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[Sid]

Hi. Welcome to The exChange Podcast, where we cover stories of System Orchestratorsand their journey of exponential change. I am Siddhartha, your host. I have with me today, Aruna who is the head of the Leader’s Lab Network at C4EC and Stephanie Brockerhoff, the Global Lead for Program Design and Impact at BRAC international. Hi, Stephanie, welcome to Bangalore and our podcast. Thank you. Your title is a mouthful, so sorry this is the third take we are doing Just a little bit about yourself. If you could, so everybody who’s listening and us, mostly me, know a little bit about your journey, what you’ve been doing and how you got to where you got.

[Stephanie]

Yeah. And don’t worry, the rest of my colleagues stumble over my title as well. I’m actually the global lead for systems design and impact at BRAC’s Ultra Poor Graduation Initiative. Before I’ve been with BRAC for two years now. Before joining BRAC International, I was working for an organisation called Oxford Policy Management, OPM, and I was leading the poverty and social protection team.

And one of the things that I saw across, a lot of my work is that governments were very interested in this graduation approach that BRAC instrumental in developing, but, struggled to sort of implement in such a way that it had the impact that BRAC was able to have with its original project, and that a lot of RCT showed, could be had across the world. So part of what brought me to BRAC is, UPGI which is the Ultra Poor Graduation Initiative’s new focus, which is to say, can we rethink how this graduation approach is being Implemented in such a way that it works better for governments to implement?

And maybe I can just take a moment to explain what this graduation approach is that, you know, the Ultra Poor Graduation initiative. It’s basically, Brac is basically an NGO, and it does a lot of things. And I’m really not the best person to talk about all of the different, but it’s got microfinance, it’s got social enterprise, and it’s got lots of different NGO type of programing. In about the 90s, Brac realized that its programing wasn’t reaching the poorest of the poor. And that all of the different interventions just either weren’t reaching that cohort or weren’t able to have a real impact on their lives. So they developed this graduation approach.

And what it is, is basically a 18 to 24 month intervention that, provides access to an asset or a productive livelihood to the household. It helps the household meet basic needs because as we all know, if you are hungry, if you, have basic problems, you aren’t able to pursue aproductive livelihood. You know, you will sell off your asset to eat, to deal with shocks. And all of this is underpinned with, coaching and mentoring and that coaching and mentoring covers a whole bunch of things that covers getting you ready for your livelihood, teaching you skills relevant to your livelihood, helping you troubleshoot your livelihood, including diversifying. But it also covers certain aspects that are relevant in your context be that nutrition, be that health, be that GBV or other things. It covers training on basic financial literacy, and it accompanies households on this sort of journey of changing their livelihoods and really starting to believe in themselves again, regain agency and feel empowered to do something, but also, crucially, have the tools to do something about the circumstances.

We work mostly with women. BRAC, itself works exclusively with women. Most of our governments also work with women. And what we are now doing, and this part of BRAC that I work with is that we are saying, can we reimagine how you deliver that program, which was obviously designed around BRAC and, a NGO model, around case workers, etc., in such a way that it’s easier for governments to deliver having the same impact, but getting there in a completely different way.

[Aruna]

And it is absolutely wonderful to see these women, in these group meetings. One thing is to sort of learn about how they have grown, their livelihoods have grown. So but for me, what was super heartening is to see like how confident they are. Right? Like we are seeing, we were part of meetings where, the newly joined group is there and also graduated women are there. And the way the graduated women, their articulation, the way they think about it and the way they kind of speak about it, it it was such a wide gap and, and and the BRAC Bangladesh people were saying That is what happens in the 18 to 24 months where they really understand what is that they have to do and the amount of agency that they gain. I kind of remember that trip to Bangladesh. Can you tell us a little bit about what you have been doing in BRAC International for the last two years?

[Stephanie]

Yeah. So as you said, I think the most powerful thing, there are two things that are incredibly powerful about this program. The one is just seeing how the women we work with change. And how they, regain agency and hope and belief in themselves and that shows. So that’s the one really powerful thing.

