A crazy rich in spirit Asian, yes sir. Okay, because all the people in Singapore like that aren't they? Well, some richer in spirit than others, some richer in their pockets than others. I think we have like the largest number of millionaires per capita, I think. So I think you're onto something. She's from Singapore. We wouldn't know it necessarily. And now she's teaching at Leeward Community College in theatre and various other things and she's an author too and we're going to focus mostly today on her authoring. So you wrote a number of books Loretta about women, why? Yes, sir. I mean, first off, first off, I am woman, hear me raw, right? That's me. But I feel like there is no better way for me to put my stories out there if I don't speak from my own body, my own experience. And I think that that's always the best place to start from because I think I have greater depth of experience than say if I try to write about your life. So I think that was how I got started being, you know, having my stories to tell or people asking me to tell my story and that led to me being really curious about other people's stories. And the more I went down that rabbit hole, I think the books just grew and now we're on to our fourth book, inspiring women of Hawaii. Okay, well, let's talk about the first book. The first three real quick. Yes, sir. What do you got? And if we have, we'll look at some slides on this. Sure. Okay, what do we got? So the first book is called Woman on Top, haha, maybe that's for a late night show. Woman on Top, the art of smashing stereotypes and breaking all the rules. And basically, because I'm a media personality in Singapore and what I really wanted to do. What did you do to become a media personality in Singapore? Radio, television, what? No, that's, so a lot of it was radio, TV and the theater. The theater was where I really cut my teeth, told searing controversial stories that mainstream media in Singapore did not quite allow. So that was how I cut my teeth. And then I got recognized by brands that decided to ask me to helm their marketing campaigns because it's about connection. And this was way before social media. So I found out. You don't look that old. Thank you, sir. Thank you. I love it. Yeah. So this is way before social media. So I found a niche in being able to communicate messages to a live audience. So that was my medium. So to answer your question, yes, it was theater, radio, TV, but it was a theater that got my name out there. And then the marketing campaigns and then the radio shows and the TV appearances. Oh, wow. You were pretty active. Yeah.  In critical theory. Yeah. Critical theory. Does it philosophy or something? Yeah, it is. It is a PhD. That's right. It's a doctorate in philosophy. I always admire philosophy and PhDs. We just keep thinking about a whole lot of nothing. It's a thought process. It's discipline thought process.  Okay, so back to the first part. So back to the first part. Women on top. So I wrote that because I really wanted to use my platform to inspire young women. Because men, because I felt that speaking as an Asian woman, there was a lot of shame and people often felt embarrassed about owning up to their own issues or problems because I think in Asian culture, we all need to look like a crazy rich Asian. And so I felt like that's not right because I remember my niece coming home from school one day. She was asked to audition in a play and she turned on that role because she was afraid that she would fail. And I thought, well, that's not right. I mean, she's a pretty smart, talented girl and she has all this fear because there is this culture and climate where people just don't dare to talk about failure or loss. And it's a taboo. It's Singapore. We all need to look like we have these perfect social media lives. So I decided to use my platform to enable the discussion on the things that are taboo to Singaporeans, namely on failure, on not getting it always right. And so I used my platform to have those conversations. So that was how that started and that led to a tech talk, a tech talk called Power Failure, which became quite popular. Oh, tech talk? You gave a tech talk? Yeah. We always admire tech talk people. Thank you. I don't know about that. But the Power Failure. And so then I wrote my second book called Driven By Purpose, Destined for Change. And in it, I interviewed an entrepreneur because, again, I wanted to highlight or showcase or underscore the fact that we don't always get things right the first time. Entrepreneurs are entrepreneurs because they take risks. And taking risks mean you fail and sometimes you get this. Is Singapore a place where people do take risks? They do take risks. They take calculated risk. And I think a lot of it of risks that people are comfortable talking about is financial, monetary risks. But the kind of risk that I also wanted to enable a conversation on is emotional risks, mental risks, taking risks on your beliefs, your social values. And ego dashed, whatnot. Right? And, I mean, get this, I mean, Singapore, we don't have freedom of speech is one of the things that we campaign and champion because we still don't have, there is a law called repeal, we're part of a team working on repeal 377A because homosexuality is still banned in Singapore. But it's not just homosexuality. I mean, it really is a subset of a bigger picture that not everyone is equal, right? So I think as artists, as educators, we're always trying to fight for those changes. So you know, America for me is a great place to be. I think it, I went out in UCLA, I think it was my formative years. So I decided to come back in 2015. But that was, that's my second book. Should I, is this where I talk about my third book now? Yeah. This is where you talk about the third book. So I love that we're just all over the place. And then we come back to the point. My third book is called Madonna's and Mavericks, Howard Women in Singapore. And I had the pleasure of interviewing 17 of the most illustrious women in Singapore, including our current president, she's the first Muslim female president, Halima Yako. And I realized that the readers were thrilled at reading the stories of these women because we asked them questions on their overcoming, their struggles. It's not just about celebrating our success. So look at me. I'm so rich and beautiful and gorgeous. But these were all the hurdles I had to cross to get to where I am today. And what I also asked of all the women was to contextualize for us the issues, the problems. And that was hugely empowering because it allowed for a dialogue and conversation about then and now and about the battles we have won and the battles we have to still fight. So these are, this is a model is, you have women who are successful. You want to find out how they got to be successful. That's right. And you want to find out what they had to overcome to be successful. That's right. And how we narrow down that list too. It's not your typical Forbes list of successful women about how much money they make, but in the spheres of influence, whether it's in education or the arts or in sport or in advocacy. So it's a whole range of women. And it's a formula that I repeated for our fourth book right here in Hawaii.  