PDIA Conversation with Alieu Nyei and Ganga Palakatiya

Matt Andrews These three are in our teaching team. We have worked with them around the world and when I say we, it’s Salimah and myself and this is Tim McNaught who is also part of our team. We worked in Sri Lanka and the government’s problem was that it had not found foreign direct investment in new sectors for about 20 or 30 years. So the country had, in the late 1970s… Managed to attract investors to help create a clothing sector that became incredibly competitive. Very very good clothing sector. So you know before I worked in Sri Lanka I didn’t understand that the clothing sector could be really high tech. But Sri Lanka is the place where most of Victoria’s secret clothes come from which are really you know I don’t want to say high end because it’s not that it’s kind of high tech clothing. It’s also where a lot of the clothing that is designed by Nike and places like that, you know, the kinds of materials where they take your sweats and they get your sweat out of the shirts immediately. A lot of that stuff came from Sri Lanka. The problem is that the clothing sector, no matter how high-tick it is, is something that is really affected by the cost of labor. And as your country moves from being a low income country to a low middle income country people start to get, you know, businesses start to say is there a cheaper place to go to and the people in the sector start to say we don’t want to work in clothing factories anymore. And so Sri Lanka started to run into a situation where the sector plateaued in terms of growth and they needed other sectors to look into. But if you want to get other sectors, you really need to get investors who can bring their know-how and they didn’t have those investors. So seven or eight teams from the board of investment came together focused on finding investors. And one of the members of the team was Ganga. And Ganga was on a team called the R-Team, which is the investment promotion team. There were a bunch of other teams. Ganga is a research officer. Research that you’re taught throughout. At the Board of Investment, and one of the coaches was Anisha. Anisha was coaching, she’s, oh you’re like the therapist, Anisha! Alieu worked with us in a different way. We worked with a group in South Africa called Cabri. And Cabri worked with seven or eight countries at a time. And we helped train the coaches in Cabri to work with the countries. He worked with the Liberia team. And there were a bunch of other teams. A key part of their work was developing peer relationships across countries. As we said, he met Alieu there, so it’s a good peer relationship. I thought that Anisha could host a conversation between the three of them. So let me invite them up here now. I said to them, let’s have the conversation go 20 to 30 minutes. If you guys have any questions after that, that’s great. And remember that we also have the next couple of days, they’re going to be with us all the time so we can carry on those conversations. They don’t all have to happen tonight. Okay. But, welcome guys.

Anisha Poobalan Thank you. It’s been great getting to know all of you the past couple of days. Great meeting everyone, and just thank you for listening to our stories as well. So I don’t think I need to introduce Alieu and Ganga, but we’ve heard a bit about Alieu’s problems, so I’m probably gonna start with Ganga and just ask her to tell us a little bit about her problem. And how the construction of your problem went, how the deconstruction went.

Ganga Palakatiya Thank you, Anisha. Hi to all of you. Actually, I think that you have heard of Sri Lanka. Matt told you more and more about Sri Lanka, but I have to tell you that the problem actually arises It was rare. It’s a country, we actually have been experiencing post-conflict economy, but in 1978, we open the economy for foreign direct investment. So until 2018, from 1978 to 2018, that means 40 years, we actually could have attracted only about US$17 billion. So which is less than the few countries like India, Indonesia, they attract more than that in a year. So it’s kind of a Like actually we need to think of it and when it comes to the exports actually, our export basket is very limited. As Matt said, the more portion is from the upper set. So we are not actually engaged in manufacturing other technical productions, so that actually made us thinking of why we fail to attract FDI. The problem is actually the lack of export catalyzing FDI, we found the problem, the lack of the export catalyzing Fdi. So that is the problem that we need to look at and to find out the solution. The solution we thought was to attract foreign investment and to make Sri Lanka as their most preferable destination for the value-added manufacturing. So that was the rise in that race.

Anisha Poobalan Yeah, so the process of the Sri Lanka PDIA project was a little different. We first met with the teams in a workshop where we had about five teams who kind of convened. They did not have, for example, Ganga had no experience in promotions, for example investor promotions. And so this was a completely new area for them. The problem was completely new. Their team members, some of them were from your department, some of them from other departments within the organization, and some of them from other organizations as well. So they were meeting new people for the first time, too. So that’s just the context in which this workshop was happening. And so then we got down to the problem construction and the problem deconstruction, which is what you all did today, kind of drawing up your fishbone. So can you tell me a little bit about your first impressions, maybe your teammates’ first impressions on that first day, what was everybody kind of thinking of this new crazy food process that Matt was talking about?

