a lot of requests to another process, because you will have all of the processes swapping back and forth on your system. And well, that's not fun. Definitely not a powerful performance. A good tool to look at memory is Massive. Massive is one of the tools by Valgrin. I'm not going to show it today, but it's something you need to keep in mind. The big reason why Massive is important for performance is not that much, because you want to actually have your processes not take a lot of memory, which you actually do. You don't want to take all of the system's resources, but it's also very slow to allocate memory and deallocate it all the time. So we need to use that and make sure that you don't do a lot of things. OK, Gasgrin is the same, but instead of using Valgrin Massive, you will use Massive Valgrin Colgrin, and it gives you where in the CPU is spending the time. We need to remember when using Valgrin tools is that it's not actually running on our processor. It's some kind of virtual machine, so it will not be 100% representative about what we're doing, but in general, it was really well. Another one I really like, really, like this one and Massive visualizers have been developed by Million from GitHub, and he's awesome. He's also a KD developer. That's why I'm praising him. Hotspot is really cool. This is Hotspot, and basically, you get to look at where you're spending time in your process. You can filter by processes. So when I was talking about blocking calls, I mean, it's especially bad if you're doing blocking calls because it will be slow. But it's only or it's especially a big problem when you're blocking on the main thread. So if you actually keep the rest of the system or the process from proceeding, but if you can put it into a separate process, it's usually nice. So what you can see here is that's why I took this picture is that there's a big chunk over there that says red image. This is plasma loading the wallpaper. And when I looked, then it was like a big 30% or so of the whole run. And well, it helped me track down a bug in Qt. So this is after fixing. You can see before, after, after, before, or it's a bit slow. So with this, actually, the patch was really simple. I can show you the patch if you like. But well, we didn't just improve plasma. We did improve all of the Qt users of PNG images. So basically what it was doing is it was still loading an image that was the same size of my display, but it was scaling it. It was scaling it to the same size that it was, which is, well, unnecessary. But it was doing it. And now it's doing it much faster because it's just putting the image where it has to be and, well, not processing it. Brilliant. Another nice tool, this one is coming from Nome. It's SysProf. Why this is interesting is that it doesn't focus on one process. It will be profiling the whole system. So for example, what I did was modify my plasma startup script to call these two things, which basically is start the SysProf and then after 20 seconds, system D will kill it. So I was only concerned about the first and the second. So I started a process that started gathering all of the information. After 20 seconds, I killed it so that it was saved on the system. And then I would analyze it. QML is something we use a lot. We need to remember to only initialize the objects when all of the properties are set. It's not fun that we spend all of the time with what properties changing quickly. We can delay things using the QML loader. And there's key object tracking. I am actually out of time, so you can look at my blog, what it's about. But if you use QML, I think that it could be interesting for you. There's API trace, which is nice. If you're using OpenGL, you will get to know which OpenGL calls are being done, which textures are being uploaded. If they're too big, if they're too many, anything that can be reduced, you will be able to see there. GPUviz is a Valve-developed tool that you can use to see where actually every process is spending time on and how it relates to the VBlank of your graphics card. It's pretty cool as well. And one of the things I did, for example, was dumping that Bash script, because Bash is not how we make things fast. We're using C++ now. We're using libraries. Well, if you want to hear some stories about that, you can ask me when I have a beer in my hand, and I will tell you all about it. We ported away from deprecated APIs and like, crazy related things or things that you see that they could be done better, like this kind of problem. We had tens of these. I mean, it looks absurd, but whatever. And things to do, there's Plasma Shell. And actually, every Qt process is doing font config loading wrong. If we do font config loading right, we're going to improve the startup of any Qt process. So it's not going to be only Plasma. Actually, it will be Plasma. It will be Queen, but it will be Kate. It will be Dolphin. It will be everything. So we have to look into that. I started looking into that a couple of days ago, so I didn't fix anything there yet. Actually, there was a guy who even did his degree thesis on it, or her bachelor's thesis on it. And he just didn't contribute it upstream, which is, well, sad. But oh well. We're doing more things with Wayland. Better tooling with Divas would be interesting. And yeah. Thank you so much, Alex. Any questions? So about the Divas performance stuff, there's a thousand environment variable called QDBusBlocking called main thread warning milliseconds. And if you set that to zero, you effectively get a warning on console every time something does a blocking Divas call. And then you can just go through all of them and fix them, right? Cool. Any questions? Do the changes in QT6 regarding QML, will they change anything for you in startup? Everything I've been working on has been Qt5. There's, well, there's that change. It's already, actually, that one was on 5.12. There's a couple of 5.13. But in general, you should have available. If you have a nice rolling distro, you will get it as soon as possible. I'm sure that the brilliant things that I've talked about will have an impact, definitely. But I didn't look at that. OK. Any more questions? Do you have a before and after picture, like time used in booting Plasma before your changes and after? It's kind of hard to have. Like, we could show the boot chart from yesterday and we'll be able to see some differences. But actually, my last improvements have been in Plasma Shell itself.  But if you want, I can prove you, it boots really fast on my laptop. OK. Any more questions? OK. Thank you, Ali.


