Launch of Digital Impact Stories - Action Dome, UNCCD COP17

Hello, ladies and gentlemen.
Hello.
Our next event is starting in 1 minute and we are launching one of the most exciting initiatives here at COP, where are you going? Where are you going? You're going into the audience.
Yeah, it's the launch of the Digital Impact Stories Initiative.
And basically, we're taking the stories of the work that people are doing hard on the ground and placing it online digitally for everyone to access the entire world.
You don't need a book, you don't need insider knowledge.
You don't need to attend COP to know about the wonderful work that people are doing on the ground.
So I invite you to please take your seats, ladies and gentlemen, This will be a nice, snappy event.
We're looking at about half an hour.
So please take your seats.
Ladies and gentlemen, if you'd like to know how you can access the stories of why you are here in the first place, if you want to visualize it, please take a seat.
You will not need to attend endless sessions to find out about the amazing work.
All you'll need to do is know what the URL will be for what we are about to discuss, and in particular, if you're in coms, if you want to learn how to sell your story and your initiative, this is what you need to listen to And enjoy for the next half hour.
Okay.
All right.
For those of you who are not attending, I'm going to be quite strict and ask for some silence at the back.
Thank you.
Silence just because of the acoustics.
Thank you very much.
It's Cop 17.
This is the first week.
I don't know how many acronyms you've heard.
I don't know how many targets you've heard.
But what we're doing here now is completely different because we're looking at the real action.
We're not reading about it, we're not making a pledge.
We're looking at the work that people are doing on the ground, the people behind the action, basically, and that's why we've got them in the action dome.
So there is a new collection of what we're referring to as digital impact stories.
Now, it's been created through the partnership with the Global Environment Facility, WCT, which is WOCAT and the UN CCD's G 20 Global and Initiative.
At that point, this is the perfect Point to welcome onstage, the man behind the action dome, the director of the G 20 Global and Initiative, and a man very much in demand to tell us a little bit more about this project, but also to launch it because nobody has seen this yet.
I have, I've played with it, and I've already forwarded some of the images and the stories onto newsrooms that I work with because they are desperate for these stories.
Mali doctor Moray, Tamara Coudi, thank you very much.
Thank you.
Good afternoon.
I'm happy to meet some of my old colleagues, many new faces.
The digital impact stories which we are going to launch today is part of a long standing discussion which I have been having with my chief of communication, Bagaki Buchnerski.
I have been telling that wouldn't it be very interesting if we instead of producing all the statistics, do something like the Humans of New York type of story, one story a day coming relentlessly about the actual action of land restoration happening around the world.
In the G 20 Global Initiative itself, we have a number of stories.
We have the stories of the entrepreneurs, some of them are here.
We have the stories from the small grant grantees which we have been working with and there are many other people whom we interact over a period of last four years whose stories need to be told.
Then we had the opportunity to collaborate with the global environmental facility who are funding many projects around the world.
They have stories as well.
Finally, Wot who is compiling global stories for last 30 years, again, many stories, but not in a scientific manner, but in a very humane manner.
I was having a preview of these digital impact stories, and they are stories of agriculture, of waste management, on climate.
Very, very many stories, but each of them to from a human point of view with a human face for every story.
I was very interested to read those stories.
I'm sure all of you will be extremely interested to read those stories.
I understand a couple of those people will be telling their stories on this table today.
I think that's also something that you should promote the actual act of storytelling, human to human.
So with these few words, as Lucas said, I have to run for a few other meetings.
I have to leave you now in very capable hand and I declare it open and Bai will formally show you where to go, et cetera.
Thank you very much and enjoy the stories.
Thank you very much, Mali.
We'll let you head off to your next meeting.
We completely understand.
Okay, so storytelling, as Mora just said, is imperative.
If you're selling your initiative, to the man with the money bags or the woman with the money bags, you better know how to tell your story.
An initiative like this is going to support you and it's going to guide you.
In a moment, we're going to hear we're going to hear from two entrepreneurs actually, and I'm keen to hear how they told their story, how they had to learn that skill even.
Was that a new skill set that they developed from a completely different point.
They were just trying to solve a problem, trying to help, but then they become marketeers.
Brands, and they're there at the back nodding their heads.
