 I'm Dan Rundy. I hold the Shrier Chair here at CSIS. We're having a conversation today about resilience, learning from practice across the development spectrum. I want to say a big thank you to my very good friends at DAI for helping make this event possible. And we're keying off a very interesting journal, the DAI Journal's Resilience, Learning from Practice Across the Development Spectrum. I hope you all have picked one up. And I think this conversation will build on the great work that was done in this very timely journal. We have some very thoughtful speakers today across development practice, as well as from a number of perspectives from outside of the development community. So without further ado, I'm going to ask Ambassador Jean Nierie-Camau to come on up, who is the Chargeret Affairs for the Embassy of the Republic of Kenya to speak and provide the Kenyan perspective on resiliency. And then I'm going to ask former Undersecretary for Civilian Security, Democracy and Human Rights of the Department of State, Maria Otero-Habson, to also be on the DAI Board to also provide some framing remarks. But first, Ambassador, if you'd come up please. Thank you. Please welcome Ambassador. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. I won't go into too much of the introduction since that's been well done, but just go straight into my remarks and share with you Kenya's experience on how resilience has been applied in our development planning and in response to disaster preparedness in the country. And our experience has been drawn obviously by incidences and situations that have called for a different approach in how we respond to disasters and emergencies in the country. And most of the work that has been done in this area has been done mainly through partnerships and networks, bringing together government agencies, international development agencies and UN agencies. The experiences that are drawn in Kenya are from programs and projects of the government, civil society agencies and international development agencies who have worked with vulnerable communities over the years. The threats and conditions that require communities' resilience are both natural and man-made and Kenya has continued to face a rising degree of vulnerability to disasters that affect households and communities in such a manner that their lives and livelihoods are seriously disrupted beyond their capacity to cope or withstand using their own resources with the result that affected populations suffer serious human material, economic or environmental losses. Communities in Kenya are predisposed to disasters by a combination of factors such as poverty, the arid, those communities that live in the arid and semi-arid parts of the country, settlements that are prone to flooding, drought, famine, landslides and epidemic outbreaks. In addition, disasters that emerge out of the effects resulting from climate change also pose a, you know, risks that bring about destruction. Further, we have conflicts that are man-made such as fires, ethnic conflicts or conflicts that are purely driven around lifestyles among the pastoralist communities and acts of terrorism that our country has experienced in the recent past. So how is the government initially, I mean, has intervened? The government of Kenya has developed and adopted a disaster risk reduction policy and strategy that aims to strengthen the disaster management institutions, strengthen partnerships so as to develop resilience of vulnerable groups to cope with potential disasters. An elaborate mechanism is in place in this policy and strategy from a national level to the villages to respond to issues that require intervention. The key elements of the government's intervention is to work in partnership with key institutions and agencies to reach out to vulnerable communities in different parts of the country. Some of these agencies include the Red Cross Society in Kenya, UN agencies such as OSHA, UNDP, the World Food Program and UNFPA, UNICEF and others. In addition, our bilateral partners such as USAID differed from the United Kingdom government and others work closely with the government agencies on responsive interventions where disasters have emerged. In addition, we can't ignore the immense contribution the international development agencies have also contributed to the realization of this strategy. These include Plan International, Action Aid International, Oxfam, CARE and several others who have played a great role also in sometimes reaching the communities that the government is not able to reach. So what are some of the key aspects of this policy, of our disaster management policy? First of all is the multiple agency support framework that requires that the government doesn't work in isolation but works in partnership with other agencies and development partners. And this is important because through this effect, through this approach, we're able to see the successful networking that comes with the multi-agency approach. Different methodologies find a space in which to be implemented. Resource mobilization takes place and there's a learning platform through which the agencies can all mutually benefit from this kind of approach. So you'll find very successful programs that have been implemented through the UNDP effort, through USAID effort and other agencies that then contribute to the realization of a national strategy and policy. Other aspects of the policy are also how well the planning is done and what factors go into planning and intervention. And here I want to highlight how conflict-sensitive planning principles are absolutely important in the Kenyan scenario. Some of our longstanding conflicts, especially those relating to the pastoralist communities who are in the northern part of the country or the political violence that we've seen erupt in Kenya at different times of our political development, require conflict-sensitive planning principles to be applied so that we, and through this kind of process, were able to look at the causes of the conflict and work directly with the different stakeholders who are involved either through who are affected by the conflict or perpetrators of the conflict so that you have longstanding, sustainable solutions. And conflict-sensitive planning principles, regardless of whether they're relevant, whether the project or program is for humanitarian aid, peacebuilding or development, or whether the intention is to address a conflict directly or simply to avoid indirectly exasperating tensions. And one of the good examples that we found in this book, which is why it's actually quite very relevant, is one of the projects that were initiated after the last, you know, last year when we had the elections on how to reduce tensions during the electoral cycle using modern technology. And that's a really good example of how you use modern technology and plan around using conflict-sensitive planning principles to mitigate against that. And the other principle that we find in our policy, which is important is participatory vulnerability analysis, the PVES, which is a tool that's developed by the international development community, again, very relevant especially in the northern part of the country where we have persistent conflicts within the pastoral community. And through this process, this is a tool that's developed that involves bringing communities, local authorities and other stakeholders in an in-depth examination of what makes them vulnerable. And PVA is essential in our work on emergencies and conflict. Having worked for an international development agency that I have firsthand experience on how this tool is very effective on letting everybody in the community be part of the process of identifying why are we vulnerable and how can we make sure that we become a stronger community and address the core issues that expose us into the vicious cycle of the different types of risks and disasters that affect a community. And PVA, again, allows, you know, why it's a sustainable model that helps, you know, once a community learns how to address the issues that affect its stability, then they're able to always, you know, it's a learning process that they know this will happen again if we don't take certain steps. So the national policy allows for the growth and the development of different methodologies and interventions that then provide a very holistic intervention that is sustainable and enriches the whole national policy framework. But again, you know, just to say that our disaster risk reduction policy and strategy is only as good as it's tested over events and situations, and we've seen several events and situations in Kenya that have tested this policy to see how relevant it is and how effective it is. And some of these are, I think, the post-election violence that Kenya experienced in 2008, and, you know, persistent drought, the ongoing threats of terror that the country is exposed to, flooding, mudslides, you know, and I'm just thinking about fires in the slump, within the slump communities are constantly challenging, how relevant is this policy, how well are we implementing it, is it well thought out, is it well resourced, do the annual work plans and the partnerships between different communities make sense in terms of being responsive, shows that we constantly have to review the policy, we have to look at partnerships that are created between government agencies, development agencies through civil society organizations, and constantly saying actually how resilient our community is becoming and the ability to avoid the cycle of disasters that make communities vulnerable. So we're finding that some of the institutions at a national level may not be always in touch with the reality of the situation that the country is dealing with, and we find that a lot of these institutions like the National Disaster Preparedness Agency has been reformed and is undergoing restructuring at the moment, but we find that the sustainability is in the little community initiatives, which have, especially in the northern part of the country, which have gone through a continuous process of learning, reflection, and review of how well they respond to different situations, that those tend to have a longer sustainable mechanism of developing long-term resilience within the community. So