Welcome back everyone, we will now get started with our poll to poll innovation session. As noted yesterday by the UN representative to Kenya to achieve the 2030 agenda, we can't rely on philanthropy alone. It is imperative that we activate market based solutions. Social enterprises have been playing an increasingly important role in that capacity. In particular, tech based social enterprises which are raising the bar in terms of innovation on every continent. I'm excited to share that we are showcasing a number of impressive enterprises at Impact Engineer this year. In particular, I'd like to highlight our 2020 I show cohort from Kenya, India and the United States who are exhibiting their innovation in the tech gallery, which is located in our exhibit hall. There are brilliant solutions to ensure a quotable energy access, diagnose malaria, enable circular agriculture and many more. I invite you to visit their booth throughout the event, learn more about their work, message each exhibitor and even set up meetings during or after impact engineered. As a recap to get to the exhibit hall, please use a navigation on the left hand side and click on the exhibit hall tab. Our experience with I show a SME hardware led social innovation accelerator program has shown us the significant potential of social enterprise in improving lives and livelihoods and underserved communities. It has also made us keenly aware of the challenges faced by social entrepreneurs. The journey to market for those innovators is arduous to say the least. As our keynote highlighted yesterday, and as we advise many of our entrepreneurs to succeed, it's important to stick to what we're good at and leverage it accordingly. This is why at SME, we've been focusing our efforts on advancing hardware led enterprises and have seen a number of them succeed. Unfortunately, many continue to struggle with reaching scale. Ensuring that social enterprises reach their full potential requires a supportive ecosystem comprised of collaborative actors dedicated to creating shared value. We have been working with a number of such organizations over the years, and are thrilled that they are joining us at impact engineered this year. Our partnership with Siemens Tiftung is now entering its sixth year, and has been one of the most long standing and meaningful collaborations. We've been members of the Aspen Network of Development Entrepreneurs for nearly the same amount of time and have engaged with the Andean team across multiple continents. And what began as a pilot at the World Bank has matured into a cross cutting program. These partnerships are the foundation of our work to meet the 2030 agenda, and we're eager to build on our learnings to date. With that, I would like to welcome to the stage Ms. Karola Schwank, who leads the Empowering People Network Programme, or EPN, within the Development Cooperation Unit at Siemens Tiftung. Karola will kick us off with an overview of the recently published study on social enterprises as job creators in Africa. Over to you Karola. The title today raises crucial questions about the impact of social enterprises, their ability to grow their businesses and to create new additional jobs, and we have also to ask how we can help them achieving this all. As a brief impulse, let me share some insights from a recent study that was conducted by Siemens Tiftung and funded by the German government, GIZ. And we published the study in the format of a trilogy consisting of a main report, country profiles and case studies, and you can find all these parts on our website. Now, in this study, our objective was to quantify the potential of social enterprises to create employment, and secondly, to define interventions that are needed to exploit the identified potential. We focused on 12 selected countries. They are mainly so-called compact with Africa countries and provided a good regional mix that allowed to make more or less representative findings in our study. You might ask why we focus on social enterprises explicitly and not on SMEs in general. Our answer is because they simply create better jobs, decent jobs. They employ people with poor chances on the labour markets such as young people, women. They usually offer better working conditions. And last but not least, they follow a triple bottom line approach by offering not just jobs, but jobs that create social impact as well. Our approach at a glance. In step one, we used all available data and analyzed the situation in the 12 selected countries. We identified the numbers of SMEs and extracted a prevalence rate for SE social enterprises. This rate was influenced by global factors, but also by the results of an ecosystem assessment for each country. Based on these numbers, it was possible to define a number of jobs in 2020 and to make projections for 2030. At the micro level in step two, we conducted case studies of five enterprises operating in different contexts, different sectors and countries and looked at promoting and hindering conditions for job creation in particular in these enterprises. In step four, based on these results, we formulated concrete recommendations on how social enterprises should be supported. An important dimension is that the entire process was attended by expert validation that was extremely helpful and valuable where data lacks have been challenging. And this is the central conclusion of the study. Social enterprises in the 12 selected countries can create a good million new jobs by 2030 as long as they receive the necessary support. The number of direct jobs can then rise from 4.43 to 5.46 million. These assumptions are limited to formal jobs and given the