Respectfully. I think to agree, to disagree, because even in my third book, what I did was I had a president and incumbent politician of the ruling party, and I also had the highest ranking member of the opposition party in the same book. Oh, no. And, you know, so you can read, obviously, the differences in opinion. And of course, we leave the audience to either readers to make up their point of view and for me as an author, as an educator, as an artist, I feel like my role is to really create, connect, communicate, and get their ideas and thoughts out as truthfully as I can. So what's your MO in terms of, hi, Ms. President, I'm Loretta, and I want to come over and spend the afternoon with you, and I'm going to bring a little tape recorder, I'm going to bring my Steno pad, and I'm going to take notes and here's some of the questions I'm going to ask you, and this is why I'm writing the book. Right, I'm kind of like how I accosted you too, right, Jay? You'll like that. I am that way. I mean, I'm just like, I mean, I told myself, I got a role of the punches and I better walk the talk, you know, if I, if I, if I'm trying to go out there and urge, you know, young men and women to take risks, I better walk the talk. I can't just like hide behind and I'll say, I do that. And that's pretty much what I did. Are you famous there? Yeah, pretty much in Singapore, I think. It's all those weird questions. I think someone else should answer it for me, but yeah. Okay, there's nobody else here. It's just you and me, Loretta. Yeah. Yeah. Okay, so now you've written three books. Yes, sir. About women. Okay, and you're about to tell us about the fourth book, which is the one that's about to come out. Am I right? That's absolutely right. I'm talking about 21st. 21st. 21st. Yeah. Okay, that's very soon. Yeah, yeah. And that's also about women here in Hawaii, right? That's right. So why all these women, what about a man's book? Are we getting to that? Where is that in the, in the offing? We are getting to that.  And you will say yes. So once I have you down, then the rest will fall in line. It would be very interesting. Okay, now let's do that. So on air. All right, okay, there we are. That's an engagement. All right, so let's talk about the fourth book. Yes, sir. And what is it, how is it different? I guess it's different because these are people in Hawaii. These are women in Hawaii. But the same model, you find the same model and say hi. And I'm coming over this afternoon. Come over to accost you and you don't even know me. I'm from Singapore, from the other island. Yes and no. I think, yes, the ammo is the same. No and that I'm writing from an outsider's perspective. I cannot posit to say that I'm a local girl. I'm writing because I have insider information and perspective the way you have. So I literally, let's take it back a notch. I mean, I came in 2015, didn't know anybody except for Shirley Daniel. She runs PAMI, the Pacific Asia Management Institute. And they did a show on Paul Zaccum, who was the coming down to Coast Guard last week in the Paul Chung Memorial Lecture at the Hawaii Prince. And we took that and we saw Loretta. Not the first time, but we did see Loretta there. Yes, exactly. And I accosted you too. You'll like that. I am that way. So anyhow, I moved here because I just had a calling like I had to be here. And it proved me right because two weeks later, I meet my now husband. And so Hawaii is now my home. So let's take that back a little bit. When I first came here, I had no idea what I was going to do. I just knew that I had a vision that my gifts were to create and that communicate. And so when I decided that Hawaii is going to be my home, I also decided that I had to go out there and get to know people. I mean, I could always be a stay home tourist and go Google about Jay or go Google about what's happening at Waikiki or go read up what's on. But I felt that the best way for me to be connected with the community was to go out there, talk to people. My gift was writing, talking, listening. So I thought I was going to propose a book. Given my past experience and some successes, I took it to mutual publishing. So I got an all credit ghost to them.  And they're like, OK, we don't know why, but we just can't seem to say no to you. I think a lot of people feel that way on the road. So they say yes to me. And the next thing I knew, they helped me narrow down the list of women that we should interview. And again, I think that was probably the most challenging process because we wanted everybody. But my criteria was, I wanted them to be alive. Because I felt like we needed to. Alive is good. Yeah, I wanted to celebrate them when they were alive. I also wanted a range of ages because I felt that having started my career young. I mean, I knew that I was, I don't want to say victim, but I was challenged by ageism.  But look at today, I mean, we have activists that are breaking down walls in high school and even younger. So that's what I told Mutual and the team that I wanted a range of ages. And I wanted them to be across a range of spheres of influence. So not just the Connie Laos, who is in the book. Not just Maisie Hirono, who is in the book. But I also wanted like Puan Nani Burgess, who is an advocate. I also wanted Raya Taya Helm, who is a native Hawaiian singer. And we also have Kim Coco Iwamoto, who is a transgender politician and advocate. So I wanted a whole range of women. A lot of them have been here. Oh, yeah, yeah. So I should interview you next time.  