Um So thanks everyone for coming. Um I'm Sophie Blasted Ceo of hive online. Uh We're building better economies for farm with Blockchain and other advanced technology. I'm also a writer and researcher.Um And if you're interested to know more, um you can see my book, Fintech, fintech Revolution, Universal Inclusion in the New financial Ecosystem, which is a manifesto for what we do. Um Today, I'll be telling you about the challenges faced by African farmers, especially women and how technology can help to build alternative infrastructure and lift them out of poverty. I'll be sharing some of the learnings from our experiences over the last few years working in some of the world's least developed countries. Um And if you'd like to ask questions, please feel free to put them in the chat and I'll leave some time at the end to pick them up. So I won't be able to actually see the chat while I'm talking. So if you put the questions and I will pick them up again, so I can tell it's probably the hardest thing I've ever done including childbirth. But imagine how much harder it is for Anna.

She didn't go to school so she can't read and has never had a bank account. It's hard for her to save in cash because her husband takes it from her. As soon as it's in the house, she doesn't have grid electricity and her village is 10 kilometers from the nearest road. But for her running a business is a matter of survival. She needs better seeds and treatments to grow her farm but can't borrow $50 without credit history, Fernando runs a successful microfinance business but Anna is invisible to him and transporting cash to the villages is expensive. Many in Africa, the fastest growing small business market and Fernando is desperate to reach them to reach them. You know, I grew up with so many advantages I can read, I have health care and I take technology for granted. But when I ran my first business, I couldn't build up my reputation fast enough and I ended up losing everything, my business, my husband and my home, to be honest, I'm not so sad about the husband. Then I had a career building technology and businesses for global banks in 60 countries including the first online bank for us at Citigroup. I was responsible for 13 African countries first for infrastructure and then business transformation. Monkeys were stealing the cables, public infrastructure was unreliable.

So I had to develop alternative infrastructure strategies like putting satellite receivers on the roofs of branches. I saw firsthand how difficult it is for banks to reach businesses in rural Africa and how financial products don't meet their needs. I saw how today's economy is stacked against entrepreneurs and especially women like Anna, 450 million small and family businesses make up over half the world's economy. They can't build trust and don't get the opportunities that big companies get to credit in markets. They can't grow and contribute to the economy. Most of them fail and that problem just got worse with COVID-19 has come a credit crunch and declining markets that restricts their options even further. It's a universal problem but trust is an even bigger problem in the least developed countries in the world. In the World Bank's Human development index, most of the least developed countries are in Africa and that's why we're working to build better economies. Agricultural cash flow is bumpy.

If you grow multiple crops, a farmer may have several harvests a year but they don't have cash available when you need to buy seeds or treat the crops in the early growing season. The farmers we work with in Mozambique can't sell markets because the quality of their crops is too poor and they can't afford the treatments to improve the quality. Mozambique used to export 25% of the world's cashews and now it's less than 3% because trees are aging and unproductive, but it's also excuse me, but it's also expensive to plant new ones and the new saplings take 10 years to become productive. Farmers in Africa have huge problems accessing credit, especially if they're women. Many lenders want collateral which farmers don't have and women are much less likely to own land or any other assets. They also suffer from inefficient markets. Farmers can't show buyers what crops they're growing and buyers can't keep the production plants operating efficiently because they can't predict where crops will be available. Middle men buy from farmers at low prices and take most of the upside. And in a broader economic context, many African countries have dysfunctional financial infrastructure, especially in mineral rich economies, oligarchy and corruption has stripped the wealth out of countries, leaving them with inadequate physical infrastructure, health care and education systems. Capital markets are shallow and moving money around is difficult.

Most people don't have any formal identity or property deeds. Many don't have basic information like a date of birth, especially in rural areas but outside the cities, it's mostly left up to communities to figure out how to survive. Social groups like co-operatives and saving groups help small producers collaborate and save to build financial stability, but all their transactions are in cash so they don't build credit history. This is a savings group that Anna joined. Five years ago. The members who are mostly women put a small amount in a pot every week and can borrow from the pot to start businesses. It's made a huge difference to Anna's economic resilience but all their transactions are in cash recorded on paper. So they don't build credit history and she can't borrow as much as she needs to really kick start her farm. There are strong social bonds and trust in the groups but they can't use it to access capital digital payments. With Telco issued mobile money can help to take away some of the risk of cash and provide records that they can start to build a digital history. And Pisa has made a huge impact on the number of people who can access financial services, especially in Kenya. But Telco issued money is expensive to use and their centralized infrastructure can be unreliable and difficult to reach. When in Pisa, which is best known has definitely helped microbusinesses.