The other really powerful thing is that the impact of this program sustains after the end of the program. So you can visit women who’ve been out of the program for five, six, ten years. And instead of falling back into the circumstances they were in before, they’re actually still improving. And even in COVID It didn’t really affect them. So those are the two really powerful things. So what we’ve been trying to do is to recreate those type of impacts on women. But getting there in a different way because we’re working with governments.

Why are we working with government? It’s about scale. So as I told you, BRAC international was created. The model was replicated all over the world by various NGOs and partnership with governments. But somehow governments always looked at it and said, you know, not really for me to scale up, even though we had all of the impact, all of the great things. And when I say we, I don’t mean BRAC, I mean a whole bunch of organisations out there, a whole bunch of research, institutions like World Bank and lots of different actors. So, and if governments were taking it up, they were often not implementing parts of the program in a way that undermined the impact of the program itself. So what I’ve been doing or what we’ve been doing at, the Ultra Poor Graduation Initiative in the last two years is reimagine the program completely.

So saying in the past, the program design was largely held constant. You have to do the following. You have to provide the asset. You have to have these coaches, they have to do the following, you know, blah blah, blah, blah Well, we are not doing, let’s think rather about holding the impact on the participant constant and reimagine how we get the program together to get there. And because most governments, are resource-constrained, our approach has really been to say, let’s build on what already exist and think about repackaging it into a time-bound and sequence program. and then make sure that this coaching part exists, that usually doesn’t exist to the same extent in a lot of programs.

Now, this sounds very simple? But, you know, one thing government really struggled with is actually coordinating with other parts of government. So in a way, we’ve turned something that could have been a funding issue of trying to raise lots of new funds for a new program into a little bit of a coordination program where we’re saying, can we layer, Can we bundle existing programming? Can we see only the bit that is missing and then look for funding for that? Can we also say, okay, so the coach that I spoke about in the original model is one person. Does it have to be one person? Can it be a whole network of people? So really saying, we have all of these preconceived ideas, let’s throw them sort of not in the bin, but imagine them. And I think I should be really like clear here.

Reimagining is obviously risky. You don’t know whether you’re going to be successful. And we don’t have to reimagine everything in every context. In some context, the governmentsalready have a labour force that they can use to do the coaching, for example. Great. So then let’s stick with the old model? Or labour’s cheap, where people live close by one another. But in other contexts. Let’s take northern Kenya, you have to travel really far distance, labour is scarce. It’s very expensive. Is it really the best way to say to a government that you have to hire this quite expensive workforce and have them spend most of their time driving from A to B, so can we, go back to the drawing board. And can we experiment a little bit about how to have the same or similar or maybe even better impact, but in a different way?

[Sid]

Speaking of the drawing boards, I just want to take a pause here and just play a small game. Which was something that, I was supposed to do at the beginning. I just forgot. But, the idea here is if you’ve played dictionary before, back in the day. Back in the day, Pick up a piece, draw and let us see if we can guess it? Aruna, We’ll start with you. One. And here’s your pad.

[All speakers’]

Start with the one who can do the least amount of drawing. Well, let’s see about that. You have a team that can draw really well. So I am assuming that you’re inspired, I am inspired, but definitely not qualified. People are going to judge me. I know people are going to judge me. Does it? This is what Aruna drew. I have no clue what it means. Is it someone going down a road? Yes. What is that? A Journey? Should be easy, but also difficult Because I can’t draw to save my life. This is it? Oh, is it a plane? No, it’s like a caterpillar hatching into. Oh. Transformation. Good. So we’re doing much better than we did yesterday. So. Well, enough. It shows that you have a very intelligent guest and host today. I don’t know how to draw this. So I spy something. Yeah, I will explain in a second. It’s so difficult to draw this It’s a box. Graduation! Oh, that is very good. Yeah. That’s nice. That is the graduation hat. Yes, I think that’s quite good.