Yeah. So you showed me a list of some 20, or this has to be the most ambitious book you've undertaken. Yes, actually, when I did complete the manuscript, we had actually, I think, closer to 33 women. But publishers said it's going to be like this thick and no one. I mean, even if people wanted to read it, it's hard to lug this book around. And I mean, it won't make financial sense for them as well, because they were publishing it, not me. I'd be like, let's go publish it. So we had to, unfortunately, take out some stories. That was the hardest part. That was the next hardest part to communicate that to my interviewees as well. And we narrowed down to 24 of very diverse illustrious and strong, strong women. OK, Loretta Chen, when we get back from our break, we're going to start talking about some of them of interest. And I'll tell you why you remind me of Dave Heenan. Dave Heenan used to be the president of Theo H. Davies. He was the dean of the College of Business at UH Manoa. And most recently, he was a trustee of the Campbell estate. And he has written a lot of books. And when we come back, I'll tell you why you remind me of him.  We'll be right back with Loretta Chen. Aloha. I'm your host Sharon Thomas Yarbrough of Sister Power here at Think Tech of IE. And Sister Power is all about motivating, empowering, educating, and inspiring all people. And we have various subjects here. Sister Power is here at Think Tech every other Thursday at 4 PM. Again, my name is Sharon Thomas Yarbrough, host of Sister Power. We look forward to seeing you. If you have any questions, feel free to contact me at sistersandpowerandkawaii at gmail.com. We look forward to chatting with you soon. Aloha. Aloha, y'all. My name is Mitch Ewan. I'm from the Hawaii Natural Energy Institute. And I'm the host of Hawaii, the State of Clean Energy. We're on every Wednesday at 4 o'clock. And we hope that we have interesting guests who talk to us about various energy things that are happening in Hawaii all the way from PV, to windmills, to hydrogen, most of my heart, electric buses, and electric vehicles. So please dial in every Wednesday at 4 o'clock on Hawaii, the State of Clean Energy. Aloha. OK, you did it again. You weren't around for the break. You didn't hear what Loretta was saying during the break. But it was very interesting. It was about her secret sauce and how she approaches people. You want to talk about that for a minute, Loretta? I think it's just going in there with a lot of guts and not being afraid that they slam the door in your face and not being afraid to take no for an answer. So if they say no, I'll say, oh, please, please don't say no. But if you say no, that's OK. I completely understand. I'm very respectful. But please don't say no. It's very important to be able to deal with rejection. Yeah, it is. It is. That's actually the secret sauce, being able to deal with rejection. So Dave Heenan, who was a great guy, has written a number of books about business leaders. And he finds a thread. They're both men and women, I might add. And he gives you a little bio sketch or a story that happened in the life of these individuals, many of whom are famous on a national level. And he calls them up on the phone. He goes, he flies to meet them. He interviews them no matter what. And he writes these great books. There's a number of them. We've talked to them about some of those books. Anyway, so let's talk about your new book. And first, I want to ask you to read something out of it so we can see about your prose. Woo! Wow, they're putting on the spot now. Wow. The title of the book? The title of the book is Inspiring Women of Hawaii by the Reddichon. OK, and it's going to be on sale in October? October 21st, Costco, Target, Amazon, Barnes and Noble. And everyone's invited to the launch party November 1st at the YWCA. That's only the beginning, too. That's only the beginning. Hope you're ready for a best seller. Oh, thank you. Yes, I hope so.  And some of them actually shared some very personal things that they have not shared ever before. Oh, I want that here. So let's talk about your prose. First of all, can you describe for me why your prose is different from all the other prose in the world? First of all, it's my version of the world. But I think what I did with this book, the slightly different two, is that all the women have such distinct voices. And if I had tried to encapsulate all their voices with my prose, because I have a very distinct voice from Singapore, and a completely different accent, I could talk like that as well, right?  I decided to use their voices. So I turned the format into a question and answer format where you can hear my voice as the interviewer. And I tried as best to capture their prose. But of course, I had to edit, I had to listen very thoroughly and clean up all the pucas and make all the leads and put the reader in the room, right? But I felt like that was the best way to do them justice, because I didn't want the reader to hear my voice, because my authorial voice will come through in a very dominant personality too. I would never have guessed that. Right? I know. So that's already one difference. That you're actually hearing their voice, their ways of saying things. And the other thing that's different too is that, in the introduction that I'll read you a little bit from, I do state the fact that I am the outsider looking in. I am the outsider looking in with a clear lens, nonpartisan, and I can't posit to take any political side, even though I have my own preferences and my own beliefs. I can't posit to do that, because I cannot posit to be a Hawaiian. But don't feel bad about it, because if you're an outsider looking in, maybe you see things and the insider would not see. Totally. And that's exactly what I feel. And let's stretch that a little bit. I also think that that is why a lot of the women feel comfortable with me. I like to think so, because I state my ground that I'm not going to take sides. I am not, I don't know if your history, so this person or that person, so I'm going to just report the story most objectively based on all the facts and figures and data that I collect, and based on the things that you tell me. Robert Heinlein, a fair witness. That's what we want from you, a fair witness. So read your part of the introduction that you wrote. Okay, I would like to think that every part is worth reading, but since I only have 30 seconds. So while no two stories are