fact that social enterprises provide additional indirect income opportunities in the informal sector, this number could be even higher. The social enterprises in the case studies show a clear job creation potential at the micro level as well. You can see the predicted individual job growth until 2030 within the decade in this slide. Using all these findings and results from the micro studies, a complex growth model has been developed that considers not only the different time horizons but also the different development stages of the social enterprises. The model refers to specific preconditions for positive business development and in the end provided a good framework for the formulation of the recommendations. Important to note that we distinguish between interventions that promote enterprise growth in general and measures that target on job creation and job growth in particular. Yeah, finally we came up with a series of recommendation that is clustered into financial support, technical support, enabling environment and last but not least data landscape has been a topic as well. You can find all these detailed recommendations in the report online, so let me highlight only a very small selection in very brief. Access to finance is extremely challenging for social enterprises in the so-called missing middle we all know that so it's not surprising to see a range of recommendations around that equity blended finance guarantees collaterals grants and further options. In the human resources context social enterprises could be strengthened through subsidizing stipends for trainees or additional social benefits that ensure decent jobs in the enterprises. Data support recommendations focus for example on assistance in terms of market research and customer focus and partnerships with technology providers are also seen as very valuable. On the job creation level collaborations with HR firms on management coaching programs are assumed to be good solutions. A well supporting environment is important for growth directly and indirectly several recommendations underline the positive role of lobbying through social enterprise bodies or suggest promoting preferences for social enterprises in public tenders. Specific job models that development of appropriate curricula or training schemes could help improve the workforce for social enterprises on a more structural level. And the last set of recommendations focuses on the data landscape improvement is absolutely needed here on a generic level, but also on specific questions when it comes to topics such as top quality or inclusion or gender equality, especially in social enterprises. This would, for example, be an appeal to academia or organizations that fund research work. Yeah, so far, the study results in a nutshell and what's next, the report can definitely not be the last step in the process. We are aware of the demographic dynamics on the continent and we see the high need of decent jobs in the African countries. And we have now assessed the huge potential of social enterprises to create such urgently needed decent jobs. Therefore, we should help them exploiting this potential. There is actually no alternative if we aim to provide better conditions and good future perspectives to the people. Concrete projects need to be developed as fast as possible. And I think sessions such as today can provide room to discuss first ideas and concepts. And therefore, let me come to an end with an appeal. Let's join forces and help social enterprises create more and better jobs. Thank you very much, Karola, for the great introduction into the study and into our panel. My name is Leonhard Nima. I'm the founder of Studio Nima and we are very excited that we have been editing part of the study. And I'm even more excited that we have a great panel today where, as Karola, as he said, we have to discuss all the recommendations, discuss the findings and define a way forward. For this, I would like to introduce and welcome my speakers and our panelists for today. Elaine Tinsley, Elaine, your private sector specialist at the World Bank Group, warm welcome, great to have you with us today. Then hi, Elaine. Then we have Richenda Van Looiven. Richenda, you're the executive director at ND, the Aspen Network of Development Entrepreneurs, strong expertise in the field of connecting the dots. So this will be exciting to hear from you how you actually do this. Richenda, warm welcome. Then we have Dr. Gerhard Ressel, your deputy head of division at the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development. As Karola just mentioned, being the partner for the study and basically you have that special initiative on job creation in Africa. Very excited to hear more about this and how social entrepreneurs actually can play a role in this and create more and better jobs in Africa. Warm welcome, good to have you with us. Last but not least, Patrick Obonio, Patrick, your program manager at IKEA Foundation. Also, they are very much involved, especially with a focus on youth employment. So this will be also a very interesting perspective that we are going to discuss. So my panelists, I hope you're all ready for a good discussion. We have heard from Karola and Karola, of course, you will join the discussion as well. So good to have you on board here as well. As we heard, there are quite a few recommendations and this will be my starting question to our panel. What are the most important interventions that you see when it comes to job creation potential of social entrepreneurs? And Elaine, I would say we're going to directly start with you want to hear your thoughts on this. Thank you, Leonard. And thank