there are great lessons that we can draw from our own country's experience that are relevant for analyzing how well resilient and how relevant it is in being incorporated in development processes and in disaster reduction strategies and policies. So I'll just stop there right now, but only just to mention that I think the examples in this book are great. We enjoyed reading it very much at the embassy, not just because it has two or three case studies from Kenya, but because it really blends in, how modern technology again can, the case study on using telephone technology or farmers who again are also affected by market variations and what that means for their products. But it's good making development planning and disaster reduction efforts a continuous learning process because it's an evolving area of development that needs us to be flexible and to learn from what efforts we are making. So thank you very much. Ambassador, thank you so much. Please join me in thanking Ambassador Kamau. Thank you very much. I'm sure you all agree with me that Ambassador Kamau really represents Kenya so ably and that was really just so helpful. Thank you very much. Having a person who's a development professional representing Kenya as you do is just really great and thank you so much. Those were very, very helpful comments to help us get started. I'd like to ask former Under Secretary Maria Otero to join us and she's also a DAI board member to also provide some framing remarks to help get this panel kicked off. Maria, please come on up. Thank you very much, Dan, for the opportunity to be here. Thank you, Ambassador gentlemen at the table. Let me just try to provide a few framework comments that then can be dealt with at the at the panel level and draw a little bit from my experience as an Under Secretary but then also the work that I'm doing on the board of DAI and then the previous work I did in microfinance which is really where I spent more decades than I'd like to tell you. You started as a child product. That's right. I was eight when I started. Resilience is a topic interestingly enough that unites development agencies. It unites UN agencies. It unites NGOs. Everyone as we look today is seeking to integrate this topic into their own framework. USAID developed the guidance on resilience that has very much helped frame other areas. The European entities like DFID and others are making resilience part or really a centerpiece of their own programming. We see the NGOs, especially the large ones, incorporating a definition into their application of the way that they're working. The Ambassador referred a lot to the UN agencies that are doing this. So part of the reason that this is the case and it having worked in development for a long time, this is unusual, is that resilience really applies itself across such a wide spectrum. It addresses health, it addresses food, it addresses nutrition, water, climate, and relief. And so there are many now that we see that are working in development that are trying to institutionalize it into their own program. It's important, resilience is important because it cuts across a wide range of players. And as I said, and for this reason, one of the things that we are seeing is a growing number of opportunities in which development professionals, people involved in humanitarian aid, are coming together for opportunities to dialogue about this issue, to dig deeper into our understanding of how it is that it will be able to integrate into the work that we are all doing. Events like this one right now, last month it was an event at American University, there was an all-day event. We are seeing a big event that IPRI is doing in May in Ethiopia. In other words, lots of roundtables and discussions where a wide array of people are coming to really try to understand how to do this work. And they are all asking the same question. The first one is what about resilience is different or new? We've dealt with vulnerability, we've dealt with risk, we've dealt with a variety of factors. But if we understand resilience and we apply it to the work that we are doing, is it going to lead to a more powerful, more impactful, more effective paradigm for foreign assistance in the future? So these are the questions that we are trying to not only say yes and yes to, but to really understand the dimensions of them. The second point is that resilience is about linking emerging shocks, whether it's disease, death, nutrition, economic loss, water, I've worked on a lot of water as Under Secretary, displacement, conflict, drought, all of these pose a great shock to security, to the security of the communities of the individuals. And the question that we have before us in that situation is where should resilience be strengthened? Exactly what components of that situation are the ones in which one needs to address? Because resilience, when we talk about resilience, we're recognizing that it's really the ability of individuals, of households, of communities, of nations, of institutions, which I think is a very important point to highlight, even of value chains to be able to withstand crisis, to be able to recover and to adapt and handle them better in the future. So as we look at how to strengthen resilience, we also have to ask, who's resilience? And we have to ask, what does resilience accomplish when we do this? And interestingly, even though everyone is discussing it, it really isn't one definition for resilience. In fact, this document by DAI, which I'm really glad I'm not going to have to just refer to, because others are going to refer to how good it is, provides the definition that the different agencies give to resilience. And they really are quite different. But even though they're quite different, one can draw the links between them. If you read Diffitt's definition and AID's definition, they're really quite different. Now when resilience, when the programming is done with resilience at the center, when it applies to natural disasters and to conflict and crisis situations, it does become a very valuable framework for humanitarian aid, where the thinking is immediate response, where the thinking is shorter term periods that you have in order to address massive shocks of suffering that can happen overnight. I visited quite a number of the Syrian refugee camps when I was undersecretary on the Turkish and the Jordanian border, as they were just beginning to develop those camps. And you noted that you really didn't have a lot of time to be able to analyze. You had to think and do this in the short term. You had to put up tens, 20,000 tents in no time and think about how those communities were going to be affected. I spent a lot of time talking to refugees in the Syrian camps and other camps. And there you begin to see what threats held their communities together and the degree to which you can retain those in a refugee camp, especially true about women. So that part of the humanitarian work is important. But the second part of humanitarian work, which is disaster risk reduction, conflict mitigation, is actually work that requires longer term planning, longer term engagement, partnership, as the ambassador said, with a lot of different organizations. If we look, for example, at earthquakes, I was born and raised in Bolivia. And I remember like yesterday, the earthquake in Chile in 1959. I could change the date, but that's just the truth. And it was devastating. It was horrible. So many people died in that. And then we saw the Haitian experience just a few years ago in which hundreds of thousands of people lost their lives. But on that same year that Haiti had its earthquake, Chile had another earthquake that was even harder and stronger. And Chile suffered 300 lives. So this question of disaster risk reduction takes a long time to do. And it takes whole of government involvement in it. Kathmandu today, for example, will walk you through the earthquake walk. And you wonder whether they're going to be able to move towards developing the disaster capacity to deal with disaster before it happens. So these are some of the things that are important to highlight. One of the things that I hope is dealt with on the panel is resistance can also bridge the divide between humanitarian aid and development assistance. Those two worlds in the spectrum of overall assistance that have for years found hard to work with each other, found hard to develop a complementary framework. And in fact, when I worked in microfinance, I had almost no contact with humanitarian work. And I think that is the one piece that relief to development that becomes a very important component here. And it also allows us to think that the development planning and development program with resilience in the core of it is long term planning. It is the kind of planning that requires thinking much broader. From the development perspective, it brings into the resilience brings in the concept of a systems based approach. It's just an approach that incorporates resilience into the larger context of really placing it within where one is operating. It means understanding the issues in which one is working and then layering and sequencing the programming of the development initiative in a way that identifies what in the system needs to grow and to improve and what in that system perpetuates poverty. It forces one to define organizational principle, organizing principles for developing programming that includes resilience in them. This concept I think is particularly important, the systems based approach because we see the creating resilience in institutions and value chains where you want to involve, for example, small farmers, where you want to change banking systems, which is what we did, tried to do microfinance. All of these require a clear understanding of what a systems based approach is. Just a couple of additional observations. One is that the challenge of resilience plays into our learning and into our practice and this is very much comes from the work that AID has been doing because it isn't just a question of putting forth the theory but really figuring out a way to move it into the stressors that are being addressed. And finally resilience, I think at the core of everything we say is that it really comes from within. It comes from the person, the household, the