So this is wonderful.
Now, we did have a little video that we were going to show.
Do we have that video ready and primed to go? Can I just check with the audio visual team at the back? Do we have a video for the digital stories? Yes, we do.
It's been a long day.
It's okay.
Yeah, can we play it? The video? I'd like you to see it visually yourself rather than imagining it so you don't have access to it.
That's fine.
That's fine.
We Gaki Moley just said that you can point people as to where to go.
Come on up.
If you still have a voice, you've been very busy.
I In what format is this initiative going to be available? Where is the platform? Do you have to be an insider? Just tell us about accessibility.
This is important.
The stories have been collected through partners as Morelli said.
They're going to be available on the G 20 website.
They're going to probably be mirrored on our partners websites.
They really are going to be available on the G 20 global and Initiative, G 20 and.org website.
Okay.
Thank you very much.
All right.
Thank you, Agaki Let us meet then our entrepreneurs.
I'm going to bring them both up because I want them to have a conversation as well.
I want to see how they can compare their stories and experiences.
First, we have Leif Van Grinsven and he has developed, the images were striking.
I was having a look over the last few days.
This is a housing model and it links a secure place to live with livelihoods and environmental restoration.
And I'm really keen to know what we mean by a secure place to live.
Don't we all have that? Why is that so important? So Leif, please join us up on the stage.
Leif is the co founder of Small Farms Cities Africa.
If you want to have a look, have a Google.
Small Farm Cities Africa.
Joining him here on the stage is the founder of Peta Carlos Gonzalez.
Carlos, interestingly enough, he's gone back to a rather ancient technique.
The elders always know, don't they, Carlos.
It's an ancient technique that's been used by, I love this word, indigenous communities.
Wonderful.
In the Amazon to improve soil fertility.
Soil, and also to keep the carbon locked in the ground.
Um, Carlos, come and join us, please.
We are going to start off.
I want to start off by just finding out, do you know what? I'm going to bring my chair around a bit.
I hate being feeling as if I'm on some extreme border.
Oh, look, we have a gentleman in the house.
There we go.
That's better.
Okay.
Carlos, what made you start your initiative? Why was that important? Thank you very much for the opportunity.
Hello, everyone.
I'm from Ecuador, a tropical country in South America.
Our continent holds the largest rainforest in the world still standing, the Amazon basin.
Yes, it's mysterious that ancient civilizations, Aborigines people intentionally put carbon in the soil mixed with organic matter to restore its fertility.
Now, answering your question, modern forestry industry is very intensive.
It generates a lot of waste that is typically burned or left in the fields to decay.
I was working on it back in 2018 and seeing that polluting the atmosphere, degrading the soils, and wasting a resourceful biomass was a change making moment that I knew that I had to do something about it.
Then doing some research, I came up with this legendary Terra Prettn which is Portuguese for dark soils of Indians, these archaeological carbon soils in the Amazon.
So that translated to modern science and technology.
It's called biochar.
That was the triggering moment when I decided, I have to transform waste into soil regeneration.
And how long ago was this? When you started.
Back in 2018, officially, I incorporated as a business in 2021.
Okay.
The reason I'm asking this is it's not something that happens overnight.
These things are something of a journey.
Seif, what was your story? Where were you? Where was that moment when you thought, you know, light bulb moment, I want to help here, I can actually find a solution.
Yeah, it's a great question.
Our journey, um, We were looking into affordable housing.
We were looking to sustainable agriculture for quite a bit of time, and we had thought we had found a solution.
This is one of those stories where you thought you had it and then you realized you didn't, and then you have to refine it.
We thought we had a solution.
We thought we found affordable housing in Malawi, and we were very proud of our work.
We had found housing for about $3,000 or so.
Mai-Mai Maui Africa.
We thought this was something to be celebrated, $3,000 for a home, eco friendly, very sustainable.
We've made it.
And then we quickly realized that that wasn't affordable.
That wasn't affordable for our target market, for those living at the bottom of the economic pyramid.
And really, the event that triggered that was a cyclone.
So in Malawi, cyclone Freddie hit in 2023, it left over half 1 million people displaced, their homes completely destroyed, their fields all lost, which meant their income, their food for the year completely gone.
