IGF 2025 - Day 3 - Workshop Room 4 - WS #305 Financing Self-Sustaining Community Connectivity Solutions

>> MODERATOR: All right. Good afternoon to everyone. And welcome to this session on financing self-sustaining community connectivity solutions. My name is Luca Belli. I'm a professor at the law school here in Oslo, and I propose this meeting together with my colleague and friend, Dr. Hadzic. Unfortunately he is not here with us.

And today we have had the exceptional help of Carlos, who has been the driving force behind this outstanding output that we have this year. Not only because of the content but because we managed to have hard copies printed and delivered three hours before I boarded the plane. So they are -- let's say that also today we have an incentive for participants to join us at the table here. Because there are copies here on the right and on the left. Also benefits if you join us at the table the mic is open so you don't have to cue to make questions and make statements.

Having said that, let me start by introducing our distinguished panelists today. We have from my right, Chris Locke, executive Vice President from the Western European and Civil Society foundation. And Carlos from the APC association from progressive communication that has been really instrumental in organising this work this year and has been with us over the past ten years of dynamic coalition.

We have Alessandra Lustrati here from the U.K. development for the FCDO. And on my left we have Marie Lisa Decanay founding president for the central ownership in Asia, Asia Pacific Group. And last but not least, we have Claude Dorion, director of McConsay (?). And we have remote participants, Nathalia Foditsch with programs for directional programming. And we have Elmstam Carl with organisational work for WEOG.

Now just for a few minutes, let's set the scene first for the participants to understand what we have been doing over the past decade and why we are here today and second to accept the team totted. The coalition has realised a very long series of reports and policy suggestions which is available on com community do the org. Everything is available. Including the PDF of this book.

Can you also try to search and find it on the IGF website but it is a very tough and frustrating experience. So that is why we have a dedicated website. But it is also on the page of the coalition under the reports.

Now we have been discussing community networks pretty much all issues that can be analyzed and community networks over the past years. And actually this has been useful because it has also allowed us to have retrospective over the past ten years, over the past decade offer what could be done to improve the architectures, the governance, the funding indeed, which is a very important point. And it is the main subject of today's debate and of this book.

So this volume of today and also the presentations of today try to contextualise which type of community networks exist. And what are the regulatory problems that do not facilitate the funding of community networks? And then what could be the solutions. We are starting from empirical evidence. And that is something I want to stress. The report here is not a collection of opinions.

It's a collection of facts. It's a collection of very thoroughly researched papers that have our back -- they are backed with evidence and analyze what could be the possible models expanding from blended finance to other community solutions to support the community network initiatives until what could be the social return on investment of these initiatives? And that is something extremely normal in terms of research, and extremely valuable for investor, not only for people that want to build one.

And then we conclude with some recommendations that could be used by policy makers, by funders and by other organisations.

Now let me stop speaking, which is the hardest part for an academic. And let me give immediately the floor to our introductory remarks that will be performed by Chris.

>> CHRIS LOCKE: Thank you very much. It's great to be on a fantastic panel. I would like to recommend the book. It is a great book and promoted by my boss. So I'm delighted to promote the book. It is an astonishing piece of work. We at the international society have been involved in community programmes for a very long time. For a significant chunk of our '0-year history. We have been driving this from a practical angle. We run training programmes to support the communities to learn the space of crimping wires and dining and deploying community networks all the way through to the policy angle where we have been instrumental in helping the ITU and African Union and other regulators to look at regulation to support community networks and to make them available interest a perspective Spectrum.

So it's something that is very much a core part of the work that we do.

When it comes Toronto financing, what we see -- and we are a grant focused organisation, so we are very much -- I've been in meetings with pretty much everyone on this panel, if not today then within the last few mop, explaining the position that we play as a donor and as someone that can support community-centered connectivity at those early stays.

What we do is take someone from effectively 0 to effectively 3,000? What can he can do is put that capital together in the first place to help get the new networks off the ground.

And what that allows us to do is start to train the community networks in what sustainability looks like. Train them in exactly how they can move from being a grant backed organisation to one that has some longevity and some sustainability. And this is a difficult jump to make. I was saying earlier on. To a previous role of someone supporting entrepreneurs in Kenya. He referred to the fact often we create grant-preneurs not entrepreneurs and of as donors we train people at getting good from getting grants from donors. It's a different skill to transition into being a commercial business and being a sustainable business.

So when we looking at how he we can drive self-sustaining connectivity being with he have to understand how we put financing in place that can pick up from the grant stage, that can move through blended finance solutions into the sustainability of community networks. You but we have to be sure we are table to train people to build organisations that can cross that divide and build into that space.

