 Good afternoon, everybody, to all the participants of this IEA webinar. I am so pleased to welcome you to this IEA webinar, which is co-organised with the Embassy of Columbia in Ireland. I would like to thank both the Embassy and my good friend, Ambassador Cortes, as well as the IEA for hosting an event on such an important and topical issue, addressing gender equality and the global challenge of migration through the prism of the Columbian experience. I have to say, Columbia is really at the forefront of these two issues. In terms of gender equality, Columbia has made important strides over the past two decades, and just in the last two years has risen from a ranking of 40th in 2018 to 22nd out of 153 countries in 2020 in the World Economic Forum Global Gender Gap. It has also led the way in its generosity in dealing with migration flows, in providing a new home to over 1.8 million Venezuelans who were forced to leave their homes. I have no doubt that today's seminar will be incredibly enlightening. Columbia has groundbreaking experience to share. As Filippo Grande, UN High Commissioner for Refugees said last year, and I open quotation, Columbia's offer to provide temporary protection to Venezuelans on its territory for a 10-year period is a humanitarian gesture of an unprecedented scale in the region and in the entire world. This initiative is an extraordinary example of humanity, commitment towards human rights and pragmatism. And I close quotes. And I have to share with you all that there is no one better to share Columbia's experience with you than Colombian's Vice President, Martha Lucia Ramirez, who has also shown her generosity in taking some time at a very busy schedule here in Dublin, where she is attending the Global Diaspora Summit to share Columbia's experience with us today. I personally feel very privileged to be moderating this seminar today, as I have direct experience of working with her excellency, Martha Lucia. As Ireland's first resident ambassador to Columbia, I received a wonderful welcome for Martha Lucia, but also much inspiration and support. She is a role model and an inspiration to me, but much more importantly to millions of Colombian women and girls who now know that it is possible to lead their country and to realize one's dreams of making positive changes in our own country. Finally, before I introduce the Vice President, I wanted to quickly share with you a very personal experience that I had in Columbia. When I look back on my three years in Columbia, I have so many special memories, but one that really sticks with me is when I met a 40-year-old Venezuelan woman in Medellín, a mother of a nine-year-old girl with an inoperable tumor, who prior to having to leave Venezuela had been a business administrator in Venezuela's second city, Maracaibo. She was now selling chewing gum at the traffic lights in Columbia's second city. She was so grateful to her Colombian neighbors who had provided her with refuge with healthcare for her daughter, and when I met her, her last remaining wish was that she would be able to recover her career. The temporary protection status and women empowerment programs that the Vice President has led, that Vice President Marta Lucia has led, now means that this woman has this opportunity. This is the extra step that Columbia has taken, and this is what I believe Vice President Ramirez is going to tell us about now. So just to let you know, some minimal housekeeping that the Vice President Ramirez will deliver an address with about 20 minutes in length. This will be followed by a Q&A with our audience, and we're so delighted you're here with us. You will be able to join in the discussion using the Q&A function in Zoom, which you should see on your screen just now. Please feel free to send your questions in throughout the session as they occur to you, and we will come to them once the Vice President has finished her presentation. Just a reminder that today's presentation and Q&A are both on the record, and please feel free to join the discussion on Twitter using the Twitter handle at IIEA. I will now formally introduce Vice President Ramirez and then hand over to her. Marta Lucia Ramirez is the first woman to be elected and serve as Deputy Head of State and Government, that is Vice President, in the history of Columbia. In that capacity, she has sought to improve transparency, fight corruption, achieve gender equality, improve infrastructure, and increase economic growth. In May 2021, she was also appointed Minister for Foreign Affairs of Columbia. Previously, she had served as Minister of Defence from 2002 to 2003, and as the first and only woman to have served as Minister of Defence in Columbia, she created the Armed Forces School of Human Rights and sought to promote women in service by allowing them to reach the rank of general for the first time in Colombian history. So it's often said of us women that we manage many different roles at the same time, but I don't think there's none. There's anyone who manages as many different roles as our today's speaker. Vice President Ramirez, the floor is yours. Thank you very much. I would like to thank our friend, Alison Milton. She was a great ambassador from Ireland in Columbia, and I would like to thank also our ambassador in Ireland, Patricia Cortez, the two ambassadors, and of course the current ambassador, she is also a wonderful ambassador of Fiona. The three of them have been working in order to