Ganga Palakatiya Actually it was an amazing experience for me and the Board of Investment as well. So initially actually we had around 7 to 8 members from different departments of BOI. For an example, I am from the Research and Policy Advocacy Department. There were members from investment appraisal and also from the Promotion Department and also the Legal Department. Initially, I was actually thinking why that actually has to be done by the promotion department, why research, why legal, why investment appraisal, why sole management as well. But at the end of the day, I realized why actually we needed all those expertise to attract the right investment. And also, as Anisha said, we found out the problem. And we deconstructed the problem into pieces, like we constructed the fish bone analysis and there we found so many reasons why we could not achieve export catalyzing FDI to Sri Lanka. Mainly, the main problem was actually we didn’t have a master plan for the FDI attraction. So the government actually was not thinking about a master plan, which has to come from the top of the government. So we thought of formulating strategies to attract investment. In that case, actually, we needed to be very specific, be very and also we had to thought about the base and means of attracting investments so in that case where there were so many problems we identified through the fishbone diagram if I say some like we don’t have we actually have only 21 million people in our country in a 65 000 square kilometers of space, so we don’t have a very large domestic market. So most of the investors, they look at the market. And also, we don’t have a large amount of FTS signed with other countries. We have only two FTS. Now, actually, it’s three, which we signed recently. We had only with India and Pakistan. And also our utility cost is so high. So the manufacturing sector. We need some kind of subsidized programs for the utility sector, especially for the electricity and water. So those are the problems we identified through the FISH Diagram.

Anisha Poobalan Alieu, I’m going to ask you a little bit about the team, the team that you are working with. Because all of you are now going to have to go back to your teams, your respective teams, and work with them. You know, sometimes it’s easier, you might think it’s just kind of convincing yourself this is a great process. How are you going to go and convince your team members and also work with them towards solving a problem? So do you want to tell us a little about an experience. What were the key challenges and also how did you motivate your team members to go on this journey with you?

Alieu Nyei Yes, I think it works. So in Liberia, you know, when the project document was submitted to Calgary, the political authorizer actually formed the team. So there was a selection of the team that was sent along with the proposal. And in a way, the team was drawn from various departments and sections within the ministry that were deemed to be important to finding a solution to some of the issues. So for example. We’re looking at challenges in budget executions though. We have someone from the Department of Budget, we have someone from the Comptroller and Accounting General’s Office, we have some one from Revenue and Tax Policy, and we have one from Aid and Debt Management. So… The idea behind the formation of that team was okay, by bringing people from these various offices is going to help in putting together the information that was required in order to get things done. But what we realized after the inception workshop, the framing workshop, when we came back, Initially, to get teams to work together is really, really difficult, especially for our team. The first thing why that was so was because when we started to look at the problem, especially during the deconstruction, if you want to say, oh, maybe there is a problem with the aid data or the data on debt, the representative from the deaf management office who’s on the team. That particular person saw it like oh, okay, maybe he tried to tell us that my office is very inefficient So no, that’s not an issue So it was almost like at the beginning everyone basically tried to say no, this is not the problem, but eventually the team was able to come together. And in order to get the team to work together, we have to be very specific on team dynamics. So we were able to assign tasks and responsibilities to various members of the team. For example, someone was responsible for sending out a citation for team meetings, even though we all knew when the meetings were happening, but a reminder email had to be sent out. And when we were having our meetings, someone was responsible for taking the notes. Engaging political authorizers, someone was also responsible. When we had to update our assignments to the group assignments to Canvas, there was somebody responsible to do that. And there was also someone, basically like the team lead, responsible to follow up with team members to ensure that team members were submitting their assignments on time and some of the roles and responsibilities we have clearly defined for the teams were actually being followed through. So we were able to do that and that worked. In our institutions, it’s pretty simple and easy to find people putting these rules together, but the issue is, do we really end up following those rules? So we decided to go a step further for our team. So we say, okay, because when we had the, after coming back from the inception workshop, we had a first two, three team meetings. There were cases where other members of the team would come to the meeting a little Okay, maybe next week. Late. Other people won’t come to the meeting, there won’t be an excuse, so we say, okay, let us maybe develop a rule, I mean, various rules for the team. So we have rules, for example, if you are not coming to a meeting, you need to make sure you do a formal email to the team members stating the reason. If you did not come to a meet without providing a justification, you had to pay a fine. Yeah. And uh

Anisha Poobalan Did that work?

