My name's Robin McDermott, I'm a public health doctor and for 25 years I've been working in rural and remote areas in primary health care and particularly looking at the health transition and the fact that now we're faced with a big health gap between people living in remote areas and everybody else, indigenous people and everybody else and the big part of that health gap is chronic disease. About 10 years ago in Queensland and as a part of the Northern Territory intervention there was some new policies introduced into communities with respect to controlling the supply of alcohol into these communities in order to reduce some of the consequences, a lot of violence, a lot of abuse of women and children, a lot of disruption, children not going to school, not getting fed properly for example. So there was no question that there was literally a public health emergency fuelled by alcohol, particularly in some of the remote communities in the Northern Territory and in Queensland. One of the projects that we were doing as a part of our CRE was looking at the impact of some of these plans over the last 10 years, particularly asking people in the communities what their experience of it was and to try and capture some of the unintended consequences of that. And so Alan Clough who's one of our CRE investigators undertook extensive community consultation about this and interviewed over a thousand people in four of the North Queensland communities including local government members and policy people. And it found that some of the unintended consequences were that there was criminalisation of offences which for you and I living in Canberra, Sydney, Brisbane perhaps wouldn't come wouldn't be criminal offences and that had the downstream impact of making it difficult for these people subsequently to get employment in the public sector for example or in local government because they had a record. The other thing that people were saying was that if you just look at the supply side restriction and you don't look at the demand side reduction then you get a very much unbalanced sense of what works and certainly the alcohol management plans were very much focused just on the supply side reduction and not on supporting communities to either for rehabilitation or for prevention in the first place. These issues are very important and now they're feeding into discussions with local government about where to next in terms of policies for these communities. So I think that's been a extremely interesting and valuable journey not just for the communities but for local government. What it means is that there's no simple solutions to this and it's an iterative process and we must look for unintended consequences of policies that have been made in a particular context in the past.


Daniel Medvedev vs. Riley Opelka is the final match for the Canadian Open for 2021. Both players have had different roads to get to the final. Opelka entered the tournament unseeded and will take on the wild card Nick Kirios in the first round. And after dropping the first set, he would rally to win three, four, six, seven, six, six, four. His second round opponent would be the number 14 seed Dmitrov, with Opelka getting through in straight sets in a very impressive performance, six, three, six, four. His third round opponent would be against the inform Lloyd Harris. And after dropping the first set, again, had to rally from behind, winning it in three tight sets, four, six, seven, six, seven, six. His quarterfinal opponent would be the number 10 seed Roberto Patista-Rigou. And after a close second set, Opelka got to the semifinals, six, three, seven, six. From the semifinals, Opelka would take on the number three seeds to final city pass. And after losing the first set in a close tie break, he would rally to win in three, six, seven, seven, six, six, four to get to his first Masters 1000 final. Mevedev came into this tournament as the number one seed and would get a buy in the first round. His second round opponent was against Bublik, a player that he's played a lot this year. And after Bublik won the first set, Mevedev was in a lot of trouble and seemed to be struggling mentally. But he pulled himself together, eventually prevailing in three sets, four, six, six, three, six, four. His third round opponent was against the qualifier Duckworth, who had just come off beating Yannick Sinner in the second round. Mevedev was too good on this occasion, winning in straight sets, six, two, six, four. His quarter final opponent was against the seventh seed and Miami Open champion, who be her catch. And after getting destroyed in the first set, Mevedev hung on to eventually win in three, two, six, seven, six, seven, six. In the semifinals, Mevedev will take on the unseeded Isner, who is having a great week coming off wins over Rublev and Monfice. But this didn't trouble Mevedev, who destroyed Isner in straight sets, six, two, six, two, to advance to another Canadian final. These two have played four times before, with Mevedev leading the head-to-head, three, one, having just played at the French Open a couple of months ago, Mevedev getting the straight sets win. However, the last time they played on a hard court was the end of last year in St. Petersburg, with Opelka getting a three sets win. And on a hard court, they go to three sets every single time they play. If Opelka is going to win this one, he needs to serve like he did against City Pass. He served so big against City Pass, a lot of aces, as you would expect, but he didn't give away any chances. Only the one breakpoint against his serve, against City Pass, he needs to do the same against Mevedev. If Mevedev is going to win, he needs to make the returns. Something that City Pass couldn't do against Opelka was return the serve and get into the baseline rallies. So, Mevedev needs to do that and, of course, take his chances. He took all his chances against John Isner and he's going to have to do the same against Opelka. This is going to be a really fun matchup because both these guys, similar age, same generation, and Mevedev has just come off a player very similar to Opelka in Isner and he destroyed him. So, I'm going to pick Mevedev to win this one in three sets. I'm expecting a couple of tie breaks because, as I said, they have played a couple of tie breaks over their careers against each other in their head-to-head shows. They play a lot of tie breaks when they play each other. So, I'm going to go with Mevedev to win this one in a few tie breaks, but let me know down in the comments below who's going to win this.