And at that moment, we immediately realized that We had been working on a solution affordability, eco friendly homes, strong homes.
But for what? For an event like this.
Leif, I'm going to pause you there.
Who is we and what were you doing in Mozambique Malawi, sorry.
We are small Farm Cities, Africa, so we teamed up with many Malawians on the ground.
We had essentially been working on affordable housing agriculture.
We had an economist, we had architects, and then we were working with soil scientists both on the agriculture but on the housing aspect as well.
We immediately realized in Malawi that Really, the challenge of agriculture and the challenge of housing are one and the same.
80% of the population is a smallholder farmer, 80% of the population lives in substandard housing.
We immediately realized these are not two different challenges.
This is one and the same challenge that people, four out of five people in Malawi are facing every single day.
We were working on a solution, trying to figure it out that then the breakthrough essentially happened in Cyclo and Freddie Win.
We thought we had a solution, but then we needed to implement that solution.
So how long was your journey, then, from that moment to sitting here today? Yeah, so we started in 2019.
Cyclo and Freddie was 2023.
So about three or four years before, and then three years since then.
Okay.
To both of you, what was the biggest lesson you learned? The thing that surprised you? Well, Well, in my case, how misunderstood is soil by farmers.
Like Africa in Latin America, 80% of land stewardship is held by smallholder farmers, less than 20 hectas and they are not aware on how to measure and take care of soil health.
Unfortunately, the agriculture model in the last 150 years has been changed to make profits and not to make food to feed communities.
That was really surprising to me how unaware farmers are in soil health, at least smallholder farmers.
So that's part of our mission, educate them on how to take care of their soils, how to measure soil health indicators.
We also have a team of soil scientists.
And now that they know, they're taking action to regenerate organic matter, organic carbon through different practices.
Did that surprise you though, Carlos, because you assume that farmers, well, they're custodians of our land.
You'd assume that they understand the land.
And when you educating them? Were they open to that education or did they look at you and think, sorry, I worked this land.
Who are you to tell me what to do? What was their reaction? I tried a humble approach and they have a lot of knowledge and experience.
They teach me many things as well.
But specifically the soil health thing is something that they were unaware.
They know how to fertilize, they know how to trim, they know how to harvest, focused on maximize profitability, but not focusing on keeping sustainability.
So raising awareness on soil health allowed us to balance both things.
So we are happy that now think, okay, if I overply urea in the next season, I will have salinized my soil.
So I apply what's necessary or replace it for something organic.
So that was my best takeoff.
Okay, so seen as you are an entrepreneur, you're an entrepreneur, okay, selling your stories are important.
So let's put you on the spot.
Okay? Please sell and describe to me small farm cities Africa.
I have 1 million bucks waiting to invest.
You've got two sentences.
Two sentences.
Lots of pauses and commas.
Go ahead, Leif.
I would say It depends what you're looking for.
I think one of the things that we straddle as youth entrepreneurs is that impact with that financial return.
And so there are different expectations for different investors.
So I'm going to pretend that you're an investor that cares a lot about impact as well as financial returns when I do this, alright? You have me at depends what you are looking for because that means you listen to the problem, okay? So that already impressed me.
Carlos, how would you sell Petro in about 25, 30 seconds? Yeah, we honor Pachamama, which is a South American way to call Mother Earth, by revrizing agricultural residues with pyrolysis and biochar to regenerate soil organic carbon and improve plant yield, farmers living income, and any other aspect regarding soil services like water filtration and carbon removal from the atmosphere.
All right.
Mr.
Alif, you were building secure, a secure place to live.
Was that a launch pad to other aspects? Did you expect the consequences, the knock on consequences that came from a secure place? Because I just think that's such an interesting word to use to describe it.
What do you mean by secure? The front door locks, the windows lock? Yeah.
It's a perfect question.
I think the way to understand what security looks like is to understand what insecurity looks like.
I'll tell the story of the Nangus, a family in Malawi who are in many ways representative of what a typical Malawian family will look like and where they are from.
So the Nangus lived in a grass thatch home, a typical home, grass thatch roof, mud walls, dirt floor.
That home was connected then with their farm.
It was a corn farm, a maze farm that they worked on every single day.