you, Karola. We greatly welcome the study for us. It's really important to have more evidence of the impact that social enterprises can have, because this greatly helps our dialogue with the government. And I think for us, we see creating an enabling environment as one of the critical issues to helping scale social enterprises. And I think one of the things maybe the study doesn't touch upon is it's not just the jobs that are created in the social enterprises. It's actually the jobs that are created outside of the social enterprises, the indirect jobs. And we can see this as having a great multiplier effect. Because when you create, when you have off-grid vendors who are able to reach out to larger markets, this means that there are more smallholder farmers that have access to more productive instruments. They're able to generate more income. They're able to send their kids to school. So the multiplier impacts on the economy are actually quite substantial. And so if you can even just, even just pointing to the number of jobs that can be created in the social enterprise sector is wonderful, but the indirect jobs are even more fantastic. And so the more we can do on creating jobs and creating ties, I think for us we see the enabling conditions in terms of how do we get the governments to recognize the sector so that they can create the policies and regulations that can support the sector. It's actually quite critical. Stop there. Thank you very much. So governments and how to get them involved. I think one fundamental aspect that we're going to discuss today, maybe they're over to Gerhard, your point of view, I think will be great. So the government as one important player, what is the role that BMZ could play, what are the most important recommendations and interventions for you. Thank you. Yeah, my name is Gerhard Russell, I work on the German Development Ministry in a unit called a special initiative on training and job creation. And our goal is to create 100,000 jobs and 30,000 training places within the next years. We have seven partner countries at the moment, we have seven partner countries are subset of the 12 analysis countries. And I think what we add to the traditional instruments of the development ministry is that we want to deal with companies as directly as possible. We want them overcome investment obstacles. And we wanted to develop projects together with them. We have three fields of action. One is focused on European investors in Africa, one is focused on clusters and industrial zones and parks in Africa, and one is focused on smaller medium enterprises in Africa. Most social enterprises study is focusing on small and medium enterprises and we have some examples where we dealt with medium enterprises directly, but it's it's difficult to get in touch with small enterprises. And this would be one of the most important next steps for us all, I think, to get in touch with them. Usually we need some kind of intermediaries or similar for to get in touch with them. So, thank you. I would pick up the intermediaries, Richenda, over to you. I think that's a good keyword. What is the role that intermediaries play in this process and what can they actually contribute? Thank you very much. And just to explain that as Andy is a network of intermediaries that are providing a range of business and financial support to help the small and growing businesses, SGPs as we call them, not only have access to capital but really to be able to grow to the maximum potential. One of the things in the report did talk about financing and certainly that remains an issue. The IFC, the International Finance Corporation has estimated that there's still an annual financing gap of around $136 billion a year for African SMEs. So, you know, there's still work to do on that front, but I would also say that we need to go deeper than that and actually look at the overall ecosystem. And we've been working for the last several years with the support of the German government now as well on a global accelerator learning initiative, looking at what's happening in the ecosystem in terms of acceleration support for small and growing businesses. And it's very encouraging to see that acceleration helps and indeed actually putting a small business through two acceleration programs can create additionality. So it can be better than one. We still see that there are some significant gaps and one of them in particular I want to just focus on is that there is a gender gap in acceleration that actually gets widened often through acceleration programs, meaning that a woman led will come out of acceleration further behind than a male led business. And we've also seen that women led enterprises, while they can get access to debt, often do not get the access to equity that they need to grow the businesses. So in order for the SGPs to fulfill their best potential social enterprises to be the maximum job creators. They also need to have that equitable access. And certainly, we're focusing on on the gender component as well as other aspects there. Thank you very much for general very, very important point very specific point also when it comes to that gender gap in finance financing in general we all know this has been a massive problem you mentioned how big the gap actually is and we're always talking about the missing middle. Patrick over to you. How do you perceive this funding gap and maybe they're directly a follow up question do you think we need to have more specific funding let's say focusing on job creation in particular on closing the gender gap on creating youth employment. So that funding itself by quantity is a gap but that it needs to be