village. It can't be imposed from the outside. It builds on the strengths that people, individuals, communities already have and it catalyzes them and supports their inherent strength. So we do away with language like beneficiary or victim or those that are actually being improved by what we're doing. We really are building on what they do and it requires that humanitarian and development professionals spend a great deal more time understanding the dynamics of the context in which they operate. And then finally the role of women in resilient responses is an enormously important issue to address and I hope the gentleman will address it here. The role they play as mitigators, as producers, as deliverers, as peacemakers is enormous. Their knowledge of their communities, their knowledge of the networks, the ways in which we can see them not just as victims of, for example, gender-based violence but really as key players in helping us address the situation that we are addressing is I think a very important part of this dialogue and conversation. So let me leave it at that and thank you. Thank you very much, Maria. Thank you very much. I think that really helped kick us off just the right way. Thank you so much. Which I think some of Maria's comments about this intersection between humanitarian aid and development, the intersection between shocks and security, I think is a very nice segue to our first panelist who is my very good friend, Ambassador Bill Garvelink, who's a senior advisor here at CSIS, but he also has a day job at the International Medical Corps, but everyone I think knows him as the former ambassador to the Congo where he served very ably, but also was assistant administrator at AID for democracy, conflict, humanitarian assistance. That's it. So Bill, over to you. Thank you. Thank you very much for hosting this event and with the AI. I think this is an important time to be talking about resilience. And I guess what I would like to do is focus on resilience in terms of fragile and conflict-affected states and probably broaden the discussion just a little bit. I think Bob Zelick, who when he was head of the World Bank, had it right when he said fragile and conflict-affected states are not just a really tough development issue. They're a different issue and they're different. You have to deal with it in different ways. And I think that has implications for what we think about and how we think about resilience. And as others have said, and it's in the book or the journal that everybody has mentioned, it is very good. I recommend it to all of you to read it. Resilience, you can talk about resilience in terms of households, families, communities, countries, and regions. And I'm going to focus a little bit on resilience in terms of a conflict-affected country and the region that that country is found in. And states are fragile because the institutions, either due to lack of political will or capacity, cannot deliver basic services, security, justice, basic services, food security, economic opportunities. And if you look at a fragile state, I think and you want to build a platform for sustainable resilience, you have to first look at state building and at security. And that's a very important issue that overarches all the others in terms of fragile states. You'll find, I think, at least from my experience in Congo, there were a lot of efforts at building resilience that were not sustainable and, in fact, were counterproductive because to build the kind of resilience you're talking about, ethnic groups cling to their own ethnic group. And that leads in a longer term to conflict with other ethnic groups. So unless you have your focus on building resilience at the governance level, you're going to have a difficult time in fragile states, I think, dealing with resilience at the community level and at the household level. You have to set the platform for that. And that's a long-term process. That's 10 years at a minimum, most experts say. But that, in a fragile state, in my sense, is the beginning point. Now, how do you do that? How do you muscle or muster the resources for resilience? Then we've talked about it before. It's a whole of government, a whole of donor government, and a whole of UN operation. And frankly, if you look at the AID paper, policy paper, and the EU policy paper, and others, they don't really do that for a fragile state. What they do is talk about how you link humanitarian assistance and development assistance together to work on various issues related to resilience. In a fragile state, a whole of government includes the military. It includes diplomats in addition to the humanitarian assistance and the development assistance that we talk about more generally. You cannot focus on building resilience in a fragile state without adding those elements to it. This is why it's interesting for me to bring the Congo into this. 2013 was a pretty good year for the Congo. It started from a low base, but it's a pretty good year. And I think it's the first time you see a whole of donor government activity. For the first time in the United Nations and the peacekeepers, you have an intervention force, a powerful force that actually is going to go in and with the Congolese military take care of business in a sense. And you saw the M28-23 movement defeated, the ADF, the Uganda movement is in trouble, and there's talk about going after the FDLR, the genocidaires, quite soon. At the same time, for the first time with regard to the Congo, there's a very robust diplomatic initiative that's underway as well with special envoys from the related states, the African Union, the Great Lakes group that are taking this much more seriously than has ever been done before. And if you look at what happens, has happened, that's just not directly related to conflict. You see some actions. The senior generals, who are very much involved in corruption, are gone. They've been in Kinshasa for a year, they're not in the field. The amount of revenues that rebel groups make from illegal minerals have dropped by 50%. You see some very significant actions out of the parliament in terms of amnesty legislation. There's some interesting things going on in the Congo that are all seemed to have started from this focus of the international community with the government on some military issues in the east. You know, when I was in the Congo and before that, everybody said, well, you know, we need more democracy and governance. We need more focus on gender-based violence and on corruption. And if you'd sit down and talk to the Kabila administration, I said my concern is survival. We've got a really bad problem in the east, and frankly, it's supported by some of our neighbors, and it's a serious threat. And if you do a little bit of history, we forget about that, and it seems like a long time ago, but just over a decade ago, two neighbors, Uganda and Iran, invaded the Congo twice, and the international community never said a word about it. And it took the Angolians and Zimbabweans and a few others to push the Rwandans back from Kinshasa. That is a real living threat for the Congolese government. And so we don't think in those terms, but when you're the head of state or you're the center of government, that's your first priority. So when we said the things that have to be done are this, this, and that, those are our priorities. Those aren't the Congolese government's priorities. And if this new system of resilience is based on country-led, country-focused, and they have to take ownership of it, well, we best understand their priorities and their concerns before we get too far along. So this is sort of just a couple of issues that have come up. But in terms of what are the challenges then of dealing with resilience in fragile states, and I'll just apply them kind of specifically to the Congo, and our previous speakers talked about them, one is understanding the context. It's not our context, it's their context. And in terms of the Congo, their context is security. And when you agree to work for the government on that big issue, cooperation and other issues start to come along. And it gets a little easier to work on the next level of issues. And so I think understanding the priorities of the government where we're working is a huge priority if we're going to really be serious about resilience. Second, what is second here? I had a second one. This is a tough one for development agencies. We need, if we're going to do resilience programming and development in fragile states, we need to have a much higher level of tolerance for risk and corruption. And I think a lot of the folks who work on this do. It's when you get to the auditors and members of Congress that you have a problem. And all corruption is bad. And some of it has to be dealt with right away. And some of it you can set aside. Let me give you one example. When I was in the Congo, there was concern about padding all the ministry staffing patterns with dead folks. And so that the higher ups in the ministry could get more money by paying ghost folks. So I went to the Ministry of Education first and the Ministry of Defense. And I said, let me see a list of folks who are on your payroll. And I started looking through it. I said, this is an awful lot of people in the Ministry of Education. And they said, yeah. And I looked and I said, these people are 80 years old. You mean to tell me they're teaching? And they said, well, no, they're not. I said, and they're real? And I said, oh, yeah. And they said, well, in our mind, that's corruption. You were padding the budgets. And they said, what do you want us to do? We don't have a social security system. No one's going to take care of these folks. Do we cut them off from their 20 bucks a month or whatever they get? I don't think so. Not until you have a system in place to take care of these folks that no one else is going to take care of. Then when you look at it that way, it doesn't look so bad. And the same was true of the Ministry of Defense. There were 85-year-old guys in the military. I said, yeah, right. Come on. Well, there's nobody else to take care of them. We got to pay them the 20 bucks a month or whatever they get. So it's issues like that. You set aside until you have sort of a social safety net system set up to take care of those folks. And