Cycle and Freddie happened, and during Cycle and Freddie, that home collapsed, the maze field was swept away.
That's insecurity.
Your house can be gone in one evening.
Your income for the year and food for the year can be gone in one evening.
That's insecurity.
So the question is then now, what does security look like? What is creating an environment where that doesn't happen look like? And that's what Small Farm Cities is.
Small Farm Cities is starting with the home and saying, Is there a way to create a home that can withstand a cyclone? In fact, is there a way to create a home that can counter the root causes of cyclones? Homes in Malawi are one of the root causes for land degradation.
In Malawi, you're chopping down trees to create the bricks that you use for your home.
So we're saying, can we create homes from an alternative building material, Adobe, which is mud, sand, and straw? So we do that with the homes.
Then we say agriculture is another leading cause of land degradation.
We're looking at monocropping, we're looking at decades of poor agricultural practices.
Can we create regenerative agriculture that uses biochar, that uses agro forestry, integrate these into a system that restores the soil.
When you do that with the home, you do that with the soil.
You bring a bunch of people together that all believe in that suddenly have a system and a group of people that's more powerful than the individual.
You're no longer afraid that you're going to lose your home overnight.
You understand that your soils are much stronger and more resistant to the cyclones that are coming.
You also understand that when you're part of a community, people have your back.
I think that together, the community aspect of the home, the agriculture, you start to realize it's more than the sum of its parts.
You know that you have confidence to not just care about what am I doing today or tomorrow.
You can start to dream for the future.
You can start to think, what do I really want to do with my life? What can my kids do in their life? I'm no longer concerned about losing my home or my crop today or tomorrow.
I can look much further ahead and that's what stability provides.
So I think for anybody who is involved in soil stability structure, you know I'm coming to you but trying to make this link between a secure home, what did stabilizing the soil because that's what it's all about, isn't it? What knock on impact did this bring to the communities, Colors? Well, it took us about three years of pure research and development to answer that question.
It's an old but new material that needed to build up credibility through field trials.
So agronomic trials, measure soil health indicators such as aggregate stability, structure, porosity and many others, and also the plant health and plant yield, which eventually translates into revenue for farmers.
So the most surprising, Result after two year trials was an average 20% yield increase in cocoa, roses, and banana crops across Ecuador.
That was really surprising to me and proved the power of soil organic carbon, soil organic matter, and healthy soil translate into healthy plants that brings healthy foods to humans.
So it is all connected and also the revenue for farmers.
I'm going to ask the question.
There's always an elephant in the room, isn't there? You said revenue for the farmers.
What about revenue for you too? I said just now that you're both entrepreneurs as well.
You have to be to be so innovative.
What's the revenue stream like? How are you getting this work done? Has that been a challenge for you both? Yeah.
Okay.
I'll go first.
It was quite challenging.
During the first three years, we had zero revenue.
But in year four after the results, fortunately, many clients came across.
We have two business models in PCR, the centralized biochar production in alliance with forestry operators, we supply biochar as an input for crops that cannot generate enough biomass, for example, bananas.
Okay.
They buy the packed biochar and they use it as a soil amendment.
Then, of course, we have a revenue from that sales.
And the other model which like more is what we call the carbon farmers Network.
We deliver technology and training on the leasing model to farming communities.
They share the pyrolysis ovens to transform the residues into biochar, and we get a leasing fee for that.
And also, we train them and we get a fee for training them on the biochar.
And in the coming months, we are going to finish a certification process for carbon dioxide removal from biochar, which is an important revenue stream for this purpose.
It's about 16 billion USD market worldwide in 2025, and biochar took 92% of that market.
I think on the revenue question, I think an important aspect for us is we're working with smallholder farmers, and for us, I think, to speak with legitimacy and I think an understanding is to put ourselves literally in the shoes of smallholder farmers and to understand the challenges that they're facing.
So when it comes to cash flow, we as an organization face the same challenges of a smallholder farmer because we're working with smallholder farmers and that's our revenue stream.
When we face an El Nino year, we're getting hit by that.
When we're facing fuel shortages that are driving costs of transport up, we're hit with that.
Malawi is going through critical x shortages, which means fertilizers are not coming from somewhere.
