Daily Tech News show is made possible by its listeners. Thanks to all of you, including Pat, DeGrashe A. Daniels, and Irwin Stur. Coming up on DTNS, do you need security labels on your car charger? Uber wants to show you ads while you ride, and why banning TikTok has only made YouTube and the Gram more powerful than India could possibly have imagined. This is the Daily Tech News for Thursday, October 20th, 2022. Happy birthday to my brother Tim in Los Angeles. I'm Tom Merritt. Also in Los Angeles, I'm Lamar Wilson. Also in the area, I'm the show's producer, Roger Chang. All right, my brother is having a birthday, but we've got some other tech things you should know with the quick hits. Lots of news from Intel today. It showed off the next generation of Thunderbolt, which is going to be based on USB 4 version 2.0, the one we just told you about earlier this week. Basically, it takes some of those optional USB specs and makes them required. So if you have a Thunderbolt connection when this is published, you would be assured to get 80 gigabits per second with the possibility of that asymmetric 120 gigabits per second support for dual 4K monitors and delivery of at least 100 watts of power, although USB 4 version 2 can support 240 watts, so no word on that. Also no word on when the next version of Thunderbolt will be published. Intel also officially launched its Raptor Lake family of CPUs featuring the core i9-13900K, the snappily named i7-13700K, and the sportily named i5-13600K. Each chip is also shipping without integrated graphics. Just look for KF in the model alongside Z790 motherboards. Reviews are finding the increase in the efficiency cores, seems to improve it over Alder Lake for sure, and all those e-cores and faster clock speeds make it competitive with AMD Zen 4 as well. You're going to need Windows 11 or a recent Linux kernel and be ready for some high power consumption. Oh yeah. Google announced new features for messages on Android. It now supports emoji reactions. Other Android users will see the emojis and iOS users will see a sense in selling them which emoji was used in the response. Messages now also support threaded replies, and you'll be able to watch a YouTube video in the Messages app. Yeah, and messages can be used on United Airlines Flight's Wi-Fi without charge. More airlines are expected to follow, and Google announced Android 13 Go edition for low-end phones. Now this includes material, U-designs, and Google Play system updates, among other features. Phones will need two gigs of RAM and use Android 13 Go edition. Yeah, a bit of a ram hog, that low-end operating system. The Competition Commission of India has fined Google $161.9 million for anti-competitive practices related to Android in, quote, multiple markets. Google requires that device manufacturers install the entire Google mobile suite and prominently place Google apps if they want to get the Google mobile suite and the apps. The Commission found that this, quote, amounts to imposition of unfair condition on the device manufacturers. It also ordered Google not to offer incentives for exclusive search. 97% of smartphones in India run Google's version of Android, so it's kind of hard for them to argue that they're not, at least, in a monopoly position. Maybe they don't think they're abusing it, but they certainly are in one. Yeah. Podcast company Pocketcast, which is owned by Automatic, the folks that own WordPress, announced that all of its apps are now open source. Pocketcast is using Mozilla's public license. Pocketcast encourages all developers to share modifications they make to the code. Repositories for iOS and Android version of the apps are now available on GitHub. The information sources say Apple has paused production of some of the components of the iPhone 14 plus. That's the larger version of the base model. There's also the iPhone 14 Pro Max. That one has not been paused. Just the big version of the intro, the non-pro iPhone 14. The information also says a plant that assembles the iPhone 14 plus hasn't paused but has cut its production by 70 to 90%. It looks like Apple is pausing or halting or delaying production in order to evaluate how to go forward because they're not selling as many of these as they expected, but it does not look like they're going to cancel the model. Hey, remember BlackBerry? I think so. I was little. Yeah. The company, the company that made the phones and stuff, yeah, they are still a company. They do security now and they do it quite well, I have to say. They also do a little market research around security. Recently, BlackBerry published results of a survey that found around 74% of people think there should be ratings for how secure connected cars and electric vehicles, chargers, are. So you have a little label that says, you know, like Energy Star. This is 70% protected, hopefully bigger. The US National Institute of Standards and Technology, along with the Federal Trade Commission are working on a basic set of security standards to create at-a-glance labels like that, similar to those Energy Star labels. And those are set to launch in 2023, but not necessarily on connected vehicles and chargers. That's not part of the plan. It's all about IoT. And while most people want the ratings, 54% in this BlackBerry survey said they are concerned about devices in their home being attacked. That means 46% are not. They think their IoT devices are just fine. 32% said they have at least one IoT device that they do not allow to connect to the internet because of security concerns. That means that 68% of them just let everything connect. Now, Lamar, it could be because they have very secure, well-vetted IoT devices and they've never bought an off-brand one. Is that what you think is going on? That or they just really put a lot of trust in their system. Like, for example, I use HomeKit. I put my trust in HomeKit. That's what I personally feel secure when I have all my devices connected under there. And I'm sure other people feel the same with Alexa, Google Assistant. But I honestly think the most important work to matter protocol team, no matter 1.0 is out now, I think the most important thing they can do is the education of this because all these devices are going to become going to be matter certified. But what does that mean? Well, we as techies know that HomeKit is the foundation under matter. We know that's rock solid secure, according. But how do you tell everyday consumer that if it says matter, it matters? That was corny, but they should use that. Yeah. In which case, it will be easier to have these labels. One wonders if maybe the labels won't be necessary, but it sounds like they're going to do them anyway. And it would be interesting if you walk into a store and you see all the matter compliant stuff in the 90s or whatever the rating system is, the high rating and non matter stuff is lower. I do think that what happens is people say, yes, I'm very concerned with security on the box. I would like it to tell me if it's insecure. But I assume that everything I have running in my house is fine, which may or may not be true, right? Yeah, absolutely. When you said the box, maybe you're thinking of a