[Stephanie]

I should, just, if you allow me, the reason I struggled to draw this a little bit is because, the term graduation is something that is applied to our program a lot, but it’s also one that we are grappling with a lot. Because we want to make sure that people understand that you have to graduate out of poverty. It’s not just to graduate out of the program just because the program is over. It’s really about achieving transformative impact on the participant’s life and only then can graduation happen. So this is one of the most misunderstood things about our model.

[Sid]

And you spoke of an imagination as a very risky thing to do, and that is what I want to double click on. I want to understand what that means and what are the challenges that you kind of faced, both as Stephanie and as BRAC International, when you go through that process of reimagination?

[Stephanie]

Why do I say it’s risky? Well, because implementing the program in the traditional way we know works and we know it works across the world. Implementing the program in a different way. In the end, we don’t know whether it’s going to work And, it’s a cross-sectoral program. And, obviously, governments implement many very complex programs and healthcare and what not, but cross-sectoral, cross-departmental coordination is difficult and aligning mandates and all of the systemic work. So, you asked me, why is it risky? For me and also for BRAC, let’s start with BRAC.

I think what really attracted me to joining BRAC is that instead of saying, oh, this is too risky, and the graduation approach is associated with us, and we should just continue to implement and we should raise funds to implement it ourself the leadership of BRAC, Shameran Abed, and our managing director decided, our founder had this sense He said, Small is beautiful, Scale is necessary. And this is the ethos of the organization. So BRAC itself doesn’t actually think name of the founder for the the place a little to, the ethos of taking risk. And scaling instead of staying small and beautiful and controlling everything is in the DNA of the organization. Now, it’s obviously risky because we might fail and, it could, have repercussions for the wider graduation agenda.

But if we want to do something about poverty globally, we need to be audacious. We need to have big ideas. It’s not okay to do lots of small things and then say I didn’t want to take the risk. And therefore I’ve been successful, but you haven’t actually done anything about what you really want to do, which is really about reducing poverty at scale. So they would probably say it’s risky but not really. Because what’s more risky is not to do something about poverty.

For me personally, In a way, I’m an outsider. So there a lot of people who’ve been in BRAC all of their life who developed the original program, who have played around with it and are very attached to the way of implementing it and said, I’m an outsider? I come from working with governments who I saw struggling implementing the program. So for me, the risk isabsolutely necessary. If you ask me, what’s the cost of not doing it? The cost is that people implement this thing and it doesn’t have any impact on the participant, or it’s only implemented in very small pockets and with high donor funding or by NGOs. So for me, It’s really a necessary risk to take, to rethink the model. Now when we decide what parts of the the individual program to experiment with, it’s it gets a bit more difficult. First of all, I think, you need to identify what the biggest hurdle for the program is. The possible impact of the program could be. And then in a lot of cases, that is around the coaching function. Why? Because a large, workforce of, highly motivated, relatively skilled, frontline workers is really not available to a lot of governments in a lot of context. Or if it’s available, is it affordable? Maybe, it’s not. Should it be affordable? Another question.

So rethinking that part of the model, is where I started with. Because I think it is the crux of it’s going to be the make or break of getting this to scale in a lot of parts of the world. And then there are other parts where we’re experimenting around, that is more about the experimenting with the delivery and how we can get the delivery and how it works through government systems and how we can get the different parts of the government aligned. The real set of big, big experimentation is in, can you unbundle what used to be delivered by one or very few people into something that doesn’t have to be, but could be delivered, be delivered by a wider range of experts. But in the past, the conversation has always been about training and that government should be hiring a bigger workforce and then governments have responded saying, well, we don’t have the money. That it is not sustainable. There was a bit of an impasse in the sector.

