 Thank you, Julie, and good morning, good afternoon, colleagues and partners. Thank you for joining us as we come together to close the 2022 Global Protection Forum with the session number 12 of the week and with a very promising discussion on how we can better engage on access issues in order to achieve protection outcomes, with a particular focus on the good practices and opportunities to better engage with access working groups. We certainly cannot have such an important discussion without inviting Ocha, who will be represented today by Ms. Sophie Solomo, who is Ocha Global Access Advisor, to provide us with pertinent examples on how Ocha, via the access working groups, ensure a coordinated approach on access. Following Ocha's global perspectives, we will together deep dive into two field experiences. The first is about access challenges and opportunities in South Sudan, which will be presented by our colleague, Mr. David Hatar, who is UNSCR Roving Protection Officer in South Sudan. And the second experience will be shared by Mr. Ramseh Briant, who is the Senior Protection Cluster Coordinator Officer in Nigeria in the sub-office of Maiduguri. These global and field perspectives will then be complemented by different perspectives on non-UN1 by Dr. Ashley Jackson, who is a researcher and author, and is also the co-founder and co-director of the Center on Armed Groups. The presentations will be followed by what I hope will be a very lively discussion during the Q&A session. But not least, we will invite Mr. Julian Marnef, Head of Field Operations and Support at the Global Protection Cluster, to close the webinar as well as the week with some remarks and ideas on the way forward and the sustained access that protects according to the GPC. To kick off the discussion, it's my pleasure to pass the floor to Ms. Sophie Solomo. Thank you so much, Sophie, for joining us today. And for offering us perspective from your work with Ocha's Global Access Advisor. The floor is yours, Sophie. Thanks. Thank you very much, Huda, and good morning, good afternoon, colleagues. It's a pleasure to be with you today to discuss engaging with Access Working Group. So first of all, what I would like to do is a brief presentation about what are Access Working Groups and where you can find an Access Working Group in the field. So if we can start with the first slide, please, and we will see that actually in most of the context where you are working, you should be able to identify a focal point within Ocha with an Access Working Group. We have like Access Working Group in more than 24 countries and you see the map and I would be happy to share more details if colleagues are interested in reaching out to the Access Working Group. And we see that in a certain number of countries, we actually do have protection cluster represented in the Humanity and Access Working Group. Top of our mind, we had like Mali, Nigeria, Somalia, North East Syria in Gaziantep and Venezuela. But these are only examples and we know that protection cluster are participating as permanent member or ad hoc participant in the Humanity and Access Working Group in numerous countries. So what is the Humanity and Access Working Group? So it's a forum. It's informal. It's not part of the Interagency Standing Committee structure where we hope to have partners together to facilitate the work of the Humanity and Access and just to bring us together in a platform where we can exchange on the analysis of the context, where we can discuss advocacy, where we can discuss like how to move forward in gaining access to a specific area and also trying to design policy on access, on engagement with different stakeholders in a joint manner. So really the Humanity and Access Working Group is a platform where we hope that all the people with interesting analysis and interesting information on access could be together to discuss access issues. We will see that Humanity and Access Working Group really vary from one country to another. It's really based on like what is the expectation from the Humanity and Country team? Do we want to have a group that is more focusing on the analysis on the situation? Do we want to have like a much more operational group that is looking at a very specific area and jointly we're just like combining like strengths and we just like make sure that we can move forward with gaining access to this specific area. But what is interesting in that in all this Humanity and Access Working Group, that we are looking at is a complementarity of skills and expertise. We are looking at people with like strong like field support and in this regard like clusters and their implementing partners are really an asset for us in terms of like bringing forward the access conversation. So this is like really in a nutshell like what are you made to an Access Working Group? Most of the time they are like reporting to the HCT but in some context they are also reporting to the intercluster. This is the case for example in South Sudan. So the Humanity and Access Working Group is present so just for you to know like you will have opportunity if you're working as an implementing partner on protection or if you are like a part of a protection cluster like you will have the opportunity to contribute to the work of the Humanity and Access Working Group. So if we move to the next slide what we can see is clearly like where you can engage and how can we contribute to having this coordinated approach and bringing a protection lens to the access analysis. So potential for engagement are available at various level. The first one is in the monitoring, they're reporting an analysis of access constraints. So we are welcoming of course the protection lens in terms of like what are the access constraints protection partners are facing in which location who are the perpetrators of the access constraint and just like making sure that you're contributing to the analysis. In most of the country offices we have like a mechanism to monitor and report access constraints so please