Hey, everyone. Welcome to the CUBE's presentation of the AWS startup showcase, Analytics and Cost Optimization. This is season three episode two of our ongoing series covering exciting startups from the AWS ecosystem. I'm your host, Lisa Martin, and today we're excited to be joined by one of our CUBE alum, Suresh Matthew, founder and CEO of Sidi. Suresh is here to talk about Sidi, AI-powered autonomous cost optimization. Suresh, welcome back. Thanks so much for joining me today. Glad to be here. Thank you, Lisa. Give the audience a little bit of an overview. We talked about this last time and I want them to really understand Sidi. I know you guys are a Gartner cool vendor for 2023, but give us the backstory. Sidi is an autonomous cloud management platform that helps you run your applications with the lowest cost, the highest availability, and with the best performance for modern applications. It includes ECS, EKS, and Lambda 2. We have seen customers like Freshworks, Fabric, and No Before Saving 30 to 50% with absolutely zero manual intervention. And of course, as you said, we are a Gartner cool vendor and an AWS GSP partner. Nice. Let's talk a little bit about cloud cost optimization. You mentioned some great customer names ready to some customer examples later on. But talk about why you think cloud cost optimization is so important, such an important problem for customers in any industry to solve. Sure. First, there is a direct cost to the bottom line for companies with significant cloud spend. When you save that money, that could impact your earnings itself. We have seen 10% impact on a positive way when they report to Wall Street.  And peak is gold for any company. They care about it. So you have to do it neat and clean so your peak doesn't suffer. Those are the two main things that I can think of. Direct cost to the bottom line actually not having cloud optimized can impact revenue for organizations. As organizations are starting to focus more on modern applications, it's obviously growing rapidly. How are cost management challenges different for modern apps? I imagine there's still the impact on bottom line and revenue, but tell us how that's different for modern apps. Yeah. Modern apps, the best part is you can innovate quickly, faster, right? The one challenge there is, like 10 years ago, you used to have tens or hundreds of services. Now you have like hundreds or thousands of services. So that makes it complex. Now there are a lot of dependencies out there. When you modify something here, you may be really impacting something in the sixth layer. Now this is a complex ecosystem. On top of it, you frequently release. It used to be once a month, once a week. Now it is once every minute, once every five minutes. Now it's impossible for people to manage their production optimized. So that's why modern systems, it's hard to manage with just automation. Services explosion, explosion of releases, the frequency of the cadence has changed so much. So then what is Sadi's approach from an AI perspective that uses machine learning to help customers solve this as modern apps, as we said, are growing so rapidly? Yeah. So why did we use this approach? Let's start there. Why? Why was there a need to have AI or autonomous systems in play, right? If you look at the wastage today, it is 30%. 30% of what is spent on cloud is going to waste. It is not when we don't have automation, we don't have skilled people out there. The only reason is it's extremely hard for companies to now stay optimized. When you optimize, it could still go unoptimized when you make the very next release, right? Now, if you look at why automation or automated systems still fail to optimize it to like 90%, there are two aspects here. One, someone has to take a look at these alerts and execute on it. And these alerts are not just alerts saying reduce it. It could carry some risks too. You need to have a system that can do most of it. And for us, the learning aspect defines the rule itself. Initially with automated system, you say, if CPU goes above 50%, do this. And this 50% could change. It goes stale quickly. What an autonomous system do is it removes that rule 100%. So there is no rule. So there is nothing to go stale. The system learns what that number is. And when it learns it updates, and the action that has to be taken is always reinforced with learning. So that's how it is different, and that's why it makes it more effective. Much more efficient as well. What about for organizations that are adopting containers and really modernizing their overall infrastructures? How does today work in practice in this case? Yeah. So the terminology is different in both these spaces. If you look at containers, it's about, how do you find the right size of it? Where do you deploy these containers into? What exactly is your purchase plan? How do you really make everything glue together? So that exactly are the things out there. When you look at the container area, we call it the size, vertical size and horizontal size of a container. The second aspect is called infrastructure choice. There are tools like Carpenter out there. We make them a little more efficient. The third aspect is really the purchase. Should it be savings? Should it be really our instances? And can you spot? This is the key there. Now, if you do purchase in isolation, you might pick spot because it gets 70% to 90%. But there are applications that can really make use of spot. There are some that cannot. And if you essentially choose a wrong implication, you might hurt yourself. So that is really how containers generally work when it comes to an optimized platform. So five-step approach here, right-sizing workloads, on-demand savings, spot optimization, research intel. You're taking all of this off of the hands of the customer and you showed some significant savings up to 90%. Now, compare and contrast containers with serverless and how Sidi works in that environment. Yeah. On the serverless side, the platform typically lets you control only the memory and CPU becomes an indirect impact there. So first is your right size of the serverless, in this case, Lambda only.  So we call it autonomous concurrency. We manage it for you. We look at the traffic and we manage it for you. And when you release, we change these two things continuously. So let's- And in fact, there is one other topic there. Provision concurrency is infamous to be expensive. People think provision concurrency is expensive. In fact, there are very specific scenarios where it becomes cheaper. It essentially is a lot cheaper to use provision concurrency than a normal Lambda in certain traffic conditions and said, I choose this for you. So you don't have to worry about it. For a Lambda, that provision concurrency is the right choice for you. We will do it for you. Offloading that from the end user. Sorry for interrupting you, but let's focus on right sizing and explain how it actually works for workloads, for infrastructure, and how it optimizes costs as you shared with those two slides. Sure. When it comes to right sizing, there are two aspects here, the vertical size and the horizontal size. Traditionally, horizontal size always takes care of your surge of traffic and vertical size decides on your application behavior. And what we do is figure out your vertical size in production. So we now know the best size for your application in production. The next aspect is learn your traffic, understand your pattern, look at your peak. Let's take an example. Let's say 11 o'clock is your peak and 12 30 peak is over. So we will prep you at 11, 10, 55 so you can handle your peak