Tommy boy where it's like the guarantees on the box. Yeah, it says it on the box. That means it's a guarantee. And it's like, do people really still have trust in that? I guess they do. Now you have a connected car that is an electric vehicle. How do you feel about this idea of, hey, maybe we should also put it on the chargers and the cars? I think as a good idea, short answer. I think as long as EVs are becoming more prevalent, they're here to stay. There has to be some kind of standard or some for security on there. I mean, side note, we still need a standard on the type of charger. I think we're getting there with that. But going along with that, yeah, a standard for safety security, because actually, after I read this article, I'm like, is my charger secure? Can someone come plug into this thing and do things to my car? I don't know. And now you make me worry. I imagine your charger at home. Does your charger at home connect to the internet in any way? It does. It does. There you go. Yeah. So there's a way in. And once they get in, anything that it's connected to apps, phones, etc. is a potential vector. That doesn't mean they will be able to get in, but you want to make sure that the highest security level is put in there. Because if it's connected to the internet, someone can find a way to get into it if it's not properly secured. I agree. And so I don't want that to happen. Man, I have a few things in my house that are not internet connected because I don't know if they're secure or not. So my washer, my washing machine, I'm like, I don't really need that to be internet connected and I can't find any vetting on it. So I'm just not going to connect it. That's just going to be the way that goes. You know, as much as I want to internet connected washer and dryer and all that, I didn't really consider that. If you're not, yeah, if you're not sure, it's probably better not to have it because it doesn't need it. I'm sure it's fine. But really, all it can do is allow me to get a notification that my laundry done, which would be nice. I'm not going to lie. But it doesn't seem to work. It can have firmware updates so your dryer could be more efficient. Yeah, that's true. And now I have to manually go check for those if I want. But yeah. All right, let's talk about ads while we relax. Who doesn't love that? Yes. Uber launched a new advertising product called Journey ads. Now it will sell ads based inside its ride hailing and Uber Eats apps and also offer in vehicle digital ads. Uber says brands will have 100% share of voice during the trip, meaning you'll only see ads in the app and the car from one brand during your ride. So Uber has already sold some ads and will continue to sell placement and sponsor emails, post checkout ads and menu ads and car top ads. That's a lot of ads. So how many people can Uber show an ad to? Well, Uber says it has 122 million monthly active users globally. And it told investors it expects it could make more than 1 billion in revenue in 2024. Ride hailing company Lyft launched a similar plan earlier in August called Lyft Media. So we all complain about having more ads than we actually exhibit behavior that we don't like. Everyone says they don't like ads, but then people respond to them, which is why people keep buying ads. So I think it's easy to tear this down and say, I don't want this. It's going over the line. I want to be able to opt out of it. And I'm not even arguing against that. But let's approach it from the other side. Is there any way this is beneficial? Is there anything out of this that you would say, okay, I would like to be able to opt out of it, but I wouldn't if it did this. Yeah, I have a different philosophy about ads. Maybe I probably sync with you a lot. I don't see a problem with ads as long as they are beneficial. I'll give you an example real quick. I saw an ad on TikTok today for a NFC business card. So someone wants my business information. I take out the card. They tap their phone on it. They get up my website and it has all my links and they can have any context. To me that ad, I sat and watched the whole video. That was interesting to me. That's beneficial. Same thing I'm thinking about. If I'm in an Uber and I'm being taken from the airport whatever it's evening time, it knows I'm probably hungry. It knows type of restaurants I tend to order from. So why not put an ad that says, hey, you could order your food now and it could be there when you get home. I think that's a really good use case of something that's beneficial. I don't mind those kind of ads if it's going to help me do something. I know you mentioned something about watching programs in the airport, right? Yeah. Although now you got me thinking about coming home from LAX and ordering Korean fried chicken to just be hot and ready on my doorstep. Isn't that what you can do? You can actually do that already. But the ad that's going to push me to do that, give me a coupon, all that stuff. But yeah, I was thinking about this because I saw that NBC Universal was one of the advertisers on board for the initial launch of this. By the way, my wife works there. So I always try to disclose that. But that doesn't really inform my take here because it could be NBC. It could be Disney. It could be anybody. I could see them using this to advertise you to you by letting you watch an episode of one of their original shows. So let's forget about this NBC. Let's say it's Apple. Apple TV Plus could say, hey, have you seen? Oh, what's the what's the the big C or? Sure, let's go with C. Have you seen any of C? We'll show you the first episode. We know your ride is 45 minutes long. This episode is 38 minutes long as you watch the whole thing. And if you like it, sign up for Apple TV Plus and watch the rest of them. I feel like that would be the kind of advertising that I would appreciate because it's giving me something entertaining in exchange for showing me off. It's like a free sample. Yeah, absolutely. Now I don't listen. We've watched those movies. I can't name them off top of my head where it's in the future.  And as you walk past the windows like, hey, hey, you there. Now, so obviously that scares us. I don't see that type of future because that does not that does not seem like that's going to make anybody any money. Those are just ads to be ads, but ads that are helpful. And I'm in a photo disclosure. I'm a creator who lives off ads, but I but I still pick and choose the ones that I can pick and choose. Yeah, something that I feel is going to be helpful for not only me, but for the people watching me, because if it's not helpful, then it's a waste of time. Yeah. And that's always true of ads. I always point out the trailers are essentially ads and people host them for free because people like to watch trailers. Absolutely. That said, OK, well, I think we've done a good job of looking at it from the other side. Is this too much? Are we swinging back to advertising just being everywhere? Not that we ever really swung away from it. Like Netflix is adding ads and they had said they would never do it. Uber is is putting ads and during the ride. Like, is that just where we're headed? I think so, because I think the