It's also had negative impacts where communities haven't been able to support these businesses because of a lack of market development. Co-operatives can also help farmers aggregate their crops and reach better market prices. But there's a lot of corruption and no transparency. So many farmers don't trust co-operatives.

And as I learned all those years ago when I was working for Citigroup, these communities are often isolated from access to centralized services by poor connectivity, low device ownership and limited access to power, power and connectivity are further compromised in areas where there's conflict or corrupt governments fail to maintain infrastructure conflict also leads to the financial industry moving out.

So there's even less access to capital for farmers. And that's where technology can help. Mobile money was a great start but it needs infrastructure. Blockchain has been called the Internet of Trust. It runs on machines in the network. So it doesn't need central infrastructure and it's designed so that people who don't know each other or anything about each other can transact assets like money or other things without having to trust each other or any central authority. It's an alternative infrastructure with no central authority validating transaction, the network validates it instead. So say Alice wants to give bill some money. She broadcasts that to the network which all agree. It's a good transaction. Before that transaction gets approved, it's locked into a block of transactions which is cryptograph, cryptographically locked to other blocks making a chain hence Blockchain. And that means that the the transaction is visible to everyone who's got access to that Blockchain. Now we've all heard of Bitcoin and Ethereum.

But Cryptocurrency is just the basic type of digital asset that can use a Blockchain. Other types of assets include stablecoins which are pegged to a national currency. Stablecoins have been around for a while although there were some early scandals because there were no regulatory filter to prevent customers being exposed. But that's been changing and stable coins are now broadly accepted as a safe regulated asset in many countries. Stablecoins have the advantage of behaving just like normal money in most respects but can provide cheap digital currency for people without access to a bank account. Now there is DM which was formerly called Libra and that's a Stablecoin which will be distributed by Facebook.

And even Amazon is joining the party along with visa giving Stablecoins and especially us dollar back. Huge distribution potential A US dollar stable coin could be particularly useful in countries where currencies are volatile. Although they can put the local monetary system at risk if everyone were to start using Stablecoins in foreign currencies instead of the national currency. Mm Stablecoin back by a local currency within the national current commercial banking system that holds much less risk because it doesn't impact money supply.

And many countries are issuing or considering issuing central bank digital currencies or CBD CS which are a type of digital currency usually on the Blockchain which is backed directly by the central bank. China is the first major economy to run a large scale pilot running to hundreds of thousands of people. And many think its announcement of the E one was partly in response to Facebook's announcement of the Libra project now called D MD M. Spooks. The vast distribution, the face they have 2.7 billion active customers even though DM is actually governed by a consortium of organizations. It's not technically a Facebook owned product. However, the big payments platforms pulled out of the project and some are now going their own way with stablecoin.

So Facebook is the de facto leader, as you can see from this map. Several countries are already using CBD CS in a in a wholesale context, but retail CBD CS are following fast. And that's partly because the technology is still maturing to the level where it can handle massive transaction volumes, but it is getting there fast. If we look at the overall landscape, China is significantly ahead of most of the major economies. Although Japan has just started a pilot, interestingly, some of the first movers were which recognize the importance of the universally accessible digital payments, although some early projects have failed. So at the moment, the only actual live cases are the Bahamas and the East Caribbean.

Um Although the Marshall Islands did issue one, but that was shut down by the IMF and Senegal also ran a pilot some years ago. Um but that was not successful either. Um But there are several other countries. I mean, Kenya, for example, is now pondering issue in 12. And Sweden is in um in pilot. So there's a lot, there's a lot going on in this space. So we've built a model that's using a stablecoin and preparing for the availability of CBD CS hive online builds a bridge between formal financial institutions and informal entrepreneurs with a distributed community finance solution that digitizes trust, businesses, build trust by delivering what they've agreed based on relationships made through the trust.

We've helped them build trust is built on facts about what they do as they agree deliver. And transact a crop for forecast. So buyers can pre-book their, produce our analytics measure when they meet these commitments and others. And we build a digital reputation to show how reliable they are based on what they do structured loans, incentivize sustainable behaviors and we aggregate risk. So communities can leverage collective muscle. I take commission from lenders who KC and credit assessment. Thanks to the scoring.

