Latest / Solving the World's Greatest Problems / Episode 12 - When Helping the Poor Makes Their Poverty Worse | Joel Cunningham

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Episode 12 - When Helping the Poor Makes Their Poverty Worse | Joel Cunningham · Solving the World's Greatest Problems

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_03: I remember hearing a story, very well-meaning organization, but they saw people who were hungry.
• 0:04
  SPEAKER_03: They said, you know what?
• 0:05
  SPEAKER_03: We're just gonna give them, we'll buy a year's supply worth of eggs and we'll send them every month to them.
• 0:12
  SPEAKER_03: And they did that, but not realizing because they sent free eggs into that ecosystem, it killed all of the layer farmers and the egg farmers in that ecosystem because they couldn't compete with free.
• 0:22
  SPEAKER_03: Then the next year, the administration of that organization had a heart change and said, you know what, we're not so focused on this anymore.
• 0:30
  SPEAKER_03: We want to go focus on something else in a different country.
• 0:33
  SPEAKER_03: They withdrew their support and left a vacuum there where the people were worse off than they were before.
• 0:38
  SPEAKER_02: Africa sits on 24% of the world's arable land.
• 0:42
  SPEAKER_02: We're the continent the most arable land out of any continent.
• 0:46
  SPEAKER_02: And uh and you see the resources in Africa and it's phenomenal.
• 0:49
  SPEAKER_02: And a lot of people then turn around and go, well, you know, the people are useless and they don't understand how to do it.
• 0:53
  SPEAKER_02: And that's also not true.
• 0:54
  SPEAKER_02: A systemic issue is based on the systems and structures that are there or aren't there.
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_00: Solving the world's greatest problems is an audacious proposal.
• 1:08
  SPEAKER_00: And yet, no generation has more talent, capital, or tools than ours.
• 1:13
  SPEAKER_00: The time has come for entrepreneurs, investors, givers, ministry leaders to reclaim the church's ancient calling.
• 1:24
  SPEAKER_00: The scale of brokenness is too big for us to do this in silos.
• 1:30
  SPEAKER_00: Under his power, before his glory, together.
• 1:34
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to the Solving the World's Greatest Problems podcast.
• 1:53
  SPEAKER_01: Every six weeks we do have money.
• 1:56
  SPEAKER_01: So there is a total change.
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_01: Total change in your financial for sure.
• 2:01
  SPEAKER_01: How much what is that change?
• 2:02
  SPEAKER_01: How much would you say?
• 2:04
  SPEAKER_01: When I was doing farming, it was not easy for me to have 10,000 fa cash in a month.
• 2:14
  SPEAKER_01: But in this uh regarding of broilers, I do make 10,000 every two months.
• 2:20
  SPEAKER_03: Wow.
• 2:21
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, yeah.
• 2:22
  SPEAKER_03: So you've gone from 10,000 a year to 10,000 every two months.
• 2:25
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, 10,000, 7,000.
• 2:26
  SPEAKER_01: If you're down, maybe five.
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_01: So it is really good for them.
• 2:30
  SPEAKER_01: That's a probably close to a 6X increase in your salary.
• 2:33
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 2:34
  SPEAKER_00: Wow.
• 2:36
  SPEAKER_00: 378 million people don't just go hungry because the food isn't there, but because broken supply chains, low yields, and disconnected markets keep it out of reach.
• 2:47
  SPEAKER_00: What if the solution wasn't food aid?
• 2:49
  SPEAKER_00: But helping farmers grow more, lose less?
• 2:52
  SPEAKER_00: They finally reach the markets and have been close to them.
• 2:56
  SPEAKER_00: Joel Cunningham is the CEO of Hamara, a company working on the backbone of agriculture in Africa.
• 3:03
  SPEAKER_00: Instead of handing out food, Hamara uses digital tools and blockchain to turn fragmented farming into coordinated, demand-driven value chains, aligning farmers, suppliers, logistics, and buyers so that the harvest actually reaches the people who need it.
• 3:21
  SPEAKER_00: Africa already holds the talent, the land, and the resources.
• 3:25
  SPEAKER_00: Let's talk about the problem of structural hunger and how to solve it.
• 3:32
  SPEAKER_03: So, what do people misunderstand about hunger in Africa?
• 3:36
  SPEAKER_02: You know, I think that there's so many things to it, and uh a lot of people I think risk running into one specific solution to hunger in Africa or what's actually going on.
• 3:46
  SPEAKER_02: And I think that um hunger in Africa is a complex problem.
• 3:50
  SPEAKER_02: Uh there's obviously things like war and famine and things like that where people really need where they have they need solutions that are not based where they are.
• 3:58
  SPEAKER_02: Um but I think what a lot of people miss is that the vast majority of hunger in Africa is not caused by that.
• 4:04
  SPEAKER_02: The vast majority of hunger in Africa is caused because people have there are systemic issues that don't get food actually produced.
• 4:11
  SPEAKER_02: Um and uh and a huge volume of people can't actually access food because of supply chains or something going wrong in the economy or things like that.
• 4:20
  SPEAKER_02: And because of that, they'll never be able to eat.
• 4:22
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and so I think that for the vast majority of Africa, that the problem isn't famine or war or anything like that.
• 4:29
  SPEAKER_02: The problem is a system issue that just there isn't the systems to be able to bring that out and to be able to produce the food that people need.
• 4:36
  SPEAKER_03: So good.
• 4:36
  SPEAKER_03: So our team has broken up hunger into kind of two sections.
• 4:40
  SPEAKER_03: And so when we look at hunger, there's 673 million people in the world who are undernourished.
• 4:45
  SPEAKER_03: Of that, about 295 million face what we call acute hunger, meaning people are hungry from things like war, economic collapse, and droughts.
• 4:54
  SPEAKER_03: That is tragic.
• 4:56
  SPEAKER_03: It demands emergency aid.
• 4:57
  SPEAKER_03: We celebrate the organizations working to make sure that no one dies because they don't have food in their stomach, right?
• 5:03
  SPEAKER_03: That is what you're talking about about like there are situations where we need to bring outside food in because it can't be grown or whatever there.
• 5:10
  SPEAKER_03: Right?
• 5:10
  SPEAKER_03: That's 295 million people.
• 5:11
  SPEAKER_03: But there are 378 million people that face what we call structural hunger, meaning they're hungry from low agricultural productivity, broken supply chains, markets that don't reach the poor, and low income or purchasing power.
• 5:23
  SPEAKER_03: And that's the type of hunger that's most prevalent in Africa.
• 5:28
  SPEAKER_03: Africa is the hungriest population on the planet, but 80% of Africans who are hungry fit in that structural category.
• 5:35
  SPEAKER_03: Only 20% fit into that acute category.
• 5:38
  SPEAKER_03: And so there's totally different solutions needed for people who are structurally hungry versus acute.
• 5:43
  SPEAKER_03: Can you talk more about that?
• 5:44
  SPEAKER_03: Because, like, if you try to bring an acute solution to a structural problem, you kind of just exacerbate the problem.
• 5:52
  SPEAKER_02: Absolutely.
• 5:53
  SPEAKER_02: And we see it all the time in Africa.
• 5:55
  SPEAKER_02: Um, aid organizations are consistently and and they really do deal very well with this acute problem.
• 6:01
  SPEAKER_02: So, you know, in a place of war, you really do need that solution.
• 6:03
  SPEAKER_02: And just to say, a lot of people swing to the other side, which they say there's no solution for that, there's no acute isn't there.
• 6:09
  SPEAKER_02: And I really agree with you that the you really see the need um in places like war and when there's famine for that, and they do a phenomenal job at that.
• 6:17
  SPEAKER_02: But more and more they're realizing they tried a one-size-fits-all solution to everything, and uh the problem with that in the communities we've worked with and the places we've seen in Africa is that uh those very organizations start handing out things like food packs and other things, trying to solve a problem of hunger in a structural issue where there's a structural problem, not an acute problem, and that creates dependency.
• 6:40
  SPEAKER_02: What happens is that people then start depending on that product or that thing and don't take uh their ownership and of their lives and what they're doing on the ground, and so it actually has the reverse problem, which is that it actually creates more and more of an acute problem rather than fixing the structural issue.
• 6:56
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, I mean I remember hearing a story about a very well-meaning organization in Atlanta who went, I think it I forget if it was Haiti or Africa or somewhere, um, but they saw people who were hungry, and so they said, you know what, we're just gonna give them, we'll buy a year's supply worth of eggs and we'll send them every month to them.
• 7:18
  SPEAKER_03: And they did that, but not realizing because they sent free eggs into that ecosystem, it killed all of the layer farmers and the egg farmers in that ecosystem because they couldn't compete with free.
• 7:29
  SPEAKER_03: So it killed them off.
• 7:30
  SPEAKER_03: Then the next year, the administration of that organization had a heart change and said, you know what, we're not so focused on this anymore.
• 7:38
  SPEAKER_03: We want to go focus on something else in a different country.
• 7:41
  SPEAKER_03: They withdrew their support and left a vacuum there where the people were worse off than they were before.
• 7:47
  SPEAKER_03: And I think what we've seen is that aid is a great triage mechanism.
• 7:52
  SPEAKER_03: It is not a solution to a problem.
• 7:55
  SPEAKER_03: Right?
• 7:55
  SPEAKER_02: And that's a great word.
• 7:56
  SPEAKER_02: The like the word triage is such a good word for it.