those subtleties seem to go by the board when you're dealing with auditors and members of Congress. The final thing I'd like to comment about in building resilience in fragile states is donors have to actually coordinate. I mean, really coordinate, talk to each other. My example again in the Congo, there was a big concern with dealing with security sector reform. That was a big issue to reform the security sector. And the entire donor community was pushing very hard for the Congolese government to do it. They could never manage to get a plan together. And everybody said, well, they aren't serious. There's corruption involved. They aren't going to do this. Well, then you sit down and talk and say, what does security sector reform mean to you? And to the United States, it's reforming the entire system, judiciary, prisons, police, military. You talk to the French, it's reforming the military. You talk to the EU, well, it's police reform. And it's even more confusing when you're sitting with a bunch of folks from the European Union. The European Union said, here's our priority for security reform. And then the French said, on this one, you don't speak for us. And then the British said, now in military, you don't really speak for us. I couldn't even figure out who was speaking for whom, much less the Congolese government. So they're trying to deal with all these different ideas of what security sector reform is. And then we were pretty upset with them when they couldn't come up with a coherent plan that pleased everybody. Well, they were never going to happen because we didn't agree. And we were giving conflicting instructions. So if you're going to work in these areas, certainly in a security area, we have to work with each other and coordinate. So in conclusion, the focus on linking the humanitarian folks and the development folks together is an incredible first step, as everybody talked about. It's never been done before. So that is really important. It's not enough. We've got to include the whole U.S. government. And then the other observation is that if we're going to really believe in resilience and country-led and community-led operations, we've got to listen to them. We've got to talk seriously at the community level and at the national level and understand what their priorities are and work with that, not the priorities that we impose from capitals. That's not helpful. And so we really have to take seriously and listen. So, Bill, what you're trying to say is if you're an AID and you've got an earmark to pass somebody, that's not what necessarily, that's sort of not necessarily in line with what you're trying to say. Well, thank you, Bill. I think that is a, I thought that was quite clear and I think very much builds on the comments of both the ambassador and Mario Taro. And I think, Alex, we were talking about this whole of government approach in the green room. I know that from your perch at PPL at USAID, you're thinking about resilience from a number of different perspectives. And I know you have to think about resilience from these different perspectives from a whole of government approach. And so please share with us your perspective on this issue of resilience. Thanks so much, Dan. And thanks for doing this great event and continuing to hold a focus on what is such, I think, a critical agenda for us, particularly when some of the cameras go away from some of the disasters. That's when we really need to make sure that we're following through on this. To me, it is always worth remembering that I think we today really, truly stand on the precipice of doing one of the most historically important things that humanity has ever attempted and could actually accomplish. And that is the vision of ending extreme poverty by 2030. This vision is extraordinary not only because it speaks to such a bold goal, but because we actually believe increasingly as a development community that it's possible. And in light of that goal, and the President's called action a year ago or so in his State of the Union address that the United States would join with its allies to end extreme poverty, a few weeks ago USAID actually delivered a new mission statement. And that mission statement, which is worth repeating here because it's short, but it also speaks directly to the topic, is that we partner to end extreme poverty and promote resilient democratic societies while advancing our security and prosperity. And I think that there are a couple of fundamental points that are embedded in this that speak to this agenda. First of all, partnership. I think one of the fundamental realizations, and not that this is new, but it's always worth repeating and goes directly to what Bill just closed with, is that the only way that you achieve any of the objectives that we're talking about here today is through partnership. And a more meaningful level of partnership, first and foremost with our partners, the ultimate owners, which are the countries that we work with. And I think the remarks of the Kenyan Ambassador are striking in that regard because it is ultimately the ownership of the governments of the communities that are going to make these changes real. But it is also, of course, our development partners and DAI, I see Sam here from Interaction and others, some of the partners in the international community like DFID and the UN, who together pick up this charge and make it possible for us to do something really that's far greater than what any of us can do alone as agencies or NGOs or the private sector. The third is on ending extreme poverty, and I think it's worth noting when you look at the scale, what happened in 2011 and 2012 is certainly not the first thing that brought this agenda forward, but it is striking to go back and remember the scale of the challenge that we were facing in those two droughts in the Horn of Africa and in the Sahel, all together between the two of them 30 million people affected. That's about the size of all of the five largest cities in the United States combined. 30 million people, effectively, who were either impoverished so severely that they were dying of hunger, making life and death choices, fleeing their countries. If you've been to refugee camps like Dodd, you know that it's the last place you want to end up and imagine that being your plan of action for survival, and so the choice is that those 30 million people were being forced to make were astonishing, and the reality is that if we are ever going to be serious about accomplishing the goal of ending extreme poverty, it is going to be ultimately those people, the people in the Democratic Republic of Congo, who are most affected by the sorts of crises, and so they are the population that we are going to have to make sure are not falling repeatedly back into crisis. We know that disasters can affect the wealthiest communities, so the difference here is not that we're going to stop disasters entirely, although hopefully we can stop some conflicts. The difference is how those communities are able to be able to respond to shocks. That is fundamentally what resilience is about. It's about building the capacity within societies to be able to effectively respond so that people do not end up going into extreme poverty or worse as a result of crises. It's also really worth remembering what the incredible costs of these things are. Obviously in lives is the most important, but one in every three of our development dollars in the last 30 years somebody did an assessment has gone towards humanitarian assistance and conflict, and that is an astonishing amount of resources that could be invested in more sustainable development. Three quarters of all of our humanitarian assistance goes to only 10 countries, and so we have that situation where we know that the crises, we don't always know where they're going to hit, and certainly there are other countries that face crises all the time, but we know that there are a subset of countries that are repeatedly facing crisis, and so the fundamental purpose of this resilience agenda is for us to think about how do we actually do something different to prevent that scenario? How do we do something different to prevent the fact that we are responding over and over again with our taxpayer dollars to crises that we should be investing in preventing? So there's a couple of things. So we have this mission statement, and the reason I think that the mission statement is so important is because it highlights a couple of fundamental things. I talked about partnership, I talked about extreme poverty. Promoting resilient and democratic societies, and the reason those two things are together is that we don't only want societies that are going to be resilient, but we fundamentally believe, and I think this is American principle, we fundamentally believe that societies that are democratic, where citizens have a role in their decision making, where governments are held accountable, where there is transparency, are the societies that are going to ultimately be most resilient to shocks, whether it's here or abroad. And finally advancing our own security and prosperity, it's just always worth noting why is it that the American people know, invest in and care about these things? It's certainly because we care about people around the world and we have values that are fundamentally humanitarian, but it's also because we know that this mission is fundamentally one that speaks to our own interests for national security and prosperity. So let me just say something about what this really means. I think several people have pointed out that this is great, we get it, it's really important to do this, but what are we actually putting in place that is really making a difference? So the policy, so about 14, 15 months ago we put out a new policy, building resilience to recurrent crisis. Of course, we are now starting to implement this in a number of places around the world, but what are the real changes in approach? Because in my experience, if you really want to change the way, particularly a large bureaucracy like the US government does business, it's not just going to be putting out a policy surely. It is actually a series of small changes that are going to be able to reorient the way we do business. The first is political will. That's always the first thing