reality is more money. I didn't realize this before until I started studying this. There's more money to be made in ads than people paying outright. And it didn't seem that way. It seemed like, well, if you get the full amount for me, that should pay for the difference, right? Yeah. But but ad rates are going up and it's more desirable. So I think both will live. I don't think the if I want to pay for no ads and pay a little premium, I don't think that's ever going to go away. I want to I want to be shielded from that. I can pay the premium. Not everyone can. But again, ads that are done tasteful are going to keep people on the on the platform. If Netflix has some annoying ads like who used to have and maybe some of people argue still have, they're going to stop using Netflix. The negative of targeting is that targeting makes you give away your information without your consent, right? What I like about this. And granted, we have to assume that Uber isn't going to use third party ad targeting here when I say this. But if Uber just uses stuff it knows about you, it can give you good advertising because it knows where you go, when you go, what you eat if you use Uber eats. And I feel like that means it won't feel as creepy because it's first party and it will be more helpful because they actually know stuff about you. The good the good thing about ad targeting is they know what you want. And they're they're showing you something that you might find useful. But how does Netflix know who we who what we do? They know what stuff we like, right? Right. So I think they kind of have to use third party. You have to use third party. I think they have to because that's just not enough. It's just not enough. Well, folks, if you know if you've cracked the code on advertising, let us know. We got an email address. You can send us an email feedback at dailytechnewshow.com. There's a common belief that big companies like regulation because they're big enough to survive it. And regulation tends to crowd out any smaller competitors before they get big. Restofworld.org describes just such a situation playing out in India. While the US has made a lot of noise about banning TikTok, India went and did it on June 29, 2020. At that time, folks hoped that TikTok's 200 million monthly active Indian users would move to homegrown apps like Moj or Josh or Chingari or Raposo. Now, the demand is there. Restofworld notes that analysts estimate the short video space in India will be worth more than 19 billion by 2030. Wow. That sounds like good news for local apps. But most marketers rest of the world talk to believe it in a benefiting YouTube and Instagram instead. It's not that local apps don't have users. It's just that the bigger foreign apps, well, have more of them. Like at least twice as many. Restofworld says Moj and Josh combined have 300 million active, monthly active users in India. YouTube alone has more than 100, excuse me, 325 million there. And Instagram is suspected a top 400 million in India this year. Yeah. The companies that run Moj and Josh are paying creators and racking up losses as they do that and only getting half the monthly active users of YouTube and Instagram. YouTube also pays creators and racks up losses on shorts, but it has plenty of cash to burn and it can outlast the other competitors. Plenty of creators come to YouTube and Instagram without being paid as well because of the prestige of the platform, the size of the user base, not to mention that brands do seem more comfortable working on YouTube and TikTok because they're familiar with them. Part of that is familiarity. Part of that is simply things like tracking is more developed from YouTube and Instagram and any of these older, bigger platforms. Lamar, I know you've had a lot of good success in short videos, so I was curious on your insight as a creator, what kind of things could these smaller companies do to get you over there? Is it just paying or is there more than that? Yeah, I didn't think about this one for a while because obviously you want to app that if I was an ideal app, I was to build one massive reach of course because the more people, the more that benefits you and your business, I'd like to get a rev-share of ad placements that are before and after my videos if there are any ads. A lot of places do not do that right now. I think most of them do not have that. They're starting to and maybe a friendly environment for when a brand comes to me and wants to do a sponsored thing, I post it on that place, but because we didn't post it through you, through your network, you push it down and that's something every network does now. Brands know this, so they compensate for it, but it's still annoying to have the views just plummet on a branded video because they're mad that you didn't use them to add in place. KSL wonders if YouTube shorts or TikTok are better revenue-wise or are they the same? Well, YouTube shorts doesn't have revenue at all. They have a fund that pays little to nothing each month, but in 2023 they are going to have rev-share. TikTok actually sent me a notice yesterday that they're coming out with an ad rev-share program almost immediately. They're working out of since June. I think they're all trying. Instagram has a bonus program, Facebook Reels has a bonus program. They're trying to find ways to pay creators with shorts because right now they're getting a lot of data, a lot of traffic, and they don't have to pay anything out necessarily. The tide is starting to turn with that for sure. On the consumer side, on the person who watches these things, the reason if I'm in India that I'm going to Instagram or YouTube is because that's where all my friends are finding the funny things and sharing them with me. These other platforms just don't have the penetration. I feel like reach is one of the main platforms because if you get the reach, then you can sell the ads that will bring people like you to the platform. But how do you get that reach? I think you have to be different. You can't just do the same platform that TikTok does, which is what YouTube and Instagram are doing. You have to have a spin. You have to have something a little different the way TikTok did in its origins, right? Yeah, exactly. It was musically beginning, so there was lip-syncing, lip-syncing dances, whatever they got. They got a massive amount of people in, then they were able to shift. I think these local India apps right now, they're bringing in a lot of Indian celebrities. I think that's great, but that's very short-term thinking that money's going to run out at some point. What do you do if they haven't reached a certain level, having all these celebrities in? That's one of the international apps. I think they made a mistake there getting rid of TikTok. I understand it was a China-India dispute. Yeah, there was a border conflict between China and India going on when TikTok got banned. Not to mention COVID and stuff like that. Yeah, there's more to it than just helping out the domestic apps. That's a good point. I don't know. I think you have an opportunity in India to niche market because you have so many individual languages and individual cultures that you