more tailored. Thank you so much. So at the care at the care foundation of course we are working to create a better future for many children and young people. And we believe that the key to a better future is actually ensuring that the families have a stability financial stability and a healthy planet. We see therefore social entrepreneurship as a great pathway and opportunity where change makers can actually develop innovative solutions to help tackle this complex challenges. That is why we as a foundation are essentially doubling down on supporting a new generation of greener enterprises that help create jobs for young people and protect the environment and promote economic growth, because we believe that at this time climate change is one of the biggest challenges that we face in addition to inequality and bringing this together to find a solution is very important. And then to your question around finance, you know, the green enterprises certainly share a lot of the challenges that, you know, have been outlined. And the way we approach this at the foundation is actually not only finance but actually approach from a three tire perspective. The first is really say, how can we invest in programs that actually help young people to acquire entrepreneurial skills to start and be a sustainable enterprises because we believe that as you have outlined in the report, finance is just one piece of it. But the businesses need a lot of technical support services that help them access markets, help them access finance help them network and mentorship is certainly an important part of that technical support. And therefore, finance is a small piece of it technical support is an important piece. The second is to your point around finance, you know, thing we focus on is really growing, as agenda says, small and growing businesses, especially green enterprises that are already out there. And the way we look at this is to different businesses need different type of financing support to help them grow. As a philanthropy, we really try to understand how can we use our, you know, Latin capital to invest in a catalytic way that allows business to actually grow and try. How can we test new innovative financial instruments that allow them to expand the way that all businesses access finance especially green enterprise and especially social enterprise. And so I'll give a practical example of, you know, the work that we are doing in the Kenya climate innovation center where we are testing an early stage financing mechanism that allows businesses to actually develop and increase their financial cash flow, build their revenues and expand businesses so that they can have a very strong cash flow to allow them access, you know, capital in the market. So we believe through this catalytic way of testing different models, whether it's fast loss guarantee funds, or whether it's low interest grant, low interest loans, or whether it's a blended financial tool we can actually allow improve the access to finance to a larger piece of social enterprises. Maybe one point I would like to pick up there Patrick, you mentioned the green enterprises of course there's some overlap with social enterprises but also at some point they are distinct focusing in different areas. Do you also see a competition for funding in the field now green tech clean tech, there's certainly a lot of buzz and focus on this. And does this come at the expense of other social enterprises in other fields. Maybe Elaine Richender would like to get your thoughts Elaine what do you think about this. Well there's some, there's definitely a lot of great overlap between green businesses and social enterprises. They both serve very different markets and different needs, and why I really think actually the KCIC is a great example of a good intermediary in the roles that it's been able to play and be able to be an advocate for the green sector, and also in being able to provide financing so it provides a whole slew of services to the green sector and I think if we can replicate more of these kind of KCIC models and have support for them. This is actually going to be quite helpful in increasing the job creation potential of social enterprises and green enterprises. Maybe I don't really see much of a difference between social enterprises and green enterprises mainly because I think the green enterprises their impact is on the environment but you know they might be more profit oriented which is perfectly fine as long as their impact is just as strong. Right. So I think, overall I think it's good that you know we focus on both of them I don't see the competition for funding as taking one away from the other because I think a lot of impact investors they do look at different sectors. So if there's, it's a different market for them to be looking at. If I can if I can just add, I mean on the on the green enterprise, it's a broad it's a broad area. I've worked for many years now sort of been overseeing and helping to pioneer the off grid renewable energy sector. And I would say that while that has attracted a lot of funding and a lot of the entrepreneurs who are working in that sector are indeed social entrepreneurs are really coming at this from a mission first standpoint. We are still seeing some challenges on financing, which is it's still easier to get funded. If you are coming in as an international enterprise, rather than as a local enterprise so we're still seeing some systemic issues that need to be addressed in that sector that that is pretty much consistent across many sectors that we're looking at on the sort of the broader green enterprise approach and I just want to say as well that