strengthen the bilateral relation between Ireland and Colombia to share opportunities, but more than that to work together, identifying new scenarios for this bilateral cooperation in order to strengthen our ties, but also to help different nations to have a better strength of democracy, a better approach to all these challenges that we are having today. So for me, it's of course a great honor to be this afternoon in this event. So I thank very much to Agba's house who made it possible. And for me, it's so important to be part of this discussion about gender equality and migration, because we have in Colombia, of course, our own perspective, but we also believe that there is a very different momentum. Now all the nations in the entire world are very concerned about the future. So many citizens in the entire world are having fear about their future. It's a lot of uncertainty. The pandemic is still there. It's not finished. And now we have not only the challenge to recover from COVID, but we also have this so sad and unfair war from Russia against Ukraine. And we also have a lot of challenges about climate change. Many nations during the COVID lockdown went back in terms of poverty and extreme poverty. Colombia is one of that countries. So we have the challenge to move forward again, to reduce poverty, to eliminate extreme poverty, to handle with the DGS for the year 2030, and also to try to bring better opportunities, economic opportunities through job creation for our citizens. So in that scenario, I believe this is a very unique opportunity to make everybody reflect about the importance of gender equality. Not only as a moral or ethical discussion, it's because we all have the need to include women in different aspects of life in all nations in the world. First of all, let me say that for the entire history of humanity, women have been a part of economic power and also political power. And we are completely convinced in Colombia that if we include women in the economic power, and if we include women in political power, for sure we will improve conditions of life for everybody. If we include women in economic power, we can try to have, I don't know if to double the GDP growth, but at least I'm convinced that we are going to have a very important increase in the GDP growth if we include all the women and opportunities and possibilities to be part of the global economy. And it's the same with politics. Women in the leadership roles in politics means this is this commitment with the public service, this commitment with the states, which are going to be more efficient and transparent. And what we need is to have efficiency and transparency in order to have more legitimacy from states for our citizens. So for me, it's clear that we have this opportunity to think about the gender issues in a different approach than before. For many years, all the discussions from gender have been around violence against women. Of course it exists violence against women, but if we have women with more economic autonomy, if we have women participating not only in the jobs creation, but also as business women in the entire world, these women will be more prepared to confront and to avoid any kind of violence against them. So we are convinced that women play this pivotal role in societies. And of course, we exclude them from these positions of political power and economic power, but it's clear that the nations and the entire society has been losing this enormous potential to make the world a better world, to make a more inclusive and more innovative, more prosperous, and a better adapted world to the many challenges that we are facing now. So the cause of women, for me, is a fascinating cause. It's a fascinating cause because through women, we can have an impact in children, in families, in the entire society. So that's why for us, it is clear that during these three years, we have this opportunity because when people say, oh, you are the first women elected as vice president, I said yes, but this is not a reason to feel proud or to say, OK, it's because I am very capable. And I was fighting. Yes, I have been fighting my interior life, my interior career. But what is clear for me is being the first women as vice president means to have the highest responsibility to work hard in order to change conditions of life for women and through women for many people in our society. So that's why when we arrive to government, I ask President Ducat, I would like to bring gender equality to the vice presidency. I have been involved in so many different issues in the economic growth, in a competitiveness of Colombia in my past life, and what used to be a foreign trade minister. So that's the reason why I have been very close to the business community in Colombia. But I also brought this responsibility to work in gender gender equality. And we have in Colombia a presidential advisory office in order to work in gender equality. So through this office, we have been working for the last three years in order to develop at least five areas. We believe that the first area must be, of course, the economic autonomy for women. We believe that if women aren't going to be in decision-making processes in the business community, if we can have more women involved in the economy, both at the national level and also in the local level, we will have a better economic growth in our country. And we believe that the economic and social strategies must include