could superserve. I know that doesn't give you mass adoption, but that could be your way to build a community and then expand out of it. I got this impression from the Rest of World article anyway, and I don't know myself that that wasn't happening, that everybody's just going for mass appeal straight out of the gate. Yeah, mass appeal, and then when a certain amount of creators or celebs leave, they leave, and then an audience moves on, and then that was local is gone. All right, Meta announced Wednesday that it has built the first AI-powered speech translation system for unwritten languages. They call it the Universal Speech Translator, or UST. Just call it Universal Translator. Might as well just go ahead. Come on, Meta. Meta says that it estimates around 40% of the 7,000 languages on Earth are primarily spoken and have little or no written component. Usually, the way you train an algorithm to identify and translate a language is to train it on text, but on these 40% of languages, you don't have enough text or any text to train it on. Meta used a few different techniques. They used intermediate languages like Mandarin, so they would translate a language into Mandarin, then translate the Mandarin into English, and that helped bridge the gap because they could have a little more information and be able to get it trained on languages it otherwise couldn't. They also engaged in something called speech mining, where they encoded the spoken words into the semantic space as written languages like English. So instead of speech to text, because there is no text, Meta generated waveforms from the little bits of speech, and those waveforms were treated as if they were text, because they always looked about the same. The system is able to translate the primarily oral Taiwanese language Hukian. The purpose of UST is to provide real-time speech-to-speech translation across all languages. Mark Zuckerberg said Meta will open-source the Hukian translation models, but also the evaluation data sets and research papers so that others can reproduce and build on the work, so this is not a proprietary thing. In the end, what you need to know out of this is that UST has to be trained on a language, but it can be trained on languages that other algorithms can't. Once you train it, it can do real-time translation of languages that most other systems can't handle. Yeah, I think a couple of things here. Some of this is over my head, but I just appreciate, we have 7,000 languages in the world. That's amazing, you don't think about that, and the fact that 40% of those have little to no text. What a job these researchers have to try to figure out, and I think using a bridge through Mandarin is pretty genius to try to find some commonalities or some similarities. I think it's genius work. It just bridges that gap for us to be able to talk to each other in real-time one day, just like on a certain show. Yeah, we could have real-time where you speak in English, I speak in the language that I have yet to learn, but everyone would understand each other. Yeah, I also love the idea of using waveform to build a vocabulary. I think there's probably other avenues of research there that you could do regarding linguistics, regarding figuring out things like, is there a universal grammar? Because we've never done that before. We've never compared that many languages in that way. I wonder if there's some other tributaries to this river of research going on. Fascinating stuff, and yeah, the fact that it's being done by META is going to bother some people because they've got a thing against META, but these are just scientists, and they are scientists that would work somewhere else if META wasn't employing them, and I don't get the sense that they're doing anything nefarious here. It seems like a pretty good project. No, it seems good. Yeah. All right, let's check out the mailbag. George wrote in and said, hey team, hope you are well. Just been listening to the latest episode and hearing the listener's confusion over cookies. So we had an email where someone was talking about the GDPR and saying, well, they should allow functional cookies. And I was explaining that, yeah, they do. The GDPR doesn't prevent session cookies for logging in, and that sort of thing. It's about tracking cookies. And George said, that made me think this would be a good topic for Know a Little More. Working in the ad tech industry, the issue of a cookie-less world, especially with GDPR and also Google deprecating them in the Chrome browser in the future, is always discussed. I think it would be useful to know a little more about cookies. And I was very pleased to be able to write back to George and say, good, because I did one not that long ago. It was in September. We updated it and reposted it. So if you want the episode of cookies, go to know a little more.com. And I talk about where they came from, why they're called cookies, what they were originally used for, what they became used for later, and a little bit about what our emailer yesterday was talking about, which is you don't have to have cookies to track you. There's ways to track you without cookies. Real quick, I just want to say something fascinating about your podcast. I was able to learn about HMI 2.1. You did a rerun episode on that. I didn't realize that 2.1 doesn't mean it has all the features. Yeah. And when you were breaking that down, I was like, wow, I just learned a little more. Oh, I'm glad. No, I did. Oh, it was really helpful. Well, you got some good stuff going on, too. I've been enjoying seeing your stuff on TikTok and Reels and YouTube and all over the place. What do you got going on? Yeah, I'm doing all kind of unboxings and showcases. One of the highlights was this cloud device. It came out a couple weeks ago called Logitech Cloud. It literally was called that, where it's a gaming device that you can you can use Nvidia GeForce Now and Xbox Cloud and all these different services.  And I just thought it was really cool. It did really well on that. So I do a lot of tech things like that. So if you're interested, go to my site, LamarWolsey.com, and whatever site that you're most comfortable with, I am there everywhere, Tom. I'm even here. You're also behind me. I don't even know how you pull that off. Am I that emoji back there? Yeah. Yeah. Well, thanks to everyone who supports us on the show. We couldn't get Lamar here without your support. So thank you, Simon and Nathan. Simon and Nathan just started back on us on Patreon. Thank you, Simon and Nathan. Good to have new people in here. Keep it coming. You're going to get good stuff. You're going to get Roger's got a column up today. You could become a patron and see what he says about being a video content creator right now at patreon.com slash D T N S patrons can also stick around for the extended show, Good Day Internet. You can catch the show live Monday through Friday, 4 p.m. Eastern 200 UTC. Find out more at daily tech news show dot com slash live, and we shall return tomorrow with Patrick Norton and Len Peralta. Talk to you then. This show is part of the frog pants network. Get more at frogpants.com. Simon Club hopes you have enjoyed this program.