better. Now your peak customers are extremely happy by 12 30. We will scale you down. Now the thing here is you can put as a rule in there, but this peak keeps changing. The number keeps changing. The application keeps changing. You could have a sudden surge without a peak. You announced a deal that cost a surge. Now there is nothing to handle that things of that nature. So autonomously. So the customer doesn't have to worry about that. You're taking that burden off of their plates. Exactly. The rules are now decided by Sedai with guidelines from the engineering and Finoff's. Let's talk about purchasing optimization. Explain how that works. And from a from a step perspective, why are you doing it after the workload and the infrastructure right sizing? Why is that important? Yeah. Purchasing optimization is where the largest impact in most cases are, but that's where you tend to make some wrong choices to. I've seen a lot of enterprises with overcommit there. You got something for 70% off. You started committing to an infrastructure that you will never use in the next year. And now the problem is now you're sitting on a lot of money with commits. How do you repurpose it? So that's when you have to look at your application and see what applications can really consume this if you adjust it slightly. This cannot be an aftermath. You have to think about it and do the purchase based on what you think of your applications. That's why it's independent decision making would be extremely risky. So we learn the application. We learn the infrastructure. We figure out if the situation changes. This application starts getting lower traffic. What kind of purchase would still be beneficial for you? So we make this purchase decision as a cohesive decision. That's a cohesive decision. You talked about responding to traffic and that Sadiah is doing all that learning on behalf of the customer. Predictive auto scaling. How does that work? What are some of the key advantages there that Sadiah is delivering to its customers? Sure. So peak, as I mentioned, is gold. For any customer, the revenue stream is mainly their peak time. And that is where you want your best customers, your most important customers to have the best experience. If you over optimize, the biggest problem is most of your time, you may be running fine, but at peak, you may have a deteriorated experience. So that's where Sadiah looks at your production, learns your seasonality, and always gives you the recommendation that works well for your peak. In some cases that would be just horizontal scaling. That would be easier. But in some cases it would also mean vertical scaling as well. So your peak customers will get the best experience with Sadiah. If you optimize in an automated fashion, it's almost always guaranteed that your peak will have a slightly deteriorated experience. So that's why we care about peak and peak is most important for Sadiah. Most important. Okay. You talked about one of the things when you were walking us through the steps for container and serverless Sadiah's approach, release intelligence. And you also talked about now with modern applications, the release cadence has changed so much. How does Sadiah keep a customer optimized when there's so many releases, changes in the application? What's your secret sauce? Yep. So release, they say 70% of incidents are caused by changes or releases into production. So that is the number out there. When you release a new version, there are a few people who are worried about a release. The first developer himself when he releases, was it a good release? Did it impact anything? That's the first thing that we check as well. Did this release go well? Availability is good, performance is okay, cost is not spiking. Now the next aspect is, did you violate an SLA or SLO in this process? When you change, when you make a release, you might have increased the latency. That's okay if it is small. But if you cross that latency where your SLA is not met, now you have a problem. So you need a system out there that can guarantee that you will not meet, you will always meet the SLA. So if it goes above that SLA, said I will scale you up or out to make sure that you're under that SLA. The next thing is, maybe after you release, after six months, you might see, you know what? My cost is going up. Now what changed? What release cost us? It was running at, let's say $1,000 a day. Now it's running at $10,000 a day. So what changed? What changed? So we have a release trend and we have graded releases there and you can point now to the exact release that would have cost us problem. So that's how we handle release. So you're giving the customer incredible visibility to those release trends to help them really understand and fine tune and obviously optimize the way that the modern applications work. You also mentioned cost optimization is so important because it can directly impact the bottom line. It can impact revenue. So I'm sure that you must have some great customer stories that really speak to the cost optimization that SLA is enabling with its approach with containers with serverless. Give me a few customer stories that you think really articulate the value that you're delivering. So for a customer, our focus was really cost optimizations. Generally, when you optimize cost, you would see that either things are running in that state or it is slightly deteriorated. For this customer, the story is very interesting. We optimize them to 43% if I'm not wrong. Yes, it is 43% from cost perspective. Then I got a call in the evening saying, my application is running a lot faster now. The customers are saying my application, my checkout is running a lot faster now. And they know that we are saving a lot of money here. So they called us, you know what, what changed, right? We didn't release anything. What changed? We said it was SIDAI. So SIDAI is not about just saving costs. It's about giving you the best customer experience. And that's the best part about my job too. It's not just about building SIDAI. It's about helping you build your company. So that's the most, that was the most exciting story for me. For a public company, again, a public cybersecurity company, we have saved 36% cost with absolutely zero manual intervention. They turned it on. In another couple of weeks, they saw that their monthly bill is going down, went to 36%. For a large cosmetics company, we have started running their lambdas 80% faster, 80% faster with 60% reduction in cost.  