Alieu Nyei It worked! If I would actually…

Anisha Poobalan Did you make a lot of money?

Alieu Nyei We generated some money, and if you came to a meeting late, you also paid fine. Yeah, if you have a task to deliver and you did not deliver it on time, you pay fine. So what we did was, the money we raised from some of those meetings, we used the money actually to get water when it came next, and that really worked. But I think the key message for that is… There was real commitment from the team, the entire team, because we were able to collectively put together our own rules to guide the operation of the team and in ways we were able to hold each other mutually accountable. So when we had team meetings and there were other members of the team that were not basically coming up to speed with what we needed to do, we basically had it all. And also one thing that was important, even though I was the most senior person on the team, what we did and it really worked was, we decided to make sure that we do not enter into the team with our formal titles, because if you go in the team and you say, okay, I’m the minister, I am the director, so if there is disagreement on a particular issue, my views should stand, you’re going to basically make it really difficult for ideas, for nation, for people to come out with ideas, especially sometimes to even challenge your own views on issues. So we were able to do that, and that really helped. So from the beginning it was tough, but he said that eventually, over time, the team emerged stronger, were able overcome some of these things, and that was really, really important. So even after… The political transition in Liberia, sometimes the team members still meet and the bond, the friendship that was established because of that particular work we did together has remained, has remained. So that was the team dynamic that really helped us to push through with some of the things that we did.

Anisha Poobalan Yeah, and I’m so glad you brought up, if you can’t hear me, just let me know. I’m just gonna try the project. I’m glad you’ve brought up accountability because that was something that we saw a lot in Sri Lanka too. So part of my job was to motivate teams. And we had, like we said, five teams, and these were like whole teams, so whole groups of people had to be motivated. And I found too that accountability was a huge factor, like accountability to the other teams, because we suddenly, they started to see this other team is actually dependent on our team’s work, and what we produce, because they’re waiting for us to do our work. And then, you know, they’re going to learn from us, we can learn from them. So that accountability. But also we talk about authorization. So accountability to your authorizers, you know, like they’re, they are giving you authority to do the work, but now you are accountable, you’re responsible, like you said, to come back and say, we’ve done something and we’ve learned something. And so I think that was a huge motivational factor. We did not collect money, but I’m glad it worked for you guys. So now I’d like to talk a little bit about, you know we call this process also like facilitated emergence. So I’d love to talk about emergence in both of your experiences. So I like to get Ganga’s kind of thoughts on like what did you try, what did learn from that and how did that change your next steps and like how did change the trajectory of where you thought you might be going and where you. We’re going now. I think, is your mic on? You can use that.