Hello everyone. My name is Emily Pollack and I'm a researcher at the IAED. Great that so many people could join us today, especially under the current global circumstances and I'm sure many people are attending from less than usual situations. Some people may have signed up prior to changes that have taken place but great that many people have managed to join. We will be recording this and we'll be putting out a note afterwards on the presentations and discussion. But first I'd like to welcome you all to this fourth webinar in a series that we're running. This is a series on approaches to empowering producers in commercial agriculture. It's a series supported by a four-year project led by IAED but in collaboration with partners in Nepal and Malawi and is financially supported by the UK DFID under the commercial agriculture for small holders and agribusiness program or CASA. So welcome everyone. A key part of this endeavor is gathering evidence from around the world and testing approaches on how producers in challenging situations are exercising agency, are finding sources of empowerment to address challenges in their value chain relations, in their market relations. So for example we're gathering experiences, insights into different approaches to addressing information and power symmetries, approaches that support producers to be in the driving seat or at least to be engaging and interacting with public and private sector actors from a position of strength. So in light of that as the background we're very pleased to be hosting today a group of panelists who are going to share their experiences of the e-granary platform that is aiming to serve East African farmers and you'll hear hear about that directly from the speakers. e-granary was inspired by a similar platform in India. It was established to create strong and reliable market linkages as well as key services in one space, one package and a model that stays in that through a model that stays in the hands of producer organizations to some extent. So I won't say any more on e-granary. My understanding is still in relatively early days but have come a long way and have many lessons that have been learned and lessons to share and we felt that this warranted sharing this experience more widely. I'm sure those involved directly would also benefit sharing and exchanging with others. So we'd like to bring you this webinar in the spirit very much of mutual exchange and learning on a global scale about what might work well, what can work well, what can we do more of, what can we do differently, how do we overcome some of the really challenging barriers and exploit new opportunities in market systems from the perspective of producers. So without further ado I'd like to introduce our panel who will take you through the key components, the progress to dates, the challenges and the lessons for others. Once the panelists have shared with us their perspectives and their experiences we'll have a Q&A discussion and this discussion session and for that we welcome comments and questions. I believe in the Q&A box and IAD on our side will manage those directing them to the panelists in turn as relevant and perhaps we can start with mainly questions and comments in response to what we've heard and then we can move on to more general sharing and relevant experiences and we very much encourage that. So even if it's in this short window that we have together, flagging things for other people to explore following the webinar and we can stay connected through other means. So please do use that opportunity to really exchange. So the speakers we have firstly Steven Maturi will give us an overview presentation. Steven is the Executive Director of the East African Farmers Federation. He's also CEO of eGranery. The EAFF is a regional network of farmer, national farmer unions, federations and cooperatives in 10 countries and he'll tell you more about eGranery. Following that overview from Steven we'll hear from three panelists who are connected to the platform in some way and hear comments from them from their perspectives. Firstly we'll hear from Daniel Nyaga who is a farmer in Kenya who's been interacting with the platform in Kenya and then Giles Lewis who is a grain and oil seed trader in East Africa at ETG which is a leading integrated agricultural supply chain group with operating entities across 40 countries covering procurement, warehousing, processing and or manufacturing and finished of finished goods and also in transporting and distributing products. And then we'll move to Caroline, Caroline Karauki who is a project manager at Vision Fund Kenya. Vision Fund is a microfinance institution that aims to offer effective credit as well as economic empowerment through business support for rural communities and we'll hear from Caroline how Vision Fund has been involved and engaged with eGranery. So we're very honored to have these speakers join us and bring their experiences together in this session particularly in turbulent times. We appreciate people being able to make time and be available when there's a lot of changes happening and we look forward to hearing their perspectives. So I'll hand over now, I can see this presentation is ready, hand over now to Steven. Yeah so my name is Steven Mosher, I'm the Chief Executive Officer and I'll run you through a couple of slides that we've prepared for this particular engagement and next is a context, content of my presentations. Next slide. Yeah so why are we talking about digitization or digitizing agriculture? One of the major challenges they have in Africa is that agriculture is so fragmented and fragmentation lies in between farmers, in between the organizations and along the valley chain and it's only through a virtual platform that you can actually be able to play together all these activities and that's what we've actually done with our eGranery where we're able to aggregate farmers for input markets, output markets and services and here we include finance, mechanization and extension. Next next. So agriculture is faced by many many challenges and we thought these two actually stood out, one that there's low collective action by farmers and two that there's lack of data on farming and under the issues of collective action, due to that weakness, a lot of farmers have challenges in jointly marketing, jointly procuring of course due to fragmentation, the challenge of access or provision of services is a challenge to actually have effective and efficient technology uptake. That again brings challenges of building strong partnerships and of course value addition. With respect to lack of data, these are major challenges because it affects both policy makers as well as investors and we feel that due to that challenge we, Africa's lagging behind in terms of attracting innovative investments in finance and value addition in advisory services and that has an impact on policy next. When we ventured on building the eGranery, we looked at the typical profile of a farmer and one thing about Kenya where we started is that one there's massive mobile penetration. Most of the farmers are on mobile money. I think you know about M-Pesa which is globally known. Most of the adult population are actually farmers and about 60% of farmers are actually in corporatives of self-help groups. So we tried to look at how we would address four major issues which they actually faced. One was markets in terms of reliability and consistency, finance and insurance in terms of inclusivity. Resources were challenges in terms of access to certified inputs, properly pricing labor as well as appropriate equipment and of course was a big challenge of knowledge due to the fact that a lot of knowledge asymmetry and it was a challenge in terms of delivering this through extension and otherwise. Next. So the slide before takes jump. Slide before please. Yeah, thank you. So what are we going to achieve with the eGranery? The eGranery is unique because one is led by farmers. Most of the ePath forms are not led by a farm organization and it brings together at least four services in one. So the underlying proposition on the eGranery is that the ecosystem that we build actually benefits everybody. And here, for example, if you start with a farmer, one is that the insurance of the farmer gets a price and the best we can, the best price, they're able to access certified inputs and able to work with financial institutions to tailor make financial solutions. On this aspect, farmers have to actually be formally organized and have to have at least expertise in the value chain they're actually engaging. For financial institutions, we allow them to have access to what we would call the risk farmers. And the idea is that whatever loan product or credit product we build is actually based on because we work on this every season. So there's an inclination towards it being based on income. And of course, because we're using groups, you know, there's a lot of group approach to that in terms of reducing risk. And we try to ensure that the financial product actually is bundled. So it covers the cost of inputs or covers the cost of insurance premium. And to some extent, or in the future, some businesses are all mechanization and so on. And this loan, we actually negotiate it on behalf of the farmer. With respect to the buyer, we try to ensure that they actually have access to a quality product that can actually be traceable. We actually have traceability on our system. And when it comes to pricing, we actually negotiate