• 7:58
  SPEAKER_02: But can you imagine putting on a bandage, consistently strapping somebody's leg who isn't like that or thinks that their leg now is broken because you've put a cast on it, and so now they just wait for everything you're gonna do for them where they're not bleeding out and there isn't a problem actually, or their leg isn't actually broken, and yet you're now trying to solve that solution and telling them that this is the problem that they have.
• 8:17
  SPEAKER_03: Oh man, that's so good.
• 8:18
  SPEAKER_03: I I would t I typically thought of it as kind of like a you know, when someone goes through, you know, is in war or a really hard situation, acute hunger, we are kind of just putting band-aids on it, bandages on it, right?
• 8:31
  SPEAKER_03: That's what people do in the ER.
• 8:33
  SPEAKER_03: But at some point you need to move someone from the ER to the operating room.
• 8:36
  SPEAKER_03: But too often in Africa, 10 years later, we're still putting band-aids on them in the ER, and we're like, gosh, this blood keeps coming, this blood keeps coming, why is it keeping because you didn't get them to the ER, right?
• 8:47
  SPEAKER_03: Like you can't you can't expect to put a band-aid on a bullet hole and solve the problem.
• 8:52
  SPEAKER_03: At some point, you've got to stitch it up, you've got to heal it.
• 8:55
  SPEAKER_03: But what you're saying is you're kind of taking it a step further and you're being you're essentially telling them people have started to believe they have a s people have started to believe they have a problem that they don't actually have because we've put a cast on a healthy bone.
• 9:08
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 9:08
  SPEAKER_03: When they've got all of this land around them, they've got fertile ground, they've got working hands, they've got able bodies, we've got everything that God's created.
• 9:16
  SPEAKER_03: Africa is not hungry because God didn't endow Africa with the resources to feed itself.
• 9:21
  SPEAKER_03: It's hungry because of human issues.
• 9:25
  SPEAKER_02: Absolutely.
• 9:25
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, Africa sits on 24% of the world's arable land, we're the continent, the most arable land that out of any continent.
• 9:33
  SPEAKER_02: And uh and you see the resources in Africa and it's phenomenal.
• 9:36
  SPEAKER_02: And a lot of people then turn around and go, well, you know, the people are useless and they don't understand how to do it.
• 9:40
  SPEAKER_02: And that's also not true.
• 9:41
  SPEAKER_02: A systemic issue is based on the systems and structures that are there or aren't there.
• 9:47
  SPEAKER_02: Many people from a country that's stable don't take into account things like currency stability and what currency stability does for a country, and how much that affects an entire chain, supply chain, or economic base that people build off, and how much it actually ruins everything if you just change the currency in a country.
• 10:05
  SPEAKER_02: And so there's many things like that that are a macro issue rather than a micro issue structurally.
• 10:11
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 10:12
  SPEAKER_03: I think that's so important.
• 10:14
  SPEAKER_03: And so just to get some of those numbers right, so Africa has 20 per 24% of the world's total arable land of the remaining arable land in the world, meaning the land that is not being farmed right now.
• 10:26
  SPEAKER_03: Africa has 60% of the world's remaining arable land, but they're doing between four and six percent of the global food exports.
• 10:34
  SPEAKER_03: I think it's even less.
• 10:35
  SPEAKER_03: I think it's even less than 406, which is crazy.
• 10:38
  SPEAKER_03: You've got this continent that's got 60% of the world's remaining arable land, yet contributing very little to the overall food supply.
• 10:46
  SPEAKER_03: And they're importing$50 billion worth of food a year.
• 10:50
  SPEAKER_03: So just to get this accurate for everyone again, 60% of the world's remaining arable land, but they're importing$50 billion of food a year and net exporting or exporting, you know, somewhere between, you're saying, maybe even below 4% of the global food supply.
• 11:06
  SPEAKER_03: And so it's incredibly asymmetric metrics to what God has offered Africa in terms of the opportunity.
• 11:15
  SPEAKER_02: Massively.
• 11:16
  SPEAKER_02: And I mean I've heard statistics like if Africa actually uh used the arable land and the resources that God has given it, uh, Africa would feed itself and 40 to 60 percent of the rest of the world.
• 11:26
  SPEAKER_02: So to give you the reverse side of it, Africa is importing more than 50 billion dollars worth of food at the moment and not even feeding itself, and yet the potential is that it could feed for itself and 40 to 60 percent of the rest of the world, which is just crazy.
• 11:40
  SPEAKER_03: And you can see how that has a trickle-down effect into the economies, right?
• 11:46
  SPEAKER_03: When you are a net importer as opposed to a net exporter, it's essentially like you are uh living below your means, right?
• 11:54
  SPEAKER_03: You're buying more than you're producing.
• 11:57
  SPEAKER_03: And so it's just kind of a a pathway.
• 12:01
  SPEAKER_03: Uh if you're perpetually, if a country is perpetually net importing more than they're exporting, it's kind of a math equation for cyclical poverty in a way.
• 12:10
  SPEAKER_03: And so we need to start to change those tides.
• 12:13
  SPEAKER_03: And I think the Christian community has a really unique opportunity here to really start to move the needle in the other direction.
• 12:21
  SPEAKER_03: But first I want to address something, um, and this is really a heart posture that I think is really important to talk through.
• 12:27
  SPEAKER_03: And so I think what's happened over the last 20, 30 plus years, um, or really, you know, let's call it uh 10 to 15 years ago and then before, is we had this huge aid world, right?
• 12:40
  SPEAKER_03: And I think the Christian community read things like they see in Deuteronomy 15, that are essentially, you know, if anyone lacks among you, give to them freely type of thing.
• 12:49
  SPEAKER_03: And people said, Okay, well the poor, I just have to give.
• 12:52
  SPEAKER_03: And that's what Jesus would do is I would give, and I would give, and I would give, and I would give.
• 12:57
  SPEAKER_03: But then the poor started telling us you're hurting me more than you're helping me.
• 13:01
  SPEAKER_03: And you had Brian Fickert write the book when helping hurts, and you've had other people write Toxic Charity and all of these other books, and we're starting to what was wrong there.
• 13:11
  SPEAKER_03: And I think where I have come out is like, man, loving the poor is about loving the poor.
• 13:17
  SPEAKER_03: And how we love the poor should be us asking, How do we love you best?
• 13:23
  SPEAKER_03: Not just saying, How do I give the most I can to you?
• 13:26
  SPEAKER_03: Right?
• 13:26
  SPEAKER_03: Because when we're just perpetually giving to people that don't need to be given things, we're essentially saying, Hey, I've got this cast here, let me put it on you because I don't know what to do with it.
• 13:35
  SPEAKER_03: You're like, dude, my leg's not broken.
• 13:36
  SPEAKER_03: Why are you doing this?
• 13:37
  SPEAKER_03: You just you think I'm injured, why do you think I'm injured?
• 13:40
  SPEAKER_03: Right?
• 13:40
  SPEAKER_03: And so talk a little bit like how as Christians should we be viewing the poor and our work, especially in the structural hunger side.
• 13:49
  SPEAKER_02: And that's a huge thing, Zach.
• 13:50
  SPEAKER_02: And and how us as Christians deal with it, I think really represents the heart of God.
• 13:55
  SPEAKER_02: I think what you mentioned is probably the most powerful piece of anything.
• 13:58
  SPEAKER_02: Um, is a lot of people can give.
• 14:00
  SPEAKER_02: There's a difference between giving and giving out of love.
• 14:02
  SPEAKER_02: And your your words there, I think, really strike a nerve for me and for people in Africa and the poor in Africa, is love has a big role to play in this.
• 14:11
  SPEAKER_02: And when you love somebody, it's not a quick fix, firstly.
• 14:14
  SPEAKER_02: And secondly, you want to understand them.
• 14:16
  SPEAKER_02: You don't walk in and try and say, well, there's a one solution for everybody, and this worked for the last patient, so we're just going to do it for you.
• 14:22
  SPEAKER_02: They had a broken leg, so you have a cast as well.
• 14:25
  SPEAKER_02: That doesn't make any sense.
• 14:26
  SPEAKER_02: And what you mentioned is so true, and I don't mean that people have given not out of love, but but there is a very intentional effort in giving when you're giving from a place of love and wanting to understand where a person is at.
• 14:38
  SPEAKER_02: And by doing that, you actually can give a lot more specifically to things.
• 14:42
  SPEAKER_02: And so I think that in that space there there is there isn't a one-size-fits-all solution to this, and the answer to that is a love that really loves people and understands, and some people are some people view that as you're too far away to physically love somebody or to physically talk to them.
• 14:56
  SPEAKER_02: I don't necessarily mean only that, but but and that is a part of it for some areas and places, and some people are called to that, but but there is a heart of love that is really required to understand it and to build into that.
• 15:07
  SPEAKER_03: Well, I think the one key word that I think you really hit on is understand.
• 15:13
  SPEAKER_03: And that's so important because to love someone well, it often means we have to understand them.
• 15:20
  SPEAKER_03: When you want to love your wife well, it's not just how does Joel want to be loved and then I'm gonna love her.
• 15:25
  SPEAKER_03: It's I'm understanding who she is and how she feels loved.
• 15:29
  SPEAKER_03: And so I want to love her in that way.
• 15:31
  SPEAKER_03: Similarly, with the poor, too often I think, especially in America, we can sit there and be like, okay, God's given me a command to love the poor.
• 15:38
  SPEAKER_03: I know I have this extra money, or you know, I have this tithe or whatever it is, I need to give it to the poor.
• 15:44
  SPEAKER_03: And so we then give to make ourselves feel better.
• 15:48
  SPEAKER_03: And I don't think we often admit that, but I've done that too.