As long as everything impacts the customer experience positively, that's what we all want these days. Big savings, a lot of speed. I'm curious if there's a cultural impact that SIDAI is making. And when we talk about Phenops engineering and business folks, they don't necessarily speak the same language. And you and I have talked about this before. Is there a cultural impact there to your customers that SIDAI helps in terms of bridging the gap between the engineering folks, the Phenops folks, so they can get on the same page? Yeah, 100%. So DevOps and Phenops, the most important aspect is they are all after the exact same goal. They just have two different perspectives. The table stakes for engineering is performance, availability, and the customer experience for Phenops, it is cost. Rather than them executing it, they should be able to control the autonomous system that is in here saying, this is what I want you to do. And this is your constraint from engineering side. And you bring the same constraint from Phenops side. Now you have a cost constraint and an application characteristic constraints, and now you have that autonomous system that will take both of them in. With this, it will create the dynamic rules for you and execute in production. So it's really two sensors on both sides and autonomous systems executing it in production. So you've done such a great job of talking about why SIDAI, what you're able to do, the cost optimization impact, the cultural impact that you're making for customers, I imagine across every industry. So take us home, Suresh, give us a little summary for the audience about the approach and where they can go because I know they're going to want to learn more about SIDAI. Sure. Again, it is not about an if, it's about a when. So it is for any company, if you're trying to optimize cost, you have to take your teams out of harm's way. For that, you need an autonomous system that understands your goal, constraints from your teams, and it can evaluate safety and make it make and execute in production. With an autonomous system, the best aspect there is, there will not be this cost related or performance related incidents in production. When you do it, you are keeping all safety, alarms in mind when you execute. The second aspect is when you start saving, it is important to keep it there, which means you have to watch your releases, you have to continuously optimize, you have to feed, give feedback back to the developers. To learn more about autonomous systems, please come visit our website SIDAI.io. You can schedule a call with us or even self-service is super easy. Awesome. Suresh, great to have you back on the program talking about what you guys are doing, the autonomy, taking people out of harm's way, maintaining the savings that you're able to find for organizations. This has been a great presentation as part of the AWS startup showcase on analytics and cost optimization. Thanks so much for coming back and joining me. Thanks a lot. It was a lot of fun. I agree. We want to thank you for watching and remind you to keep it right here for more action on theCUBE, your leader in live tech coverage.


It is about 600 BC, and the prophet Lehi and his family are living in the wilderness outside of Jerusalem. God commands Lehi to send his sons back to the city to obtain sacred records from Laban, a wicked and powerful man. Based on actual events as recorded in the Book of Mormon, another testament of Jesus Christ. Yes, Nephi, come in, sit with me. The Lord hath commanded me that thou and thy brethren shall return to Jerusalem. Laban hath the record of the Jews and also a genealogy of my forefathers, and they are engraven upon plates of brass. Thou and thy brother should go under the house of Laban and seek the records and bring them down hither into the wilderness. You're supposed Laban and Lamb you'll have refused? They murmur, saying it is a hard thing, which I have required of them, but I have not required it of them. But it is a commandment of the Lord. I will go and do the things which the Lord hath commanded, for I know that the Lord giveth no commandment unto the children of men. Save ye shall prepare away for them that they may accomplish the thing which he commanded them. Thou hast been blessed of the Lord. I'll depend on you. Which of us shall go? The layman. As the eldest, you have always claimed the right and privilege of being first among us. We will cast lots. As I say. Word of your success. Oh, please, sit, sit. Thank you. Zora, fetch this man someone. That will not be necessary. It is kind, but my visit will be brief. What about him? Tell me, what have you come to discuss with me? My father, Lehigh, has sent me, has commanded us to ask thee for the records which are engraven upon the plates of brass, the records which contain the genealogy of my father. The plates of brass have been handed down in my family for generations. Your father believes I should simply give them to you? And what if I were to cry out, claiming thou art a robber? Then I would be within my rights to slay you, would I not? I... Thou art a robber! I was slaying! Seems you did not fare so well. At least I am alive. Called me a robber, threatened to slay me. Now what shall we do? We return to our father in the wilderness. We will not go down to our father in the wilderness until we have accomplished the thing which the Lord hath commanded us. Nephi, I tried. He will not give us the plates. Wait, let us go down to the land of our father's inheritance. He has left gold and silver in all manner of riches. He knew that Jerusalem must be destroyed because of the wickedness of the people. And it is wisdom in God that we should obtain these records. That we may preserve into our children the language of our fathers. And also that we may preserve unto them the words which have been spoken by the mouth of all the holy prophets. Come in. It grows cold. The Lord will not forsake them. A visionary man, thou has led us forth from the land of our inheritance. And my sons are no more, and now we perish in the wilderness. I have not seen what you have seen. I cannot help but fear for their lives. Soraya, I know I am a visionary man. For if I had not seen the things of God in the vision, I should not have known the goodness of God, but had tarried at Jerusalem and had perished with my brother. I know the Lord will deliver our sons out of the hands and bring them down again unto us. Once again the Lord has commanded us to ask for the records which are engraven upon the plates of brass, for which we will give unto you our gold, and our silver, and all our precious things. Zoran, it's beautiful. Beautiful. I am quite pleased with your generous honor. What thieves are thieves in my house? You are the thieves! Slay them! Slay them all! We must go back. We cannot disappoint Father or the Lord.  Know ye not that the Lord hath chosen him to be a ruler over you. It is because of your iniquities. Behold, ye shall go up to Jerusalem again, and the Lord will deliver Laban into your hands. How is it possible that the Lord will deliver Laban into our hands? He is a mighty man. He can command fifty. Yea, even he can slay fifty. Then why not us? Let us go up again into Jerusalem. Let us be faithful in keeping the commandments of the Lord. He is mightier than all of the earth. Then why not mightier than Laban and his fifty? Or even then his tens of thousands. Let us be strong like unto Moses. He truly spake unto the waters of the Red Sea, and they divided it, and our fathers came through out of captivity on dry ground. Nephi, this is not the same! An angel hath spoken unto you! Wherefore can ye doubt?  The Lord is able to deliver us. He even has our fathers.  Stay here, hide yourselves until I return. God be with you.  Never, at any time, if I shed the blood of man. Thou hath delivered him into thy hands. Behold the Lord slayeth the wicked. To bring forth his righteous purposes, it is better that one man should perish than that a nation should dwindle and perish in unbelief. Master Laban, have ye returned already? Zoram, go with me into the treasury. As you wish. And how fair are the elders of the Jews this evening. I know that you have been out by night among them. I shall carry the engravings which are upon the plates of brass to my elder brethren who are without the walls. Of course, Master Laban, thank you. Come with me to meet my brethren. Of course, Master Laban, thank you. Laban. It's Laban. The other was him, isn't Nephi? No. Laban, Lemuel Sam, it is I, Nephi!  