But what that causes you to when you sit in the shoes of those that you're working with, that's where innovation also comes from.
One of our pushes for biochar, for example, why are we doing biochar? It's because essentially inorganic fertilizer skyrocketed.
You're looking for an organic way that can help increase yields and still keep that margin and you look for innovations.
In a lot of ways, Yes, cash flow is always challenging.
When you're working in agriculture, it's extremely volatile.
But if you don't put yourself in the shoes, you won't innovate, right? It's that pressure that keeps you going.
And so I think for every entrepreneur in the room, you know the struggle, you know what you go through, but you also believe you have hope and you see the incremental changes, just as your soil is getting restored year over year, so your practices are getting better and you can see that profit margin growing.
Did you ever start off thinking that this was an actual business model or that you were just helping? Did you ever when you first started, did you think that this could be a viable business model or you were just helping or as it evolved, you thought, hang on, I can make money out of this as well.
Yeah.
I'm a agronomist.
I'm not a finance expert.
Back in 2018, I did an act of faith.
I didn't know if it was going to work as a business.
I had a lot of faith in it.
I knew of the technical power of so organic carbon, but I didn't know if we were going to have favorable results on the trials.
I didn't know if this model was going to work.
I took my chances.
I did this three step cycles of creating, measuring, and repeating or potting the entrepreneurship cycle, then we learned, we changed what we had to learn.
We made some mistakes as well.
But after three years, it worked.
I faced a lot of uncertainty, and of course, in the next business I will start, I will have also the financial I love it.
My next business.
Brilliant.
We received seed capital to get started from an investor.
It'd be very difficult for me to say I didn't think it was a business after getting that investment.
But all to say, I think you start off sometimes over optimistic as an entrepreneur.
You go into it thinking that this will be easy.
And if you knew the reality before you got started, you probably wouldn't have done it.
Do you know, I'm so grateful that you're sharing your stories here because you started off with seed money.
You discovered it along the way, which I just think is wonderful.
There are different avenues to get into this.
Do you know, I've completely gone off script.
I'm glad the boss has left, so I'm not going to get into trouble, but I'm nosy.
Let's carry on a little bit more.
Let's get back on script.
We have this Digital impact stories Initiative.
How were you contacted about being part of it and what went through your mind to say, Yeah, actually, this is good for me.
Yeah.
Well, spreading the message, communicating is the first step of sales.
Raising awareness on soil health on what we do particularly as p as a business and letting people know how soil organic carbon is improving plant yields and farmers living income catch the attention of people of the UN CCD, Global land Isias.
How did they hear about you both? I want to know about this because getting the word out, what was it? Was it social media? Did you message them? Because this is what this whole process has given birth to, this platform.
I want to know how was that initial content made? How did you expose the work that you were doing in the first place? Yeah.
I'll go go.
Well, at the beginning, in Latin America, smallholder farmers don't have much access to social media or Internet, so I had to go to the countryside farm by farm and knocking doors, only 20% of them opened.
But that was enough, let's do this.
It is an act of faith.
We don't know what's going to happen, but some farmers took the chance and say, Okay, let's try it out.
That was the beginning.
And after the results, it was like a domino effect.
They knew they had good results and mouth to mouth, the message was spread.
Now, I'm happy that even international clients in the Americas, including the US, Colombia, Chile, Argentina, have knocked at our doors to ask for advice and ask us how we do it.
But it was a five years communication curve.
Interesting.
Live.
Yeah, so our story, I mean, our approach, I think is similar, working with smallholder farmers.
I think the way the story kind of developed and kind of getting featured, obviously, so we're both youth entrepreneurs.
So that's a program UN CCC G 20 and Initiative, and then ITC together have come together basically to identify young entrepreneurs, those that are working on innovative solutions that are addressing land degradation or green businesses in general and saying, What? How can we change the world in a way that is both profitable, but also is making a substantial difference in the environment in the land that surrounds us.
And we both went through that amazing program.
It defined, I think, us in a lot of ways.
It made us a lot sharper as businesses, but it got us also better storytellers.
I think that's probably one of the bigger moments.
The reason why we're up here is that we had to work on our stories many, many times.
How do you? How do you share the value of what you're doing and I think it's exciting because what you walk away with for us as an organization is we walk away with inspiration because we have so many friends who are doing other things.