light, what is common in all these diverse accounts is the overwhelming sense of overcoming. These women unabashedly share what they had to undergo to get to where they are today. The client can be arduous and unglamorous and not always natural, but what does make it beautiful is their unyielding passion, their strength and spirit and staunch belief that things will always get better. They have embraced challenges, pain, taking a step in the back, taking the face, a slam of the door, and they all somehow find the courage to say in their own way, okay, this is how the world rolls, this is how I will rock and roll. They have never allowed their circumstances to define them and instead saw it as a challenge to overcome. None of them used the victim card. Oh, boohoo, permy, it's my parents' fault. It's my ex-husband's. It's my soon-to-be-baby. It's my future lover's fault. None zilch nada. They instead all had a similar rallying cry whether I like it or not. This fault is in my court, so what can I do? So either consciously or unconsciously, these women have all marched to the beat of their own drums and in so doing crafted their own personal worldviews, distinct life philosophies, created their own style of authentic leadership, are true beacons of light, worthy of being exalted as inspiring women in their own right. Is it true that you were a shy and retiring child? Oh, yes, yes, you can call my mom and she will definitely back you up on that. I'm sure she'll let us know.  And I'm everything. I am everything that I am today because of my parents.  That's very nice, very nice. Family is so important. So let's talk about some of the people in your book. Yes, sir. Okay, let's talk about Connie Lau first. Because, you know, she's the CEO of H.E.I. and a tremendous influence in this community and in the business community too. So what did you capture from your discussion with her? What did you write about with regard to Connie Lau? I mean, first off, obviously I was humbled and honored that Connie Lau, who like pretty much, you know, is CEO of half of Hawaii, would agree to speak to this unknown girl. But what I really took away is her sense of humility and of the biggest lesson that I think she embodies and shares is the art of listening. She said that one of the biggest lessons that she learned when she was a fairly young leader during the Board of Trustees or the trust issue was about listening. That there were many parties who were very upset and very angry and she really learned that listening was the most important. And the other thing that she shares is the importance of service leadership. In fact, I asked her, I said, if you had to write a book, what do you think it would be about? And she said, I think it would be something about being a servant leader. Well, let's go to that for a minute because that's a thread, you know, at least in all of the interviews in this book and maybe in some of the others too. What is leadership in your perception of it? And what did you learn from Connie Lau and others about it in a community which we have a lot of people who are elevated to high places. We have a lot of people who occupy very special, important positions in the community, but it's not clear that we have a lot of leaders. Sometimes one is not the other. You could argue that Connie Lau is definitely a leader and as I said before the show, which you liked so much when I said this, is that women make very good leaders? Yeah, absolutely. I said that, I did say that. So the question is, what did you learn about leadership in your discussion with Connie Lau? I think in discussion with her and other women and just through experiencing life as well, that leadership is not a position. I think you very rightly said so. Is not a position. It is not being the boss. But a leader is able to, I think first and foremost, put themselves in the positions of other people, not just their staff and employees, but the community, to be able to see a diverse, distinct, sometimes even completely conflicting points of view. And a leader must be able to heal, must be able to see both sides and bring them both to the table. A leader must not be afraid to shy away from dissension or argument. It's not to say I shy away and I let's pass on the buck to someone else and get them to solve the problem for me, but to recognize that it is going to be messy, but the leader takes charge. And yet has the foresight to think further, has the hindsight to think about the context and where we have come from, but also have the depth of understanding of the situation or situations and circumstances, but also have peripheral vision to be able to see all points of view and bring them all together. I hope you're making notes about this, because it's very important. We need leaders in the community and every word is relevant here.  What about courage? What about boldness? You know, what about those traditionally masculine traits that people expect from leaders? Absolutely, and I mean first off, I mean just to speak as a woman, I mean over the weekend, my husband and I went to Strav to see our PCP and my husband freaked out and said, can you please have the PCP to not take the needle to me? I can't do blood.  Again, I'm not being biological. You heard it here, you write that down too. I'm not being essentialist, but if there's any person living or otherwise that can take blood, it's women. We all come from a mother. I mean, we can say we came from a Petri dish or you know, we're out to feed the sheen. Seminate it, but for most of us, we all have a mother. How we choose to later on regard this woman that bears us, okay, for us it was a different thing, but all of us have a mother, which goes back to if there's any living person that can deal with blood and pain, and back then, no epidural, let's put it in context, it would be women, but that aside, I think just again, at risk of sounding essentialist and I most certainly don't wanna do that, I think because of the role that women play in society, we have to multitask, we have to be the disciplinary, we have to be the nurturer, and in modern day societies, we do have to go out and work and bring home the bacon as well, especially in Hawaii, I mean, you typically have two working parents. So all these roles require women to have a depth of vocabulary, to be able to handle all these different situations, whether at work, at play, at home, manage