I speak unto you even with an oath that you need not fear. If you go down into the wilderness with us, you will be a free man. The Lord hath commanded us to do this thing. And if you will come down into the wilderness to the tent of my Father, thou shalt have place with us. I promise thee, I will go down into the wilderness unto thy Father. I make an oath with thee. I will tarry with thee from this time forth. You've obtained the place, Father. Now I know of assurity that the Lord hath commanded my husband to flee into the wilderness. And I also know of assurity that the Lord hath protected my sons and delivered them out of the hands of Laban and given them power whereby they could accomplish the thing which the Lord hath commanded them. Come, we must offer sacrifice and burn offerings unto the Lord and give thanks unto the God of Israel. You contain the five books of Moses and an account of Adam and Eve, our first parents. Also the prophecies of the holy prophets. Look, the genealogy of my fathers. I am a descendant of Joseph. Even that same Joseph, who was the son of Jacob, who was sold into Egypt, has shown me that these plates of brass shall go forth unto all nations, kindreds, tongues, and people who are of my seed. It is wisdom in the Lord that we should have them. They are of great worth unto us in so much that we can preserve the commandments of the Lord. Unto our children.


My name is Darlene Daniels. I'm with Apikie Weiwen, which is part of New Directions for Children, Paddles and Families. Apikie Weiwen is a 40-year-old program that works with fostered and adopted individuals to assist them in finding their place in the community. And what we've experienced in 40 years is that it's changed quite a bit from when we started to now. So we've taken Dr. Martin's Broken Lakes theory of reclaiming youth at risk, and we've developed it from there. So we have a wide range of programs, educational programs for fostered and adopted youth. And the goal is to find their sense of self-identity, where they belong, and what their gifts and talents are. And we do it through a variety of activities. So we have powwow club, circle, singing, drumming, and they also learn to make their own regalia, beadwork. And in there, you know, some people have a skill, some people don't. So they learn, you know, that's where they're belong, you know, where they find some sense of belonging. And then we also offer contemporary things like filmmaking, video filmmaking, art classes. And we use the art in a sense of that's how we communicated. That was our written language a long time ago. So we look at how art has played a really integral part of our community and our culture. We have language classes and we've had it consistently go on for 10 years. So we have some fluent speakers out of the U. And that we're very proud of it. And that we are also adopted that as a call to action. And that where we would like, you know, education, people to be educated in their original language. In the program, the foster adopted 99% of the children want to go back home. So we work towards creating a self of home. What does it look like? Where does it belong? If they are Ojibwe children, Nishinaabe children, they we find them ceremonies and places of belonging there. Their creed, Kota, we find them. So we don't necessarily teach them the culture per se, but we find out where they belong and how can we get the meaningful relationships that they need aunties, you know, people can become their aunties or their actual biological aunties or grandmas that we try to find where they belong. And that during their 13 age years, the history of this program was that when the adopted and fostered youth became teenagers, they all they had a hard time. Their lives became really hard. Addictions kicked in and different things. So our goal is to make sure that those hard times aren't a long term lifetime. So and we think that they don't, they don't have as hard a time because they have their journey shorter to find home because they found home a long time ago. One thing that we did talk about was the regalia making and we're sitting inside the actual sewing room classroom and that young people learn and they master how to make their own regalia or their grandmas if they're younger children. So we look at what kind of dancer they want to be and then we look at, you know, what classes they need to take to learn how to make their moccasins. Everybody can take out class at the same time or, you know, they want to make a jingle dress. Obviously young men don't make jingle dresses. So we look at what they're going to dance and we look at knowing the bottom line is the pride and that they've made something and they can walk out the community and be so proud of what they've made and share and dance with the culture. So key. So Indigenous education to me is finding out how you learn the style you learn and we have a very different experience doing that. So with foster and adopted children often they get, they get put into modified programs because they have either perceived learning learning disabilities or they can't learn because their their life is in chaos. So we've developed a partnership with the University of Manitoba and we've taken Indigenous people who are in the doctor program, the dentistry program, and they tutor our young people and in this part our goal is not to let anybody go into modified programs and that the young girls, this is another trend we see as the young girls don't, they drop out of math and science. So our goal is to not have a modified program and they don't drop out of math and science because we see it as a key to, you know, their future if they have the ground, they've laid the groundwork and that they can, they have those credits and they can go on to post-secondary education and that they also have role models. There's Indigenous people tutoring them and that they could one day say that they belong in this institution. So they're sitting in the university on campus and they really get the sense of they belong and so if they've been going for four years or five years, however long they've been going, they really do belong there. So that's a key part and that also we need curriculum that's developed for, you know, Indigenous people with things that are relevant to their life like math, you know, using hunting skills or, you know, they really need to have something that they can relate to and often the curriculum is related to white middle class young people. So and that they also have the option to learn in their language because it's a very creative language and it's well thought out and it's relationship-based so that they could, you know, develop a lot of their basic skills in their own language. In the future in Indigenous education, I first like to see Indigenous students having their role models, having Indigenous teachers teaching them ones that can understand their learning style, how they learn and I've also taught in the classroom and sometimes it was a matter of everybody getting on the desk and dancing for a few minutes but something that you can relate to that they can learn in a sense and that we know that everybody doesn't learn the same way so that, you know, we have room for students, however they learn, whether they learn visually or by paper but, you know, everybody learns differently, slightly different so how can we accommodate their learning needs? I've often heard students say like how come we have to wait to get to university to learn about our culture, to learn about our people, to learn about the history and we started it and I think it's good but I still think we have to push further to look at where it makes sense for Aboriginal students, where it makes sense for them on how they can learn and that they be part of the system and that they also grow up to teach other students.