Ganga Palakatiya So, first of all, I have to tell you that when it comes to our team, I told you that there were seven to eight members at the initial stage. But what I realized was, in the initial stages, the members were not actually in a very confident level of what we are doing. So they actually had a very, like, this will be another course, another project that we will do, like we will learn theories and then go back to the office and do the same thing. So, but at the beginning my difference was actually I realized that this will… Because I saw that this will be another course, but there will be a more practical approach. So with that belief actually I started working. There were some members who left the group and again we appointed other members. But with the time, our members also, maybe they took about two to three months to realize that. Our members realized that this will be really amazing experience for us and will be result oriented. So that was one thing I learnt from this, we need to believe, if we do something we need to be believe it and we need start it at the beginning and we had to work hard to achieve the targets. So that part actually I wanted to give you this message. So believe this cook, this is result oriented, so we actually experienced the result, that’s why we are talking here, Alieu and me. So, if I talk about the things that I have done, so I was actually, our team, we divided it into several, I mean, we actually assigned several sectors. Initially we selected sectors There was a targeting team also, they were actually conducting a very comprehensive research to find out what are the sectors, what are potential sectors that we can, the Sri Lanka can attract more and more investment. But actually we could not wait until there are findings. So we, in our team, we realized that we need to initiate work. So with our understanding, we selected some sectors. At the end of the day, some of the sectors actually that matches with the findings of the targeting sector team. So in that case, I was assigned for solar panel manufacturing. Oh my god, I didn’t know about solar. Even when I thought of that, I knew only that solar panels, they are fixed on the rooftop. That’s the only thing I knew. So Matt was telling me, so you have to do solar panels Matt, actually. You have to attract anchor investors. Not just investors, anchor investors to the country. So it was really an exciting thing. I was thinking how to do this, it was really a challenge because it’s a really new set of Sri Lanka. There was no any manufacturing plants, only one assembly plant which was in the construction stage and even it’s very small plant and also there was some small assembling like small scale assembly plants all over the Sri Lanka, 102. So I was thinking how can I do this? It was actually kind of a challenge that initially I thought, no, I can’t do this. So, but with the time, I started to do research because I have a research background. That’s why I told you that our team members with different, different expertise. At the end of the day, I wanted to utilize their expertise as well. I will tell you how I utilized this. So I did research. And even that, at the initial stage, I realized that India is doing massively, and China is also doing massively. Being a very small country, like a pearl, so how can we do this? So that was the initial thinking. But with the time I realized, we have, we, Sri Lanka actually has really very advantages, is really competitive advantageous. Just like if you take the strategic location of Sri Lanka, which connects East and West, so that will be the real advantage for the company to come and set up their plants here. If you take Europe is the main buyer, main consumer of solar panel. We have that connectivity. And also we have the duty-free facility for the 28 EU countries under EUGSP+. So those are the things that I could realize. And also I was looking at how to manufacture this solar panel. I have seen this but I don’t know how to manufacture it, what is the process, what are the raw materials they use. When I was searching, I was surprised that the main raw material the codes, we have plenty of codes in our country, which has the 99% purity, which needs to manufacture solar panels. So that, actually that impressed me and step by step, I got confidence on why, I thought why he told me this kind of a challenge, why he might give me, but I realized why he gave me this. So, with the time, actually, we constructed a strategy. That strategy was not written in anywhere, but with the time, I told you that this is a practical course, practical project. So with the times, I realized and our team realized how to do this. So in that case, we construct four strategic approaches. Shall I continue? The four strategic approach, the first one is to understand the sector. Without understanding the sector, we can’t promote it. When the investor comes to meet us, we should know the sector We should know what is the product and how it gets manufactured, the process and what are the benefits. And what are the benefits that we can offer to the investor, those actually we had to have in our mind. So that we believe that we have to have a very good understanding of the sector. So we did best research. First we did research using the internet and reading the reports. And there we thought that it’s not enough. Then we moved into practical approach, like we went to see the, I told you that only one manufacturing plant was there, but we went there. And we saw the manufacturing pros and we talked to the people and we knew the problems. That was really effective. And then we turned to the experts. There were experts, we could find some experts in the solar sector, so we could talk to them and build up our knowledge more and more. In that way we actually understand sector. We understood the sector and the second strategy was to construct promotional materials. So in that we constructed promotional materials, we had a lecturer at the workshop, a top entrepreneur, so he suggested that we should and to have a attractive pitch book to offer to the investor, so we did that with full effort, with the we get and we really share it at the first time. When we do it and when we share it, it was not that attractive, but with the views and suggestions and comments, we constructed it in a way that we can develop it in like a very attractive and informative way. So then actually we started to build up the network to engage with the investors. So that actually we were helped by the MAT by introducing us to the embassies, high commissioners and the business community and also the Chamber of Commerce. So we provided our materials to them and we requested them to engage us with the investors. In that way actually, we could, step by step, we would… We could go through the process in attracting investments.

Anisha Poobalan Would you like to talk a bit about the strategy for engaging investors, a little bit, you know, the 300, like, you had to call just, yeah.

Ganga Palakatiya In this course, we actually learned about the 300:30:3:1 rule. That means to attract one investor, one substantial investor, we had to first talk to 300 investors. We had to engage with 300 investors and then… There will be continuous engagement only with 30 investors and out of that three will submit proposals and only one will land. So we went through that strategy and we tried our best to engage with more and more investors.