the husband and manage the child. Well, we need leadership, we need communities to come together, we need to be focused, and we need leaders that we can trust, and possibly we haven't spent enough time with women in that regard. So I think your book has a sort of larger significance, especially in these times when leadership is so important and so needed, not only here in Hawaii, but in the US mainland and in Europe and everywhere. So I really think you're onto something. So I'm sorry to say that we're out of time, but I think it's actually a good segue to say, if you wanna know more about women in this community, and there's so many more, I mean, just the ones that I was going to ask about, Maisie Hirono, Kathy Inouye, Raya Teahelma, who was here recently, Poonani Burgess, Maya Sartoro-Ing, who was the sister of Barack Obama, who was very well loved, yeah. All of these people important that we should know them and see them as leaders and find out how they think and how you think about them. So the point is in October 21st, highly hence, get on Amazon and take a look at the book because there are 24, I get that right? 24 women leaders in the book you can learn from. That's right. Thank you, Loretta. Thank you, sir, and during the break, you also did say we can do a musical on the women, so we're gonna get Jay to do that together with us. Okay, we're gonna make this book into a musical. She's got a theater experience, so we'll do that at Leewood, yeah. We'll all be down. Thank you, Loretta Chen. I appreciate it, I appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you. I love her.


Thank you, Justin. Good afternoon everyone. As Justin said, we were asked this morning to pull something together and it's always interesting to know how many ways you can look at the activities of your organisation. And so the slides that we were asked to look at today was our approaches to adoption. So this has just been pulled together this morning and we learnt some stuff along the way. And I want to acknowledge my colleagues who are here today who were able to answer some of the questions. I'm going to take it at a very different level to what you've seen before. So I'm going to be talking about the culmination of some of the technologies and science that you've seen and we sort of refer to them as agricultural innovation. So the slides that I'm looking at is acknowledging there's some fabulous research going on. How do we get the results of that research into the hands of the farmers and I'm going to be talking about the farmers in the developing world in order to have the impact on food security that's really driving this research. So I'm going to start with introducing ACR and the International Food Security Centre discussing some of our approaches to adoption and then we'll give a few examples of the projects that we've been doing. So ACR is a statutory authority within the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade portfolio for an independent agency therefore. We're part of the aid program and we're both a research funder and a manager. We're about 31 years old and we're better known internationally than we are nationally. And we also have not only our headquarters in Canberra but we have about a dozen offices across the developing world. So we do a number of things. We're probably best known for commissioning research into improving agriculture production and other activities as you'll hear later on in the developing countries. And we do that by brokering partnerships. So we're a bit like a marriage broker. We bring together Australian research partners, many of our partners in the room today and international and developing country researchers to solve problems to do with agriculture and food security in their countries. A lot of the work that we do has directed indirect benefits back to Australia and the Crawford Fund at the end of last year released a book doing what we're doing good which really tends to quantify the benefits of that. Whether it be through some of the work on improved genetic resources it could be new technologies and techniques that we can use and can be through some different exchange. We also have significant training programs both formal through PhD studies and informal at a sort of policy level. We're known for communicating a lot of the work that we do and we also administer Australia's contribution which is quite significant and growing to the international agriculture research centres or the CGIR and we've heard a bit about, well the last talk talked about area for instance. And we have a very close relationship to the research prioritisation activity that's currently being undertaken at the moment through the CG. You may be aware with the change of government that current focus now in terms of the aid program is on economic diplomacy and we've all been spending a lot of time defining what that is, understanding and looking at how it relates to our work. ACL is really fortunate that it's not difficult to do that pretty much almost everything we do falls within the bands of economic development and improving trained and laid relations. It's well known that investment in the agricultural sector improves GDP investment four times better than investing in any other sector. So we know that investing in agriculture is just really going to help the economic development in those countries. Recently we did a study and we looked at the projects that we have and we found that 75% of the projects that we're currently undertaking is focused on the market access and value chain work. And I think if you've done that review maybe 15 years ago, Toadfish is here somewhere, it will be much more on the production and so this is something that's been happening anyway and that's because of the complicated systems that we're working in. Just an example because Les is here, the Pakistan Mango project is an active project that's under way at the moment and it's looking at improving the transport of mangoes using safe rate and then controlled at speed to the Netherlands. They're at sea for a very long time but the results of the research that we've done and it's still underway has shown that through this transportation they arrive in perfect condition and it's really opened up in markets for the mango growers there. So that's just one little example of how we can relate to the aid to trade and economic diplomacy agenda. So the