make sure like you feed in in this mechanism so that we can also have like a really good analysis of the access issues per sector and we clearly see that each sector has very specific access issues. Some are common to all sectors and some are very specific to some sectors so please feel free to reach out to access colleagues and making sure that you contribute to that. There is also the potential for engagement in the coordination mechanism. We always welcome protection members in the Access Working Group usually represented by the protection cluster so please if you're not like contributing to the Access Working Group and you would like to be included feel free to reach out to Ocha and we will make sure that you can participate in the conversation either as a permanent member or on an ad hoc basis if you want to raise some specific issues. We also have like access strategies at HCT level and for us it's very important that protection is included in our strategy. We definitely want that an access strategy as a protection outcome and as you know like as Ocha we really like are the champion of like centrality of protection so we really want to make sure that protection elements are included in the strategy so we would be more than happy to have your contribution. Contribution also in terms of policy development. Some country offices develop joint operating principle, ground rules or engagement with armed group. One of the good practice for example in Afghanistan after the Taliban took over there was really like a good effort from the humanitarian community to develop joint operating principle on working with the de facto authorities and elements of protection were definitely included in the joint operating principles so these are like some good practices that we can replicate in all the context. Of course also in terms of advocacy, in terms of negotiation it's very important to have protection actors as part of the conversation and we always welcome to have protection actors as part of the negotiation team. And if we are like preparing for a negotiation on a specific area or with a specific actor it's very important for us that we have this protection lens as well and that when we're negotiating there are like some protection outcome as well. So really different level of engagement. Of course like we are welcoming protection actors in all these elements and really advocating for the contribution. If we're moving to the next slide I wanted to show like a very like a very simple example of like where we can actually have like some kind of specific like protection lens or protection analysis. So in most of our country offices now we are doing access severity mapping and we don't see like really clearly but I would like to explain like what you're seeing. We are doing like a severity mapping where we are identifying like where do we have like low access constraint, medium access constraint and high access constraint. And what is interesting is that now we're overlaying this with population in need by sector. So we can clearly have a narrative about for example in the context of Iraq in 2020 that out of like 300,000 people living in area with severe access constraints 200,000 people in need were part of the target of the protection cluster. So we can clearly have like this kind of like key messages where we can emphasize is like which sector is the most impacted by the access constraint what is the case load of population in need that we cannot reach because of access constraint and trying to find mitigation measure. So that's one of the good practice in terms of like both analysis and advocacy and if we move to the next slide we can see a different kind of analysis which was done in Syria in 2019-2020 where we're looking at access from a different perspective not necessarily in terms of like where do we have access constraints and where do we have access or not access but more in terms of quality of access. And they were looking at different criteria when they were looking at quality of access including like our ability to sustain presence the different kind of like partner that were present on the ground that we have international, national actors our ability to conduct like needs assessment or evaluation and one of their key criteria was around protection and one of the criteria to define the quality of access in Syria was the ability to have access for protection related activities or services and they had like different categories such as the presence of protection actors the ability to carry out assessment mission the sustainability of intervention and the ability to carry out evidence-based advocacy on key protection concern. So there was a strong focus on protection in this analysis of access in Syria that led to like regular reporting on the presence of a protection partner the number of activity that were conducted the number of missions and you see like the infographics on your right. So that was another example on how we can really like include the protection lens to like the access analysis and the work of the access working group and of course this requires like a close coordination and collaboration with the protection cluster and its partners. So we have like many more example where we really like have this conversation with protection actors more recently we have like Ukraine where Ocha conducted an evacuation of civilians where we really like discuss ahead of the mission with the protection cluster and after the mission with the protection cluster ensuring that all key elements of protection were included in this mission we also have like a different humanitarian access working group where we are currently like working on specific analysis on protection so there are like many more example but the key message that I wanted to convey today is that we need your contribution so please feel free to reach out to Ocha in your respective country offices or at global level to make sure that we can go a bit further actually in this analysis of protection issues and access