We are committing to this over the next four years of our five-year strategy at the Internet Society. We are committing about 30 million in capital as part of our co-fund on community centered connectivity that we launched as the emotion-wide Congress. We are very fortunate to have Meta as a partner for that.

They put 3.6 million into the pot about that. And we are talking to other donors into this facility as well.

We are doing that because we believe one of the best ways we build a very robust first stage of financing is through partnership, through working with other donors and through working with a lot of people who are here today to make sure that there is a coordinated and sustainable way of getting that early grant financing in place.

And also so we can then all use our collective knowledge to see how we do prepare those community connectivity projects for the next stage of their growth, and the next stage of their financing process. So we will commit to do this over at least the next four years, bringing other donor money in place.

And what we want to do is see real success in the projects that we fund, and some real success in the second for overall to make sure we build communities networks, whether they end up as cooperatives or social enter prizes that can exist past the grant stage and grow and develop their capabilities in those businesses. Thank you.

>> MODERATOR: Thank you very much, Chris, for those remarks and for stressing the role of the Isaac foundation stressing community network over the past years. It's also very good to know that it is an initial support and the final goal is to transform them into sustainable, financially sustainable initiatives.

Now let's start to delve into the contributions of our report today. We have the pleasure of having all the authors. Lisa you authored this piece, you co-authored this piece of work towards measuring the social impact and cost effectiveness of community networks. This is extremely interesting research. So please, the floor is yours.

>> MARIE LISA DECANAY: Thank you. So I'm going to be presenting the results of the research that we have had since last year on the social impact and cost effectiveness of community centered community initiatives. And to do this I will be sharing with you the objectives of the study and the methodology that we used first. In terms of objectives, the study undertook social impact analysis of community centered connectivity initiatives using two tools. One is development indexing and the other is social return on investment.

And development indexing assists in the quantification of impact -- social impacts on major stakeholder groups where simple project and I measures cannot be effectively used. So the final stage of development indexing is usually coming up with a score card from 0 to 100 where we assign weight to specific key rule areas where there has been significant impact and we are able to quantify the performance.

But in this study we didn't have enough time to actually do the score card. But we were able to establish the significant social impacts of the community centered connectivity issues that we studied.

We also used social return on investment, which is a measure of cost effectiveness because it's a ratio of financial and social outcomes to inputs and investments.

So for a project or a community connectivity initiative to be sustainable, or to be -- to be cost effective, it needs to -- it's SROI, or the social return on investment needs to be greater than 1. So we studied four cases. Two in Asia and two in Africa. And the two cases in Asia are Kasepuha in this Indonesia. Which served villages there. And I would like to recognize the main actor, the main actor in this initiative common room. I think Gustaff. Could you stand so they know you. And the second case was Kapathardi in Western India. Where 99% of the population are part of the Warli Tribe. So these are case. The third case from Africa is Tanda NET Community Network. I would like to recognize the Tanda NET they operate in Nairobi. And the third one was working in rural villages in eastern Cape, South Africa.

Now I think one of the more important finding that we had from this research is that community centered connectivity initiatives are not just ordinary enterprises.

But they are social enterprises, meaning to say they are socially driven. So a social enterprises they actually offer three types of services. The first type of service is what we call transactional services. These are connectivity services, accessed through punish or other form of agreed transactions in exchange for the service.

So these are services that even commercial ISPs offer.

But the two other kinds of services are services that are not offered by ordinary ISPs, which are what we call social inclusion services, which are oriented towards addressing digital exclusion and meaningful connectivity or other factors behind the usage gap.

They enable connectivity to assist the poor and marginalised to have better access to basic needs to social and economic services so that -- for example, in some of the communities that we studied, the internet services were being provided in a way that was also building the capability of the marginalized stakeholders to use the internet in an effective way to improve their equal of life.

The third time of services is what we call tyrants for magical services. They are oriented as enabling the poor and excluded to have the capability to become actors in their own development. To enable their capability to operate, govern and manage digital resources to positive impact on their lives and their communities.

So these are actually services that are provided to the organisations and leaders who provide the connectivity service in the community so they will have the capability to govern and maintain and sustain the delivery of the services.

So what we found is that the significant social impacts of community centered connectivity initiatives have been mainly facilitated not by transactional services but by social inclusion and transformational services.

On the screen you would see some examples so it's clearer to you. A transactional service would be for example the provision of internet servers through vouchers that they do. But it would include digital training and online publishing and training tears for the villagers. It would include podcast, workshops and content development and the development of the village culture through digital storytelling. So these are some of the services that the community initiative actually provides the village.