this affirmative public policies to privilege the women's participation in the labor force and also in the public spheres with more opportunities, more entrepreneurship, more leadership positions, and of course, with less digital reach. In these three years and a half, our country's objective has been to empower 23.3 million women. So we are clear that 50% of the Colombian citizens must be empowered. There are so many capable women. There are so many who know the power that they have. But we need to move women in Colombia in order to have this more ambitious agenda. Not for us. It's for the country. So women in economy, as a first age, it means for us that we want to have not only more jobs for women. Of course, we want so many jobs for women. But we also would like to have more women entrepreneurs. Colombia has worked so much to consolidate itself as a nation of entrepreneurial women. We have supported more than 840,000 women, rural and urban entrepreneurs, with different government instruments to continue consolidating their businesses with a market vision and to make them profitable, scalable, and sustainable. We create different instruments. And I would like to insist in the scalable business because I don't know why, but people think that, okay, entrepreneurship for women are small things. You can do something very easy, and this is going to be an entrepreneurship for women. And that's not truth. Women can be the owners of large scale companies, not only to produce for their countries, but also to export goods, to export services. So that's why we create these three illegal instruments. The first of all is a fund, which is called Mujer Emprende, Women Entrepreneur Fund. And this is aimed at financing the expansion of rural and urban women business initiatives with resources for more than $15 million U.S. dollars. And this is just a starting of force. So this is not a big amount of money. This is another characteristic. Budget for women is always a very small budget. And this is a convention I have. If presidents and prime ministers and governments wants to show themselves like a very proactive for women, the first condition that we have to ask them is, okay, I would like to see your budget for women equality. So this is the case in Colombia, so many other places, the budget is still a small budget, but at least we have this budget for this project for women, hopefully in the future. I hope we can have not only this budget for provide loans for women, but also to have equity in women firms. So that's the reason why we think that with this process, we will set the foundation for women economic empowerment for years to come. The second tool has been the gender responsive public procurement measures. This is the grand differential criteria and additional points for women companies. Of course, we are working under the basis that when you are taking the decision for government procurement, you have to look for the best choice, the best quality product, the best quality service, the best prices, the best conditions, of course. So they have to be projects which are, excuse me, competitive in terms of market, but if there are two offers, very similar, very alike, we are going to give some additional points to the women companies in order to have this gender criteria to promote the women companies. And the third instrument has been the women royalties type project because in Colombia, as you know, for the oil production, mining production, whatever, we have royalties that companies paid. And in the past, they were used only in roads and different issues. Now we are promoting that part of these royalties will be used in science, technology and innovation. And of course, part of this, it will be used in companies owned by women. So these royalties, and now we have a kind of a laboratory with so many different majors and governors in different states of Colombia. And we are structuring projects in order to finance and to have these different women entrepreneurs to accelerate this economic reactivation for their departments also. So in addition, recognizing that the unique distribution of unpaid work affects women mostly, Colombia for more than 10 years has been measuring the contribution of women through care which reaches 20% of today's Colombian GDP. So together with the financial system, we achieve the recognition of the care work hours in a kind of credit scoring. And past the parental leave low that promotes the equitable sharing of care work. Likewise, resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic, we carried out a gender responsive fiscal reform. And let me say, I don't know any other country that have a fiscal reform during the pandemic. And I have no information and no evidence that there is another country with a fiscal reform with this gender focus, gender responsive. So during the confinement, 50% were reimbursed for women's jobs and one third of women's formal employment was retained to these different measures in the fiscal reform to generate new jobs. We also help with the payroll subsidies. So we establish a 25% subsidy for the payroll of young women and men. This is 25% for the youth, but we have the focus in women older than 25 years. They are going to have an additional 15% of subsidy for the creation of new jobs when they are for women. So as a result, today, the women in Colombia have been living the recovery of the employment with a 57.6% of the total new jobs in our country. And