Hello, everyone, and thank you again for joining us for an E for C and IEEE virtual salon on energy and renewable energy solutions. I'm pleased to welcome O'Junoa Agemony to this special edition. We were lucky to have her join us. O'Junoa Agemony is an impact investment in development and research with experience in the areas of opportunity maturation, financing, and policies. She is the Senior Technical Advisor to the Commissioner for Energy and Mineral Resources for Lagos State, the fifth largest economy in Africa, charged with the responsibility to plan, devise, and implement strategies to deliver reliable energy to the citizens of the state. She was previously the Senior Investment Associate at All One, or All On, responsible for driving clean energy investment opportunities while providing strategic, governance, and operational support to All On Investees. Welcome O'Junoa. We're so glad you're with us. I'm pleased to present her now. Thank you very much, and it's my pleasure to join this session. It's a very exciting topic and it's an exciting time in the energy industry in general. It's no better time to be discussing renewable energies given the current discussions around climate change globally and how important the energy is to any climate discussion. But even beyond that, energy is very important for job creation, for any form of economic development, for social development, for education, health, and all of that. So it's really important, and it's a very exciting topic to join. I'll just jump right into the presentation I have, and I want to strictly speak to this. I mean, I'll give some examples that are a bit outside of the table to be very relatable to everyone who's watching. So the topic for this session is finance and investment for renewable energy solutions in Nigeria. Some of the learnings from here would be to keep people across Africa and across other countries. But the examples, two of the main examples in Nigeria, which is one of the biggest markets in Africa in general, so I decided to be discussing this topic. One of the most important reasons why this topic is important is that after the finance and investment for renewable energy solutions have come up as one of the biggest challenges facing the industry. And while the argument remains that, oh, there's a lot of funding due soon to the renewable energy sector. Some of that has been given the huge amount of funding. The top of the funding has yet to be identified to achieve the SDG7. So I'm excited to provide some more clarity around finance and investment for the energy sector, as well as to provide some clarification around the various areas of this kind of solution. So in terms of the problem specifically in Nigeria, a large percentage of the population is off the, or is one is served by the grid. So the population size ranges from, some people say 170 million, 200 million. Of that, about 19 million people are there to be off grid and another 13 million are there to be underserved by the grid. So it's a good chunk of the population. Businesses keep complaining that access to electricity and energy is one of the biggest challenges facing. And this has impacted their ability to be productive, to create jobs, and to generally thrive. In terms of the amount of energy delivered to the national grid, it's number varying. Some people would say it's about 3,000, 2,700,000. Sometimes it goes up to 400,000, a few times a bit more than that. But in general, comparing this number to the typical assumption that one million people require at least one million dollars is a bit of a huge gap in the industry. So the gap is huge and then there have been various solutions that have tried to fill the gap. I'm sorry, the number I mentioned was 1,000 people, so that's one million dollars. And so this gap is filled by about 16 million generators, some of them small, petrol and diesel generators that come to fill that gap. We know the concerns around that pollution, due to the emission, the noise, and I mean there's been a lot of that around transportation. Children cannot study at night and health facilities are not functioning properly due to these challenges. In terms of reaching that gap, obviously solutions have come to the rescue in the short term. Some of these obvious solutions, sometimes many grids or solar homes systems, it's assumed that about 150,000 units have reached these others at the end of 2018, hopefully much more. What is clear is that some of these solutions will take time and many grids will also be coming very quickly. They also take time and they require funding. So the challenge remains, the opportunity is quite huge and funding remains a key requirement. In terms of the market, it's about 120 million people lacking access to the huge gas emission fields. The distribution companies currently providing ongoing power and have suffered and continue to suffer huge losses. A lot of them haven't been able to raise additional money due to the liquidity issues within the national grid. So that remains a challenge. The distribution companies currently providing ongoing power and have suffered and continue to suffer huge losses because of that remains a challenge. But as I mentioned before, upgrade solutions are definitely huge in the future, meaning the solar homes systems and the market for that is going to be about $10 million and over the years. So the huge opportunities that are developed are all looking at how to control it. Instead of that, they are about $100 million by the study done by the rural electrician agency around the world and that's the size of the market for solar homes systems is about $10 million. So I think it's a huge opportunity for anyone looking to find a market that is larger not to absorb the need and it's willing to make a difference. In terms of financing solutions, there are various solutions that have over time been used and I'll spend some time on a few of those solutions providing more context to some of the work that they've done. So impact investors have been one of the key players in the renewable sector in Nigeria. I believe the major reason is that some of the traditional banks haven't really been able to understand the sector. We still feel that it's capital. They are not used to it. Maybe their staff are not even used to handling the transactions, even how new the sector is in general compared to the traditional architecture. So it's understandable that they're taking their time there. The impact investors have over time been able to visit the gap and been able to provide one day and I'll just talk about a few of them very briefly. All on is one of those organizations. I worked there before my previous role. And all on is basically focused on providing funding for those companies that cross the value chain. The focus is on low income households and SMEs. So for companies that are within that sector and that require funding, staff organization is able to