The transformational services include the training and capacity building of technicians and locals to undertake maintenance and repair of internet tools and devices. Also capacity building and support to step up and manage the media lab, the lab that creates local content for use by the communities and also capacity building for locals to manage and extend internet services to adjust villages, so not just the immediate village, but other villages as well.

So what is also very clear in the study is that the four cases showed that social inclusion and transformational services facilitated impacts that clearly demonstrate the value proposition for investing in community centered connectivity initiative as they relate to at least six key rule areas.

And we proved in the research -- of course we did four cases and they are actually available. We will be making them online apart from the integrated report that is already available here in the publication. The first is increased levels and capacities for inclusive human development, the improvement in the economic position and conditions of community stakeholders, more effective preservation of the cultural identity because thee cases were in communities. And increased levels and capacity for climate action and natural resources management. The empowerment of the community to control, manage the internet and digital resources and inclusion and empowerment of women as stakeholders in digital transformation.

Just to show you more clearly what these key rule areas mean and because of the lack of time, let me just show you what improvement in the economic position and conditions of community stakeholders look like for the cases in Asia. For Kasepuhan community issue initiative that was explained in terms of increasing assets not only household assets but financial resources for the increase in consumption or avoidance of overborrowing.

A second element of this key rule area of improving the economic position and conditions of community stakeholders was increasing business transactions and new business enterprises.

There was answer crease in the trade and transactions of existing entrepreneurs and increase in employment generation.

Third a greater sustain ability of the agriculture sector that was expressed in terms of improved capability to use new adaptive farming techniques to climate change, integrating traditional practices with new technologies. It was also expressed in terms of greater intergenerational sustainability because the involvement of young farmer was actually facilitated.

In India with the Pathardi initiative the improvement of the community stakeholders was expressed by financial empowerment of the tribal women who started generating their income as the service of the vouchers. And tribal women also started to open their bank accounts. Second was an expansion of markets online, which was manifested by the increased customer base and improved earnings of those who actually were selling online.

So the other finding I think that was very significant with the use of the social return on investment methodology, we were able to show that over a period of 3 to 4 years, that the social return on investment ratio was above 1 for all of the community centered connectivity initiatives. And if you notice from year 1 to year 2 to year 3 to year 4, it is an increasing trend. That means that the cost effectiveness is actually what is being shown. And there's an increase in the social value created over time.

So in conclusion, may I just say that the study that we did proved that community centered connectivity initiatives provide social inclusion services and transformation services that generate significant social impacts beyond what commercial ISPs can offer.

And secondly social inclusion and transformational services demonstrate the impacts that clearly demonstrate the value proposition for investing in community center initiative as they relate to the key areas I explained to you earlier KRAs and the social run return of internet ratios being all above one, and the consistent every demonstrated every year demonstrates there is an increase in the social value created by community centered connectivity initiatives over time. So that CCCIs are actually cost effective in bridging the digital divide. Thank you.

>> MODERATOR: Thank you very much, Marie Lisa for the presentation and also for particular sticking to the time. Creating concrete evidence of what we have been arraigning for years about the positive externalities that the community generates locally and how they not own centralise connectivity -- not only centralise but create new wealth and they are much more difficult to measure, which is the social impact. Excellent.

Now the next presentation will be by Claude Dorion on breaking the digital divide which is a title I really like very much. Over to you.

>> CLAUDE DORION: Yes, good afternoon to all. I've got a slide presentation that would support a 4-minute presentation.

I'm going to try to be as succinct as possible. The operation that we did was to make an analysis, a structural analysis of the financial needs of the community oriented connectivity initiatives in relationship with the financing opportunities. And we did this through a survey where 85 different initiatives coming from three continents participated in our operations.

It allowed us to have some crossover presentation of the different challenges that are encountered by the organisation.

On the first aspect you have on this slide some collective demonstration of resource presentation where the connectivity initiative themselves have the issue that they do have a clear social impact on their community. They allow people to increase their economic situations. They helped to get access to social and health services, and they contributed as well to build a more integrated community where different services are availability to all members.

So it's like a demonstration of the single case studies that Lisa just presented. We believe in a way that providing access for social connectivities are based in a dialogue between external environment being the regulation, the territory where we have to develop the projects. The characteristic of the community and the technology that has to be used efficiently to cover the services on one hand.