in addition to close the gender labor gap, a presidential directive, we had a presidential directive a year and a half ago with the same gender approach for this economic reactivation. So this measure boost at the hiring of women in sectors like construction, infrastructure, mining, energy, of course, sectors like health, tourism now because we have opened all the tourism and that kind of services, restaurants, whatever. So now we are promoting these steam fields of work aimed at girls and adolescents training young women in science, technology, engineering and mathematics. And finally, of course, the digital literacy for women of all ages. For us, education is a paramount. So this is the first area. The second one is more women in politics. The second policy of our equity policy is to involve women in these leadership or in these roles for politics. And we achieved the approval of a reform in the electoral code in Colombia. It was four months ago, but we were fighting so hard. And finally, we have a very positive result to have a parity list in the electoral code. So this reform will be in place for the next election. Unfortunately, there is now in the constitutional court. So that's the reason why it was not ready for the election that we had only two weeks ago. But the next Colombian Congress election will have 50% of women in the list of all the political parties. Of course, the challenge now is that these women become elected women. And it means that we have to work so hard with the political parties in order to be sure that they are going to have the financing for the campaigns, that they are going to have an open room for different debates and whatever. But this was an important reform in this electoral code. And we also have been working so much in the last two years and a half in a national school of political training. I asked one Colombian university and also the Hans Seiden Foundation. This is a foundation from Germany to help us to train women. And we have trained 5,000 women through the country. So for us, it's so positive to tell you that we have an election last March 13. And in that election, the congressional election showed a substantial progress in terms of women representation because we occupied 80 of 267 seats at the Congress, which represents 30% of participation. Let me say that before this election, women were only with 19% of participation. So now we have 30% in the next election. For sure, we have to look for this 45%, 50% of participation for women in Congress. The third area that we have been working is women, peace, and security. You have in Ireland all this experience about a peace process and security issues. For us in Colombia, Ireland is the role model to follow in terms of the work for peace in order to achieve peace for our countries. So we highlighted 57% of the indicators that were defined for the implementation of the agreement between FARC and the Colombian government in the previous government. These indicators have been with this framework of gender. And for us, it's very positive also to say that so many of them, more than 50%, we have had an important improvement. So in the last four years, women participation in this process as leaders in social areas of Colombia or whatever has been also increasing. And they are women following the implementation of the peace agreement. And also in the last four years, the women participation in the Colombian public force has grown by 38%. Let me say that, as Alison has mentioned, I was a defense minister in Colombia in 2002. It was a very difficult time because in that moment we had this very difficult and very hard internal conflict. And on that time, when I was appointed minister of defense, I was informed that women were allowed to be in their forces only to the level of coronals. When they arrive to coronals, they have to stay for at maximum two years and they have to resign. They have to live their military careers. And I said, there's no way I cannot be the defense minister if I know that there are women who are capable, who have the patient, who have them a commitment with the security issues and they are not able to compete in order to run for generals. So that's something that I asked to let them to compete. If they win, positions, fine. If they don't, okay, they have to live. And it was wonderful because three years later, we have had the first women as a general. It was in the police. At the beginning it was in the police, but now we have women generals in the army, in the police. And what it's most important is that they are not only in the administrative matters or health matters or financial matters, now they are in the line of command. Now they are in operations. Now they are working as a real officers in the armed forces and in the police. And this is something that will be so important with this increasing in the participation of women in the public force. So to achieve this goal, we have some guidelines to promotion of equity in the prevention of violence against women in the military and police spheres. And this is something that let me say we have been working not only the second or third level, we have been working in the first level with a general commander of the armed forces, the general director of the national police because we believe that this is something which is substantial for the legitimacy and the strength of these institutions for the Colombian security. The fourth area have been