that you have to make sure you have if you're going to really implement a new policy, and that's both here and at home. So having policies, having past, current and hopefully future administration officials talking about the importance of this is fundamental, but it's also again about local ownership in the countries where we're working. The second is about coordination among partners. Now I always laugh at this because as somebody who spent years and years reading and writing lessons learned studies, the one thing that comes up in every single lesson learned study is that we have to coordinate better as an international community. So it's not a new lesson, but it doesn't mean that we always do it right or that we do it well. So one of the innovations that we have done is joint planning and joint assessments because one of the most important ways to get your partners on the same page is to actually create the same page. I mean literally plan together, assess together so that you have a shared understanding of what the challenge is, but then it also when it comes down to hard choices because we spend our days making hard choices about where to invest. When it comes down to hard choices, you have a shared sense of what the priorities are. It's also been about setting up organizations like EGAD and Azure and the Horn and in the Sahel that actually bring together all of the partners on a regular basis to make a difference. Just a few weeks ago, we announced the RISE Initiative in the Sahel, which is $130 million investment in exactly this sort of framework, and we're working on some other partnerships that we will announce soon. The other is about blending investments, and that means to me really two things. One, others have already spoken about the fact of bringing together the development and the humanitarian resources. Again, it sounds like a simple conclusion, but it's actually a pretty foundational change that we're making to make sure that when we're investing our humanitarian dollars, it's actually going towards a long-term vision and not just the near-term life-saving, but also bringing that together, creating the seamless bridge with the development work. But it also means doing more with public-private partnerships. One of the most interesting and innovative things that we've been focusing on around resilience is around livestock. One of the things that we all see when we look at the images of what happens is that you have herders, you have a drought, the animals begin to starve, the herders have to sell their animals that are undernourished and at bargain prices en masse, and so they lose all of their savings, and they lose it at a great far, far less than what it could have otherwise been worth. So connecting people to value chains by improving the health of those animals, by creating micro-insurance so that people actually have something, if they do lose out, by creating better export regimes so that people are selling their animals earlier so that they're banking some of those savings as opposed to carrying them around only on four legs, are a bunch of small, innovative changes that when it comes to a crisis actually can make a huge amount of difference. Another fascinating innovation, we've had a partnership with both NASA and an organization called Watex to look at climate and geology in these areas. Two things that have come out of that. One is that we have actually discovered massive aquifers in Ethiopia and that are allowing us to work with communities that typically suffer drought in a way that allows them to look at their long-term agricultural potential, water that we hadn't seen before because we hadn't used the technology to find it. Similarly, in a partnership that we set up with NASA, we're doing a lot more to apply what we understand about climate and climate change to some of these areas. So there are technologies out there that have been developed for other purposes, but now we're applying them to this. I'll just close because I think I'm out of time with another example because I think it's so important and that is Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines that we've all been seized with over the last couple of months. When you look at the experience of countries like Bangladesh, which in the 1950s would lose half a million people to a massive typhoon and today lose thousands of people to similar scale storms, you look at the difference between an earthquake in Chile and an earthquake in Haiti relatively close to each other where you have utter devastation on one hand and problems but rapid recovery on the other. And what is the fundamental difference? The fundamental difference is about preparedness and institution building. And so the investments that those countries have put in place are similar to the types of things that we are doing in other places like the Philippines. So one of the things in all of the pictures on CNN and so on that you didn't see enough of in my opinion in the Philippines is the fact that we were able, with the Philippines primarily, the Filipino authorities, were able to evacuate 800,000 people. And how did they do that and how is that different from what had happened even in recently in the Philippines? Well, first of all, they have invested with us in early warning systems. So they knew that the storm was coming in part. They knew the scale. They knew some of the places it was going to hit so that they could target those communities. They have invested in first responders because people don't just evacuate on their own. You have to be able to get information to people where they live at the moment when they need it. And that infrastructure has been put in place. And first responder infrastructure has been put in place to be able to mobilize that population to get out. Also, again, this is not a new thing but prepositioning of supplies. When we know that there are places where there are going to be bad storms, having the supplies available in the Philippines at the ready as opposed to in warehouses in Italy or in silos in Nebraska is really where it needs to be. And we have gotten much better at doing that. And as a result, the devastation, however severe of Haiyan, I think, was magnitudes less in terms of the human impact than what it might have been otherwise as a result of the types of investments that we are talking about here today. Alex, thank you very much. That is very reassuring. The aquifer example, fantastic. This issue of institution building. I want to come back to that later. But that is, I think that we have talked about technology, preparedness, institution building. I think Jonathan Schreier, this is a nice transition. We have been talking about security, emergency response, preparedness. It sort of goes to sort of the spectrum of issues sort of, I think, nicely moves to the area that you are focusing on today which is on food security. You are the acting special representative at the Office of Global Food Security at the Department of State. You are a career foreign service officer. And if you look at Jonathan's biography, I think you will see as a very distinguished public service career. So Jonathan, talk about the, when you look at, when you think about from your current perch, the issue of resilience, how does that play in the conversation around food security as we have talked about it from other optics? The floor is yours. Thank you. Good. Thank you. So I am delighted to be here and I am delighted to talk about food security because it is what I have been focused on for the past three years. That is what is going on. For the past three years as the deputy coordinator for diplomacy for Feed the Future, the whole of government initiative that President Obama launched a few years ago. And it is really part of a prioritization of food security and nutrition in the U.S. global agenda because we know it is essential to the poverty alleviation objectives that the President set out in last year's State of the Union address. And it is essential to economic development and therefore economic growth. So it is important for our future economic interests as a country and it is important for our national security interests because the association between hunger, poverty, and sometimes instability and unrest. So it is something that we do not only because it is the right thing to do because our compassion leads us down that path, but also because it is the smart thing to do for our national interests. And we have got a big problem. So we have got a problem where in today's world the UN Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that we have 842 million people who are chronically hungry. That is a big number. That is one in eight people in the world. We have been making progress. But that progress is vulnerable to shocks. And the shock that got us all focused globally on coming back to basics on food security and agricultural development was an economic shock. It was the price shocks of the 2007-2008 period, when a sudden rise in key commodity prices resulted in tens of millions of people being thrown back into poverty. And there were estimates that the number of hungry people in the world had breached the 1 billion mark. We know that those economic shocks are not the only kinds that we can face. Alex mentioned some of the climate shocks. And I'm going to talk a little bit more about that in a moment. But the point is that unforeseen circumstances can throw people back in poverty if we don't work in an intentional way to build resilience into our efforts. Now, why do we focus on food security? Because there is that tight association between hunger and poverty. So three quarters of the world's hungry people live in rural areas and make their living in agriculture. And so working on food security through agricultural development, as Feed the Future does, gets at that double win of trying to help people out of poverty and out of hunger at the same time by increasing incomes. And we do that and increasing agricultural productivity. But we do that not in a way that simply says we need to grow more food here in this locality so these people can consume what they grow. In a sense, that's simply focusing on subsistence agriculture. What we've been doing is helping people raise their household incomes. And this is about connecting