and we are looking forward to suggestion as well so really happy to be here today just to like touch upon like what are the possibilities and looking forward to hearing from all the colleagues about like example from their respective country offices and to the question. Thank you so much. Over to you Huda. Thank you Sophie for sharing with us all this insightful and practical ideas and good practices. We are as always very grateful for the strong partnership with Ocha and the invaluable expertise and coordination on access so I would now like to turn to our colleague David and firstly thank you David for being with us today and would like to ask you the following questions how do we better negotiate access using protection risks analysis and leveraging protection outcomes especially in your context do you think that this use trying to better use protection risk analysis in the access analysis in general is it, does it have any impact and how can we measure the impact of access negotiation on the protection of affected civilians? Over to you David, thanks. Thank you Huda and thank you everyone for having me. So these are in fact quite interesting questions but before I dive into them I'd like to give a little context update on South Sudan. So as we know South Sudan remains a protection crisis where the most critical protection risks have not been have not decreased. This is of course despite the fact that we've signed the 2018 revitalized agreement on the resolution of conflict in South Sudan. So if you look at all the humanitarian needs overviews the HNOs, the country reports and other various reports that have been published regarding South Sudan you'll notice that on the contrary armed violence and conflict related crimes against affected populations are ever increasing. Of course this also affects humanitarian access so humanitarian access to essential services including healthcare, protection, water, sanitation, education, etc. is quite remains quite a challenge in this complex context. So just to give an example between January and December 2021 591 reported humanitarian access incidents were recorded. So these range between violence against humanitarian personnel to assets to operational interferences. In that same year in 2021 five colleagues, eight workers lost their lives while delivering humanitarian assistance and services and a total of 322 aid workers were relocated due to insecurities and threats against their lives or security. Just this past month in September we've had four colleagues that have unfortunately lost their lives and we've had 39 incidents that have been recorded that almost half of them have had a significant impact on humanitarian operations. So to answer your questions how can we better negotiate access using protection? So when we talk about the access working group or when we talk about access negotiations we need to keep in mind that the access working group goes into these negotiations not having protection in mind. These are people what these are security people these are negotiating people who negotiate access they go into these negotiations looking how can we get services? How can we get food assistance? How can we get shelter and if I is into an area? Protection is the last thing on their mind. So for people like us who work in protection obviously protection is the first thing in our mind. So because the way we think about it is how are we going to talk about food assistance or shelter and if I is if we cannot even guarantee that the person can get to said location? So basically the protection cluster in my opinion needs to bring a narrative that looks at access negotiations beyond food beyond shelter and if I beyond political negotiations because like I said if a civilian cannot access the location there are no safe roads there are no safe zones there are no military free zones we cannot even begin to talk about assistance or protection programming. How are we supposed to talk about GBV for example when the soldiers that are committing sexual violence are sitting under the tree opposite the road from where when you're doing your protection services? How are we going to talk about food distribution when youth or armed groups are attacking women and children on their way back home with the assistance they've received? So protection is supposed to provide an analysis that security or access personnel don't think about. So I believe the way we can do this is by three things or at least the way that it's supposed to happen or that we wanted to happen in South Sudan is by three things. First of all participating in the access working group which we're doing. Second of all we have the mobile protection working groups and we have the recently launched protection monitoring system. So participating in the access working group how is that beneficial? So by participating in the access working group we act as a bridge between the access working group and actors. To put it in simple terms when negotiating access ideally what should happen is you have your protection actors who are your first responders who are people who are already in the field who are people that whenever there is conflict there are the people who are there who are telling you who attacked who attacked whom why did it happen when did it happen people who in other terms are doing your conflict analysis and you have your access working group who usually negotiate with politicians with the government with the actors themselves. In any given negotiation or access negotiation what should happen is protection people should use the people who are in the field not use benefits from the people that are working in the field and engage with communities. Obviously here engaging with communities is key because it's the community leaders it's the communities who are going to tell you this location is safe for us this location is not right. So you talk to the community you engage with the community you do your risk analysis and then from that you come back with plan A, B, C to whatever letter