On the other hand you have the challenges coming from internal function in an origin of the projects where we have in most cases a challenge of size and low density of the service, which will bring average costs for user a little higher. And we undergone the concept of -- articulating the equilibrium of the social accessibility of the service and sustainable pricing policy that will allow to offer the service on a long-term basis.

And there's also a question of skills to be supported and enhance being on the technical operation of the service and also on its marketing and management aspect.

And the other element that represents a challenge for the initiatives is that they have some difficulty to demonstrate exactly their performance as an operator and their social impact as an actor of their community. And that will bring constraints in their dialogue with the financial sector.

And with the financial sector we see some relation of gaps of expectation as a return we should expect from the investment on one side but also the documentation of the projects where we have to get a closer mutual understanding on how do we present an connectivity project to a financial actor and how the financial actor has to consider all kinds of impacts in the way to assess the development possibility.

We also have the difficulty coming from the perception of the higher management cost of doing small financial operations and the perceived risk coming from the nonprofit nature of those operations.

We asked our sample of initiatives what were their main constraints in raising their project and developing their project, and you see on this slide that they are multifactored, but there's a high density of participants that underline clearly that access to financial solutions, fundraising, the cost of equipment, all financial reeled issues are among the main constraints that they are encountering.

We also asked them for their different challenges. And you see there again that the cost of the equipment is important. The cost of funding, difficulty to have access to some technical services as well, are all issues that they have to overcome.

And among the organisation that we surveyed, we see all kinds of different financial situations on the level of covering the total costs coming from the operational revenues coming from the operations.

And you see here that there is just a minority of the initiatives surveyed that cover all the costs with their autonomous revenues, ask that this part of -- this rate of covering the cost is quite variable coming from 0 up to a few minor minority cases where there is a full coverage of costs coming from the revenues. And this will depend mostly on the social policy and the type of population that are covered by the service.

Here is -- this is not a contemporary art try and failure, it's a graphic demonstration of the very large diversity of solutions that are put forward by the initiatives as how do we split the revenues from private fees paid by the user, community financing, public grants, municipal, our local government support. And not only that there's different recipes but there's a different mixture of those different sources that are used, depending on the countries and the regions where the initiatives are active.

And this implies that with different sides of operations and different levels of autonomous revenues, and different solutions as blended source of revenues you will have to encounter different kinds of financing in order to accompany those initiatives into keeping operating and developing their revenues.

And one of the basic strategies for us is we really have to build on a mixture of financial projects where impact will be funded mostly by graphs and it will be financed by loans and the working capital and the risk part of the operation should be at least partially financed by flexible refundable financial projects. And that together those three kinds of sources should be involved in each project, because they are self-reenforcing.

The strategy of sharing a strategy between equity and grant allows the grant part -- reduces the risk perception by the refund Alberta part of the financing and by consequence will help to reduce the interest rates that will be expected from the players.

And the fact that bringing some debt part in the financing of the projects that are directly, namely depending on grants, will allow the system to accompany more projects and to increase the volume of financing that may be available for each project.

Right now, as you see in this slide, all the CCCIs that we surveyed had more than one type of financing that was involved in the project. The red financing that you see are all refundable and the blue financing are all non-refundable and you see that international corporations, or corporation development agencies are the main players that we most frequently see in those cases that we surveyed but they never are alone in financing a project.

So for our -- in my last 40 seconds at least, our main proposal and message is that there is a clear need and pertinents to bring a financial mechanism that will be blended/financed in order to increase the volumes that are available for the connectivity initiatives that are led and made for communities. And that kind of project should allow to increase the size of the projects, and even if it has to pay a certain part of interest on its financing, it should allow to lower the cost per user with economies of scale. So that was the main message with the importance of having a flexible and has to be adapted to each and every CCCIs that has to be supported. Thank you very much.

>> MODERATOR: Thank you very much, Claude for highlighting -- more providing us a very good detailed of mapping and also starting to put forward what could be the solution, right, the direction towards -- we are starting to move, especially with the next presentation by Nathalia Foditsch and Brian VO. Sorry he is also with us. He is chief investor of Connect Humanity and they are building an impact investing market community center. Nathalia, the floor is yours.

>> NATHALIA FODITSCH: Hi, everyone. I'm really happy to be with you remotely. I wish I was there in person. It's so good to see many of you.

And this study was commissioned by APC. So I would like to thank APC and the community center and the internet providers we have talked to. I know some of them are -- and Lisa mentioned that Gustaff is there in person and our colleague from Tanda NET, so thank you, everybody for providing valuable input and helping us developing this study.

So it's a first pro sectional analysis of community centered internet providers in the Global South through the lens of investability.