on these prices with and on behalf of the farmer. Next. So in building a platform, there are certain things that we observed. One, that technology is not a single bullet, especially in agriculture. And you need to build this tech on a sound and feasible business plan. There's need to invest on relationships that are non-tech, you know, for agriculture to work because of the very many moving parts and the many partnerships that you're actually building. You have to really work on partnerships within the farmers themselves, between the organizations with other actors and so on. The business model has to have a market orientation. We try to work a lot from the market end towards the farmer because they just make business sense when you're actually proposing this to the farmer. Then the idea at the end of it is that we generate data, and this data actually helps us in terms of, we do a lot of work on policy, but also it helps us in terms of negotiating better engagement with off-takers and other actors who have actually invited to the class. Next. Next. So this next slide actually shows a basic model. I know we've tried not to put a very complex one, but basically what happens is that the equally more or less aggregates everybody. So we start off with groups that are actually organized. We ensure that they actually are able then to access bulk in bulk procurement of inputs. So we are able to get a quantity discount. We are able then to tailor make extension, whether the beginning of the season or during the season. They're able to negotiate for them services, whether it's equipment leasing, whether it's a microfinance, whether it's post-harvest services, and all these has to come under contract. Like I said earlier, we use all this to actually help us in policy and we advocate along all those areas that are actually managed. Next. So currently we have about 260,000 farmers, 214,000 Kenya, 15,000 in Uganda, and over 5,000 in Rwanda dealing with all sorts of cereals and grains. We are currently reviewing our service delivery model in partnership with the Institute of Sustainable Development. I think the biggest challenge so far and I think is the biggest challenge in agriculture has always been access to finance. And I think the challenge we faced was trying to get the big banks on board, but you're lucky that Visual Fund actually agreed to work with us. And the challenge I think of the onset when it started providing this support had been the collateral value. The request was 20% from the farmers and 20% from here, that's 40% of the loan. I know with time we've been able to negotiate this based on the performance of the farmers and of course other child issues. And now it's 10% of the farmer. In Uganda, it's 14% in terms of collateral demand. The interest is also high. I know we've been dealing with 36%, but again that has been negotiated and I think my colleague Caroline is here. And that is falling to about 24%, so like I said so far, only the microfinance institutions have actually shown interest in working with us. Next. So what are the challenges? What are the other challenges that we faced? Now, we've opened up in Uganda and like I mentioned, and it's been a challenge just setting up. It took us about eight months and we needed to do regulatory studies as well as looking at competitors and what they're actually doing and many things around the studies. It took time for just setup. We had to acquire what you call the unstructured supplementary service data, USSD acquisition, which again requires it's a security issue. You have to be assessed by security apparatus of a country, of course setting up the partners and of course HR. Second thing is farmer coordination. Again, you realize within groups is a lot of heterogeneity you know so going to get the homogeneity around it so that you can actually have homogeneous data also takes a bit of time. Synchronizing partners of course create a lot of delays. Like you've seen, we have almost four or five kind of partners from inputs to services to all that and you have to synchronize all this. Issues of course of quality of product. We are having climate change challenges affecting you know us during harvest, high moisture, flotops and so on. Price fluctuations in the region we come from, there are challenges in government sets, pricing, sometimes you have market class and you really need to understand all this. Of course repayment by the farmers. I think you've seen the cost of interest is quite high, cost of money is high, but again coupled with climate change and issues of governance within the groups again that contributes to repayment defaults. Next and these I think is the second last slide. So what are the other lessons you've learned? One that I think the biggest challenge that farmers face among the other challenges is access to markets and certified input and I think we've tried to address this with our platform and you've actually seen a lot of positive response from our members. Important lessons include the mains procurement like you've heard we deal with ETG which works with many markets and it's important to understand how they do their procurement so that it informs how we plan our production. Of course climate change has been a challenge and we've been working through with the insurance partners and the credit partners to ensure that we innovate through all the seasons because the issue of group guarantee, the reason why we work with groups and that's why when we recruit the farmers we use the 28 approach. They would convince 20, they would then convince the remaining 80, bundling all services to reduce transaction costs. Over time it means if you bundle the inputs, the inputs, the other services in between the insurance then it will become cheaper for the farmer and then the importance of having farmers organized into groups because this helps in terms of partnership mobilization, the actual partners actually receive value in engaging in large groups. You help them to negotiate better terms when you're doing bulk procurement of inputs among many others. When it comes to credit, farmers are actually ready to pay back. They are actually properly priced and structured. When it comes to insurance, of course now with the challenges of climate change, farmers are demanding insurance however they actually want it to be also priced well and then the reason why we are trying to innovate a lot around bundling. I think the next one is the last one, next slide, which shows all our partners and I want to thank those who are actually in the panel, the farmer, Daniel, ETG and vision fund. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you so much Stephen. I'm now going to ask Caroline to unmute her microphone and share her quick remarks in relation to Stephen's presentation. Caroline, over to you. Okay, hi everyone. My name is Caroline Kariuki. I work for vision fund Kenya. Vision fund is a microfinance that is affiliated to our vision and we offer financial support to farmers and small hold, to small holder farmers and entrepreneurs. Just like Steve has said, we are in partnership with the agranary to be able to empower the small holder farmer and at this partnership what we do is that we offer financial services and we offer product called input financing. Input financing is a product where we offer certified input that is crop insurance and there is also life insurance and the reason why we have a product is so that our small holder farmers can be able to benefit from this particular product because we know that sometimes the small holder farmer, if not supported financially, they are not able to get value for their money and in Kenya many people are small holder farmers since the highest contributor to the country's GDP is through agriculture. So this product we give due to climate change we are able to cushion ourselves and that we offer crop insurance in every season. Every input financing loan we give there has to be a crop insurance and also life insurance where we protect the farmer. In case the farmer is unwell and they are hospitalized then the insurance comes on board and pays the loan for the farmer for that particular period that the client is hospitalized. Also in case a client loses a spouse or a child who is below 18 years old, insurance comes on board and supports the client with some check just to show that visual fund cares you know and also if a client when the client has this input financing loan and in case they die insurance covers the risk so we are not we don't go back to the family to ask for our fine our money. So how we do this is through group lending. So eGranary helps us to mobilize farmers through their platform and the farmers once they register with eGranary then they we register them now to vision fund Kenya we offer them trainings that is financial literacy training and eGranary also trains them on good farm practices and we do this in partnership with them and also in partnership with insurance because the organization that offers insurance on behalf of vision fund they also comes on board and trains the farmer under the advantages of having insurance and so this farmer in a group once they are trained then we give them the leeway to choose whether they want to go ahead they take the input financing loan or not and most of them really appreciate that they are able to be given this financial service from vision fund Kenya since most of these big banks they don't to bank on the smallholder farmer so vision fund has gone ahead and taken the risk of