Anisha Poobalan Yeah, so it was quite a daunting task when Matt brought this strategy to the team. I mean, it was a lot of just cold calls and emails and just, you know, creating just a network and trying to engage with as many investors as possible, you know, just that, I mean I remember that experience was just, yeah, it was crazy. Alieu, is there something you’d like to add about the process and, you know, what you guys tried, what you guys learned? And then kind of how you will follow it from there.

Alieu Nyei Yes. When we started the process, actually when we came back from the inception workshop we had a pretty different view about the problem. We thought that the problem was more of the ministries and agencies and less of the responsibility of the ministry of finance. And then… One thing that we decided to do was to have conversations within the Ministry of Finance meeting key stakeholders. So we talked to some of the line technicians, the directors, and the ministers. And that enabled us to understand the problem in a much more deeper sense than we knew prior to the conversation. So as a result of that, of the conversation, one thing that we decided to do next was to have a forum where we will bring all of these people together. So we call it internal coordination workshop. So we have a working session wherein we’ll draw all of the key stakeholders together to just talk about the issues.

Anisha Poobalan And have you ever done that before?

Alieu Nyei We’ve never done that before because we talk about problems basically about going to offices and learning about what’s happening, what’s the challenge here, but to bring all of these departments into a single office, I mean into a room and talk about what the challenges are and then at certain point in time it was really really heated because you have people talking across the room about. Where the responsibilities, I mean who’s not doing their job properly and what needs to be done in order to get things done and eventually after all of the Eventing we’re able to get them to to commit to working together, so After that meeting, in fact, that was how we say, okay, this has been a success. We’ve been able to bring all of these people together. We now know about this problem better. In fact, it was from that meeting that we were able to understand that the Ministry of Finance, in fact, had greater responsibility for the challenges, I mean, for the problem, than the Ministry and agencies. So essentially we say okay after this meeting let’s now call a meeting of the ministries. So that’s how we develop a presentation based on the issues that were shared with us from the various layers, from the technicians, the directors, and the ministers that attended our meeting. That’s how we call the Ministries and Agencies to our meeting, they were so excited to find that for the first time, the Ministry of Finance was making a presentation to them and not… Casting blames at them. We’re basically saying, we understand the challenges that the budget execution has been faced with, and we take responsibility for everything, I mean, at least for 80 to 90% of the things that have gone wrong. So we want to start a new engagement with you on the basis of working together so that we can improve the quality of information exchange in order to make sure that we improve budget execution. And that worked. After that, we said, okay, now that we’ve had this meeting, the next step we need to now do is, let us try to understand also why is it that ministries and agencies are not sending in their reports. So we just collected the report, I mean the information on submission of the report. We realized that just about 30% of the institutions were submitting the report So we went to a bunch of them, talked to some of the institutions that were submitting their reports, why they were submitting the reports, what were some of their issues. And then talk to a bunch of those that were not submitted because if you want to understand the challenges that people are facing, you also have to be able to compare what are the incentives that lead people to submit their reports on time and what are issues that prevent others from doing the same. And that really, really helped us. We realized that our training programs were not targeted in some other institutions. Simple things like, They didn’t have certain skills, and when we called them for these workshops, you have everyone in one room. People are sometimes ashamed to ask specific questions about things that they don’t know. That was one powerful message that we got from the interactions. So the approach was to send teams of people to go and work with some of the reporting teams in the ministries at their desk. So what about the reporting template that you don’t understand, and then provide some insight. And there were also issues about making some revisions to the reporting templates, and we were able to do that. So once we did those things, we realized that the next reporting period submission jumped up to 68%. From about 33% and that improved over time. So that was significant improvement in just few months of interaction and the key driver of that was the way we engaged the ministries and agencies. That normal arrogance that ministries of finance staff were used to where you are the problem, you’re not doing your job well, if you don’t do your report, we’re not going to give you money, we realized that that was not working because initially we had said, okay, if we don’t submit a report, you’re now going to get any money and that’s not going to work, for example, in making health, in education, even without submitting reports. They’re going to get their money. We said, okay, let’s revise some of our execution rules. We wrote new rules, more robust rules, and we realized that no one followed any of those rules. So it’s more about engaging people and making them feel part of the process and bringing them along and also really, really valuing the impulse that they make in order to get things on course. So that was really, very powerful in the project we were able to make for our families.