Governments and NGO S get cheap reliable voucher distribution. NGO S alone spend $4.2 billion on vouchers annually. And a lot of that goes to administration. Our Blockchain based solution ensures they go to the right people taking out cost and corruption, commercial and governmental organizations pay for access to the data and analytics that form the core of our platform. It's built on the stellar Blockchain so communities can build wealth without being tied to a bank or a financial institution, but they can access formal finance. As I said, we use a stablecoin so to our customers, it looks and behaves just like money. But with a token structure that keeps wealth in the community, we help for low literacy, very low data use on any device for the browser. It's extremely tolerant of dropped signal and poor connectivity. It operates on a minimum of one device per community. So Anna's friends can have an account, an identity and a digital history without needing a phone and women are much less likely to own or have access to phones as well as lacking digital and functional literacy. We've also designed so it doesn't need a consistent signal to operate and we're working to constantly improve it. So we work better offline as well. And although it's the financial, it does need to connect from time to time.

So Anna gets the agricultural input, she needs to increase her crops and makes enough money to send her girls to school. She can prove that her peanuts were treated with organic controls against toxins and her peanuts can get a premium price on lucrative export markets. One of her girls wants to be a doctor with increased investment in the community should be able to access the education, she needs to develop a professional career. The statistics are astonishing by giving farmers access to better inputs, agricultural productivity can increase three times, giving much better revenue, given 70% of arable land in Africa is unused. There's also the opportunity for expansion and more food production. As farmers become more secure, we're all going to need Africa to produce more food in the future. And at the moment, it's responsible for only 3% of the world's food exports. Africa today is a net importer of food which is crazy when you consider how much land there is. So agriculture is a sector with a massive upside potential and by keeping wealth in the communities, more jobs are created. So for the youth, they have options that look more attractive than going to the city or picking up a rifle market, efficiencies, increase farmer income and help buyers to be more prosperous. While women and entrepreneurs give back to the community.

Each of these ladies at the heart of a family or her community and in some countries, they're responsible for between five and 15 people. Each they buy solar panels, plant trees and invest in irrigation, making their environments more sustainable. Trust builds business relationship and hive online builds trust as we're proving in some of the least developed countries in the world. And the results are amazing. Background experiences are really key to what we do as well as my experience in Africa in building global banking systems.

I've written books on organizations, fintech and economics. I built a strong inclusive team with over a century of experience in finance, technology and research from commercial banking, the World Bank and NGO S and elite developers from Kigali's Carnegie Mellon University. When I set up the development team for Africa, I recognize that it's important for all of us to understand the needs of the farmers and especially the women we support, which is why I decided to put the development team in Kigali in Rwanda, both JP and Kasay ex refugees. So they understand the environments and challenges our customers face the tie our product owner grew up in, in poverty in Dar Es Salaam in Tanzania. And his mother is still the treasurer, treasurer of the Savings group while Simone's from Mozambique and she's a Portuguese speaker.

We have over 10 languages between us. We work in Agile Springs, constantly testing new features with our customers and learning more about their needs. This has been really important when we're working, have very little exposure to technology or digital systems. And many, many of our most popular features are a result of their ideas super important when working with customers who've never used technology to talk to them and learn what's meaning from, from them. Some of these ladies have never used a phone before and some are worried about touching devices. When I asked the group on the left what this symbol meant, they didn't understand it. But when I asked what would be more meaningful, they couldn't tell me they've never seen sent, but they agreed that they would learn to understand whatever symbol we use though because they're so keen to engage and get the benefits of technology. We work with partners in the NGO government, excuse me and private system to help reach the ecosystem and these partners are really important to our customers too. We combine our technology with the work they're doing already to improve farming ecosystems in both rural and urban settings.

Each country is different with different challenges and we're learning now with each new release, our research is also an important component. I think it's fair to say without the research would not be able to understand our customer needs and their opportunity nearly so well.

A by-product of this is that there are a lot of organizations who are interested in what we're learning. So we support them with insights into how Blockchain can help humanitarian causes and improve sustainability. It's a rapidly emerging field and the technology is evolving really fast.

So practitioners like us are really well positioned to feed back to these groups when they're designing policy and regulation. And if you're interested to read more, um you can read our research for free on our website or I mentioned in my book fintech Revolution, which is a manifesto for how the global financial system needs to change and how technology can enable it. So to summarize, there are some key takeaways which I hope will find useful Blockchain isn't enabling technology to build a distributed economy. It's not something that's happening in the future. It's already here and being used by commercial banks, central banks and fintech.

Like us, women entrepreneurs give the opportunity, build sustainable communities and inter intergenerational opportunities. These these women aren't just giving back to their communities. They're raising the next generation. They are the community and rural Africa is full of largely untapped opportunities and new technology opens out these markets.

The upside potential is huge and the world should be able to turn that FEX map of Africa, mostly green with greater rural development. The world needs Africa to keep producing food more efficiently and space and opportunity is there all that's needed is more opportunities and lastly diverse teams are essential to building technology for diverse customers. They're not a nice to have a critical to understanding the needs of.