women free of violence. At the beginning I said, usually it was the speech for women, women are suffering violence. Yes, we still have women suffering violence. You still have women suffering violence. The entire world saw during the lockdown how much the domestic violence has increased. So many cases of women suffering violence. So of course this is an axis that we still have to work in and to be enough clear that there are so many challenges. What is something important also is that 76% of the municipalities in Colombia and all the 32 departments that we have now, they have a mechanism that we create to prevent, confront and to solve and punish violence against women. Let me say during our government for the first time in the Colombian history and the president of Colombia, he organized these security meetings focused only in security for women. So security meetings at the national level with the commanders of the public forces, the director of the police, but also with representatives of the judiciary and judges. We have in Colombia something which is called Comisaría de Familia, family commissioners. And those are institutions that have some illegal capacities to have an intervention asking for the judicial system, prosecution in cases that there are evidences about family violence. So through all this, we have this first national meeting to be focused in security for women. And after that, now we have in all the departments these meetings which are regularly in order to be clear that we have enough policies to avoid to prevent violence against women. And we also create a new figure which is called Inés. Inés in Spanish is a women name. And I put this name because we have this inter-institutional nation, economic empowerment and security for women. This is the meaning of Inés. So this is a strategy to bring justice to those steps for rural women. So if somebody has any information that women in very apart villages are suffering violence, the family commissioners and also a judge and a police will be there on their own house to ask what's happening and of course to protect these women or their children. So through this strategy, we have visited more than 2000 homes in 18 departments in the last year and a half. And we are working every single day rising awareness about this violence, what it means and the action routes to address it. This strategy was recognized as an innovative gender policy by United Nations women. The six axiom of our work have been in the institutionality for women. So for the first time, we also have in the Colombian National Development Plan, a chapter which is focused in gender equality. So when you have this at the national level, you also have the moral capacity to ask your governors and your mayors that they have to do the same. So for the first time, all the Colombian departments which are 32 as I mentioned before, they include a gender equity chapter on their development plans. And they have been creating some kind of gender secretariat for women in some of the departments. It means secretariat without bureaucracy because I asked them, okay, you can put a one or two or three members from your health secretariat from your political secretariat from some others in order to have this secretariat to be offering women in every single department all the national institutions offer which is for women in our government. So through this strength of institutions for women, we are also having this very positive reaction because this inclusion is now a reality. They are creating some of the departments or whatever. They are also creating with us a monitor to be clear that all these governors and also mayors are allocating some budget and programs to close the gender gaps. So today we have created 25 empowered women houses and we are giving them training in technology. We are giving them training to organize their own frames to become entrepreneurs. We are giving them financial training. We are giving them low counsel. How do I say? Okay. And we are also giving them some psychological assistance because when women are having a violence, of course they also need this kind of psychological assistance. So we have these 25 empowered women a thousand and until now they were created in the last two years until now we have had 117,000 women who have benefit from this legal counseling and advise the financial training or whatever. So this is something which is also changing very much. So through our access of equity and policy, Colombia's reaffirming our commitment to increase the fully equal and meaningful participation of women in all the decision making processes and positions and of course migration. Migration for us is a key challenge because as you know, we have two million Venezuelans in Colombia, you know that Venezuela has 6.3 million migrants because there is a dictatorship in Venezuela, a very hard and horrible dictatorship affecting human rights and everything. So these 6.3 million are very difficult to assume but we in Colombia, we took 30%. So we have in Colombia two million Venezuelans in this migration policy that President Duque has been leading. It's a temporary protection status and we also have these importance of adopting a gender approach to the migration policy emphasizing the particular impacts of migration on women. These essential requirements and benefits of a gender-based approach to understand and to address of course the complex migration flows and to protect