• 15:52
  SPEAKER_03: It's like, man, I feel almost guilty.
• 15:54
  SPEAKER_03: I want to be a part of the solution.
• 15:56
  SPEAKER_03: Let me just get this money out and then I don't have to worry about it.
• 16:01
  SPEAKER_03: And so you find a good organization, something that feels like you're doing well, and you're like, here you go, here's some money.
• 16:05
  SPEAKER_03: And now I feel better.
• 16:07
  SPEAKER_03: And my conscience has been appeased.
• 16:10
  SPEAKER_03: But if we really truly took the time to examine ourselves internally, I think we would ask the question Am I giving so that I feel better?
• 16:18
  SPEAKER_03: Or so that their problem is actually solved.
• 16:22
  SPEAKER_03: Not superficially, but systemically.
• 16:25
  SPEAKER_03: And I think that that's a really important shift.
• 16:27
  SPEAKER_03: And so understanding is so important, and that's why I'm grateful that we can work with people like you who understand this, right?
• 16:34
  SPEAKER_03: Because our heart first in starting this hunger fund, the structural hunger fund, was to first understand what's going on in Africa, right?
• 16:43
  SPEAKER_03: And so I spent six months, uh, you know, across six months traveling extensively across Africa, doing nothing but listening.
• 16:53
  SPEAKER_03: Spent time sleeping out in the bush with you guys in Zimbabwe and in Zambia and all over the continent, just listening and trying to understand, hey, what is working, what's not, why is this not working, why is that working?
• 17:06
  SPEAKER_03: And really just talking to people who are are poor, who are the farmers, who are and like, hey, what is it that you need?
• 17:13
  SPEAKER_03: And I think that what you guys have come up with with agriculture is really, really special.
• 17:18
  SPEAKER_03: And I want to get to that in a minute, but but before.
• 17:21
  SPEAKER_02: If I can just say on one of the things you mentioned, you you you you mentioned very well to love somebody you have to understand them.
• 17:27
  SPEAKER_02: And uh, and I think that a lot of people to appease their conscience go for the quick give, and like you mentioned, like hand out as long as I get it off my plate, that's what I'm called to do.
• 17:37
  SPEAKER_02: And Jesus' argument is you're not, you're not called to giving out of obedience, you're called to giving out of love.
• 17:43
  SPEAKER_02: And uh and to mention that, like you mentioned marriage and understanding your wife or understanding your spouse is difficult, like it's not an easy thing, it takes time and effort, and I think that one of the things in the kingdom is that it takes time, yeah, and people want to say, Well, I can just give, and then I've done my my my bit.
• 18:01
  SPEAKER_02: I've I've followed a biblical principle or I've followed a biblical law, and now I'm done.
• 18:05
  SPEAKER_02: And the answer is that's not what we're called to.
• 18:07
  SPEAKER_02: We're called to love people, and that does take effort, and that does take time.
• 18:11
  SPEAKER_02: In different scenarios for different people, it's not again, it's not a one-size-fits-all, but the heart of that is really important.
• 18:17
  SPEAKER_03: I think that's such good advice, and I think one of the things that I think about a lot is a lot of times we can think that our giving is about us, right?
• 18:26
  SPEAKER_03: And there is a spiritual aspect to it.
• 18:28
  SPEAKER_03: God does call us to give, and releasing capital increases our trust in Him and all of that type of stuff, and that is good and that is biblical.
• 18:35
  SPEAKER_03: But I would say ultimately the best thing about my giving is that others have more because I have less.
• 18:43
  SPEAKER_03: And that should be enough, right?
• 18:45
  SPEAKER_03: I shouldn't need to get, oh, I get this benefit from God.
• 18:48
  SPEAKER_03: I get in too often, you know, even if it's not in a prosperity gospel circle, people are still like, oh, but you get this from God and you get a closer relationship and all that, and that's beautiful, and that's amazing, and that's an amazing byproduct of giving.
• 18:59
  SPEAKER_03: But I think giving is really wrapped up in 2 Corinthians 8 9, and it's my favorite verse in the entire Bible.
• 19:05
  SPEAKER_03: But Paul is writing to the Corinthians and he says, For you know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sake became poor, so that you through his poverty might become rich.
• 19:19
  SPEAKER_03: And it's just to me the most beautiful representation of the gospel in a single verse because it's talking about the sacrifice of Jesus laying down his life, of leaving the riches of heaven for the poverty of earth, being born in the likeness of man, and that in a manger.
• 19:36
  SPEAKER_03: But because he was humbled himself, we were able to be elevated with him.
• 19:41
  SPEAKER_03: And too often I think our giving, we want to stay up here and just send like zip lines down to people.
• 19:47
  SPEAKER_03: But the biblical message is like, let's empty ourselves, let's go, let's love, let's serve, let's understand first, and then let's ask them how they want to be loved.
• 19:58
  SPEAKER_03: And so what I what I love about working with you guys and with our partners on the ground is I don't have to come over here and spend 10 years to understand the culture of what's going on and to build all of the relationships with all of the farmers and all of that.
• 20:12
  SPEAKER_03: That's not the role that I feel called to, and I think that we feel called to in the States.
• 20:17
  SPEAKER_03: We have incredible partners on the ground who are born in Africa, who live in Africa, who have grown up, you understand the cultures, you understand all of this, and you can implement solutions much more effectively.
• 20:27
  SPEAKER_03: But there is a way that we can partner together to make each other better.
• 20:31
  SPEAKER_03: And I think that over the last you know 15 or 20 years, um that's something that especially the Christian development community in America has had to wrestle with, right?
• 20:40
  SPEAKER_03: Because people have picked up, moved to a different country, and then you know, 10 years in they fail, and blah blah blah, and they're like, gosh, I didn't realize how big culture was and all of this type of stuff.
• 20:51
  SPEAKER_03: And as people ask, like, hey, what's your solution to dealing with the culture?
• 20:54
  SPEAKER_03: I'm like, my solution is to use local people, like partner with local people.
• 21:00
  SPEAKER_03: So I don't have to spend the time to understand it.
• 21:02
  SPEAKER_03: And and you guys have understood agriculture deeply.
• 21:05
  SPEAKER_03: You spent 40 years as a family working in agriculture.
• 21:09
  SPEAKER_03: Tell us a little bit about that, a little bit about your background, share a little bit about just ag in Africa.
• 21:15
  SPEAKER_02: That's such a good question.
• 21:16
  SPEAKER_02: So we we as a family started.
• 21:18
  SPEAKER_02: Well, I'm a fifth generation Zimbabwean, um, and uh we've done a whole bunch of different things over many, many years in Zimbabwe.
• 21:26
  SPEAKER_02: Um but uh our family's passion has always had a thread of faith through it of what is God doing and what is God calling us to.
• 21:33
  SPEAKER_02: And uh we've always been incredibly passionate about Africa and what God is doing in Africa and done various things through the generations, um, but particularly the last two generations really focused on last two or three generations really focused on ag.
• 21:48
  SPEAKER_02: And a big reason for this is uh a passion for watching things grow and what Jesus does in ag.
• 21:54
  SPEAKER_02: There's a beautiful there's a beautiful experience in putting a seed in the ground and watching something develop.
• 21:59
  SPEAKER_02: Um there's a Beautiful experience in having a baby chick, a baby chicken, and watching that baby chicken grow.
• 22:05
  SPEAKER_02: It's a beautiful thing to see, and it's an amazing experience of God.
• 22:08
  SPEAKER_02: But it's also what you can do through AG, and really sensing like there is a huge pop huge proportion of Africa's population that are dependent on the land, that live in rural areas that have no real solution from where they are.
• 22:22
  SPEAKER_02: They're a huge part of the demographic of what Africa is, and there's a huge uh synergy and connection between people of a similar trade or like part of society.
• 22:31
  SPEAKER_02: And ag is one of those things that can connect across culture, across people, across language, because everybody loves to see a plant grow or the food they eat, and they they can really relate with it, and it's also incredibly relatable.
• 22:43
  SPEAKER_02: And so we've been really passionate about how do you unlock people in that space, not on the scale of yes, it's really important to unlock it at the scale of 200 or a thousand farmers and in an in a specific area, and a lot of people do very well at doing that, but again, to the point earlier, this is a systemic issue.
• 23:00
  SPEAKER_02: So, how do you create systems and structures that can structurally alleviate poverty and structurally bring people back into value chains and grow value chains?
• 23:09
  SPEAKER_02: And I think over the years, uh the my my my my father started the business uh 40 about 40 years ago, and uh his passion for ag was was always there.
• 23:19
  SPEAKER_02: Um you can feel it, you you can.
• 23:22
  SPEAKER_02: You hang out with him and uh you you really really feel it.
• 23:25
  SPEAKER_02: And uh he started at like eight years old.
• 23:27
  SPEAKER_02: That like that's just who he who he is, and uh started like that and really built up to how do you start, and then God really gave him the question how do you really unlock small-scale production in Africa?
• 23:38
  SPEAKER_02: And I think for many, many years there's been a lot of blood, sweat, and tears.
• 23:41
  SPEAKER_02: Um, I think that a lot of people like the idea that it's roses and cream.
• 23:46
  SPEAKER_02: It's not.
• 23:47
  SPEAKER_02: The reality is that similar to your point earlier, there are people that are called to different things, and our calling is into this, and uh and it's a beautiful thing to look back over the years of blood, sweat, and tears and see how much God has done in that space.
• 24:01
  SPEAKER_02: Um, but there's been a lot of hard lessons learnt to try and work out how do you build structures that do this.
• 24:07
  SPEAKER_03: That's so good.