On the one hand, the implementor is saying we ought to do this. The donors who are funding programs. This part of the program would then be paid for by donor funding. The moment the program gets taken over government, this falls apart again. And we weren’t actually talking to one another and winning those kind of conversations and my old job I saw some of that play out. So this is the area where I decided to focus, the most radical redesign because I think it’s necessary. Otherwise we’re not going to be scale. Is it going to work? Well, hopefully. Does it look the same in each country? No, it’s completely different in each country.

The only thing that is common is to say, don’t just treat it as a training problem. if you don’t not have enough staff, if the staff is part time or something, you cannot train them into the original model. You have to then think about how do you incentivize them, how do you support them? How do you equip them, how do you train them, etc? So saying, let’s look at this a bit more realistically.

[Aruna]

You talked a little bit about Unbundling. So can you talk a little bit more about that. So everyone understands. What does that look like?

[Stephanie]

I think this is quite common to a lot of NGO programming. You have a caseworker. The one that goes into the community all the time. And as a result, that person does a lot. They do everything from selecting the beneficiaries, telling them about the program, enrolling them in the program, supporting them through the program cycle, collecting the monitoring data and delivering all of the different parts of the program, that is not really necessary if you’re a government. First of all, most governments, including yours, have their own ways of how they like to target their own systems that they do.

Sensitisation about programs is usually done through certain government structures that are different in each country, etc. but also, as I told you earlier, the coaching part actually includes a whole bunch of things. So it include hard skills training and transfer relevant to the livelihood. It includes psychosocial support around empowerment, agency and so on. And then it includes some sort of softer skills. And then there’s that relational aspect where one shows up for you,, that in the past didn’t really receive any support from any program, let alone someone who really comes regularly to you and works with you. I mean, all of us. If we’ve ever tried to change Anything, you know, we have apps, we have friends, everyone around us supports us. The same type of thing.

So when we said unbundling, and that’s, we also what we did with Aruna and Sanjay, when they came to Bangladesh, we said, let’s look at all of this and let’s unpack what’s actually happening here. There’s some transactional things, where, some skill is being transferred and so on. And that could be transfer of a bunch of things. There is some relational thing here.

And especially, the people in the sector who worried about Reimagining this way of doing coaching, what they’re really worried about is that relational design where they say without that relational thing, the program can’t work. I think that’s probably true I guess the question is, how frequent does that relational aspect have to manifest itself, and how does it have to be done? So we are experimenting, for example, with, more group sessions than individual sessions. A heavy, Engagement, especially in-person at the beginning of a program. So lots of these typeof modalities, where you don’t lose the in-person contact but you experiment with different ways of, focusing on the relational aspect and taking some of the other, M&E (measurement & evaluation), Targeting, but also the transactional parts out and thinking about how you could deliver this differently, either through technology or through different actors or different parts of the government.

Listening skills and empathy skills are the main thing that, in my mind, these coaches also have to have. By the way, the coaches have different names in each country, depending on the local context. But being able to listen and show empathy and be actually empathetic to the person’s circumstances. There should not be a lecturing thing where I teach you and I coach you to behave in a certain way? But it’s really about I support you on this journey.

[Aruna]

So what we saw in Bangladesh, many of these, group members really think of the coaches as part of the family. They even go to talk to them about things which are outside of the scope of the coach. And the coaches still do it. Stephanie, If you could talk a little bit about your, specific approach while you are scaling this in very different governments. What is that that you’re doing on building this this model where it can be adapted by many countries. And so what has been your approach towards that? And can you break it down for us as to what are the elements to that, and who are the ecosystem players in this?

[Stephanie]

So the first part is I think I really touched on this is that instead of designing from scratch, and saying to government, these are the different parts of the program and you now need to look for, consumption stipend and, you know, an investment for seed capital or an asset or something. And you need to look for this workforce and so on. We are working with governments on what they’ve already got available and what they can anchor this program.

[Aruna]

So can you give us an example of that?