also because there are so many cases in different countries with these matias of human trafficking or migrants trafficking. So we have been also working in order to protect women and Alisson's experience is a very sad one and I have heard so many very similar and I agree with you. This is something which is shocking and this is something that gives you more strength in order to work to protect all of them. So I will then discuss Colombia's experience, achievements and challenges through the adoption of a comprehensive migration policy and these temporary protection status for the Venezuelan migrants which have been widely recognized as an example of fraternity and solidarity and responsibility with a brother, a country like Venezuela is for Colombia. So migration is a very complex process in different societies, cultures, territories. Now you have the Ukrainian migration. It's gonna be very complex for Europe because at the beginning you can think, okay, this is gonna be for one year, two years. This is gonna be a short time. This is not realistic. This is gonna be for a long time and this is gonna be a lot of people. It's going to involve a lot, millions of Ukrainians and you have to prepare yourselves in order to include these people for real inclusion in the society and we have to be very clear about these specific characteristics that determine both their access to benefits, the risk involving the migration process, the differentiated impacts for men and women, of course and as such a migration should be understood as a gender process. So comprising almost half of the world's total population of migrants, migrant women are agents of change and leaders who contribute socially and economically in multiple ways to their countries of origin and might also contribute in the same manner to the receiving or adopting countries through their skills and knowledge as well as by sending remittances to their relatives and friends thus helping to improve their living standards. Yesterday in this wonderful forum that the island government and also the International Migration Office from the United Nations organized here in Dublin, I mentioned so many years we have heard about migrants in terms of remittances. This is not an issue of remittances. So many migrants are not capable to remit money to their countries but they are capable for sure to be part of the labor force, to be part of the economic growth, to be part of the new jobs creation. So this could be something in benefit of both sides. So despite all these contributions the migrant women suffer from intersecting forms of discrimination encountering additional challenges such as the feminization of poverty the deepening of all types of violence and reduce opportunity frameworks. Migrant women are more frequently affected by socioeconomic challenges such as unemployment, under-employment, informal employment such as this and their significant participation in these unpaid domestic work and market labor is not always fully taken into account but neither agenda-based approach for the specific experiences relating to women are usually captured in migration laws, programs or data collecting system. The states frequently forget to address this massive crisis with gender lenses and overlook the importance of understanding whether migration occurs because of gender inequality or itself helps to perpetuate so many gender disparities. So in our view, to achieve an effective migration governance states must assess the specific challenges that affect migrant women and girls with particular emphasis in these discriminatory practices influencing the decision-making and the ability to migrate but more importantly, states needs to be focused on how to empower women and girls through the migration policies. So Colombia's migratory reality has changed considerably during the last three or four years going from a country mainly sending migrants to a country receiving a large migration flows. And now, as I said, 2 million from Venezuela and we are 50 million people in Colombia. So you can see we have 2 million. It has a big impact for the Colombian economy and 52% of these migrants in Colombia are women and they migrate for different reasons to look for better opportunities, look for work and for health services for political discrimination or for political risk in Venezuela just to mention some. So this massive migration process on February 8th of 2021 was launched by President Colombia, and also Filippo Gandhi from United Nations and they launched this temporary protection status for the Venezuelan migrants. And we feel that this is going to be a good reference, a good, not role model, but a good reference to a taking consideration for this new European challenge through the Ukrainians and also the Syrians who are still here. So Colombia recognizes the risks, the challenges, the vulnerabilities, but we would like to say we are ready to work in order to change this in our country and to help to change this in different countries and regions in the world. So thank you very much to the two ambassadors for this opportunity to share with all of you and I'm ready, Alison, if you want to arise some questions. So thank you very much. And of course, I'm so sorry. And of course I would like to thank again to Andrew Gilmour from the Institute for International and European Affairs because this is a wonderful thing, and so for me it's a honor to be invited here. Thank you very much.