Anisha Poobalan And the recognition to you.

Alieu Nyei Yes, so one other thing that we did was because the nature of our problem in Sri Lanka, we had a small team that basically had to inspire a whole bunch of people sitting within the Ministry of Finance and also across government to do their work. How do you do that, man? Yeah, so you have a team of five persons. The entire reporting team in the controller and accounting general’s office, there is a reconciliation and reporting team that has to go out to the ministries and agencies to encourage them to do their reports on time. How do you motivate those people in order to get them to their work? So one way we did it was when we engaged them, we got them to work when we really got some good ideas from them. We arranged the presentation where we did presentations to the minister and other members of the senior management team we bring them along at these presentations and we gave them credit because in the public sector what normally happens is You find out that there are maybe some line directors or other senior people that will go to lower level staff and pressurize them, get them to do stuff, and they go to these senior management meetings, sit there, do elaborate presentations. The ministers are so happy that they have really, really good senior staff that are doing excellent job, but we actually changed that dynamic and we realized that that was really, powerful because Just by doing that and bringing people to senior management meetings and recognizing their effort, that really got them to do more, especially in getting things done and engaging other people across the administration, outside of the administration. So that was really, really important in terms of recognizing people’s effort and appreciating them. That was really really good.

Anisha Poobalan Right, so it’s been great to hear about both of your journeys, but I know we are all wondering about a very big challenge when it comes to implementing PDIA, and that is authorization. I guess I’ll start with you, Alieu. How did you go about getting authorization and then also maintaining that authorization and expanding your authorization?

Alieu Nyei When we started working on the problem, the first thing is, you know when you’re talking about issues about off-budget expenditure, on-budgets transfers in an environment where it’s so rampant that many people will just see it as, okay, this is part of standard practice in our budget execution. So how do you change the narrative around that? So what we did was we were able to get real-time data. From our execution, we went up to four years backwards to look at how many transfers have happened in the budget and how they started, for example, allocations that went to education, went to health in order to deliver on basic social services. And we actually have a narrative around it. We met the minister. But more importantly, besides just getting the numbers, we’re also able to carve stories around the numbers. Because we were also in a period of political transition. We were very keen in making the minister and the senior management team of the ministry to understand that there’s going to be significant pressure and the numbers were there, the requests were already piling up from across government for increasing of budget expenditure. That if you continue at this rate it is going to actually reflect badly on the in. The ministry now because in a few months when the political transition happens it’s most likely that all of you are going to be out of this place. What sort of a legacy do you want to be remembered for? Do you want to be remember as someone who actually left the ministry of finance in a mess state or someone who had the a system in place that basically was robust to deal with some of those issues. And when we did the presentation, clearly outlining how these things could help, we got the support of the minister and our political authorizer. But then every one of us that work in public sector, you realize that getting political authorization. It’s difficult, but sometimes it’s not that difficult. Maintaining political authorization is the really, really difficult thing. So what did we do in order to maintain it and grow it in fight over time was to basically bring in our political authorizer into the process so we get regular updates. So each time we go to the political authorizer, we’re able to make progress. Okay, what we were able to achieve, what were the next steps we were considering, and we basically asked, what are your thoughts about how do we do the next step better? So in a way, the authorizer once saw that the team was making progress each time we made updates. And also the suggestions that were coming in from the authorizer were also finding a way to incorporate them so that we can make sure that we are able to achieve a lot. So that was very, very much important for our team in building and getting things done because at the end of the day we’re able to do that. For example, when we’re even planning the budget workshop or the reporting workshop. When we went to the authorizer to tell you how involved the authorizers were, the authorizers basically took the phone and called some of the cabinet ministers that were finding difficulty in getting them to come to the meeting, personally called all of them and they all came on board. That’s not going to happen easily to find a level of involvement of the authorizer unless the authorizer is pretty much certain that this is a team that’s doing a good job and that needs to be supported. But most times what you find people do is, okay, you just have a… You have a long interval during which time you provide update to the authorizer. I personally think that may not be a good option. You need to be able to make sure that the authorizer is regularly updated so that the authorizer understands that that team, my team, is doing a good job. And the only way the authorizers will believe that you are doing a good job is for the authorizer to be regularly updated about private, about challenges, so that basically, all of us, the team, the authorizer, can basically find a way to solve the challenges together. So, in a way, we’re able to bring the authorizers along. And I know that this may not necessarily be an approach. That’s going to be suited for every other content, but that’s exactly what the PDIA. So it’s about basically watching your own content and seeing what really works and how do you design interventions that work.