them to markets. That's one of the tools for building resilience into the system is the idea that we need to help people move into commercial agriculture. Now, that can be a single farmer with a small plot of land. But once they have a marketable surplus, they are engaged in private sector activity, they are a commercial farmer. We do this through a variety of means, but it all involves focusing on full agricultural value chains and connecting all the links in those value chains. We do this in a variety of ways that include hardware. We sometimes invest in feeder roads connecting remote rural areas with market towns and larger cities. It also involves the software, the economic policy infrastructure that supports the connections between producers and markets. And so that includes things like warehouse receipt systems where farmers are able to put their production, their harvest away for a time so that they can sell it when prices are higher. It's a little bit like what Alex was talking about with timing the sale of livestock. You also want to time the sale of your crop production so that you aren't selling into the boom that inevitably happens right after the harvest. And if you can sell that into a warehouse or put that into a warehouse and get a receipt that is then usable for collateral for financial purposes so that you can get loans or otherwise get access to finance, you then are ahead of the game. Feed the Future also has a number of trade hubs where we are working with countries to improve their connections with international trade. So that involves helping them to improve custom systems, helping them to develop the food safety systems that are needed to meet international sanitary and phytosanitary standards to use a term of art from the trade world. But it basically means giving people the wherewithal to connect to those local, regional, and global markets that can enable them to increase their household incomes and lift themselves out of poverty. And it also involves work to develop entrepreneurs at all links across the value chain. And here we often find that women play a distinctive role to address Maria Otero's point about the important role of women. So in many areas where livestock is raised, it is often the women who are the primary dairy producers in those communities. And so we have projects that involve supporting women's cooperative dairy farms, for example, in Malawi. We also focus on the role of women as intermediaries in local trade. So there are women in Haiti that have been helped through Feed the Future programs in their role as intermediaries connecting farms to markets and so on. And so we do take this kind of holistic approach. We recognize the key role that women play in our efforts. We also have been focused even more intensively on resilience since the extraordinary drought of 2011, which was the worst drought in the Horn of Africa in 60 years. And it's really remarkable to see the shift that occurred as a result of some of the longer-term efforts that the U.S. and other donors have been involved in and the countries themselves have been involved in pursuing. So to take the case of Ethiopia, there were some 14 million people who were in need of emergency assistance of food aid in the last major drought in the 1990s in Ethiopia. This time, it was only about five million people who needed international assistance. Why? Because there had been safety net programs developed by the Ethiopian government, supported by their own resources and the resources of a number of donor governments, including the United States, that helped people to weather the shock. And that's an example of the kind of approach that the future feeds into. And through the work of USAID's resilience strategy, we're doing an even stronger job now than we ever did before of connecting those emergency response systems to the safety net systems to the longer term agricultural development work that we do. We probably have more work to do in the area of climate change. The kinds of droughts that we are seeing are likely to grow more recurrent, the kinds of extreme weather events that Taifun Hayen represents are likely to become more common as climate change advances. And so we are targeting some of our efforts in this area. The work that Alex mentioned on helping pastoralists adopt better ways of managing their herds and flocks is part of the kinds of work that we're doing through the Innovation Lab for collaborative research on adapting livestock systems to climate change. That's an effort that also works, by the way, since we had the representative from Kenya here with the work of the International Livestock Research Institute, which is based in Nairobi, Kenya. And so we're doing targeted work to pastoralist communities, which often suffer the impacts of drought most severely. We do this through efforts, as Alex mentioned, on the tracking of climatic conditions and also tools such as risk index insurance systems. We're also doing this in the context of other international, broader international initiatives that the U.S. is involved in. And this may help in some of the coordination of donor efforts that Alex pointed out is sometimes a weakness, something we always know we should do and sometimes don't always do in practice. So the U.S. joined with other G8 governments and African governments the year before last to launch the new alliance for food security and nutrition. President Obama announced it in May 2012, just down the street at the Ronald Reagan building. That effort has now grown to encompass 10 African countries. It has many components. One of the components that's relevant to resilience is the funding of World Bank risk assessment teams to go into a number of these African partner countries to help identify what risks they face and use that as a basis for advising them, advising these governments and societies on how to develop national risk mitigation strategies. Many of these strategies relate to climate change, but they are broader. And so that's another example of ways we're working with others. And in the area of climate change more broadly, there is growing attention to the approach that's known as climate smart agriculture. That's an approach that has three main pillars. The pillars are sustainable intensification of productivity, so making sure that in the face of climate change we're continuing to grow more because, as I mentioned, we've got 842 million hungry people today. By mid-century, we're going to have about 9.5 billion people on the planet, so that's another 2 billion inhabitants joining us on this planet. So among all those, it's close to 3 billion additional mouths that we have to feed. We're going to need more productivity in the face of climate change. We're also going to have to ensure that our agricultural systems are resilient to the impacts of climate change, and that ties into today's topic, while also ensuring that we're producing more, while reducing the natural resource impacts of agriculture so that we're making agriculture a more efficient process. We do all of this through Feed the Future. We're looking at ways to join with other countries to spread this idea more widely of climate smart agriculture. And some of the work that we're doing in Feed the Future includes the Feed the Future research agenda, which has a primary focus on climate-related issues, so that it focuses on drought and heat-tolerant cereals so that farmers can make their crops more resilient to the impacts of drought or flood. We also do flood-tolerant varieties. We're also tackling pests and diseases that can spread more widely as climate shocks continue, and so on. And through all this, we partner with the private sector and with civil society at home and abroad, because we can't do this alone as governments, whether it's donor governments or governments in developing countries. We need to work in a multi-sectoral way. That's important because the economic systems that the private sector represents are one of the shock absorbers in an economy, because if you have a private sector-based system in an open trade environment, you can more readily move goods from areas of deficit or from areas of surplus, rather, areas of deficit. And you can also adapt more rapidly than a government-run economy could. So we look to the private sector as key partners. We also look to civil society as key partners in this effort, and there's been a tremendous coming together of civil society actors and government actors and international organization actors in the food security area, in particular in recent years that I think really serves as an excellent model for other sectors. So as we go forward, I look forward to questions from the audience on ways that we can work together more effectively to improve the resilience of our food systems for the sake of ending hunger in our lifetimes. Thank you. Thank you, Jonathan. Thank you very much. Andrew Watson, your Managing Director of Environment and Health at DAI. You're a graduate student in geomorphology. I'm not sure what geomorphology is, so I hope you'll tell me what that is. I won't go into that right now. Okay. And could you share, DAI obviously has a global reach and has to think about the variety of resilience perspectives that have been put on the table here. Share your perspective and DAI's perspective about the resilience challenge. Thanks, Dan. The purpose for publishing this DAI Journal on Resilience was to underscore the importance of strengthening resilience, not only within different development sectors, but across the components of integrated development programs which are becoming more and more common these days, thankfully. The journal articles cover wide array of topics from cross-cutting gender issues and post-conflict environments in Libya, Somalia, Sri Lanka, and then also at focus certain articles focus on specific sectors, economic growth, health, and environment. What I wanted to talk about this morning was to get a little more granular and look at ways in which we can operationalize resilience, strengthening activities and really dig down a little bit into the specifics of that. So starting off with, without getting into the semantics of it, I think there is a need to clearly define what we mean by resilience. As Maria pointed out, the overarching definitions