So nine initiatives were assessed, and the initiatives were in South America, Africa and Asia. And as some colleagues have mentioned before, this is more important than ever, because -- first of all I think -- I might be mistaken but it's the first time we have a discussion on IGF discussing specifically on financing. So while this has been a need for a long time, I'm glad to see that we are finally starting to add that to the agenda here too.

And we have seen some major challenges over the past months, right, in regards to financing development. So I'm really glad we are talking about financing as was mentioned.

I would like to introduce my colleague Brian Vo the Chief Investment Officer. He has almost 20 years of investment strategy and experience and he has a portfolio of projects he has been involved in of $7 billion. So he knows what he is talking about, right. He will present the study and we will both be here for questions later.

>> BRIAN: Thanks, Nathalia, it's been a joy to work with Claude and Lisa. A lot of supply moments from the supply side of the capital but also the demand side of the capital, and that was a part of the equation that we really focused on. So what do we do? As Nathalia mentioned we analyzed nine different CCIs across the world.

But why did we do that? What we wanted to add to the conversation was beyond some of the top-down evaluations of what does the market need. What do CCIs need, we wanted to look at it from a bottom-up nature to really start with the finish line if we looked at these organisations as potential investments as an investors how might we underwrite it? Would we do an investment as they are right now? If not what might be some of the gaps that would be preventing us from doing an investment today?

So that really was the goal of it, to say let us purely look at this from an investment underwriting perspective. What might we be able to learn about the organisations and really the state of readiness. Because I know there's a lot of conversation around investment readiness and investment ready.

So with that lens, with that mind set, we used our underwriting risk framework that we have used for all of our real investments, actual investments. And that centered around five major things. First is looking at the network technical design. How is the network designed?

How is the organisation thinking about construction, operation, engaging the community, getting subscribers, maintaining the network, staff buildout, et cetera.

Second one was around community engagement. How are they thinking about getting that right to play? How are they estimating actual demand? How are they thinking about pricing their products and services? That culminated in the third thing around business model.

So these are all the parts of the equation, but how is the team then bringing it together to say here really is our business plan, our projects are our expected financials, the gaps in the types of capital we might be needing.

Fourth was then our portfolio impact. So we wanted to mimic it really from an investor perspective, where investors wouldn't just look at an opportunity in isolation. I'm going to look at potentially investing in this organisation and how that -- the economics of that particular deal fit into my portfolio. Does it weight average my returns up or down. Does it weight average my collective risk up or down?

And then the fifth one was around legal and compliance. Those were around the standard fair do you have the right license and permits and financial audits to date. So that's what we did. Here is a snapshot of the organisations that we were able to engage. So as can you see we were quite intentional in really trying to get that cross section from really representation across the Global South.

So what is it that we learned?

The first one is demand is real. I don't I this that will be news to anybody online or in the room. But it was very -- I think inspiring to see how potent that demand really was and how the organises, the CCIs were able to capture that, communicate that. With many of them -- with a few years under operation, having take rates in the 30-50% range.

From an investment perspective really great to see am I think here is also great to see a lot of innovation around the business model. How different CCIs Mike capture that demand in terms of -- you know some might have a subscription types of products where others had vouchers.

The second major thing that we learned was the technical capacity is very credible. The level of depth in how the CCIs spoke about the thoughtfulness of designing the network, different types of equipment that they were using, redundancy and resiliency to their network, was really impressive. I think there was such a depth in the problem solving and the grasp of the technicalness of really connecting the unconnected.

So really that technical expertise we saw really in spades. The third one then is growth is primarily blocked by structural barriers. What are some of the structural barriers that we saw? First and foremost is lack of access to capital. One of the priority thing we are talking about here. But it seemed to be more on the CapEx side rather than the auth-ex side. Most of the organisations we analyze were financially sustainable in some way, at least on the operating side. So it really was that CapEx, that you.

Front inclusion that they needed to either build or grow that network.

Most of the capital we have seen in here has been from multilaterals, donors, funders of some sort. And that kind of led to the second major structural barrier which is -- I think when we saw CCIs growth from primarily grant funding that altered the way that we were engaging with them on how to talk about -- how we were talking about their business model number in their financials. So oftentimes those organisations who were founded through grant funding, who had more -- when asked for financials that was where we saw more grant proposal budgets and that lens of thinking rather than financial protections that you might get from, you know privately owned, privately operated type of company.

And then lastly structural barriers from ins a jurisdiction from structuring and license to eligible for different entities.