• 24:08
  SPEAKER_03: And so AG in Africa, I mean, ag anywhere is a complicated thing.
• 24:11
  SPEAKER_03: If we were, I mean, if the average person watching this knew what it took, what went into the food that they eat, their mind would be blown.
• 24:20
  SPEAKER_03: And we saw it the other day touring some of the facilities, and it's just it's unbelievable the amount of care and process and different steps and different people touching all the different parts of the value chain that go into what our food is that we eat.
• 24:35
  SPEAKER_03: Um but what I want to talk about is kind of two two of the issues that we have seen in agriculture in Africa, and how you guys have learned through this, how you've grown through it, and how you're kind of you've found a new thread.
• 24:47
  SPEAKER_03: Um I think that you know one of the things that that I've seen with you guys is it's almost like a Thomas Edison type of thing, where you've said, you know, we've been working at this for 40 years and we've paid a lot of school fees, in your words.
• 25:00
  SPEAKER_03: But we found, you know, Thomas Edison said we found 99 ways of not doing something, but we found something that is really working, and it can be totally revolutionary under the light bulb.
• 25:09
  SPEAKER_03: And so the two issues, if I were to just kind of sum it up for our audience that we see in AG in Africa, is that one, the smallholder farmer is not connected to every other port in the value chain.
• 25:20
  SPEAKER_03: Right?
• 25:21
  SPEAKER_03: So you've you guys have identified 14 parts of the value chain.
• 25:24
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 25:24
  SPEAKER_03: That's from genetics to vet techs to the farmers to logistics providers to the abattoir to the processors to the off-taker to all of there's so many different points of the value chain.
• 25:35
  SPEAKER_00: Trafficking, structural hunger, a billion people without the Bible in their language.
• 25:40
  SPEAKER_00: These aren't unsolvable.
• 25:42
  SPEAKER_00: They're just uncoordinated.
• 25:45
  SPEAKER_00: At solving the world's greatest problems, we're a community of givers taking on the root causes of the world's deepest suffering, and we're taking them on together.
• 25:53
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• 26:26
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• 26:37
  SPEAKER_03: You've learned a lot about ag.
• 26:39
  SPEAKER_03: I'm trying.
• 26:39
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 26:40
  SPEAKER_03: But if the farmer is not connected every point in the value chain, they fail, right?
• 26:44
  SPEAKER_03: So maybe they have access to guaranteed offtake, meaning they have access to a guaranteed buyer, a grocery store or somebody saying, I will buy this.
• 26:50
  SPEAKER_03: But they don't have access to the right genetics that will allow them to produce at a size, quality, and scale that anyone wants.
• 26:56
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 26:56
  SPEAKER_03: Or maybe they have access to good genetics and they have guaranteed offtake, but they don't have a logistics provider that's going to move their product from point A to point B once it's ready.
• 27:04
  SPEAKER_03: And so what we've seen in some of the other stories that we've filmed is someone has produced something, it's been sitting there for 10 days, and the guy's 10 days late to come pick it up, and by that time, 60% of what they've produced is rotten.
• 27:16
  SPEAKER_03: Right?
• 27:16
  SPEAKER_03: And so the farmer needs to be connected to every other point in the value chain.
• 27:19
  SPEAKER_03: So that's like one issue that we see.
• 27:21
  SPEAKER_03: The other issue that we see is when people understand that, they sometimes go to the total opposite extreme and say, well, the solution is to create a massive hold code, we'll vertically integrate everything, we'll raise a hundred million dollars, we'll do it all ourselves, right?
• 27:35
  SPEAKER_03: From the genetics to the logistics provider, to the farmers to the all of it.
• 27:39
  SPEAKER_03: But then you're essentially running 14 businesses at the same time in Africa at the same speed, at the same in the same direction, and it's nearly impossible.
• 27:47
  SPEAKER_03: And even if 10 are going great, four might not be.
• 27:50
  SPEAKER_03: So everyone sinks the money into the four, and eventually the whole thing topples over.
• 27:53
  SPEAKER_03: We've seen other organizations put billions of dollars into that type of thing in Africa.
• 27:58
  SPEAKER_03: Hasn't panned out.
• 27:59
  SPEAKER_03: What's the solution that you guys have come to right now?
• 28:03
  SPEAKER_02: Um, so and to add to your point, I think that the there's a lot of people who do try and integrate all 14 parts of the value chain, and they can actually do it fairly well, but the problem is scale.
• 28:13
  SPEAKER_04: Yeah.
• 28:14
  SPEAKER_02: So they they do it, they do create a hold co and they do vertically integrate, which is great, and it works very well, don't get me wrong.
• 28:21
  SPEAKER_02: Uh it works incredibly well, but it can only work at a specific scale.
• 28:24
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and so what we looked at and realized in that is you can't firstly unlock people like that, other than creating a few a few jobs in the process, um, but also you don't unlock the the vast majority of land and people in the process.
• 28:39
  SPEAKER_02: And so that's what we've kind of seen in doing that.
• 28:41
  SPEAKER_02: And uh over the years we've tried to work out how do you build the right systems and structures that can create a space for the smallholder farmer to develop into that value chain.
• 28:51
  SPEAKER_03: And what I love about what you guys are doing is you're essentially creating an ecosystem or an environment where you're aligning incentives such that every part of the value chain can plug into it and be connected without one entity having to own it.
• 29:03
  SPEAKER_03: So you've looked at that and you've said, yes, the smallholder farmer needs to be connected to every other point in the value chain, but one entity doesn't need to own it all.
• 29:10
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 29:11
  SPEAKER_03: And we can democratize that, we can decentralize that.
• 29:13
  SPEAKER_03: You guys have used blockchain and incredible technology to do this.
• 29:17
  SPEAKER_03: And you've connected all 14 points of the value chain, but then you also allow market forces to take over, right?
• 29:22
  SPEAKER_03: So you've got multiple genetics companies, you've got multiple vet tech companies, you've got all these farming co-ops, you've got multiple off takers, logistics providers, and they can all bid for contracts, and so it's created this incredible system where every point in the value chain is connected, people can focus on what they're best at, but you've created kind of the system of trust.
• 29:41
  SPEAKER_03: Yes.
• 29:41
  SPEAKER_03: Can you talk about that?
• 29:42
  SPEAKER_03: We we likened it to Uber to Airbnb.
• 29:44
  SPEAKER_03: Talk about you know how you guys are creating trust within the ag ecosystem in Africa.
• 29:49
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, it's it's not enough just to have all the pieces.
• 29:51
  SPEAKER_02: What you mentioned is such a good word and the right word for it.
• 29:54
  SPEAKER_02: You've got to create trust.
• 29:55
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and a lot of people to what you mentioned wouldn't believe that that can actually exist, but they wouldn't believe that the hotel industry or the hospitality industry could have been turned on its head like Airbnb did or has done.
• 30:05
  SPEAKER_02: And what did Airbnb fundamentally do?
• 30:08
  SPEAKER_02: They created trust.
• 30:09
  SPEAKER_02: That was the thing that brought Airbnb and Uber.
• 30:11
  SPEAKER_02: That's what they brought to the table.
• 30:13
  SPEAKER_02: And they created a system that was incredibly complex, that brought lots of pieces together that created trust.
• 30:18
  SPEAKER_02: And and then from our side, we realized many years ago, it's it's it's a similar principle to that, but value chains have to be integrated, things have to be built as a whole where you create trust between all the players, not just the farmer and the other pieces, but the other pieces in between themselves as well, because otherwise you get disjointed chains, and that ends up falling apart anyway.
• 30:41
  SPEAKER_02: And so a lot of what we've created is the ability to put together the 14 parts of the value chain that you mentioned, and as you put those 14 parts together, you create the trust that threads between them and the way to thread the farmer into the middle of that, that the farmer can really succeed in the middle of that, but then also that we we we first did this just so you know, all but all uh on our own.
• 31:02
  SPEAKER_02: Um we first did this on our own where we built everything ourselves, um, and we built the genetics piece and we built the abattoir and we built the processing plants and we built the pack plants, etc.
• 31:13
  SPEAKER_02: etc.
• 31:14
  SPEAKER_02: But what we realized and and we were successful.
• 31:16
  SPEAKER_02: Um well we failed for a long time, and then we were successful, and we realized that this now really, really works.
• 31:21
  SPEAKER_02: But one of the problems we realized was scalability, and it's to your point of vertically integrated chains.
• 31:26
  SPEAKER_02: We were a vertically integrated, we were vertically integrated on multiple value chains.
• 31:30
  SPEAKER_02: And part of the problem wasn't success, the problem was scalability.
• 31:35
  SPEAKER_02: And uh, and so what we did is is that uh about 10 years ago, just under 10 years ago, we decentralized everything through this platform, and uh by decentralizing it, we can connect thousands of organizations together that do genetics, that do all the different pieces, logistics, etc.
• 31:50
  SPEAKER_02: etc.
• 31:51
  SPEAKER_02: And uh you referred to it a bit earlier that now you can put lots and lots of these different organizations together and connect them together and create the system of trust.
• 31:59
  SPEAKER_02: Um, but by doing that, if I can also point out Zach to you, a much earlier part of our conversation, Africa is a hang of a lot bigger and a hang of a lot more complex than we believe, even living in Africa.
• 32:09
  SPEAKER_03: Oh, you've got 54 countries, 54 political systems, economic systems, regulatory environments, all of that.
• 32:14
  SPEAKER_02: And in each country, in the country I live in in Zimbabwe, the difference between the South and the North could be two different countries in the West.