I have friends in Nigeria.
I have friends in Zambia.
I have friends in India.
I have friends in Ecuador who are pushing.
And I think Carlos and I will agree that being entrepreneur, especially a young entrepreneur can be a very lonely journey, a very challenging journey, especially when you see maybe some of your other peers doing things that are more profitable.
Things that maybe don't keep them up every night.
And so, you know, the journey can be challenging, but what Yao really does is it provides you with peers that are walking through these similar journeys, and it gives you the motivation.
Even seeing Carlos' story, it's like, Okay.
All right.
I'm motivated to keep pushing that even though it's challenging what we're doing, it's worth it, and that there are others that also believe in this longer term vision.
So what does the Digital Im Story Initiative mean to you both? Why does it matter? Why does it matter? You know, when you were asked to come on board, what made you say, Yeah, I'm going to travel all the way to Mongolia to push this.
Why? It was quite a long trip.
My country is almost the geographical antipode of Mongolia.
It's a few kilometers away actually.
But first, I'd like to say thank you for caring for soil.
It's a shared feeling.
As you know, in South America, it's ancestral.
We call it Pachamama.
It's literally Mother Earth.
So spreading the message, putting together world class scientists, advocates on soil regenerations and having the chance to do networking with them, be together with my peer fellow EGOs knowing that they are working hard in different corners of the world to reenerate soils and improve farmers' livelihoods was my main motivation.
So it was quite tired, but I made it here, and I'm really happy to share what I can.
I think I was very excited because when we have opportunities to speak or to share what we're doing, it means being able to share the stories of the young people who are part of what we do.
We serve I mean, the families that are working at small farm cities that are owning homes that are working on their fields, majority of them are young, 20, 25-years-old.
Also, our core team, the ones that ultimately believe in what we're doing, the ones that are building the homes that are organizing agriculture.
They're also young people.
One in particular, his name is Happy Gambi.
It's a great name.
He's a very happy man.
But essentially, happy is a success story.
Um He came to small Farm cities as an intern.
He was excited.
He believed in the mission.
He saw homes, he saw the agriculture.
He thought, this will be transformational.
But the biggest change that you can actually see and happy is, yes, in the work that he's doing, but it's in his own self.
Um, he came in shy.
He came in wanting to do good, but having a lot of ambition, but not being able to actualize it.
And so I think what's been exciting is to have young people like Happy who come on board, who are leading a team of now 50 individuals.
He went from a college grad to leading a team of 50, building homes, leading agriculture, confident, and now has embraced the vision as his own.
This is not a small farm cities vision.
It's not Lay's vision.
This is happy.
Happy believes in what we're doing.
He's made it his own.
He's made it much better than I could have ever made it, right? He's made it contextualized.
And that, being able to share his story, that's worth the trip.
Okay, so before this platform, just very quickly, is there anybody in the audience that would like to put a question to these entrepreneurs? Do we have any? Yes.
Can I get a microphone, please to the lady at the front with the beautiful, I mean, we call it Chitanga in Zambia, but beautiful cloth that you're wearing.
No microphone.
I can share.
Sharing is caring.
Here we go.
Thank you.
I'm from Nigeria.
My name is Asia Ablesz Um I observed that I'm gender conscious, what percentage of what do you do involves women or revolves around women? I said, I'm a Nigerian.
And since you have the Nigerian friend, what percentage of is your entity involved with women? Because, you know, population there.
It's a great question.
Gender.
It's a When it comes to home ownership in Malaui, the owner of the home traditionally is the male, right? It's the man's home.
And as we were starting out, we work with formally titled land and then formal homeownership.
Everything's by contract.
And so it was a big decision for us.
We're saying, when we're working with families and a man and a woman, a husband and wife are coming together, who's the owner of that? And so what we do at S Farm cities, it's actually it's a 50 ownership.
If it's a man and a woman, 50% woman, 50% man coming together, so that home ownership is actually captured 50 50.
It comes to our staff, we have an amazing team.
It's actually female led.
O Director of agriculture, Sara Samira.
She's the one who's leading everything on the ground.
You'll see her.
If you want to look up Small Farm City, she really is the heart and soul of what we do.