So what now? The first one is we saw a huge opportunity to design better capital. And Claude mentioned a few potential financing tools. I think when we looked at broadbands in particular and CCIs, it is just a different business model. It is a different type of -- you know business organisation that is not just infrastructure but also not just community or Civil Society, right.

So the need to create a financing product that makes more sense for this type of business. I think it's been a big need.

Part of that also is -- it seems like you get such a step away from just thinking about a single deal perspective and thinking about it as a portfolio perspective. You know while we looked at nine -- some might be on the margins, invest or don't invest, and ready or not ready. But I would say the more that we are able to aggregate those underlying CCIs together, you are actually more able to spread the project risk and the connectivity risk across several CCIs and that might be a better way to unlock capital-ex scale. And funding assistance. When I mentioned the technical assistance was strong does deep there was a variance of business planning business modelling translating from, you know grant-led organisation to revenue and earned income-led. So being able to pair that technical assistance with investment, either pre and post development, we think is also important.

Think of this as infrastructure investing and not charity. That was I think an incredible thing, an ah-ha moment for us when we were engaging with some who started as grants and nonprofits, are trying to figure out what their pricing model is. But there's this jump I can see within the organisation and internal dialogues about how do we evolve the organisation really into a -- you know sophisticated, financially sustainable operator, not just the market.

And capitalising the markets, I think we can do this through facilities and funds, not just looking at it through deal by deal. I think a second one is really developing the spoke underwriting tools and benchmarks here. If you are copying and peacing and underwriting algorithm from another industry, it's just not going to work for broad bands. Connectivity, particularly for CCIs it's the intersection of way too many things to fit into the box of other underwriting.

And then lastly, figuring out how to align philanthropy with investment capital. I would say on that fund or portfolio basis. So those are our biggest learnings. I will turn it over back to you.

>> MODERATOR: Thank you, Brian. This is really enlightening. I think Nathalia you're right it's the first time we have analogy from investors. That actually could be a guide for investors that want to chip into this -- invest into these initiatives or actually also a guide that community network leaders and associations can use to reverse engineer it, and know what to pitch to investors which is also quite useful. And then also I think I speak on behalf of all the panelists here saying that Brian, if you need investors have billions, please contact us and we will give you a lot of tips.

Now to go on with our presentations. And I would like to ask the last presenters to stick to time so we still have a good 10 minutes to discuss. Carl Elmstam from week thank you for joining us online.

>> CARL ELMSTAM: Thank you for having me. Sorry for not being there in person. But I'm happy to be online. Sorry to not repeat the same point I think this is timely begin ow many owners are reducing budgets. We even see major withdrawals from developments in some cases. So timing is great for this.

So my experience is mostly from CEDA I started working. But mostly the European commission. I've been second to the European commission. And I think, Claude, you had a slide where you had sort of relational challenges or something like that, working with private investors or even the DFI investors. And sort of combining that with development corporation or -- you know Civil Society culture kind of. I think that should not be underestimated, those challenges. Basically -- like it's different languages, there is clearly a need for facilitation or interpretation. So that's an important point from my perspective.

And looking at the technical side. The financing, for the last years I've been working on -- I was working on set, up a fund. So this fund was more commercially drink. And I mean, let's also remember, and not forget the fact that the connectivity market in many places in Africa is going to grow a lot. So there should be room for different types of actors, different types of investments.

So the fund that I was working on, or sort of the fund structure, it was similar to, this sort of based on -- you know looking at existing types of investments in connectivity but really ranging from submarine cables to mobile networks or even data centers could be included in this work that I did.

And there I think Brian also mentioned something important. Because you have to have a portfolio perspective for sure to reduce risk, so spread risk. But there is also -- it's important to consider have you to spread it in the right way. Because in the end you will be sitting there with a group of people, and a fund manager who are identifying the projects to invest. In and of course they can't be experts in all types of digital infrastructures across all continents because that would require a huge team to do that in an initiate way.

So I think striking the right balance and basically allowing more of those community networks that are sort of likely or to have high revenues. And somehow graded in order to be able to finance the one with high risk, basically.

And of course it makes complete sense. I think Claude, you put it very clearly in your presentation. It's really about bringing together multistakeholder group to do the investments.

At the bottom there should be grant funding which is for technical assistance or -- you know the setting up costs of the -- of whatever punish functioning you are building, right. And actors like CEDA, we can do guarantees. The European commission can also do guarantees to lower the risk for other investors. And of course these other investments -- investors could be -- you know organisations like the World Bank and national DFIs clearly they would be interested in the social return of investment, right.