Australian International Food Security Research Centre is a new initiative that was announced at the Chargum at the end of 2011. Our focus is on accelerating adoption and so when we talk about food security we're really looking at the full definition of agricultural production, access to food and utilization which is another way of saying food quality including nutrition quality including safe food and non-toxic food. So in order to do that we really try to bridge the gap between the research and development professionals and try and involve them early on in the research to improve the chance of development and adoption and we also work significantly through partnerships. At the moment the Food Security Centre is focused in south, southern and eastern Africa. The work that we do and this is part of ensuring it's adopted has to be identified at a country or sub-regional or pan-African level and we're really fortunate that there's such strong leadership when it comes to agricultural research in Africa that we've been able to leverage off. In June this year at the African Union all of the African countries will be signing on to an African science agenda which is really going to have a priority for anyone including the CGN, other international agencies and the national agencies within Africa in terms of research priorities and what development outcomes that this work is aiming to achieve. We're also really keen to leverage off existing work and that also means utilizing co-investment particularly with the private sector we'll talk a bit about that later. And it's also, I'm not going to talk too much about gender but just to recognize that in the areas that we work the majority of the farmers are women yet they don't have anywhere near the access to basic technologies, seeds, credit, land, information at all market and it's really low hanging fruit and if we just focused on ensuring without doing any more research ensuring that the women farmers of Africa had access the same access to what the men farmers do we could improve agricultural yields by 30% which equates to about 150 million people no longer going hungry. And then finally we're also cognizant of being being able to draw on where Australia's comparative advantage is and we've heard quite a bit about that earlier today. So what is it that Australia is really good at and what sort of technologies and farming techniques can we explore? So this is the theory of change for our centre. I just want to draw your attention to two things. One is this lens. So we have three research programmes which pretty well reflect the definitions of production, markets and nutrition and then we have some capacity building programmes. The lens that all of our activities operate through is looking at accelerating the adoption and then we have some intermediate development outcomes here great access to ag technologies better informant supported policies increased access to more nutritious and safe food less post-harvest loss with the aim for food security goal. Now this graph has since been updated I don't have the latest data but it shows that Africa here is really lagging behind the rest of the world not only in producing improved varieties but also in adopting improved varieties. There's a lot of data here as I said for 2010 for Africa but it's 35% adoption and that's significantly behind the rest of the world. So in Asia it's about 60% and in South America it's about 80%. So we're really focusing on why is that and there's a whole stack of reasons why that is and so we're trying to put some data and a better understanding about that rather than relying on some of the anecdotal evidence out there at the moment. This is one view of an impact pathway and I wanted just to show you a couple of things so the area that we've all traditionally focused on is doing research and delivering scientific helpables and that's including the CGIAR. Where we're now being asked to work is here and that's developing or delivering development outcomes or intermediate development outcomes and really engaging the end user in the research cycle and ensuring that at least with our target group of users they're able to adopt and use the outputs of the research. Now as you can see we're sort of losing control here. We're losing the area that we tightly control is this part here and we're all really good at being able to deliver these outputs and results but this is the area that the agricultural scientific world is being pushed into and that means we need to partner with different people. We need to get social scientists and anthropologists and a whole range of other people on the team early on in order to ensure that by the end of the project we're heading into this sphere. So the Food Security Centre that I'm the director of is really focused on as I said adoption and looking at the constraints and the incentives and just trying to understand that better and with those learnings trying to incorporate that into some of our future research projects. So while our projects are doing fantastic science on whatever issue they're looking at in addition to that we've asked them to identify what the impediment to adoption is in their project whose behaviour within that project so who are the key stakeholders in that project needs to change in order to remove that and that could be the researchers, could be the farmers, could be the policy makers, could be the extension agents, could be the private sector and what mechanism is being used in that project to reduce it and I'll share some of those mechanisms with you we'll actually hear that out here. So some of our projects are relying on leveraging off existing national programs and policies to ensure we can scale out utilising the private sector is really key especially for sustainability. Innovation platforms are best practice hubs things that are particularly successfully being adapted in Africa. Innovation platforms are where you put all the players along a value chain together to solve the problem and Fred is here with us today and A and B are doing a small scale irrigation project with us in a couple of countries in Africa and I think the basis of the change that they're seeking to achieve is through innovation platforms and taking a high level policy top down and a farmer based management bottom up approach and bringing them together through an innovation platform. Gender empowerment is