provide some staff support. So in terms of providing proper business plan, proper financial model that could be required for any other class of investments. So it's not, when you think impact investors, some people think this is sort of a grant. Do not believe in future investment. People investors want to see an economic and a social impact on the investment. Other investors in the market, one of the two actually meant, actually meant is the impact investor that's focused on the sector as well. We certainly move the capital to Nigeria. So that's an inclination after the size of the market. The focus on investment across the value chain as well. Another which is international is great to energy ventures. This is an organization that's chosen. It's sponsored by Bill Gates and Richard Branson. They recently closed an investment in Nigeria, one of the local companies, Ireland, for about $9 billion, along with other investors including all of Northwarn Electrified, which is also located there. Electrified is another one of those companies or organizations. It is funded and supported, which is one thing to see an economy as renewable in this world. Across Africa and Mississippi in Nigeria. They have a $120 million global productivity, but they also have a $30 million that is dedicated to the Nigeria market. So that's a very good opportunity. This debt energy is one of the other investors in the market. We also focus on the renewable energy sector and funding as well as the sector. So that's another potential source of funding. Conquander is a debt provider. It provides debt to the renewable energy company as the name implies. So focus on solar. So that's another one of the fastest debtors in the market. There are a few others. Largely international organizations within the future for the potential sector to see the impact, to see the education of the health impact, the job creation and all of that, and the importance of that. This takes us into the market. Another group of investors in the industry are the development finance organizations. So most of these are bigger organizations that have bigger money, but are just too hard to niche for the renewable energy sector. One of those is AFD, the French organization. They have a specificity in Nigeria that is sun-dried productivity. For about four million euros, it's so close to supporting the local commercial bank with funding. And they're working with a few local banks. Although I don't believe it's operational again, but it's been touched hopefully come to see. The African development banks are not at great support. They provide funding mostly through bigger programs. One of the programs I will discuss is one by the World Bank, along with the, which is one of the ones I have there, along with the African development, with the rural electrification agency. So the African development bank also supports funds. So they provide funds into other funds. One of which is the off-grid energy access funds that closed last year, in 2018. The first was about $16 million along with other funds, which we need all on and not the development foundation, Harvard and others. Another one organization I've noted there is the Bank of Industry. So that's the local DSI. It's based in Nigeria. It has the renewable energy, mandate as well, or expression as well. Providing funding to the sector. Recently, actually this year, they have a lot of funds along with all of them. One million Naira funding. They provide local currency financing to countries focused on the Niger Delta area of Nigeria. So in terms of funding, that's another source of funding that can be assessed if the project qualifies. In terms of donors, there's a wide range of donors that can have various activities. Some of the activities are more focused on technical assistance while others actually provide some bit of funding for projects. So one of it is DFID which is focus of the Sula Nigeria program and should be ending in 2020. They provide grants for projects that are deploying solar solutions, solar home systems specifically. GIZ is another they provide grants funding for procurement of capital expenditure across the country. They have years of money at the moment. Another is Shell Foundation. They have a program that they are running called the NUMA in one of the programs that they provide. So of course they conduct studies to support the market of the market role. Then there are various US companies in the organization. So there's the USAVF which provides funding in different forms. The USAVF provides some grants, matching grants funding to a program with all of them about $50,000 for a US city with multiple costs of providing funding for people with digital income. If you have a project that needs to be and you need to do a study you can potentially provide that. I just mentioned a few others. Green Bond. This is an idea that has been going on in this course recently. Although the argument for Green Bond is that most of the companies will need more energy so they might not be able to attract a large bond size. The other argument has been that there's potential to actually group companies together or group projects together and actually issue a Green Bond issue. Recently in 2018 I believe the Nigerian government issued a sovereign Green Bond so that's a good start. We're still looking to find a way where companies can come together to group projects that would attract the kind of funding required from the capital market for that. For local financial institutions it's going to be slow. Most of them, as I mentioned are still trying to get used to the market so they don't quite understand the sector as well as they would like to. For the few banks that are leading the way, for example Stirling Bank they've been very well invested in the sector and I'm actually being able to close the future of the central. UBI and Access Bank are one of the banks that are under the AIG program I mentioned before where they're supposed to be on lending based on the funding and FDMB also has a mandate actually for renewable energy. In terms of crowdfunding there are a few options and a few organizations we put energy organizations that are actually free funding through this source. So where various people, hundreds of people provide funding for particular projects that the company has set up I mean there are various things in this range that are there that are mentioned here or there's lend to hand and they're here that is the market that are providing this service. It's very attractive to a lot of people and even young people who share this because people want to be associated with the impactful projects sustainable projects and I think the level of awareness is growing very recently about the need for free energy solutions. This is becoming very attractive for companies where they need to raise really quick funding or working capital they're able to do that. So this is not an exhaustive list this is