I think I've seen a couple of the questions that have come in around around sort of looking at D growth. I mean there's so much potential with green growth. And I think that we have just a massive first of all, the urgency of climate change, you know demands that we find more sustainable circular solutions to these challenges, but we have great opportunity to do this and I think you know we've we've really got really great opportunity to use social entrepreneurship and green entrepreneurship sort of as one as one approach to really look at building circularity into our systems, you know looking at how we address waste looking at how we actually address things like agricultural waste which is a huge issue, not only in developing economies but I would say across the world as well. And we can really work with social enterprises to help address many of these issues and at Andy. We are increasingly embracing that and and working across our ecosystem to surface and support these green entrepreneurship approaches. Yeah, and you mentioned how they can address all the different issues out there there are quite a few issues that we're facing nowadays in carola you mentioned it before of course with the study we have a focus on the job creation potential. But it's not only about creating jobs. It's not only even about creating decent jobs but decent jobs with impact. So even one step beyond and that kind of correlates to agenda what you just said so how can you then take care of the other problems around carola. Do you think and that's also some of the recommendations that we have that we say financing also needs to go more specific into this direction of creating really jobs and have a focus on job creation do you think that is a big potential and a big need the mute button carola. I can only agree with agenda with agenda and Patrick. There's a high need on financing and access to finance that is tailored to the needs of the social enterprises in terms of ticket sizes types or sources of fund that that's that's a huge problem. On the other side, it would be great if actors would come together from different development fields such as a public sector private sector philanthropic sector to have a detailed looked on the single recommendations and to see how they could fit into their own strategies and approaches. But the same process would definitely be necessary in terms of technical support and supportive environments and that that is actually the answer to your question because we have a range of recommendations that focus on recent jobs and the quality of jobs in the social enterprises and how the social enterprise could be supported to provide such jobs and there is a huge demand in terms of leadership coaching or on financing things such as different or support curricular development so I think it's not funding only funding itself but it's only also funding levels that can help enterprises to create more and decent job. Absolutely and maybe now kind of way forward look into the future like we all kind of agree about the big potential that is out there and the big need. Still it has not been fully utilized yet so what are the things that can really be done also from your point of view from your organizational point of view. You mentioned the public sector so over to Gerhard question for you also the plan for the German Ministry for the BMZ how to integrate social entrepreneurs specifically where do you see the potential for for the ministry there. It's in our initiative. The first thing is to get in touch with the companies with enterprises and so we are collaborating in different countries with different say agencies that support small and medium enterprises but they don't focus on social enterprise directly so it would be a great step forward if we could identify some actors that work more closely with these social enterprises and then ask them what's what are their individual investment obstacles because of course we know it statistically but we to support them. We have to know it also individually to help them create jobs and I would hope that some of you could support us and share your knowledge and that we can establish a kind of forum hopefully afterwards. Thank you. Call to action to the other panelists and Patrick I know we had some good discussions up from where we talked about we have these intermediars on site but also the activities of the meteors need to align coordinated and so on. Where do you see the big potential when it comes in this direction. One of the two things that I want to you know echo from from from grads presentation one is you know the ability to recognize social enterprises, you know legally in a different geographies, because I think at this time despite the massive contribution to the economy that social enterprise is finding it really difficult to operate legally, proper it from a legal standpoint, governments either classify them as NGOs or for profits or whatever different so that they are recognition the unique role that they play in addressing some social environmental and economic issues on the ground and not actually, you know, recognize and appreciated by them and they're not provided with the enough, you know, policy framework that allows them to try. I think there's a lot that can be done by working with different organization to actually ensure that we provide social enterprise new as with, you know, a platform and opportunity and we see from an example of our work. The reach for change, for example, has, has, has worked with the social entrepreneurs in Ethiopia to register a social enterprise association that brings all the social entrepreneurs to help communicate and