empowering this smallholder farmer back in the village in Kenya to be able to farm and this has really given us it has been able to allow the smallholder farmer to be able to get value for their money because once we give them we offer them the input financing they are able to farm bigger pieces of land than what they've been farming before they were able to access finances and this also helps them to produce more and hence there is an increase in source of income for this smallholder farmer so our product just like I've said it's a bad old product and what we are doing is that we are offering a net to end financial solution for the smallholder farmer so once e-granary mobilizes the farmer we come on board and offer financial training and after that we offer the input financing we don't give them cash we give it in kind this means we have as an input supplier who is who we pay to and then the farmer goes and collects the input from them this allows the farmer to be able to access certified certified seeds and this leads to increase of production then once the the client takes that input financing we work with the farmer from planting to harvesting and up to aggregation and of taking and we also through e-granary we've been able to find market for the smallholder farmer that is through the partnership that we have with e-granary and this has been very helpful to the smallholder farmer since most of these farmers they know how to farm but the main challenge is the getting finances to be able to do the farming and also getting market because in Kenya we find that the brokers we have brokers who wait for the crop to to to be harvested and then they go and buy from the farmer at a very lower rate but once we've gotten we've got market for this produce for our farmers then they're able to get a good price that is better than what they get from the brokers in the in the field so this has really made a big difference in terms of us being able to impact the smallholder farmer back in the village since they're able to get the finances and also get a proper market for their for their crop um so that's what a vision fund has been involved in with e-granary it's been a very helpful partnership because we as vision fund we've been able to reach more farmers than we than we did before we got into partnership with e-granary thank you very much thank you so much Caroline um I will now ask Daniel if you want to also share your quick remarks five minutes maybe you would need to unmute your microphone Daniel yes thank you very much for the contribution which has been done by Caroline and Mochili it is true that uh e-granary as uh assistance farmers very much because they have been uh they have been uh forefront because they are they are they are giving credit to our farmers and uh farm input uh plus training our farmers now my question to them is because now we have increased our productivity uh how can we how can how can we uh move forward by having this uh for your listening equipment so that we can uh for you hand our our our produce secondly I want to thank Mr. Caroline, Manda Mochilain because of the financing lighting out we have financed our groups and the farmers right now we have uh uh planting materials in our stores waiting to plant now mine is congratulating them for the work they are doing and hoping that we are moving forward so I don't have much to say but mine is congratulating them for the work they are doing to the farmers thank you very much thank you so much Daniel yes um uh Giles would you like to share your quick remarks yeah hi everyone um I work for ETG as a grain and all seed trader um so I've been heading up the relationship between ETG and uh EFF and the e-granary platform um so I was just going to give you a bit of a background perhaps on ETG and what we do um so ETG has been present for about 50 years with its foundations in Kenya now operating in over 40 countries predominantly countries in Africa but we also operate in major um agriculture markets in the US and Canada and Australia um so I ever see the East Africa grain and all seed trading books so that includes maize, soybeans and any other grains or all seeds um ETG is one of the leading fertilizer um traders on the continent and also one of the largest maize originators in Africa obviously maize being a staple food in Africa it's a very important commodity so I think the relationship started with historical relationships between EFF and ETG obviously our brand of fertilizer was known in the market and they were looking for a partner to come in come and board and ETG's unique position is that we are able to offer a two-way supply chain so by providing inputs fertilizer seeds agrochemicals while also buying back farmers crops so in Kenya we have three major buying uh points two located in the main growing regions Eldret and Katali and one main center in Nairobi those points are used for for both selling inputs and also buying back farmers crops so the discussions began and our contract was set up with the e-granary whereby we provided fertilizers and the agreed price delivered to their various distribution points and at the end of the season based on a yield prediction model we priced up a off-take contract for a set number of tons at a minimum price very few aggregators we're aware of are able to offer a minimum price especially on a volatile price commodity such as maize however we understand the importance of this in order to build trust within the value chain and also giving financial institutions comfort to provide finance so we we based our pricing on a number of different factors including the previous years government minimum buying price and over the years we will obviously tailor make this to ensure that the farmers do not get disappointed at harvest time while we put in a minimum price we also update EFF on a weekly or even daily basis on our prices um so if the prices go up we pay that to the farm if the prices go down the same so we're completely transparent um for us um the advantage is that we are leveraging a lot more of of our sort of the fertilizer supply chain historically obviously we've been the two businesses have been fairly separate so that's why we want to work with the likes of EFF and co-ops because they are very powerful um on the ground presence in in places like Kenya where value chains are often very fragmented and it's a very relationship driven value chain so we value that immensely with EFF and we look forward to continuing it going forward both as Daniel says he's increasing his yields but also looking at other crops um where you know the margins might be higher um and as Daniel says there might be opportunities for adding further value um and I think maybe I'll just throw in there you from my side that's probably going to be around proteins and soybean um we're just trying to find the right varieties um suited to Kenya um so yeah that's that's my five minutes thank you very much Giles and thank you to all the panelists my colleague Emily Pollack is going to very quickly wrap up the webinar okay thank you I'd just like to say a thank you to all the panelists for the webinar today uh and engaging actively on this really interesting topic um I think we've really spanned the big picture context the questions the challenges and some of the much finer nuts and bolts and I think there's been a lot shared and a lot learned so we will be preparing a blog uh and we will include the slides in that uh and we hope people will stay in touch there and and as we move forwards with epic project and future webinars and and exchanges on on this topic we welcome feedback um we hope everyone stays very safe and we stay connected and keep on with this work looking at how to support producers in their commercial agriculture from all our different perspectives so thank you to all the panelists and thank you to all the participants and we look forward to connecting as we move forward together thank you very much


The House voted late Tuesday to censure Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, the only Palestinian American in Congress, an extraordinary rebuke of her rhetoric about the Israel-Hamas War. The 234-188 tally came after enough Democrats joined with Republicans to censure Tlaib, a punishment one step below expulsion from the House. Republican Rich McCormick of Georgia pushed the measure in response to what he called Tlaib's promotion of anti-Semitic rhetoric. He said she has levied unbelievable falsehoods about our greatest ally, Israel, and the attack on October 7.  She added that her criticism of the Jewish state has always been directed toward its government and its leadership under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. I'm the only Palestinian American serving in Congress, Mr. Chair, and my perspective is needed here now more than ever.  The idea that criticizing the government of Israel is anti-Semitic sense of very dangerous precedent, and it's been used to silence diverse voices speaking up for human rights across our nation. Do you realize what it's like, Mr. Chair, for the people outside the chamber right now listening in agony to their own government dehumanizing them? To hear the President of the United States, we helped elect dispute death tolls as we see video after video of dead children and parents under rubble. Mr. Chair, do you know what it's like to fear rising hate crimes, to know how Islamophobia and anti-Semitism makes us all less safe? The gentlelady yields back, gentlemen from Maryland Reserves.