But I think it's important to see them as different layers. Because depending on how commercial or how commercial I will viable the projects end up being or how big a portion you have of the more commercially viable projects you might even have private investors on the top. And of course in a layered investor structure, it's probably -- Well, of course the ones who are giving out the guarantees or the grants at the sort of bottom of the structure, they will all be the most likely to lose the money or to lose their investments in case of failures. And the risk goes lower and lower the higher you get in the structure. And not very fairly but I guess logical in another way. When there is some return on the investments the people on the top of this gets repaid first.

So that's where you might be able to even attract private investors with or without guarantees. So I hope that might be helpful. I think that there are similar cases that could be used. Or that could sort of guide this a bit. But, yeah, basically -- although, sorry there was one other thing. I think there will also be sort of a relational issue when you try to combine development assistant funding grants with companies, just as simple as that. Because you run into issues of the older grants should no be -- you know able to generate profits. I mean revenues.

So there are quite some challenges around that. But other than that, I think relational challenges, spreading the risk and allowing more commercial thing to come in to carry the less commercial one, those would be sort of my highlight. But thanks a lot.

>> MODERATOR: Thank you for respecting the time and also for highlighting something we have strived to emphasize at (?) the examples of multistakeholder partnerships and we frequently speak about mum stakeholder dialogues but we also should analyze how stakeholders enter better act together to build strategies from? That has been instrumental for the organisation of this work. Please, Alessandra, the floor is yours.

>> ALESSANDRA LUSTRATI: Thank you very much. And thank you for having me here. And even all the great point have been made. So I will try to add a little bit from the perspective of CEDA and for you fundamental we think this piece of work is but also how it fits in last night through connectivity and community based solution and community networks and a shoutout to the governments in the room because I've been on the roof to (?) to see the technology in 2019, I think and almost broke a leg. And I have seen the bamboo tower in Chiptagula (?) with Gustaff, so I feel everything we are discussing in this room today.

It may sound theoretical, we talk about SORI and how can we work on the underwriting, et cetera. It is actually something extremely concrete that has a direction impact on people's lives. And I am extremely proud of the work that has been done by others. I mean I was marinating all of this but I'm really glad we are progressing in this field.

Just to Zoom out very quickly, the reason why I'm speaking here with you is because from FC -- (?) we have been supporting this connectivity in many ways. We decided we would be supporting the community networks and community based solutions for connectivity was like a foundational block of digital inn delusion which is a key pillar of our digital strategy 2020 to 2030.

But this is just a new strategy. Of course we have been doing this for many years. And for the digital access programme, we have been having for over four year, I think. The collaboration and partnership with the ACP and stakeholders with.

That different types of approach and donors who work in different ways but compliment each other.

Obviously the social enterprises, the community networks the experts in finance, obviously great NGOs like APC and ISOC is a fundamental actor and the academic and research expertise, all of this has to come together to progress. We have been working on supporting digital inclusion in particular, as connectivity model, all of these work in two parallel levels. One is the regulatory framework standards and Spectrum management and we are committed in the U.K. to continue work on that so we can create a better business environment actually for social enterprises and community net works. So that's connectivity.

And the other level is more in the community and in the market. Basically testing those technology and business models that makes sense at the local level, that have to be very diverse as Claude was saying and that can become sustainable if we work, obviously on the upper bit forms of access to finance. And this is also -- the topic that is very close to my heart. SME finance in the olden days and digital and financial inclusion. Feel it's all coming together.

Mainly just mention. We want to have at least a few minutes interior for the questions, of course. I will just mention the points that have struck me the most in all the presentations.

So the fact we have managed now to read the concept of social enterprise and SORI as Lisa explained, the fact that we think now differently about community networks and their investability, or recognizing that we need a blended finance approach, where we can't expect the community networks to suddenly become from one day to the other fully viable, for instance, the private commercial investors, so the importance of starting from the ground and blending it directly with different types of finance. It would be interesting to do more in the future to understand the equity in this and I know there are different ideas what have would be viable.

We talked about the underwriting and how to actually analyze -- you know what are the different features of the community networks. In different context or seeing that the demand is real. That there is very deep capabilities and work of APC and other partners like the school of community network, building local leadership and local technical capability and being able to do the operation and maintenance of community network.

So you have a really robust entity can you invest in. But there are other barriers and I think Brian, if I'm not wrong, explained that really well in terms of both access to finance but the business capability of the very basic level, not designing a grant but designing a proper focus for your business.

So growing the business capability also of community networks. The demand side rather than just the supply side of sources of finance investment we can think. The importance of aggregating and using scale to distribution and spread risk but also reach that critical mass that can lose the costs and make everything more attractive for investors.