used by many development agencies do differ and there's still a heavy emphasis on linking resilience to disaster risk reduction and response. And there's a tendency to equate resilience with reducing vulnerability. And I want to talk a little bit about that because we're on the risk of mixing apples and oranges here. And by simply focusing on mitigating risks rather than strengthening communities, I think the USA policy that was mentioned stresses the importance of integrating resilience-building initiatives into a wide range of development programming. To give you an example, increasing the height of the levees in a flood prone area will certainly reduce vulnerability of the populations living in the flood zone, but it doesn't necessarily strengthen the resilience of the households there in the event that the levee fails. As Bob Lauer points out in the journal quoting, I think it's a Chinese proverb, this is the reason for the graphic on the back of the journal. The bamboo that bends is stronger than the oak that resists. In other words, protecting people and their assets by mitigating risk is not the same as providing people with the wherewithal to withstand shocks and rebound quickly when shocks and stresses occur. So reducing vulnerability is largely about safeguarding assets, whereas strengthening resilience is more about what people and communities do when their assets are compromised. I think that's fundamentally important so that we're not using the word resilience in too cross-cutting a manner. The other thing I wanted to point out is that while the term resilience is new to the lexicon of development, it's not something that's absent from many of most of the communities we work in. Sometimes you get the impression that now that we recognize the importance of climate change, we need to start implementing adaptation activities and resilience-building activities. I think the reality is that in many parts of the world, rural parts of the world, particularly in agricultural areas, resilience not only exists already, it's a way of life. I'll come back to this in a minute. If you take this to hell, we've heard quite a bit about this hell already. The majority of smallholder farmers already have strategies in play and have had for hundreds of years, if not thousands of years, that balance farming activities with livestock herding so that they have, in good times, they have money on the hoof in the form of livestock which can be cashed in if they're not too starved at a time when cash is needed. Beyond that, individual farmers, if you look across the whole of this hell, in many cases, they'll be farming different types of soil. That's a very specific strategy they've adopted. They'll have clay soils adjacent to the river where they grow rice when the river floods under wet conditions, and they'll have peanuts typically planted on sandy soils further away. In a dry year, the rice in the lowland areas will do fine. The peanuts might will probably not. In a wet year, when the rice fields flood, they can always rely on the peanuts which are growing on the sandy soils. These strategies, it's not just an example of risk aversion. They actually optimize food production and create household resilience and also community resilience. In a sense, these things have been called coping strategies in the past and social safety nets. In fact, it's climate smart agriculture or weather smart agriculture. So it's not like the important point here is that I'm not suggesting that these communities and households in this hell are sufficiently resilient to withstand the future shocks and stresses. Climate is changing. There are more weather-related disasters and is increasing conflict, and people's resilience is going to be stressed breaking point. But the point I would like to make is that when we start designing resilience-building programs, we're not starting from scratch. We have social and cultural systems in place that we not only can build on, but must build on in order for these new programs, these newly designed programs to actually have a chance of being successful. A couple of challenges at the implementation level that are still fairly recently identified and still proving somewhat intractable to address. Acknowledging that there are existing levels of resilience. We need to be able to identify that resilience to measure it in a sense, and it's the resilience of households, it's the resilience of local governance systems, including land tenure systems, for example, which is something that Steve Lowry talks about in the journal. The first challenge is to define, first of all, what specific shocks and stresses need to be taken into account when you're gauging resilience at the household or community level. The second challenge is defining the scale at which you're working. Anne Simmons Benton talks about, again in the journal, talks about the different level of resilience of men and women even in the same community, maybe even the same household. But you have to look at the household level, which at the household level, socioeconomic and cultural factors can make significant difference in the level of the household resilience, and it's the same factors apply at the community level, plus local governance. To give another example from the Sahel, parts of Mali, where in a single landscape, you can have interspersed villages made up of bamboo farmers, pearl pastoralists, tuareg herders, bozo, community fishers. Each community will respond differently to different shocks. Indeed, in some cases, a specific shock may be detrimental to one community, but beneficial, an actual opportunity to another community. So those kinds of nuances need to be taken into account when you start out measuring resilience and designing a resilience building program. The third challenge is actually measuring the resilience or the ability of institutions to provide the services and strengthen local resilience. There's a tendency to focus only on disaster preparedness, early warning systems and disaster response. These are critical, for sure, but during and immediately after a specific event, but other services and types of supports are essential for helping put households and communities back on track to meeting their ultimate development goals. At the event, so I think it was two or three weeks ago now at American University, Maria referenced it, there was quite a discussion about how you actually monitor and evaluate resilience strengthening programs. I don't think we're anywhere close to getting where we need to be on this, but it's something that's actually essential. We have DAI, we have a fair amount of project implementation experience that suggests where we should be going. Some folks have argued that it's probably difficult or impossible to measure improved resilience until a community, a household or a community is actually stressed or shocked by a specific event. Others have argued that you can maybe the way to go about measuring changes in resilience is to kind of look at it as a pathway, a starting point and an ideal end point and you measure progress in percentage terms going down that pathway. Our feeling is that neither of those approaches to monitoring resilience is really suitable, principally because you need a rigorous evidence-based approach to measuring progress. What we're trying to do right now on a couple of projects is start out with some of the tools and methodologies that we're already using on climate change programs that measure vulnerability. By that I mean the risk to community assets. I'm not just talking about economic assets, also natural assets and human capital. Using those frameworks as the starting point for monitoring what people will do, can do, will do in the event of a shock or a stressor affecting their ability to access their assets. At a slightly higher level, at the community and institutional level, we're focusing on measuring the ability of organizations, measuring the ability of organizations to deliver specific services before, during and specifically after a crisis because that's what the emphasis of resilience is. Just to wrap up a little bit, a couple of things on Jonathan talked about the early warning systems and so on. There are two articles in the journal, one by John Jeffs and the other by Jessica Heinzelman, talking about the use of mobile technology to build resilience. I think that is a great, the two examples are great examples of how we have the ability, the technology now to communicate readily with people in remote rural areas using mobiles for early warning, for telling people what to do in the event of ABC happening and John Jeffs talks about the use of mobile money. These are not necessarily resilience, resilience strengthening activities in themselves, but they create the foundation for strengthening household and community resilience. Thank you. I want to get a couple, several, there's several, many thoughtful people in the audience, but I want to give a chance for this audience to ask this panel some questions. So if you quickly shoot up your hands if you want to say something, that gentleman in the back, that woman in the back, and this gentleman in the front. And so if they keep them quick, name, rank, serial number, question or a very short comment. And then I'm going to ask each of you all, if you, you know, you can pick and choose, you don't have to answer all of them. Be economical in your response. Go. I'm Wyman Howard. Oh, thank you. Wyman Howard, retired Navy captain and chief executive of the Serendipity Horse Farm. Thank you for your remarks. I'm enrolled. I had no idea why I was coming here today. My question is focused at Alex, but it's for everybody. And that is, if I could deliver a non-proprietary technology, like a disruptive technology within a year, that would reduce your transportation costs to a tenth of what it is now. In terms of meeting the great Stan, the aspiration you shared about USAID, would that be useful? Okay. Thank you. This, this woman here, we're going to do this as a, we're going to bunch the questions together. Yes, please. Hi, Rachel Yavinsky from Population Reference Bureau. I just wanted to know if you guys had any thoughts on how family planning and other aspects of reproductive health can help impact building resilience in these