• 32:22
  SPEAKER_02: And the north to the country just above it is another different country.
• 32:25
  SPEAKER_02: And so in South Africa, in Zimbabwe alone, we've got more than 11 languages.
• 32:29
  SPEAKER_02: Like you talk about just the complexity in one country, and so one of the reasons why I think decentralized systems are so important in Africa is because again, it's not a one-size-fits-all, and it allows people to be able to be culturally relevant where they are, and so we don't need one genetics company or one logistics provider or one pack plant or one market.
• 32:47
  SPEAKER_02: And the reason for that is because the markets are going to be incredibly different in Tanzania to what they're gonna be in in Zambia, and the people are gonna want different product, and what what pack plant and what production, and how do you do that?
• 32:58
  SPEAKER_02: If you tried and put all of that in the in a hold co, you would fail.
• 33:01
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, Africa itself fits China, the US, the whole of Europe and the UK and India in the continent of Africa.
• 33:10
  SPEAKER_02: It's huge, it is massive, yeah.
• 33:11
  SPEAKER_02: And the US itself, or China itself, struggles to govern what's in its borders.
• 33:15
  SPEAKER_02: Can you imagine something eight times that size?
• 33:17
  SPEAKER_02: It it is astronomically big and astronomically.
• 33:20
  SPEAKER_03: So you need something that can scale, that can be adapted to the local environments, that can be flexible and all of that.
• 33:26
  SPEAKER_03: And so I think that that's um just so important.
• 33:29
  SPEAKER_03: Can you just give people an idea?
• 33:31
  SPEAKER_03: Like, run us through one example of how the Hamara platform works.
• 33:35
  SPEAKER_03: You can use broilers or layers or whatever, whatever you want to use, but run us through how that cycle works.
• 33:41
  SPEAKER_02: So good.
• 33:42
  SPEAKER_02: So you mentioned broilers, broilers are the chickens you eat, yeah.
• 33:44
  SPEAKER_02: Um chicken breasts, things like that.
• 33:46
  SPEAKER_02: Exactly.
• 33:47
  SPEAKER_02: When you go to KFC, you're eating the end product of the broiler value chain guy.
• 33:51
  SPEAKER_02: Um the broiler value chain starts with um inputs like maize and soya and or corn and soya, as as you call it in the States, corn and soy, um, which come into a plant and get processed into feed, and then they start with little dale chicks that are fluffy, yellow, and cute, and uh they they get uh then they those get delivered to farmers.
• 34:10
  SPEAKER_02: Um and we have farmers on our platform that uh we've built with over many, many years.
• 34:16
  SPEAKER_02: Farmers can't join our platform and immediately have access to everything.
• 34:20
  SPEAKER_02: It's uh it's a bit of a gamified approach where we we we've built levels into the farmer's development, and so as they grow through those levels, they have better and better access to more and more of the value chain.
• 34:30
  SPEAKER_02: But I won't dig into that just yet.
• 34:32
  SPEAKER_02: So the value chain starts with feed and chicks, yeah, and a chick is a little day-al chick, and feed is the stuff you have to feed it, and it's really, really important to get the right nutrition.
• 34:40
  SPEAKER_02: A lot of people believe you can throw some corn on the ground and chickens will be okay.
• 34:44
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, don't get me wrong, they'll survive, but they can't grow to the efficiency and cost factors that you need to be able to produce and compete.
• 34:51
  SPEAKER_02: And so you need very, very highly formulated feed and that's produced in proper feed mills and proper facilities.
• 34:57
  SPEAKER_02: And um, as as those uh as we bring those, what we do is that we take those into a contract, and that contract is given to a farmer, and that farmer grows out those birds with the feed and the different inputs, but they also have all the support of the local churches around them, but also the the vet side and the technical side of teaching them how to grow the product better or and and these visits happen often.
• 35:17
  SPEAKER_02: We're talking about once, twice a week where they're walking in and out of the chick chicken houses with farmers, teaching them uh and they're doing courses, and the farmers are learning, so that you gain that technical knowledge to be able to do it.
• 35:27
  SPEAKER_02: A lot of people also believe that growing a chicken or growing a corn plant is easy, it's not easy, it's a highly technical process.
• 35:34
  SPEAKER_02: Um, chickens these days and and farming these days is is more like driving a Formula One car than driving out driving a battered old Land Rover down the road.
• 35:42
  SPEAKER_02: It's a highly finessed process that you're trying to get the most out of the car.
• 35:46
  SPEAKER_02: And agriculture is quite similar to that.
• 35:48
  SPEAKER_02: It's a beautiful, incredibly productive process that God made to be efficient.
• 35:52
  SPEAKER_02: And uh, and so this kind of brings that out, and the farmer grows the product through, and then uh on the contract, it would be stated that the product would be picked up and taken to a processing facility and then processed through and sold in a local market.
• 36:05
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and this all gets put together in a way that uh there is a threaded trust between all these players, and there's many, many others as well, because like you mentioned earlier, you referred to we've broken the value chain into 14 parts, um, and and so we're building all the 14 bits into this, but it just gives an overview of how that piece of chicken ends up in KFC or somewhere else, you know what I mean?
• 36:25
  SPEAKER_03: So let's zoom out then and let's say, you know, let's say KFC is the end consumer in this cycle.
• 36:32
  SPEAKER_03: So they place an order for X amount of birds.
• 36:36
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 36:36
  SPEAKER_03: How does that, how does the money flow, how does that kind of all work?
• 36:40
  SPEAKER_02: Such a good question.
• 36:41
  SPEAKER_02: So one of the things we learned over the many years is that you have to have a demand-driven chain.
• 36:45
  SPEAKER_02: So you started at the right end and uh you start with the demand.
• 36:49
  SPEAKER_02: Yes.
• 36:49
  SPEAKER_02: Um and so uh an organization like KFC or others would come onto our platform and provide orders for product.
• 36:55
  SPEAKER_02: Um, it's less like an order and more like a contract.
• 36:58
  SPEAKER_02: Um and they would provide a contract that they will say we will off take this amount of product at this quality, at this price.
• 37:04
  SPEAKER_03: Okay, and they put that onto the onto the platform, and uh as they put it out there, we have thousands of farmers um across various countries and plenty of UCO clubs together of 10 to 30-ish farmers working in community together, accountable to each other, local oversight, chiefs, all of that type of stuff.
• 37:22
  SPEAKER_03: Absolutely spread incredible accountability, zero NPLs, as we can talk about a little later, but continue.
• 37:28
  SPEAKER_02: And and those farming clubs, we call them a club, uh, they're like an enhanced co-op structure.
• 37:33
  SPEAKER_02: Uh they put about 10 to 50 people, um, and they're free to pick which people and how, and we can dig into that in a little bit.
• 37:40
  SPEAKER_02: But um, that like you said, that creates this real accountability, and those clubs apply to deliver on this contract.
• 37:46
  SPEAKER_02: Um, so the KFC contract states that they want 20,000 chickens or 20,000 kgs of product at the end.
• 37:52
  SPEAKER_02: The f the the the farming clubs can apply to that, and KFC would be able to accept or deny clubs based on how well they think the club will do to that.
• 38:01
  SPEAKER_03: On the platform, everything's digitized.
• 38:03
  SPEAKER_02: Everything's digitized.
• 38:04
  SPEAKER_02: There's a huge track record on every club, and you can see levels of where the club is at and how well every farmer in that club has done.
• 38:09
  SPEAKER_03: So, KFC places an order for 20,000 chickens.
• 38:12
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, you have you know, five clubs bid for different portions of it.
• 38:16
  SPEAKER_03: Yep.
• 38:17
  SPEAKER_03: Three clubs get awarded the contract.
• 38:18
  SPEAKER_03: Yep.
• 38:19
  SPEAKER_03: How does how do they get the inputs?
• 38:21
  SPEAKER_03: How's the money flow?
• 38:22
  SPEAKER_03: Do you give money to the farmers or how does that work?
• 38:24
  SPEAKER_02: So good.
• 38:24
  SPEAKER_02: So I'll dig into I'll dig into the nuances of how farmers get money, but let's presume in this case that they can.
• 38:29
  SPEAKER_02: There are what they would be one of our top-level clubs who can get money.
• 38:32
  SPEAKER_02: So what happens is that then that farming club can apply to our system for money if they don't have the money to be able to grow for that contract.
• 38:40
  SPEAKER_02: Um, we'll get into it in a second of who who is legible for what level of money, because there's different, there's a sliding scale here.
• 38:47
  SPEAKER_02: Um it's not just anybody can apply for money, but they can then apply for the money through the capital structures that we have.
• 38:52
  SPEAKER_02: And when they apply, we then vet them.
• 38:54
  SPEAKER_02: Again, we we confirm that they are the level that they should be, etc.
• 38:58
  SPEAKER_02: etc.
• 38:58
  SPEAKER_02: And when they um when they have been accepted by the contract and they've applied for this and we've accepted them, we then pay for their inputs.
• 39:05
  SPEAKER_03: So you buy the you don't give the money to the farmers, you go and buy the inputs, the high-quality inputs, and you give them to the farmers.
• 39:12
  SPEAKER_02: On that contract, it'll be stated what inputs and where and what value to be able to produce those 20,000 chickens.
• 39:18
  SPEAKER_02: And so we already know that will cost$60,000, for example, and they will apply to us for that$60,000.
• 39:24
  SPEAKER_02: We will pay the input supplier who will deliver the feed and chicks to them.
• 39:27
  SPEAKER_03: The company who's making the food and the food.
• 39:29
  SPEAKER_03: Exactly.