particularly powerful as it's looking at what's happening at a system level rather than just a commodity level. Institutional capacity building Eric's going to come in in the end and talk about some of the work we're doing looking at demand pool instead of technology push. But before I go there I just wanted to also recognise that ACR is renowned for some of the impact assessment work it's been doing over the last three years and adoption study work. This work generally happens at least three years after the end of the project it's independently done and the adoption studies aren't done on all projects but they really provide us with not just quantitative but qualitative information on what are the characteristics of our projects that have really had good and successful adoption and are there some characteristics that are common to all of them. When we started in Africa we actually went back through the last 30 years or so and compiled the data and there wasn't a particularly strong level of adoption but where there was success it was really dependent on having the end users on board at the very beginning of the research and also having really clear disseminational impact pathways identified through the project. This is some of the work that's come out unfortunately I don't have time to go into it in too much detail but you can see the fact is inhibiting the success and then the corollary here in terms of what was successful. Lack of incentive so knowing I remember talking about risk it's really about farmers being in a position to take a risk and they need to be able to have demonstrated to them what the impact of whatever the change is being able to know about and access it is obviously a major inhibiting factor and then there's a whole lot of stuff about infrastructure policy factors etc. Continuity of staff is a big one and something that is really important when you're looking at technology such as agricultural modelling like the absence stuff we saw earlier if you've got really mobile stuff and this requires a lot of expertise to be held in country then we've had quite unsuccessful adoption levels where there's been a lot of movement of staff in these countries for example. Okay so here's an example of a project which is really leveraging on the national program Ethiopia and Rwanda have got major agroforestry programs underway at the moment they're pledging to plant 100 million trees over a period of time we're looking at integrating tree crops into farming systems through this project into maize systems in particular so it's really looking at on the one hand the spacings and the type of species in order to improve the maize yield and the results are really good I mean in a good season we can double or treble the maize yields in those areas. In a bad season that may not be the case in terms of maize you've got alternative livelihood options through fodder, through wood products and particularly through food and it's interesting a lot of these communities that we're working in have been quite adamant that they want to grow they want those tree crops to be food crops rather than fodder crops which is interesting but of course really important for the sustainability of that project but the other thing we're looking at is can these national programs and the extension services that they're training around these projects provide an effective scarlet mechanism and aircraft, the world agroforestry center is the project leader in that project this is one looking at the private sector interestingly small scale mechanization has not reached Africa it still had hose as in back in the biblical time and there's a whole lot of things happening such as urbanization, conflict, disease which is really lowering the labor force within small holder farms and the women farmers just aren't able to be as productive as they like because they just don't have the ability all the time of the day so this project is looking to introduce handheld small two wheel tractors to improve planting and harvesting but also processing and transport as well but we're really talking about models of small, higher and least scale so this, well there's a lot of agronomy and a lot of engineering in this project the number for us in terms of adoption is it's testing a whole range of business models in these different areas to see what can deliver sustainability and the other interesting part of this project is it's an example of South-South cooperation so we've got India and Bangladesh who have probably 90% uptake of these two wheel tractors in their farming systems to come and work with their African partners and look at importing it, maintaining it leasing it, those sorts of things this is being led by Senators Best Practice Hubs is another method that we're looking at and this project is really focused on peri-urban vegetables to improve not only nutrition but also livelihoods and it's got very strong focus on use and that's in recognition of the urbanization that we're seeing so dramatically in South Saharan Africa and it's predominantly in India and they're going to the cities and there's no work for them they're quite entrepreneurial and by them leaving the rural land there's less people living to grow food so peri-urban agriculture is seen as quite an attractive option for farming because it's high value it's fast paced there's many opportunities to do entrepreneurial value adding services and industries that's been off that this project's being led by the World Vegetable Center and you can see the countries that it's been operational in it's been really successfully tested in Western Africa and this is an example of the model and it's sort of a combination of research on-site and demonstration sites where a whole range of activities happen as well as training in those sites and associated with that is a lot of work in terms of variety selection developing seed systems developing post-harvest technologies to reduce waste developing integrated pest management technologies to use in the field and reduce anti-nutritional aspects of the production and then over here we've got the consumer end which is really nutrition and home economics about using some of these crops some of these crops are indigenous crops that haven't been used for quite a while and people have forgotten how to cook with them the market access etc another area that we've just started to work in and this is