Then what I will also speak to is our internship program.
We've had over 100 Malawian interns who go through our Small Farm City internship program.
It's a 12 month program.
What we do is we make sure to target women.
One for inclusion, but really also because of performance.
They actually perform extremely well, what we found.
We also target when it comes to the agricultural fields.
A lot of our programs now actually work with the women.
There's a consistency factor that we see a lot of times when it comes to agriculture and women.
Are you saying that we're collaborative? Carlos, just very quickly, we're about to end in about 3 minutes.
If there is somebody else who would like to put a question to our two gentlemen, please let me know.
Farmers.
Now, normally you would think farmers are men.
I'm still continuing with the gender theme because that was a wonderful point that you raised.
Normally, the farmers would be men, but we all know that it's women in very strong agricultural communities.
It's often women who work the land.
Have you noticed the difference when working between the two genders? Yeah, and I try to encourage that agriculture can be equally done by both genders.
The statistic in equitory 64, 60% men and 48 women.
But we are changing that.
Biochar is not a hard work.
It's relatively easy to do, and some women in farming communities are actually doing it and applying back to soil while men are doing the other heavier works like trimming the trees, carrying the harvests and heavier stuff.
I'm happy that we are rebalancing the gender equality with biochar.
I'm going to bring this to a close and I think it's very unfair of me.
But it's the perfect example of storytelling.
Leif, was it you who said storytelling was a skill you learned through the UN CCD umbrella and the academy.
Carlos, you said something that instantly painted a picture for me and that is the power of storytelling.
You said, I knocked on the doors.
I mean, you instantly engage with people the minute you say that because you think, wow, that is passion.
To bring our session to a close, I am going to ask you both to formally sell the digital impact platform.
Your stories are on there? I want you to stand up, I want you to talk to the floor.
All I'm asking you to do is, I'm your friend and I'm saying, why are you going to Mongolia? And I want you to explain why you've come here and why this platform is so important.
What difference will it make? Instead of a piece of paper or a book, what does the digital element mean to your storytelling? Carlos, do you want to start? Sure thing.
Go for it.
All right.
My dear brothers and sisters, I'd like to leave one fact.
We are the soil.
Every element of every cell in our body was once in the soil.
Let's think on the calcium in our bones, the iron in our blood, the phosphorus in our nervous system.
Everything was once in the soil.
In that way, we are all brothers and sisters and we are coming close to the point of no return on soil degradation.
So based on that, the young generations taking action today, including my CO fellows, have the honor to make a change on that.
We are in the point that we can regenerate soil and sail it ourselves or keep doing extractive intensive agriculture.
So my way to do it was biotar as it is an ancestral practice, we can regenerate soil organic carbon and tackle many problems at the same time.
So let's take action to save ourselves.
The planet Earth doesn't need to be saved.
Let's remember that there's been six mass extinctions.
Last one was dinosaurs, and here we are.
Life will endure with or without us.
So to preserve life as we know it and ourselves, we need to take care of soil.
And thanks to the ECO program, I learned how to improve my skills, my knowledge, and take better action to have better impact.
I really encourage my generation and the younger generations to be part of it, to learn how to take better action to regenerate soils and preserve life as we know it.
Do you know what? You must be magical because the minute you started talking, we got the platform up.
Thank you very much indeed.
Leif, the digital impact stories.
Why does this matter? Thank you, Carlos.
I'll just be very brief, I would say.
No, no.
I would say when you open your news feed, when you scroll through Instagram TikTok online, what you're often presented with is scary things, dark things.
The world is coming to an end.
I would say if you're looking for stories of hope, you're looking for stories of resilience.
You're looking to learn about what's going on around the world.
Look no further than the impact stories.
Bravo.
Thank you.
Okay, to my team at the back, please pause the scrolling.
Just pause for a moment.
Come down right to the screen.
There we have them.
Can we just click on there, please? Carlos, I believe that's you, isn't it? On the right, sorry.
I don't know my left or right.
I don't know how I passed my driveway.
Yeah.
You see my face of surprise? Yes.
That was the moment when we measured our first results in roses.
In roses? Yeah, Ecuador grows a lot of roses.
Oh, wonderful.