• 39:30
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, so those get delivered to the farmers.
• 39:32
  SPEAKER_03: The farmers spend 42 days roughly growing the chicks with the support of the technical service and all the community side, all of that side of things, and then a logistics provider comes, picks it up, takes it to the processing plant, processing plant does it, then takes it to KFC.
• 39:46
  SPEAKER_03: Exactly.
• 39:47
  SPEAKER_03: KFC then pays your treasury system back and everyone gets paid out at once.
• 39:51
  SPEAKER_03: Exactly.
• 39:52
  SPEAKER_02: Exactly.
• 39:53
  SPEAKER_02: And it's very, very key that this happens.
• 39:54
  SPEAKER_02: If you give money to a farmer on the ground, works, cash starts moving.
• 39:57
  SPEAKER_02: Firstly, it's very expensive for cash to move, and secondly, you have huge losses.
• 40:01
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, there's a huge amount of risk in it.
• 40:02
  SPEAKER_02: And so money never touches the farmer's hand until the profit at the end.
• 40:06
  SPEAKER_03: Well, I think this is this is revolutionary because I think that you know, a lot of people we've made stride after stride after stride, and it's getting to a better direction.
• 40:15
  SPEAKER_03: But I think where a lot of the community is at still is oftentimes it's microfinance institutions are giving money to the farmers for them to go buy inputs to deliver to a contract, but it's not at a size or a scale that they have economies of scale, right?
• 40:33
  SPEAKER_03: And so if it's for just a thousand chicks or whatever, you give the farmer money, they're gonna sit there and say, Oh, I I I want to squeeze as much margin as I can.
• 40:40
  SPEAKER_03: So maybe they go and buy inputs that aren't good enough.
• 40:43
  SPEAKER_03: Absolutely, and they're not gonna produce chicks at a size, quality, and scale that the end producer wants, and then they're stuck with it and all that.
• 40:48
  SPEAKER_03: So, what you've done is you've said, Hey, let's let the farmer be successful, let's build this entire thing around the farmer.
• 40:55
  SPEAKER_03: The farmer's the most important piece of this puzzle.
• 40:57
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 40:57
  SPEAKER_03: And we want to make sure that they succeed, but we're gonna put them in a system where they can access economies of scale.
• 41:05
  SPEAKER_03: So they can a one smallholder farmer out in the bush that we saw yesterday can be supplying to KFC and to those types of people because they're you know placing huge orders, you're buying huge amounts of feed and day old chicks at good prices because there is an economy of scale.
• 41:19
  SPEAKER_03: You can negotiate that, then it gets delivered to them, they do what they're good at, everyone gets paid out.
• 41:26
  SPEAKER_03: Absolutely.
• 41:26
  SPEAKER_02: So and a note on that is it means that a small-scale farmer can not only deliver to the local KFC.
• 41:32
  SPEAKER_02: We're talking today, uh, one of the value chains that we are um uh looking at uh building next is the flower value chain to Holland, um, which is an incredibly delicate value chain.
• 41:42
  SPEAKER_02: It's fresh flowers traveling 11,000 kilometers after they are produced.
• 41:48
  SPEAKER_02: It's a massively technical uh value chain, and yet we're doing that because some of the best people in the world to grow flowers for Holland are small-scale producers because of the attention to detail.
• 41:58
  SPEAKER_02: You can't actually grow the quality of flour that a small scaler can on a large scale because they have that very, very strong attention to detail of where they're at.
• 42:06
  SPEAKER_02: And so, yes, you can get incredibly simple value chains where they're delivered to local markets, but you can also get incredibly complex, high precision value chains that are delivered to markets around the world.
• 42:14
  SPEAKER_03: Okay, so give us give us an idea of how a farmer can grow through this, like just briefly, but like where does your average farmer start in terms of how much money they're making a year?
• 42:23
  SPEAKER_03: Where's the average one at who's implementing what you're doing in a system that's maybe mid-tier, and then where can they get to over time?
• 42:31
  SPEAKER_02: It's a good question.
• 42:32
  SPEAKER_02: You alluded to a little bit, but I'll just give a bit of an explanation is that a lot of one of the one of the other learnings that we had over the years is that you can't walk into a community and work with anybody.
• 42:40
  SPEAKER_02: You can't work with any farmer.
• 42:42
  SPEAKER_02: Many people believe, well, if you put a seed in the ground, it will grow and you get your product.
• 42:46
  SPEAKER_02: Farmers, farmers have to have a passion for it, like we have to have a passion for our jobs if we want to be any good at them.
• 42:51
  SPEAKER_02: And uh, and so what we realized very early on, and a lot of the learnings that we've had over the years is that you have to develop farmers and you have to develop communities, and I'll talk about both.
• 43:00
  SPEAKER_02: Um, but we have a five-stage process for farmers to join and grow into the value chain.
• 43:07
  SPEAKER_02: And they they go through real courses and real learning and technical training as they start to develop through this process, and they have to do courses and they have to go to events and field days, they have to get trained by technical people, etc.
• 43:18
  SPEAKER_02: And so when they start with us, they don't have access to most of the value chain.
• 43:21
  SPEAKER_02: And for example, alluding to it earlier, they don't have access to capital because you can't trust them to grow it yet.
• 43:27
  SPEAKER_02: You you don't know that they can actually grow the quality for KFC or the volume for KFC, or they're not going to do what they tell you, if that makes sense.
• 43:33
  SPEAKER_02: And so it starts right at the beginning, where a farmer for us starts with very little knowledge, very little understanding, but a passion.
• 43:39
  SPEAKER_02: And we train and develop them through this through these stages, and as they go, they get more and more access to the different parts of the value chain.
• 43:45
  SPEAKER_02: And so, for example, they don't get access to anything to do with finance until about the middle of this process, where they start getting very small amounts of finance in where they can access that.
• 43:55
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and and then as they go, as they reach the top end of this, they are incredibly good.
• 44:00
  SPEAKER_02: Farmers with very, very good track records that have proven over many years that they can grow and develop the city.
• 44:05
  SPEAKER_03: Individually and in their club.
• 44:06
  SPEAKER_03: So this is kind of like a personal and company performance.
• 44:09
  SPEAKER_03: I was talking with someone about yesterday about it yesterday, but like my performance in my company determines what I have access to within the company.
• 44:17
  SPEAKER_03: Yep.
• 44:18
  SPEAKER_03: But the company's performance determines what we have access to globally.
• 44:23
  SPEAKER_03: Yes.
• 44:24
  SPEAKER_03: Right?
• 44:24
  SPEAKER_03: And so there's kind of this up into the right movement of the better you do, the better your club or your company does, the more access you have to market share and things like that.
• 44:32
  SPEAKER_02: And that's such a good analogy.
• 44:33
  SPEAKER_02: And just so you just so you're aware, it takes the farmer at least nine, nine months to three years to go through this process.
• 44:41
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 44:42
  SPEAKER_02: And I love your analogy of the company.
• 44:44
  SPEAKER_02: I think it's such a good visual way of viewing it.
• 44:46
  SPEAKER_02: The club of farmers all work together.
• 44:47
  SPEAKER_02: We also don't assume a club can work together on day one.
• 44:50
  SPEAKER_02: They have to, to use your analogy of the company in Inverted Commerce, the club has to develop through a five-stage process with us.
• 44:58
  SPEAKER_02: Exactly.
• 44:58
  SPEAKER_02: And as they do that, and as that club starts to develop, you do develop the leadership, the trust, the identity, the ability for them to work together.
• 45:05
  SPEAKER_02: And as they do, like you mentioned to the company, they get access to more and more.
• 45:08
  SPEAKER_03: And is it accurate to say, so we we saw a farmer yesterday?
• 45:12
  SPEAKER_03: He was, before interacting with you guys, he was farming maize, corn maize.
• 45:18
  SPEAKER_03: He was making about$500 a year, US dollars per year, able to harvest it once.
• 45:23
  SPEAKER_03: So you're talking a dollar and thirty cents a day.
• 45:26
  SPEAKER_03: Then he started working with you guys.
• 45:29
  SPEAKER_03: Now he's doing broilers and he's doing six cycles a year.
• 45:32
  SPEAKER_03: So every two months he's doing another cycle of broilers.
• 45:36
  SPEAKER_03: He's making five hundred dollars every two months.
• 45:38
  SPEAKER_03: So now he's making three thousand dollars a year.
• 45:40
  SPEAKER_03: And I've seen it, and you see his house, and you see how he's built things up around it, and you see how he's taking his kids to school and all that stuff.
• 45:46
  SPEAKER_03: So he's six X'd his income and he started working with you guys 18 months ago.
• 45:49
  SPEAKER_03: Over time, he's got two of those, you know, broiler houses houses, and then he wants to get to five to eight.
• 45:58
  SPEAKER_03: And so you can see how someone goes from five hundred dollars to three hundred, three thousand dollars a year, and then can get up towards the eight to ten or something like that as they grow, and there will be natural consolidation.
• 46:09
  SPEAKER_03: And if he's a great farmer, which he seems like he's a great farmer, then maybe he has five or six or seven or eight, and then some of his other the other guys are like, Man, I'm not super good at this in his community, but he's like, Man, I know how to do this, I can hire you.
• 46:21
  SPEAKER_03: So I'll go and pay you a thousand bucks and I'll buy your business, I'll hire you to operate this, and then you can go do this.
• 46:26
  SPEAKER_03: And there's a natural consolidation of how things happen.