[Stephanie]

I’m going to give a few examples, because actually what is happening as a result is that every government is anchoring this on something else. Like in South Africa, for example, they have this cash transfer program that is nationally available. No fragmentation like here. So it’s a national program. And they’re saying, we want to work with the participants of this, one of those cash transfer programs and use that as the anchor and the infrastructure on which we build this program. And then we are going to other parts of the government for the asset investment and the skills training, Etc., etc.

In other countries and it’s perceived as a livelihood program or it’s perceived as a youth program. So we are starting where governments are right, rather than saying this is a social protection program, this is a community-based program. There’s a livelihood program. We’re saying in your political priorities, where does this fit then with them we do analysis of saying, what have you got available that you could bundle and package together. And then we help and support them in thinking through how to do that, how to deliver this through the government system. We’ve explained the details of what the program is, and we are really like a thought partner. We don’t go to communities for anything. We really just support governments in thinking through how they can build such a program in the context fit for their purposes, but also fit for the resources and the capacity they’ve got available So this is a really customised way to do that So it’s looking quite different.

I’m telling you were bundling in this, that’s not necessarily what we were thinking when we started. That’s just what we’ve seen a lot of governments do. One key thing that we’re doing to the coaching is the thing we are helping really think through where might that come from? Where might that come from? If it’s coming in a different way, how do you leverage that. I’m still new to all this language that you guys use. But the ecosystem language. What other organisations can government rely on to deliver this program. And those could be other government departments like we discussed. They could be NGOs that are available in the sector. That could be the private sector. This is a livelihood program that also addresses certain social problems. So the potential of your ecosystem that could contribute to this is endless in a way. And you could even think more broadly, thinking about the market and the wider system which people integrate.

So I think, again, that is slightly differently depending on how governments like to implement. In some countries, governments will implement most of the program components. In other countries they are trying to convince and coordinate NGOs to deliver a large part of the program In other parts of a country, they will pull in expert NGOs just for say the psychosocial support and but rely on the economic cluster for other parts. So it’s more about getting that ecosystem thinking, this doesn’t all have to be done by this one line department? Because whichever department you anchor this and it will have a mandate, and the mandate is narrower than what this program needs. So you either then start to replicate all of this in your program for which you don’t have funding. Plus probably your colleagues are going to ask you why you know, I am the minister or so-and-so. Why is this happening? Or you basically build coalitions.

I mean, this could be civil society coalition, interdepartmental coalitions, ecosystem coalitions and so on. Now, I think the beauty of that is that if it works, it could mean that actually the program can be even more impactful, because you’re actually crowding a higher level expertise to do some of this. And then if you’re trying to sort of anchor it all in one area. So I think there’s actually also a potential to do something really, really great. That could also spin off further build relations also of the participants into various different parts of the sector. So I, I mean, it’s early days, but I think that is actually really exciting.

[Aruna]

You are having some of some early success in South Africa. So could you talk about what does that look like? You look at it and think like, wow, this is actually moving. I mean, even though the journey is going to be very long, do you see some movements and what are those movements? What does that look like to you?

[Stephanie]

So first of all, obviously it’s not really us. It’s the South African government. That’s a really that’s. So the South African government is implementing this program called Generating Better Livelihoods. And really what they what they want to do is that they have a very successful and very instrumental cash transfer program that is really supporting a very large part of that population. And the grants have been very successful in alleviating poverty, that what they have been less successful at is like providing people with enough financial support to really access transformative livelihoods.

So this is really a program that is not meant to replace social protection, but to provide additional opportunities on this. And yes, so they’ve been quite successful. And we’re working with this amazing partner in South Africa called Finmark trust. And they’ve been really successful at going through the initial design process. So the program has now started to implement, 720 participants are enrolled, across three different provinces and seven different sites. It’s in urban and rural areas and out of necessity, there had to do experimentation around the coaching, because the fiscal space is tight.