really building on Australia's comparative advantage Australia's really strong in biosecurity and there's some of the aspects that we do here which is quite transferable to these countries and in our consultations it became really evident that intra-regional trade you see there's a key pathway to food security there's a number of obstacles to that so that's moving food or seed or produce from one country to another those borders and one of the obstacles that we think we can deal with is biosecurity obstacles and that's just because of the lack of capacity and some basic surveillance risk assessment etc monitoring so we've currently got out of tender we've called for an expression of interest for Australian providers to work with us in developing some capacity training of sort of mid-level policy people within the African region and to develop an alumni of expertise at a regional level and also develop linkages with Australian expertise to try and unlock at least one of the obstacles to food security in the region which ultimately what we've focused on domestic and regional could lead to international trade as well okay so I'm going to hand over to Eric just to finish up this particular project is in alliance with ourselves the Sogente Foundation for Systemical Agriculture and the Global Foundation so as Melissa said we're focused on on studying and researching adoption there's a perception that maybe some of the improved varieties that plant readers of the public sector in the developing countries have gone out to farmers in the past decades have not been adopted so we'll try and explore this so here I have just summarized very briefly the lack of adoption questions that we want to study so the traditional varieties are massively used by farmers but in Africa in particular there's a big shift from self-consumption to a new range of utilization of the food their traders become involved a lot of new demands on the crops between the fresh market and now the supermarket in the growing cities of Africa processing now export so all the questions we are asking is how to get the market signals that are now emerging to impact on the researchers and basically this study that we are undertaking with a range of other partners we'll try and understand what makes a good plant reader to address the needs of the market and determine those needs so if I have another few minutes just about adoption of what we do I've been involved at ACR on the conservation farming projects which are one of the best applications of Australia's expertise in two developing countries so because it's not a well-known story we had for a long time a project in the dry lands of northern Iraq which is coming to an end this year but as an offshoot of that project and without any investment of the Australian government conservation farming studies have been used by local farmers in Syria and despite the conflict in Syria we kept in contact with the people who were involved in the project for the last seven or eight years and it's important to note that in the background of conflict and all the difficulties people have life goes on and so for example that extension agent she's a scientist in a small research station near the town of Hama and after having been exposed to the research experiments on conservation farming and no till she's actually continued to promote the technology and even today she's conducting field experiments, sorry on-station experiments and also dissemination to farmers now it's important to note that a major factor in the technology adoption in these circumstances is the fact that the farmers have a strong interest in saving fuel because diesel availability in Syria at the moment is very limited we're finishing the project in Iraq on a high note and so one of the major contributions of Australia is about the design of the appropriate cedar for no till planting of cereal and legumes so here you have on the left a picture of a field day where a no till cedar is introduced to the farmer and the gentleman here with the hat is the leader of the project in Iraq he's an agricultural research scientist at the University of Mosul in the Nineveh province of Iraq and so he said we can't travel to Iraq it's a place where as a federal government agent we are not allowed to travel but we have regular meeting and contact with these people on the left here an interesting reflection on the continuity of Australian assistance to the Middle East this machine is a cedar manufactured in South Australia by John Shearer a famous Australian agricultural equipment company which has been converted to do no till agriculture recently and on the basis of that we now have in Mosul in Northern Iraq local workshop small operators developing local cedars for no till farming which we believe is going to produce sustainability of this work because now there will be machinery available that's locally made and so that's on the right the first prototype that's been tested and validated by the scientists we support and so it's called HACIDA which means conservation in Arabic


To keep the ABC system manageable, companies need to keep the system as simple as possible, yet refined enough to accurately determine product costs. The cost hierarchy helps managers understand the nature of each activity cost pool and what drives it. Some costs are able to be refined down to the unit level, whereas some just can't be refined past the plant level. The least refined allocation base is considered the plant-wide level. These costs occur regardless of how many units, batches, or product lines are produced by the plant. Examples include cost of depreciation, insurance, property tax, and maintenance on the entire production plant. Often these costs are allocated with a plant-wide cost driver like direct labor hours. The product line level is slightly more refined. Some of our costs and activities can be traced to a particular product line, like fluid milk or yogurt or ice cream, but can't be refined beyond that point. The batch level is our next most refined level. In this case, we can trace costs to a batch, like whole milk or 2% milk, but not to the specific unit. Finally, our most refined allocation basis is the unit level. Here, activities and costs can be traced to a specific unit, like cremaweber skim milk gallon. This slide shows other examples. I would encourage you to pause the video and look closely at these.