areas. Okay. And this, this gentleman here. Yeah, yeah. Good morning. My name is Maman Siddiquam, the Ambassador of Niger Republic to the USA. Welcome. Thank you. I skipped African Ambassador Group meeting this morning to be here. I won't tell them I skipped the meeting, but frankly, we won't tell anybody. Yeah, but frankly, I am more than delighted because I've learned a lot. And because also, you know, the US Africa Leaders Summit is coming in August. I'm going to Bologna on Bologna in Italy on the 5th, on this month to meet my president to engage him in conversation about what's going to happen during that summit. And, and being from the Sahel, being from a group that follow cows, I've been herding when I was a small boy. I've gone through about four or five droughts. Well, it means I'm 50 plus. I have a concern. I have to raise it here. Sometimes even resilience and over issues can be a fad. And we see PEPFAR great. We see the great work MCC is doing. We're not part of Feedback Future because it's restricted to a number of countries. I was country director for Save Children UK in Rwanda and in DRC. So my plea, since we have administration people here, let's make sure this is not forgotten in less than 10 years. Secondly, the missing link, and Secretary Otero mentioned that, women. I was going to come to that because I figured I was going to get into trouble with Maria if we didn't come back to that. But yes, Ambassador. Yeah, that's a missing link also because where I come from, also they are the one, the most resilient from the grandmother who took me to school to those who help us go through the drought. And I want to make sure that if we continue, then more is coming on their way for all of us. Thank you very much. Thank you, Ambassador. So, Bill, let me, I want to, you and I were talking earlier, Jonathan and Andrew had both touched on this issue of gender and resilience. You, I know that there's obviously a very important link between resilience and security and gender. Could you just talk from your experience to that point first and we'll get to that question or issue first? Well, just a couple of comments. Certainly in the conflicts that are going on and have been going on in Eastern Congo, if there's one group of people that are probably the most effective in dealing with conflict in Congo, it's women. And it's the women who link not just the communities in Eastern Congo and it's going on now. And the women are getting together with different ethnic groups, different ethnic groups in different communities and drawing people together. The men can't do that. The government can't do that. They're not very effective at that sort of thing. When I was there, we brought in some very impressive women from Liberia and Sierra Leone to talk to the women's groups in Eastern Congo and in Rwanda and in Uganda. And we thought if we could get the women's groups across borders talking to each other, that's probably the most effective way to end conflict in Eastern Congo. So I think in general we tend to very much underestimate the role of women, particularly in conflict settings and difficult ones like that. They are the glue that holds the communities together and they're the solution as well. Thank you, Bill. So we had a question about technology. And so maybe each of you comment on this issue of technology. And then someone had a question about family planning if someone wanted to take that. And then if someone could come back to this issue of, okay, we've got a summit coming up, and how do we think about resilience in that? And maybe perhaps in the context of Sahel, which has come up throughout because it's a multi-dimensional challenge and perhaps an opportunity in this Sahel. So, Andrew, why don't you go first? Can I go back to the gender issue? The reality is that in most rural communities throughout the world, certainly in developing countries, women and children are a lot more vulnerable in the case of crises, shocks, and stresses, simply principally because they are already starting from a disadvantage by not having access to assets or control over those assets. And as I said earlier, in the case of a crisis, when resilience is that people's ability to access other sources of assets, critical assets, women are going to be even, women and youth are going to be even more disadvantaged. But to loop in the aspect of family planning, what DAI is doing right now on a USAID project in Malawi, which is the project is called Integrating Nutrition Value Chains, is one of the key entry points is local health services and particularly family planning services in the districts of Malawi, and where women are coming to get standard services, family planning services, but also using the project, using the opportunity as the entry point to talk about nutrition, family nutrition, and food security tactics at the smallholder level. And that's the scaling up of the nutrition value chain activities is working really well through the linkages to family health systems. This issue of youth that comes up reminds me that my great friend and colleague, Nicole Golden, is here with us who is running the Youth Security and Prosperity Initiative at CSIS in April 3 at 9 a.m. We are releasing the Youth Global Wellbeing Index 9 a.m. April 3, and so this is related to this conversation about resilience. So that's my PSA for CSIS. So I'm hoping Jonathan and Alex, you can talk about this issue of how are you thinking about this for the summit. You might want to just a brief comment about this hell and this issue about technology. If you could take those, the two of you could take those three, that would be great and we'll end it there. I can take a shot at the question about the summit is easy because the summit agenda is being worked out at the White House, so stay tuned. We will hope to have news on that soon, but that hasn't been finalized and it's beyond anyone at this table. But you're going to pass that along. We will take all suggestions. And the area of resilience and food security more generally is an important one. I know that this has been declared by the leaders of the members of the African Union. This year has been declared the year of agriculture and food security in Africa in 2014. So it seems like an important topic. And the work of the international community on resilience in particular in this hell was prominent. Alex mentioned agir, just to spell that out for people. It comes from the French initials for the Global Alliance for Resilience. And it's a grouping of countries that's been led out of the European Union to help promote resilience in this hell, but it's something that the U.S. through USAID has been working on closely because we also helped launch in May of 2012 the Global Alliance for Action Against Drought, which was centered in the Horn of Africa. And agir and the Global Alliance really are two sides of the same coin. So that's part of the, you know, when institutions are built or alliances are established, it's one of the ways that the international system has, that the international community has of giving these ideas staying power. And, you know, in the case of the Global Alliance, it's built on already established regional institutions like the Intergovernmental Organization for Action Against Drought in the Horn of Africa. So again, we're trying to root this in local systems. And I know that agir has been a focus of some of USAID's resilience work, so maybe that's a good handoff to turn it to Alex. So Alex, before you respond, if you just responded to the gentleman's question about technology, if he wants to talk to you about technology, who does he talk to? Is there an 800 number? Yeah, we can certainly give you, I mean, obviously people are always interested in ways in which we can make our operations more efficient. And so we can give you somebody to contact to talk more about your idea. But close on the ambassador's comments. So first of all, we miss you, Maria. It's always, it's great, you know, to have leadership that is articulate like Maria. And I think in particular, you know, one of the reasons that the work that Maria and the Secretary and others did that has been so deeply operationalized to the core in USAID, our number one operational principle, not only for the resilience policy, which I was looking to check, and it is true and it's there, but it has become gender and gender inclusion. And the fascinating thing is that there's so much work that's gone on in the last decade or so that points to the centrality of the role of women and their decision making in the family that is so in so many ways in terms of health, nutrition, agricultural production, horticulture, diversification that increases family income, that women's decision making and then the role of education and that is the linchpin to so much of this agenda. On, you know, the thing I will say about the summit, you know, if you look at the AU platform for the next 50 years, if you look at the things that the President said when he was in Africa last year, I think one thing stands out that this administration believes firmly and strongly in the African Renaissance, that we want to be spending our time talking about inclusive growth and opportunities for democracy in the private sector. When you look at the strategy, we want to spend a lot less time focusing on responding to disasters. And the only way that we're going to be able to fulfill that agenda, I think, is by a lot of the things that we've been talking about here today. And so we may not know the exact specifics of the agenda, but you can be assured that we're looking to a future of an Africa that is growing, that is inclusive, that is increasingly democratic, where citizens enjoy their rights. And the only way we all know that we're going to get there is by addressing the challenges that we face today. So I think you're going to hear about a lot of that. But frankly, your voice is the most important. I mean, what African leaders want and their commitment to that future is going to be, I think, one of the most important things that comes out of the summit as well. Alex, thanks very much. Congratulations, Barbara Lauer, on being the editor of this very successful journal. And thank you, DAI, for your support for this event. And please join me in thanking the panel and our speakers.