And, the whole argument is to let’s first show that it works in South Africa, and it’s hard to make the case to government that we’re going to show, but you have to first hire 100,000 people, so what we did in South Africa is exactly what I described. We unbundled the different parts of the program. And de facto, what you now have is that, there were some administrators from the agency that traditionally disburses the cash transfers who’ve become these, what they’re called linkage champions. In South Africa, the coaches. Reallywhat they do is they basically project manage and coordinate a whole range of network actors to come together to deliver the specific support to the participant in a sequence and time bound manner, in line with how the program should roll out. This obviously sounds very great and linear, and you know, it doesn’t always work in that way and not the same. The one problem with the ecosystem or relying on other partners, they might not always be willing. They might have funding issues. They have other priority There are not the same amount of actors available in rural areas as in urban area. So the job of the the linkage champion actually differs a little bit depending on where they are n who else they can draw in? But you get the idea of that.

They sit at the centre of a network of different actors, and organisations, that they can pull in. And what we are working with you all on is to say, can we build a platform that supports these coaches in delivering this task? in three ways. One, dealing with this coordination issue with all of the different actors. And this is not just a coordination actors, as in like, hey, can you come tomorrow? But also I need to know whether you’ve been there. I need to know your thoughts. Your material needs to be on there so that I don’t always have to call you right in the future. That’s transactional, relational, aspects that you talk about actually.

So that’s the coordination issue. Over time, obviously we want to also build content on that. So that you’re less reliant on always convincing all of these organizations and departments to give the basic trainings. Over time, you could build on this platform a lot of the training that then can be used by the program. And, this only really works if the coach is motivated and incentivized. Now, you can incentivize them many different ways. Sanjay told me this you can obviously incentivize about money. Yeah, you can incentivize with prestige. You can incentivize by sort of future bankable, sort of like prestige, And there’s the fourth one that’s now skipped my mind. But basically what we wanted to do is build a platform that also give something back to the person with that coach? By continuously providing them with training opportunities.

And depending on the context, that could be training opportunities, certificates that could be maybe, I don’t know, opportunities to other jobs. We’re still in the early stages of figuring out and also talking to coaches in different locations about what, in the absence of necessarily like a high salary, what else to do? Some of these things are like credentialing them. How much have they learned so far? And it’s really interesting. I didn’t think that certificates would be a really big thing. But actually some of the coaches are referring to for them, it’s a really big thing. So I think, trying to take your own, preconceived ideas out of it.And really working through these sprints that we’ve been doing, asking the different parts of the audience, you as the person in the government department running the program, what do you need to see? You as the sort of like on the ground implementing part of the government, what do you need? And then you as the coaches, what do you need to do your day job, but also to remain motivated and want to work on this. And then try to design a platform that speaks to all of that, which will then allow us to deal with one of the key scale constraints, which is a highly motivated, dedicated web force on the ground.

[Aruna]

And what’s your aspiration In say two years down the line. What would you like to see, that will make you really happy and say, oh, this is kind of going somewhere.

[Stephanie]

I have two aspirations, one linked to what we are doing, which is I think if we can build this platform, that means we can get quality coaching to graduation program participants in a range of different contexts. So it’s like agnostic to the workforce that governments want to use as the anchor point, and is able to support any of those workforce to do a good job of supporting the participant.

[Aruna]

And you are talking about across geographies.

[Stephanie]

Yes, globally. But, I actually think frontline service delivery more generally, the fact that they need support is the bigger question here. Because in a way, this is the same type of problem, whether you’re delivering, I don’t know, health care or anything like that. We have people at the front of. Often, they are not well-paid. Often they’re volunteering. Often they’re doing a thousand different things. So developing a platform that supports them, that Incentivizes them, give something back to the workforce, without which the world would not be running. If we can develop something that is a useful tool for that, I think that would be really instrumental beyond graduation to be on the side.

And using technology, but in an enabling way to help with that. In ways that make sense, that take some of the tasks that nowadays no one needs to do anymore. One more thing to say, like working with government is a slow process, it’s a slow and a fast process. It never really goes at a comfortable pace. So we could be sprinting. Or we could be moving slowly. And in a way, that is part of the challenge. You have to be ready to support both.