just a general list of various options that are typically available for fundraising and for investment. I just in case some people are not very familiar with investment instruments I'll just give a brief overview of the types of instruments and some of these organizations provide. So in terms of donors, most times it's grand some are that need to pay back, some are not to be allowed to use the funding as you wish. For the people who are recently designed as to solve these financial problems. In this case you need to actually put a project to support the funding you get back funding after the project has been verified. So that would be a grant for you to be after the fact and then you can use that to provide and develop for the further project. In terms of other instruments that are not of the popular ones. In terms of debt, the funding that is provided to people either short or longer periods of time so it could be working capital where you pay off within a one-year period so it could be traveling where you pay off in a number of years. If you pay a fixed principal then you pay an interest on the song on either fortunately business or a yearly business. FBC has been a very important form of funding that sometimes you need to be lacking. FBC helps to provide share funds to the company and most times when you need to get there most times the organization wants to see that you put some money in or that you have some equity funding to watch the debt they are receiving so that's a very important form of funding that takes more risk because you are not really going to be charged on a yearly basis. Sometimes they might be dividend or it's not always the case. They return money back into the business or the business. So these are just a few examples of some of the funds you provided. Other funds that have been more complex in terms of guarantee to the organizations that provide guarantee. So for the investments that have been made it would be a special guarantee to say okay in case you don't pay the funds then this would be you can draw on this one. A few companies that are providing that form of guarantee in Nigeria one is Infrafery. They have support from Garand School as well as Nigerian Subway NSI Nigerian company organization. So basically those staff is one of the companies that provide guarantee for other companies or other organizations who need to provide other forms of guarantee. In terms of impact I'll just speak very briefly about impact most of you probably already know you're involved in the center in one form or the other the impact we've seen is really amazing. Sometimes it's not as measurable as you'd like but you see that it could be of beneficiary of this funding. So you see business is being able to deliver more they're able to produce more they're able to open more longer hours a day they're able to employ more people they're able to be more productive especially if you have productive these appliances going along with the whatever it is just productive appliances help the business to actually do their business better so you can be a clipper a solar clipper that you provided and they're able to do much more with cherries for diesel for generating it could be drying like a solar dryer for fish for fishermen it could be fishing lines that are solar hard that are used during fishing to help to increase the amount of fishes cost. So we see that this impact is a full range environmentally friendly even the fight against climate change that provide funding and investment to the energy companies schools, hospitals are able to perform better it could be one school in one community that is providing a solution and changes the outcome of that community over the next generation so in terms of even productivity and competitiveness of the business you see that businesses are more competitive their costs are reduced a large chunk of costs for businesses is typically spent on energy so when you reduce the amount of energy automatically you become better and you're able to perform better than you can so in general these are the few areas I thought to touch on in this webinar in terms of the areas that are very crucial for investment financing and maybe if I have some time to take some questions I might touch on an area around the key areas that investors think are for when you're accessing a project or a solution if I have some time I might touch on that but I think that there's a huge opportunity for students and for to join this sector I mean we don't have to be technical although I know most of you are technical there's an opportunity to go into other parts of the business to be financed it could be health and safety it could be human resources given the amount of human capital required for this sector so I believe that there are great opportunities for innovative solutions that are cheaper and giving your background in engineering I think will remind you that these solutions will have to be taken through the overall investment project if I have some time I will talk about what in general I think that's something I come to highlight well thank you Ajunwa that was very very fascinating that was very good to learn to how 120 million people lack access to energy but you know there are so many financial opportunities available what in your experience how do national regulations and investment opportunities in Nigeria how many national regulations are very important for the developers to invest in order to deploy the solutions to the investors it's very important for developers and even investors to have comfort when they are putting the solutions the regulations increase will not change and the investments will not go down the drain it's very important that the regulations put in place are tried and tested they are predictable, they are clear and they are actually implemented properly I give a quick example the mini grid resolution in Nigeria has to be one of the best across Africa because it's been very clear on the key areas so in terms of okay if a mini grid has a specific location and a specific location and even in terms of what kind of content do you get if you have to for any reason so a mini grid or just things around the types of permits required the level of clarity is very important so I believe that national regulations are being very important to provide the comfort required by all the developers and investors in any of these projects that's great to learn and I think that's a wonderful point that you made in general I just want to say thank you again for taking the time to meet with us to do this presentation we really appreciate it I also want to say a special thank you to IEEE for sponsoring the virtual salon and thank you to everyone who's been watching this special edition my name is Janna Melpolder and I work as Webinar producers at Engineering for Change on behalf of myself and my entire team thanks to everyone again have a great day alright thank you bye