That's one of the crops where we had our first trials.
We need to talk because I love roses.
Can we click on there, please? Can we just enter Carlos' story just so we can show you? Because we've been talking about it and visualizing it, and here we are.
Yeah, just give us a scroll.
Let's just see the information, the story that is on there.
If we keep scrolling, how much input did you have with the team who developed this Carlos leaf? Yeah? Quite a lot.
Quite a lot.
What did you there we have the soil.
In terms of input, how did you work with them? When they were developing the platform, did you give your feedback, your opinion? Yes.
We provided some baseline information.
Then thanks to the nice team of the G 20 GLI, they improved it a lot.
That's the Cocoa tree where shovels come from.
That's our 90% of our sales right now.
But I'm so thankful that you guys helped me to improve the communication through this platform.
Okay.
Wonderful.
For anybody looking for stories and for original content, you see these images, it's perfect.
Can we find Leaf's story as well, please? My technical genius at the back, my hero.
Thank you.
Um, I mean, the story of the Palestinian Lady, what a wonderful positive story coming out of a conflict area.
I mean, there are true stories of inspiration.
I would encourage you to read her story, but let's just go back.
I want to find Leif story, please, from Malawi.
Thank you.
Scroll down.
There it is.
Yeah, scroll up, scroll up.
He's in the middle.
There we are.
I'm happy as well.
Yeah.
Okay, let's scroll and let's just see what's on here for people to find out more.
What input did you put into this leaf? Just just talk us through as we scroll and observe.
I think it was a lot of storytelling.
It was telling the story of how we began.
It was telling the story of what we're working on now, the stories of our leaders who are developing.
And then we have the bricks.
The stories of the family.
These are Adobe bricks.
If you look, you'll see Cassava is right behind us.
We grow some different crops.
Cassava is one of them.
These are Adobe bricks, so that's mud, that's a little bit of sand, and then some rice husk.
Let me scroll.
Completely sustainable, all local building materials as well.
Just showing how they stack together.
This is our first site.
So we integrate in this site, this is greenhouses, commercial greenhouses, this is aquaculture, and then the homes in the back are built through those sustainable construction methods as well.
And so you'll see when we say community.
And what we talk a lot about is affordable life.
What does an affordable life look like? And I think what we're trying to show here is an affordable life can have dignity.
An affordable life can be something where someone takes pride in it.
When you look at this and you say, I'm proud that I live here.
This is my home.
These are the plots that I live in.
Can we just Okay, that was the second image he had.
Let's just scroll on a little bit more.
This is the image that caught my attention.
There was a before and after, wasn't there? Yeah.
So you'll see the different homes, and then around the homes, you'll see the plots, and then community spaces.
I think an important part about what we do is that community infrastructure and how the community gathers is an important part that we gathered when working with community.
That came up as when we were saying, what about the home? What about the home? You immediately realize When you're building communities, it's not just about a home.
It's about where does the cooking happen? Where are the bathrooms? Where's the running water? Where are my kids going to be playing? All these need to be integrated.
When you're saying we want to have agriculture in homes, how do you plan? How do you do urban designing around that so that it's a place that families can actually thrive.
Here's another image.
You'll see commercial greenhouses along the sides.
Families will work in commercial greenhouses, they're grow tomatoes crops.
I will do them around five tons or so of tomatoes on this site every single week.
The families will then live in the homes, cultivate the land also around them.
And then in doing so, their kids are able to grow up in a great environment where they have access to water, there's bathrooms, there's substantial income increase and equality.
I'm going to not spoil it for everyone because we want them wanting more, don't we? So let's not spoil it for you all.
We want you to go to the platform and have a look.
I just want to say thank you very much.
Yeah, the sweet spot.
Yeah, I was reading about this.
Carlos and Leif, you're doing amazing work.
Thank you for coming to join us here in Olmbata.
And good luck with the rest of it.
I am very keen to see how many more businesses and how many more positive impacts, particularly on the communities that need it and where all of this leads us to, and who also contacts you in order to adapt and adopt your approach, having seen your stories online.
Ladies and gentlemen, please, a warm thank you to Carlos and T.
Thank you.
We need a picture.
We need a picture.
Wonderful.
Nick Nick Nick.
To