discuss policy issues reach out to policy makers and to really create, you know, a conducive environment for the government to recognize them. These are, you know, basic steps but we have to realize that this has to be driven locally and we need to promote this. Secondly, the, you know, I already talked about, you know, innovative financing but beyond that I think that social entrepreneurs need a radio of these facilities that we talked about, you know, and you have outlined them very well in your document, you know, access to finance, technical support and enabling environment and different organizations that are talking today on the table have unique expertise. And I think we need to rethink of, you know, this whole idea around intermediaries and think, can we find an Uber intermediary, you know, like Andy or whoever who brings other players together, not only intermediaries together but also is able to facilitate collaboration and communication again with different players with impact investors with philanthropists with governments and with the social entrepreneurs themselves because I don't think that, you know, finance is an issue. There's more money than we need. It's a question of how do we bring the different people who hold the money together to direct them to the right, you know, right players and the right businesses that are going to solve our social and economic issues. And I think we are not lacking expertise. We have enough expertise, even right now, talking that can provide technical expertise. It's a question of how do you bring them together and how do we liberate it as expertise and knowledge and capabilities to be able to support the social entrepreneurs or green enterprises for that matter to try and create more employment opportunity.  Thank you. Thank you, Patrick. I mean, therefore me the question is, how can we actually make such an umbrella, intermediate work? How would it happen? Where are the constraints? Why is it not taking place yet? And I think one thing that comes to mind is the legitimacy of such an intermediate who's doing the job. So maybe, Richenda, over to you. How do you see the role because that's something that you're kind of already doing, of course, with Andy, but having this umbrella, intermediate the need for this?  I mean that that is our membership and we're very, very much member focused.  One thing that we've learned and, you know, we're 11 years old and we've been doing a lot of research across the sector as well and certainly very supportive of the conclusions of Parola and the Stifton, Siemens Stifton, their work, it's very consistent with a lot of what we've seen at Andy over the years. We also see the need to take an ecosystem approach in an individual country. And that's where, you know, a country like Uganda, for example, that actually has a very supportive startup culture. However, a lot of those businesses are not able to grow to their maximum potential. It's not just because they are lifestyle entrepreneurs and social entrepreneurs particularly, they do want to grow, they do want to develop, but the ecosystem as a whole is not supportive of them. So one of the things that we've done is we've done very deep dies in terms of the landscaping and the mapping like Parola and her team have been doing on those several countries that she mentioned across Africa. And then from that building out what what then needs to happen. And so we have an initiative underway in Uganda called the entrepreneurial ecosystem initiative. That's really working across the whole of the sector.  What are the results, and then also sort of having a research component as well, which is not burdening the social entrepreneurs themselves. So it's not on their balance sheets but we can look at the dynamics and we can really look at the data of what what what approach is more effective than than another approach. And we're taking that that work, you know, in other countries as well, and really partnering, I would say doing radical partnership, you know, to make with with with donors, and increasingly really with looking at how we can then use that, and the results and the findings for advocacy purposes, both with the funding community, and with governments and other stakeholders as well so it is happening. It's not happening everywhere yet and there's certainly still a long way to go. I think the aspect of it's happening, not happening everywhere yet I think also Patrick to what you said there's some experience when it comes to the social enterprise bodies in some countries, Ethiopia it's kind of working well. Other countries it's not really happening yet. A lot of obstacles, working with the government also Elaine that comes back to your initial statement fundamentally important, but I can see different levels of speed house, it works with the governments. And I think in sense here is that they let you want to add something to this I guess that was the I think actually I mean, going back to pick up on a point that Patrick made between like having a legal definition between like an NGO versus a nonprofit organization. But so, so I think this goes back to creating that enabling environment and also having the government recognize the importance of the sector right in order for the government to recognize the importance of the sector they also need to have the evidence of the sector quite important to. And so the more we can also build up on this evidence which is I think the fourth point on the recommendations on the data analytics is is quite critical, because as the World Bank when we were talked to our government and we were trying to get them to put forth a change in their in their