Anisha Poobalan And eventually, after a while, if you didn’t update the authorizer…

Alieu Nyei Yes, so in fact, there were a few instances, because she was so much involved with the team and the projects we were making, so there were one or two instances where our regular scheduled meeting for update didn’t happen, and the other rather was calling, oh, we need to meet. Yeah, and then we got the team who went, we had a meeting, and they provided the update, and the authorizer was pretty much happy about the team progress. So that is one way of really, really building authorization by getting the authorizers involved in the work. To also be clear about authorization, you do not only need authorization from the political authorizers that you need their support, but the technical thing that I was talking about, maybe you call that acceptance that we engage, you also need to make sure that you always have them along, because we know that in our institutions in public sector, there are so many political directives That comes from… A political authorizer minister that don’t get implemented. It is because of most times if you sit in the institution and think that you wouldn’t need a minister to say this and things will happen, you are actually mistaken. When the minister says, okay, I have proved this, we need to be able to find a structural way through which we can get the institution to move along in order to make sure that we achieve things.

Anisha Poobalan Yes. Thank you for sharing. So we’re going to wrap up soon. I just have one more question for Ganga, and then we’ll move into a time of questions. So you told us about the journey, you told us about how you started off with absolutely no knowledge of the solar panel manufacturing industry. What happened in the end? Were you able to get your one at the end, Would you like to share kind of what? How you finish that.

Ganga Palakatiya Actually, I’m really happy to share this and finally we had a very hard, we did hard work and we tried our best to talk to the investors and to attract the investors. Eventually actually our, there was a meeting, it’s like a story. So there was a meeting and I was called for the meeting, I was informed that there is a solar panel investor, so we need to have a meeting, just inform me. So I went to the meeting and when I saw the investor, when I see the business card of the investor I was really surprised, that was the world number one investor. So I was really surprised because I knew that because I did research because I worked hard and I knew, that was the investor I was targeting. So he has already counted, so I was really surprised and that was a real opportunity for me to share my knowledge with the investor and to get their knowledge and to understand the requirement of the investor. So if I didn’t know about the sector, if I hadn’t done any research on the sector I would have ended up with just having a meeting with an investor. So that actually I realized the value of this task. So when I was talking to the investor I nip the problems in Sri Lanka to get their investment to establish in our country. I nipped all this. They are talking about the requirements, they are talking the problems, but I need that. So that was the language that I learnt to talk to the world class investors. So we never said no because we have some kind of thoughts, we have some kind strategies in our mind, how to solve that problem. When the investor tell us, OK, we have this problem, so we actually already have that knowledge, and we actually have kind of a solution. So we said no. So we said, okay, we knew the problem. We will definitely look into that. We don’t know whether we can do it or not, but we told them, okay we will look into it. And in that way, actually, they arose three problems. Those are policy issues. So we had to work on that policy issues that authorization matters in that case and also I told you there was a legal person in my members, out of my members there was legal and zone management. All that expertise I needed to solve those three issues. So one issue was on the import tax. We have to change the regulations for the legal person I wanted to have their contributions. And the other one is, it’s also kind of a, because the BOI Board of Investment has issued a regulation, Investors, manufacturers can only allow local market up to 20% of their production. So the investor wanted to release 50%. So then we’ll have to again change the regulation, again the legal matter. And also they wanted to establish the company in a… In a BOI zone, they wanted to change the ground rent and they wanted to have some kind of concessions. So in that case, I needed the zone management person. So, in that way, actually, we collectively did that and we had to get the board, board of, board of investment, the members of the board approval and then we’ll have to go for the Prime Minister’s approval and then we had to go to the Cabinet approval. It was a long process and very hard, difficult process. Finally, we could achieve that. That was the result we had with the understanding, with the hard work we did with this course.

Anisha Poobalan Thank you. Thank you both for sharing with us. Thank you everybody.