• 46:30
  SPEAKER_02: And we often find in communities that a community will end up doing two or three value chains just because of cycles and seasons and different things, and so different farmers consolidate in different areas, but they actually all can still be part of the same club and all still benefit each other because the the consolidation is still there, the scale is still there, but they start to find their nuance that God gave them or called them to, and that the things they're passionate about.
• 46:51
  SPEAKER_02: The other thing that we see, Zach, along the way is sometimes they grow to five or eight, or they develop in themselves.
• 46:57
  SPEAKER_02: Often we also see in very, very good communities that they start to develop their kids, and their kids start to join join the business to begin with.
• 47:04
  SPEAKER_02: And a lot of people talk about it like, oh, that's child labor.
• 47:06
  SPEAKER_02: No, no, no.
• 47:06
  SPEAKER_02: They the the kids join the business to want to like in the old days where your father was a butcher, you become a butcher sort of environment.
• 47:13
  SPEAKER_02: The kids, the kids start working and enjoying the environment with it, and by doing that, you start getting the next generation coming up, actually understanding a lot better than their parents.
• 47:21
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, and so what we found a lot and are seeing a lot is the next generation is actually going to be even more powerful than the than their parents because of this.
• 47:27
  SPEAKER_03: So talk to us about how spiritual integration into what you do, right?
• 47:32
  SPEAKER_03: Our conversations.
• 47:33
  SPEAKER_03: It's obviously important that Africa develops economically from your stance, but not absent of spiritual economic development.
• 47:40
  SPEAKER_03: Right?
• 47:40
  SPEAKER_03: We want it, we want to see spiritual economic development coupled with financial development or spiritual development coupled with financial development.
• 47:48
  SPEAKER_03: How does that, how do you guys integrate that into what you're doing?
• 47:52
  SPEAKER_02: Going back right to the beginning, our whole passion and reason why we do this is Jesus.
• 47:57
  SPEAKER_02: And uh and there is no point in helping somebody 6x their income if if it pushes them off the rails.
• 48:03
  SPEAKER_02: And so a huge part, we had huge learnings along the way on this, but a huge everything we do is actually through the church and developed through with the church along the way, where discipleship programs and different things are worked into the system with uh with the local church.
• 48:18
  SPEAKER_02: We don't necessarily do it ourselves, uh, all the specific, very personal discipleship side, but all of our farmer and community development and all the training is highly biblical and very openly Jesus.
• 48:27
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and people need to learn about all the different principles of Jesus and what Jesus said about leadership and stewardship and financial management and business, etc.
• 48:35
  SPEAKER_02: etc.
• 48:35
  SPEAKER_02: And so all of that's built in, but the church is the one that we go through to be able to find farmers in areas, and most of the time that we go into areas, we're going through the church network and asking them for people in their communities of integrity.
• 48:46
  SPEAKER_02: And the incredible thing, Zach, just to make a note here, is that most of those farmers of integrity and people of integrity then have people that don't have a faith that join their club because they see profit or benefit and income and later then start learning about Jesus and connecting and so it's an amazing way of drawing people into the kingdom.
• 49:03
  SPEAKER_03: That's awesome.
• 49:03
  SPEAKER_03: And we saw that exactly yesterday when we were talking with Stafford, um, who you'll see you know some videos of through the throughout this podcast.
• 49:11
  SPEAKER_03: But he said he heard about Hamara at church because there was someone from Hamara that came to his church and was talking about the Jesus that he knew and loved, and also talking about a systemic way that he can bring his family out of poverty as a farmer.
• 49:27
  SPEAKER_03: An ability to be a part of this ecosystem that will allow him to be successful, that will provide him with both the input and the offtake and the logistics and the vet text, all of this that will allow him to be successful.
• 49:39
  SPEAKER_03: But it was through the church that he got introduced to this, right?
• 49:42
  SPEAKER_03: And it's made the community stronger.
• 49:44
  SPEAKER_03: But also within the training that you guys have, there's technical training that people have to go through, and he talked very highly of that, how it's helped them to grow and build.
• 49:52
  SPEAKER_03: But then there's also spiritual training too.
• 49:53
  SPEAKER_03: How does what does Jesus say about money?
• 49:55
  SPEAKER_03: How do you steward that?
• 49:56
  SPEAKER_03: How are you steward of the land?
• 49:58
  SPEAKER_03: All of that type of stuff, which is super important.
• 50:00
  SPEAKER_03: You guys do a great job with that.
• 50:02
  SPEAKER_03: Let's talk about capital real quick.
• 50:04
  SPEAKER_03: So capital's everyone needs every business needs capital.
• 50:09
  SPEAKER_03: Is that a core need of yours now?
• 50:11
  SPEAKER_03: And how should we think about, you know, if people want to get involved, how how do we get involved from a capitalist standpoint?
• 50:17
  SPEAKER_02: Really, really good question.
• 50:18
  SPEAKER_02: Yes, so the answer is every scalable business needs capital.
• 50:21
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and uh I mentioned earlier that we decentralize the value chain, and one of the things we decentralize is is is the capital piece, and we've partnered with many banks and local insurance companies, etc.
• 50:31
  SPEAKER_02: etc., to be able to provide those services.
• 50:33
  SPEAKER_02: But one of the big pieces of it is the capital.
• 50:35
  SPEAKER_02: If if farmers go into a local microfinance institution in Africa today, they're paying four to seven percent per month.
• 50:41
  SPEAKER_02: That is obscene, it's daylight robbery basically, because the farmer can never compete with a commercial entity next door, earning a 12% interest per annum or a rev share on that, and actually compete.
• 50:53
  SPEAKER_02: And so, yes, there is a huge demand for capital because as we develop these farmers through that process and these clubs through that process, what happens is that they have a desire to scale.
• 51:02
  SPEAKER_02: And they all start.
• 51:03
  SPEAKER_02: A key principle is they all start with what they have, but at some point in that business, they need to scale past that and start to develop into a bigger environment.
• 51:10
  SPEAKER_02: And this is where we start to fund contracts and things like that.
• 51:13
  SPEAKER_02: And so today there is a massive demand for capital as these farmers start to come through this journey and these clubs do.
• 51:18
  SPEAKER_03: What's your backlog right now?
• 51:20
  SPEAKER_02: We have a six million dollar backlog today.
• 51:22
  SPEAKER_02: Okay, um, if we hit that six million dollar backlog, um, we would be at about a twenty million dollar backlog within about 18 months.
• 51:28
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 51:29
  SPEAKER_03: So just so everyone's kind of aware, within the value chain, there's different pieces, and there's different partners.
• 51:35
  SPEAKER_03: You guys have had great partners.
• 51:36
  SPEAKER_03: Greg Herbrook, we interviewed him yesterday.
• 51:39
  SPEAKER_03: He's you know about the fifth largest egg producer in America.
• 51:42
  SPEAKER_03: Came here and said, Hey, I want to do the same thing we did in America here.
• 51:45
  SPEAKER_03: He's invested a lot of money into the capex of building up some of the infrastructure around that type of stuff.
• 51:50
  SPEAKER_03: That's separate.
• 51:51
  SPEAKER_03: What you guys are looking for now is for working capital for the system, right?
• 51:55
  SPEAKER_03: Capital of fund, the feed the seeds, the day old chicks, that type of stuff.
• 51:59
  SPEAKER_03: So that when KFC has an order, that that can go in and buy the inputs, that capital can go buy the inputs.
• 52:06
  SPEAKER_02: Exactly.
• 52:06
  SPEAKER_02: And and that capital has an incredibly catalytic effect and it circles around.
• 52:11
  SPEAKER_02: So just to say, when I mentioned that we have a demand for six million and it will grow, it's not because that capital disappears, it's because the value chains are getting bigger.
• 52:18
  SPEAKER_02: And one of our problems for a pipeline view of it is that we're starting to develop farmers today that will be ready for capital in 18 months' time.
• 52:25
  SPEAKER_02: And so when you start to do that, you can't reach 18 months' time and not have capital to be able to develop and work with them, if that makes sense.
• 52:31
  SPEAKER_03: And and you guys are giving returns to investors and they're getting money back.
• 52:35
  SPEAKER_03: And one of the things we're working with you on is designing a new financial product that we feel like can mul can can unlock market rate returns for ag investing in Africa by tranching the structure out and having a waterfall, all this type of a little bit more complex financial instrument type of stuff.
• 52:52
  SPEAKER_03: But it will eventually essentially just allow people to get market rate returns investing in ag in the value chains you guys are operating in.
• 52:59
  SPEAKER_02: So and it's really what you need, yeah, because donative capital is a powerful thing for a certain space, which is really, really good, but you also need to unlock that ability to be able to get that market rate return, to be able to act to be able to really unlock value chains because everybody in the value chain can, well, not everybody, but there's pieces of the value chain that really do need to make money and be able to develop on what their pieces, if that makes sense.
• 53:20
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 53:20
  SPEAKER_03: So if there are people in the US who might have been successful in building infrastructure for ag, there's opportunity in Africa to do that.
• 53:28
  SPEAKER_03: There's people who, if had they have no experience, are able to put money in the working capital side of things.
• 53:33
  SPEAKER_03: They can get a return.
• 53:34
  SPEAKER_03: Even if it's out of a donor-advised fund and they don't necessarily need a return, you can put money in once and it recycles over.
• 53:41
  SPEAKER_03: We saw that, you know, the World Food Program just partnered with you guys because they said, you know what, I would rather give money once to you and you can recycle it a hundred a thousand times over because it's churning a profit, and then the baseline's going back into it and it's going around and around instead of just buying food packs all of the time.
• 53:57
  SPEAKER_03: And so I think that's a really powerful.