regulatory framework a change in their legal definitions of what constitutes a social enterprise. That's, it's that's a huge legal burden for them. And they have to know the why it's worth it for them to invest their time and energy and resources into that. So, this is why it's actually more important and I think this is something enablers and intermediaries can help with their social enterprises that they're in charge with to help build in those M and E systems that can help capture the data that can then be translated into how effective and important the sector is to the economy and the multiplier effects of it too. And I think going over to also we tend this point on local financing I think this is also a key thing we see a lot of like the, what do you call it expect social enterprises coming in, and they do well they managed to raise the money they're able to expand, but it would be nice also to see it more on the local entrepreneur side because I think this is where you really get to the grassroots and you're really able to encourage the community to do that. I think it's, what is it that we can do to improve intermediaries capabilities to support these enterprises to go up the value chain of their products and take a look closer look to that to see and especially, I think it has to be a per country approach because each country is at very different stages, and you can create that more enabling environment by having more of the evidence for it, more of the enabling factors for those enterprises. So we can actually come to the government and ideally my for me it's like what I want to see is governments collaborating more with social enterprises, because I see this as a pathway for scaling up. And it's a critical pathway, because then you can really reduce a lot of the burdens, any place where the government is actually in the way of these enterprises from growing, are also where these governments have policies that stop them. I think that's more fluid and so that governments recognize that these social enterprises actually they're natural development partners, and actually can have a great impact on both social and economic factors. And one thing that it shows Elaine I mean when you mentioned the necessity of having good quality data to give governments the justification to get involved with a little bit and then hand and act dilemma as well because data is scarce good quality data is scarce so we need to have more investments in this direction we need to get academia involved in order to get government involved and so on. I think what made it very clear and I think this was really great that also the panel showed here, how the different topics are connected and interconnected with each other, and that is fundamental you cannot just focus on one part of the interventions, but they go hand in hand I think this was kind of the perfect example how data and government involved might be very connected and linked. And at the end of our session and I think this was a short deep dive into a big topic, I think we covered quite well the diversity of the different topics. I think one thing that I really sense is the need for the intermediaries and more collaboration and cooperation in the field. So there's a clear call to action to proceed with these kind of activities in order to address these and I think there's a lot more need to discuss this further and build on this and with this I would say thank you very much to all of you has been a great pleasure. As I said a short session but let's keep continuing the conversation.  So thanks everybody. Thanks to gender. Thanks Elaine. Thanks. Thanks Patrick and thanks carrot.


From Soldiers Radio and Television, this is the Army Now. The top senior enlisted advisor for the U.S. Army Reserves is continuing his efforts to ensure wounded warriors are getting their questions and concerns addressed. Command Sergeant Major Michael Schultz spoke with Soldiers Receiving Care at Fort Samh Houston, Texas. What I want to do is anytime I go out is to do a town hall with Army Reserve Soldiers to get feedback from them on issues or concerns they've got, put out information to them and then take it back to General Schultz and then to our staff to make sure that we get, if there's issues, that we get them rectified. Sergeant Daniel Birches is receiving care for wounds he sustained in Afghanistan. Whatever you want to do, if you want to stay in, he's going to go to your back to help you stay in. And as long as you're putting forth that 110% effort, he's going to give you a 200% and give you the support so you know, hey, I can still be a soldier. That's the Army Now.


Recent Hubble observations of Jupiter's icy moon Europa have uncovered a probable plume of material erupting from the moon's surface. The plume went about 100 kilometers above Europa's surface at 62 miles. It happened at the same location as a similar apparent plume erupted two years earlier. These plumes are consistent with the idea that Europa has an ocean of water under a thick layer of ice. Although it is quite cold on the icy surface at 92 degrees Kelvin, that's minus 289 degrees Fahrenheit. Other studies have found that there is an area of relatively warmer temperatures in the same region where the plumes are located. If there is a causal link between the plumes and the thermal anomaly, there could be geologic activity on Europa's surface that is producing the plumes. This would also provide the energy for life. Given all this, a new mission has been funded to send a spacecraft called the Europa Clipper to Jupiter with the instruments needed to study Europa in greater detail. It is scheduled for launch in the 2020s.