And then -- mainly just come to the last point, in the U.K. we want to continue to be committed to add value where we can.

Because through the digital access programme what we can do with the type of finance that we have in that programme, and in our digital development portfolio and the Colin made an important point about the use of how can you co-mingle with other types of fun. We can continue to support thing like technical assistance, capacity building, the broader business en, and of course reducing some of the costs of maybe the unwriting for the individual investment efforts, that's something we can do. Maybe can he cannot directly obviously invest the money. And also we don't have any return of capital in our portfolio but we hope we can continue to add value in that sense.

I will leave it at that but I want to congratulate again everybody involved in the work and looking forward to the questions. Thank you.

>> MODERATOR: Fantastic. Thank you so much, Alessandra. Now it's time to check with Carlos, if we have any questions from the audience. I see that he is running to find a source of energy for his commuter. So let me try to reverse the order and start from the room.

So if we have any questions or comments from the audience, nick you would like to know as to our participate --

Ask to our participate's and our panelists. I also see that, yes we have a hand raised. I think there is a microphone there. Or if you want you can even have a seat with us. And take a complimentary copy of the report. And you may ask your question. It's on. We can hear you.

>> QUESTION: Thank you. My name is James (?) from Kenya, where we are running a community network. I appreciate the research done on various community networks. And the -- one of the items I would like to highlight is the structure of community networks by the nature of their licenses that they have. They are supposed to -- you have to seek funding of investors and when you look at your business model they see a lot of risks, because we are looking more at social return on investment as opposed to -- you know the profits themselves.

If you look at -- like the area where we work, where people fin it very difficult to pay $10 in a month, then you need very large numbers to be able to break even. Some of us are actually passing on resources on community networks to have them work. Because when we try to seek funding, we have actually not found any one donor, even giving in excess of 15,000 dollars. When you look at the network equipment that is required to expand the network to solve a large area, you realise that you need a lot of -- you know -- a large amount to be spent on equipment. Especially around CapEx and OP-ex, so most of these community networks are relying on much more volunteers and other initiatives, and I think it's high time that in governments and donors look at them as a social good and continue to count money, just like they do in health and education in order to have many people -- you know enjoy the benefits of digital opportunities. Thank you.

>> MODERATOR: Thank you so much for this very important statement. Do we have, did sorry I think now Carlos has energy. So we can --

>> ONLINE MODERATOR: Sorry about that. There was a question in the chat. I don't see the person who asked it any more. Maybe he left but what is the relationship between connectivity viability and energy viability and perhaps also monetary uses for any available energy. I don't know if maybe in the context of climate finance and some of the other thing we are talking about, whether any of the panelists or the -- also the research from Lisa on the KRA, around green and annual impact, whether this is any reflection there that you would like, to sir, highlight. Thank you.

>> MODERATOR: I see that Chris that was to the $1 million question. So please go ahead.

>> CHRIS LOCKE: Just about the networks, when we talked about the development and capacity training power is one of the most important things. Not just from the perspective of wanting to move to greener solutions from power. And also -- we know this is the case, and I visit visited recently in Tanda NET where power -- allowing power to grow is one of the most requested thing we have as a training topic after basics of training network and managing it as the bakes.

>> MARIE LISA DECANAY: From the community networks they need power in the form of renewable energy because they don't have access to the grid. So I think investments in green energy is very important side by side with investments for community connectivity initiatives. But maybe some of the community networks that are working on this, like Gustaff you might want to come into the discussion about the relationship between energy and demand for energy and also connectivity.

>> MODERATOR: If you want to do so you have 1 minute and 8 seconds.

>> Well, thank you for the opportunity. In terms of energy supply, some most of our projects that we are working with, there are almost none electric supply. So we have to -- like in (?) we use hydro supply. And the community is already running hydro for quite sometime and they are very secure for that. So there are strong connections between green energy supply with community center connectivity. Thank you.

>> MODERATOR: Fantastic. As we only have 31 seconds left, I think it is time to wrap up and I would like to thank everyone. Also I would also like to remember that on our side connectivity.org there are also previous reports and one of them was also dedicated to exploring some of the issues on sustainable but from a more environmental perspective some years ago we have done a lot of work. So if you are into this topic please go there and download as much as you wants. Because it's free.

And I would like to thanks very much all the participants and all the speakers, and particularly our friend Carlos. And if she can hear us online our friend Senka Hadzic. And thank you for all the discussions. See you next year.

(Applause)