[Sid]

So working with the government is like a marathon. You manage your pace, based on how it’s going.

[Stephanie]

And your fitness level. So in case, if you do need to sprint, you can.

[Aruna]

All of us talk about how challenging this is. You know, it can be a sprint. It can be a marathon. But a lot of times it’s also very hopeful. In the last ten months or so, I worked with you, I witnessed some of the real things that you have won. for it to move forward when I see all these government officials coming for the sprints and the amount of enthusiasm which they operate, it’s also very hopeful. So can you share a moment where you felt like You worked at it and then something happened and you said like, yeah, you know what? I think I’m hopeful for this moment that all that I did, this happened. And it really, really makes me feel like I can do this again, for another day.

[Stephanie]

The model in which we operate is that we have in the countries where we are partnering with governments, we have country teams and they just do a phenomenal job I mean, I, I live in the UK as I run a global team. I provide support to our country teams. But the teams in-country, they’re like really at the core front of this side. And I’ve been really amazed, actually, by the traction we have gotten with governments. And if you think about this, it’s not like, you know, a traditional donor, approach where you say, would you like to do a graduation program? We’re going to give you this massive grant to do it. No, it’s about really selling an idea and a vision to government and then working with them on that.

And, I really am amazed at what my colleagues have managed to do that. How good they are at building this political support for these programs. We work with a triangle that, IMAGO as an organization. Developed and we are using something similar. which really says, for governments to scale programs, you need three things to be in place. The program needs to technically work right and then have an impact. It needs to be deliverable through the administrative system It needs to be administratively feasible and it needs to be politically supportable. And what we are really trying to do at BRAC is to bear all of those things in mind at all times. And this plays out and it’s led by our teams in the country.

And if you ask me what really gives me hope is just the amazing of traction we have gotten with that. And also government is actually quite courageous in this way. Like in many contexts we’re getting going. We haven’t figured out half of the design, but we’re starting. You’re building the car as you’re driving it. It’s an iterative process. you do an instance to ride the bus style while you’re driving it or something. Yeah. Because there’s uan rgent need to get going. And if they are convinced of the idea they want to get going, they don’t want to hear that you now need to go do one year of, design and then get back. So, we also need to get more comfortable with this notion of iterative Progress and iterative improvement over time. So, this makes me very hopeful in the sense and then just seeing people enrolled in the program and even starting to see some of the interim bits of success and, to take the South African example before Christmas, we were in one of, pilot sites and, some of the participants had started to receive some of the parts of the program, really just the psychosocial support, like around mindset. And now they were feeding back to the government officials, both from the province and from national level who came to listen to them.

And I mean, the program has barely done anything. It hasn’t done the big push investment in the livelihood yet. But people’s narrative had already changed a lot. And people were hopeful again. And the government officials, as a result, were like wow, this is like a totally different meeting to the meetings that we usually go to. Wow! This is a different tone. And you could see a little spark of Hope that maybe this could be something that could work. And those moments really for me are very amazing. Now then there’s a danger that people get carried away and forget that there was like a lot to do to have the impact we want to have.

And without that, it’s not, it’s not good enough, you know? But yeah, there’s a lot. And then there’s obviously a lot of frustration. I think, you know, two steps forward, five steps backwards. But there are these elements. And for me, what I really care about is, governments are there to say that they are the ones delivering for the citizens, especially in poverty and social protection. And for me, it’s like a social protection expert. But it’s also the contract between governments and its citizens they are there to help you during bad times when you’re vulnerable, when you’re in need of support. So enabling governments to be able to fulfill that through quality programing, at scale, I mean that is what drives me. And that’s if we can make that work, people will be and will be a pretty amazing.

[All speakers]

Thank you, Stephanie. That is a lot of sharing. And that ended on a very hopeful note and I am very happy to be part of this and doing this with you.