Now, we're going to hear from another student that you have selected, a student that you have selected to speak from the BA Class of 2018, Sojung Kim. Sojung Kim graduates today with a BA in Public Policy and a minor in Political Science from the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts. At the University of Michigan, she has worked for the Poverty Solutions Initiative, The Michigan Daily, M-City, and America Reads. As a Michigan in Washington participant, she completed internships with the U.S. Department of Transportation and the U.S. House of Representatives. She is the elected BA student representative on the Ford School's Alumni Board. After graduation, she's going to be returning to Washington, D.C. as the 2018 Thomas J. O'Brien Policy Fellow at the Eno Center for Transportation. Sojung is in every way a credit to the Ford School. She's even helped bring athletic glory. She is the two-time captain of the school's intramural broom ball team, GoBettyWebs. I'm so pleased to welcome her to the podium. I'm so excited to stand on this step stool facing what would ideally be 77 of my dear peers, our families, the staff, faculty, writing instructors, friends, and graduate students who have supported us all this way. Thank you to everyone here and especially to my loving mom for my life and everything in between. I'd like the audience to know that tomorrow is her birthday. So I will begin the student remarks by drawing our collective attention to the pivotal leap year of 2008. Why am I being nostalgic? Well, a few cool things happened then. 2008 was declared the international year of the potato. What else of note? We had an economic recession, a presidential election, the summer Olympics, but more personally, the Ford School admitted its inaugural class of 53 undergraduate students. That's right. 2018 marks 10 years of us college kids making our presence known in the student lounge. This of course means the BAMPP rivalry lives on to face its second decade in holiday skit jokes and bar crawl shirt designs. But today we sit here together politely, perhaps restlessly or reflectively. I've certainly been doing a lot of reflecting these past few weeks, taking meandering walks, reviewing old assignments for writing samples, and being plain old sentimental, which brought me back to my Ford School application essays. Pair freezing a bit, my sophomore self wrote, public policy as Ford teaches it and as I understand it is wedded to academic research, professional communication, and compassion. Did I predict these past two years well? I would say so, yes. My classmates and I have been indoctrinated with the ship and 320 mantra, preferences, policies, and institutions hang together in a rough equilibrium. We edited down a lot of crisp and pithy memos. We hugged each other as the real world erupted and we marched in streets together towards higher ideals. My heart certainly won't let me forget problematizing every minutia through true dialogue as my 495 class did, granting out $42,000 with Professor Tompkins staying and as generations of 40s do discussing human rights and reparations in Professor Henry's seminars. We would be lying to ourselves and shutting out the last two years of our policy education if we said public policy is easy. It is so darn messy. It gets messy because people are messy. And because people care deeply, we must listen to them all the more. These are stakeholders, implementers, legislators, or the observant epistemic community. Sorry, jargon translation, the knowledge community of academics and scholars such as our esteemed professors here today in their full regalia. But there was something else I had not expected to gain at the corner of state and hill, something softer than a soft skill. If we consider how our policy priorities emerged, they likely came from experience, maybe anger, intellectual awe, or humble inspiration. Our chosen niches and fields feed on our raw curiosity for contested public goods and elevating quality of life. I now realize what underlies research, communication, and compassion. Those three buckets of a policy degree I had hypothesized 2 years earlier is just passion. That gut and heart for the hard work of rigorous policy intervention will keep us young even 20 years after the international year of the potato. Now let me be clear, I don't want you to leave here today feeling like a self-satisfied wonk. We all know there's so much more to learn and uncover beyond four focus area classes. We all know there's so much, I'm probably speaking to you now from the same Rackham stage where Stephen Levitt of Freakonomics delivered the Ford School Centennial talk. While closing out his remarks, the Economist applauded policy scholars for catalyzing political action with their expertise and relentless nerdiness. So let's earn that praise. I'm confident that we as graduates will carry on with the nerdy wonkery that delights or frustrates us. I believe it is our imperative to influence policy. That is where we are going and what we work toward. Political change is best fueled by inner growth and passion. Evidence-based perhaps, but community-driven at best.  Thank you to my rock star cohort for the honor and delight of learning beside you and from you. With deep trust, ultimate respect, and the highest of expectations, I tip my hat to you. Let's go Peacock Blue.