• 54:00
  SPEAKER_02: And in their case, they're not wanting a return.
• 54:02
  SPEAKER_02: Their money doesn't come in for a return.
• 54:03
  SPEAKER_02: They're doing it because they were gonna put it into food packs, but they see the benefit of the fact that the farmers are not gonna be hungry anymore and really develop into solid value chains.
• 54:11
  SPEAKER_02: And so they're doing it from that context.
• 54:13
  SPEAKER_03: I want to talk about one more thing, and that is excellence and the importance of excellence and what we do.
• 54:18
  SPEAKER_03: You know, as we were driving in the car yesterday, we started to talk about this and uh how it's so important that we bring excellence in what we do, both in the heart and the mind.
• 54:30
  SPEAKER_03: And what we talked about is that a mind without a heart leads to exploitation, but a heart without a mind leads to ineffectiveness.
• 54:39
  SPEAKER_03: So good.
• 54:40
  SPEAKER_03: And that kind of learning came from an African entrepreneur who I heard say if you have a you have a heart for the poor, good for you.
• 54:50
  SPEAKER_03: But if you really want to help me, you need to have a mind for the poor.
• 54:53
  SPEAKER_03: You need to understand value chains, you need to understand supply and domain, you understand, you need to understand commodities and currencies and all of this type of stuff if you want to actually help.
• 55:01
  SPEAKER_03: And so the heart is really important because without the heart, we just start to exploit people, we get really technical, and you know, all of that.
• 55:08
  SPEAKER_03: So the heart is the grounding thing, and we need to be so vigilant and excellent with the way that we pursue Jesus and how we love people.
• 55:15
  SPEAKER_03: But we need to allow him to use our heart to lead us to the problem, but he gave us a mind to solve it, and so we need to bring that in.
• 55:21
  SPEAKER_03: So just talk about how important it is that all of this is done with absolute excellence all across the value chain.
• 55:28
  SPEAKER_02: It's uh it's a huge part of what has to happen and who we are, and the reason for it is because you cannot scale without excellence.
• 55:35
  SPEAKER_02: You cannot scale without things being done to a world standard.
• 55:39
  SPEAKER_02: And part of the reason I mentioned flowers to Netherlands or Europe and places like that is because precision value chains require absolute excellence from every single part of the value chain to the way capital is managed, to the way the flowers are handled, to the way they're packaged, to the way they're transported, to the refrigeration and degrees they use, you have to have excellence.
• 55:58
  SPEAKER_02: It's really, really easy to run into the bush, give somebody some seed and fertilizer and run away, and what they do with it and what quality it is and how good they are is irrelevant.
• 56:06
  SPEAKER_02: But when you're actually trying to deliver flowers to Holland, it isn't it's it's gotta be a highly precise process as an ex as an example of a value chain.
• 56:14
  SPEAKER_02: And the same in human lives.
• 56:15
  SPEAKER_02: And so, like you mentioned, the heart is so important.
• 56:18
  SPEAKER_02: We're not here for like a half-done Christianity that kind of breeds a badly cultured Christianity along the way.
• 56:24
  SPEAKER_02: We're here for people to meet Jesus, and and that's just that's gotta be excellent because Jesus is excellent.
• 56:29
  SPEAKER_02: Look at the world around us, it's it's beautiful at the way Jesus created it.
• 56:33
  SPEAKER_03: Absolutely, and what I love about the Holland thing and the flowers is that you guys over time have seen that smallholder farmers in Africa can produce at a level of precision and scale that can be wanted by even some of the most precise value chains in the world.
• 56:48
  SPEAKER_03: Absolutely, which is awesome.
• 56:50
  SPEAKER_03: Alright, last question.
• 56:51
  SPEAKER_03: What is the most transformational thing God has taught you lately?
• 56:56
  SPEAKER_02: Honestly, if I'm very genuine, dependence.
• 56:59
  SPEAKER_02: I think true dependence on him.
• 57:02
  SPEAKER_02: And it goes back a little bit to the point we made at the earlier, earlier part of the podcast, which is that God has really called us to a space of love and dependence.
• 57:12
  SPEAKER_02: And if we want to have an impact in Africa, God almost every day talks to me about dependence on him.
• 57:17
  SPEAKER_02: A dependence that requires him to step into today, or a dependence that requires him to lead, guide, and push us into places that are uncomfortable.
• 57:25
  SPEAKER_02: Most of what we do in Africa is incredibly uncomfortable.
• 57:28
  SPEAKER_02: It it it requires a grit and a courage and an ability to be able to step out.
• 57:32
  SPEAKER_02: And we would never have that without Jesus.
• 57:34
  SPEAKER_02: And that requires a dependence that Jesus refines in us of will you trust me today to do what to do what I'm telling you to do and to step out in the spaces you're in.
• 57:44
  SPEAKER_02: And I'm young and still growing a lot and learning a lot from what God is doing.
• 57:48
  SPEAKER_02: And I think every day God is teaching me that dependence.
• 57:51
  SPEAKER_03: I love that.
• 57:52
  SPEAKER_03: That's very in line with what God's been teaching me lately.
• 57:54
  SPEAKER_03: You know, it's at uh an event that our friends at Praxis put on um last week, and they were talking about Moses and the burning bush.
• 58:02
  SPEAKER_03: And they talk a lot about redemptive quests, which are these adventures that God invites us to go on for his glory to bring his kingdom to earth.
• 58:11
  SPEAKER_03: And they talked about how Moses was about to go on a redemptive quest with God.
• 58:14
  SPEAKER_03: But before that, at the burning bush, the first thing God said to Moses is take off your sandals for your unholy ground.
• 58:21
  SPEAKER_03: And they said that word take off is really the the Hebrew word for shedding yourself.
• 58:27
  SPEAKER_03: And it's the same word used for animals shedding their skin.
• 58:31
  SPEAKER_03: And what they're talking about is like if you want to go on a redemptive quest, you have to shed yourself.
• 58:38
  SPEAKER_03: You have to shed yourself, shed yourself of the need to be admired, they need to be loved, they need to be accepted, they need to be understood, you need to surrender all of that to the Lord and just say, God, you and your love for me is enough, and I'm willing.
• 58:55
  SPEAKER_03: Here I am.
• 58:58
  SPEAKER_03: Moses felt horribly inadequate.
• 59:00
  SPEAKER_03: It's not about us feeling inadequate, it's not about us having it all together.
• 59:04
  SPEAKER_03: It's about saying, God, you have my heart, you have my mind.
• 59:08
  SPEAKER_03: Everything I am is yours.
• 59:09
  SPEAKER_03: How do you want me to use it?
• 59:11
  SPEAKER_02: And you see it with a lady with two coins in the temple that Jesus talks about and how much she gave.
• 59:15
  SPEAKER_02: And because Jesus is talking about heart, not money, and and that and that space is just so powerful of God is wanting our heart.
• 59:23
  SPEAKER_02: He's wanting to shed us to shed everything we are and be a part of what he's doing, not a part of what we want him to be doing.
• 59:30
  SPEAKER_03: Awesome.
• 59:31
  SPEAKER_03: Well, thank you for the work that you're doing.
• 59:32
  SPEAKER_03: We're super excited to be able to partner with you guys is solving the world's greatest problems.
• 59:37
  SPEAKER_03: We have a platform where people, if they have those two coins, can come in and be a part of what you guys are doing.
• 59:44
  SPEAKER_03: And so we're just we're just really grateful for the work that you guys do.
• 59:48
  SPEAKER_02: And in reverse, we're incredibly excited for the calling God has put on you guys and the passion you have for it, and the fact that you've taken the time as solving the world's greatest problems to really understand what's going on on the ground and to really not just jump over the details but get into the detail.
• 1:00:01
  SPEAKER_02: You've asked some difficult questions and you've gone into the detail of what we do, and I think that that's so important in your love for what Jesus is wanting you to do, and just to say it's it's a privilege working together in that space.
• 1:00:12
  SPEAKER_03: Well, I'm grateful, and I think one of the things that we're learning is like God has given us certain assets, He's given you certain assets, they're different assets.
• 1:00:20
  SPEAKER_03: And I don't need to become like you, and you guys don't need to become like us, but when we work together and we come in precisely and we talk about you know how we want to deploy capital tactically with pinpoint precision to move specific levers that free God's children to be all they were made to be.
• 1:00:37
  SPEAKER_03: When we're able to do that and just plug in with the right financial product at the right time to tweak something, you can unlock flows of capital.
• 1:00:44
  SPEAKER_03: Uh, we're just super excited.
• 1:00:46
  SPEAKER_03: It's amazing.
• 1:00:46
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you, Zach.
• 1:00:47
  SPEAKER_00: So, what are your next steps?
• 1:00:49
  SPEAKER_00: Give together, meet friends, and discover how you can go further.
• 1:00:53
  SPEAKER_00: Join us on a call, and we'll give you a 30-minute overview of giving funds and how they work.
• 1:00:59
  SPEAKER_00: Visit solving.org to join the call today.
• 1:01:02
  SPEAKER_00: Pick a fund and step into the story.
• 1:01:05
  SPEAKER_00: Breakthroughs are happening right now.
• 1:01:07
  SPEAKER_00: God is already at work, and you're invited to join him.
• 1:01:10
  SPEAKER_00: To learn more, visit solving.org.
• 1:01:14
  SPEAKER_00: That's solving.org.
• 1:01:16
  SPEAKER_00: And if you're watching on YouTube, please subscribe.
• 1:01:19
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks for listening, and we hope that you join us in solving the world's greatest problems.