of the alphabet you want to reach and then you come back to the access working group and you say right according to our engagement with the community these are the locations that the community feels safe for us to negotiate access of services too. This is ideally what should happen and then we try to negotiate if that doesn't happen then plan B if that doesn't happen then plan C but what's key here is community engagement and risk analysis. Secondly by by being part of the access working group the cluster is supposed to be like an overarching safeguarding mechanisms. Actually we are currently the only cluster that attends the access working group. So we should represent humanitarian programming. In any given conflicts you will have the access working group will call for a meeting and they will say we cannot access location A, B and C. The groups that are fighting are this group and this group and they belong to this political party and this political party or whatever they have the incomes right they know the facts. That's the ease of it. What's difficult is us as a protection for saying right we cannot access A, B and C. So what is the next best location that is community accepted that is safe for the community that we could identify and then what are the protection mechanisms that we couldn't that we could put in place to ensure that these people make it safe to these locations receive services and are able to stay there and stay safe right. There is an emphasis here that again community engagement it has to be chosen by the community. We cannot just say oh you have to move across three counties or three villages or three whatever in order to receive services it has to be chosen by the community. Another thing that the protection risk analysis helps us to do is safeguarding our own colleagues. Like I mentioned unfortunately only this past month we've lost four colleagues. So this risk analysis helps us identify for example not only the risks that the affected populations are facing but also us as people who are working in the context. In the context of South Sudan for example if you have a conflict and you see that the colleagues on the ground are from ethnicity A or B and the risk analysis will tell you if you're from ethnicity A you should not be there or if you are a foreigner you should not be there. Stuff like this. So we should be able to say someone from ethnicity A or ethnicity B should not go to that area. If this person is going to go and negotiate with government for example we as from the protection analysis we should be able to say who needs to be present in this meeting. And if someone who is a national staff is going to be there we need to identify what safeguarding measures we're going to put in place to ensure that the safety of our colleagues. So that's from participating in the access working group site. Then we have the mobile protection working group which is something that's been functioning in South Sudan for a couple of years now. This is extremely useful for hard to reach areas because we obviously benefit from the experience of our local colleagues who not only are part of the community but because they're part of the community there are two benefits they know better obviously because you cannot go and negotiate on behalf of a community when you don't know what are their needs how they think what they want this is not how it works. And second they become a channel of a two-way communication with the community and this is essential with any access negotiations with any because access at the end of the day is building trust. If you do not build trust then it's impossible to gain access. This was quite quite feasible actually a couple of years back when we had like former southern unity states. We had a conflict I wasn't there but obviously this is like the experience from the colleagues. We had a conflict where no one outside of the state was allowed to enter access was extremely difficult and yet the production cluster the NGO forum which is an amazing production partner because they obviously represent the willingness and the participation of the NGOs national and international. We had production actors who were on the ground who were part of the community and it was because of these actors who were on the ground who are part of the community that we were able to negotiate a couple of missions that were a bit longer were like four six eight weeks missions where we were able to talk about protection where we were able to engage with the community gain their trust and now we have full-time protection programming and it was because of this that we were able to do this. So this is one of the success stories that we have with the mobile protection working group. And then finally we have the protection monitoring system. So the protection monitoring system I think it's the same around the globe but we were able to launch it last month. We've just received data back we were quite happy with it it's not published yet but basically the production monitoring system we believe is a great tool because it covers 95% of South Sudan and South Sudan is quite big as most of you know we've been able to have buy-in from most of the national international partners in South Sudan which is how we were able to reach 95% coverage. The idea behind the protection monitoring system is that we want to utilize the data that we're receiving and this data once analyzed will give us heads-ups on like potential areas for constraints but also will give us heads-ups on where there is a space to negotiate based on these findings. So I think these these are like the the pros of using protection risk analysis. Thank you. Thank you very much David. This is really interesting and you said like a few golden words I think you mentioned import the importance of protection monitoring system and protection risk analysis the conflict analysis and community engagement and also you highlighted the role of local staff and local actors and the role of the NGO forums and I think these are golden keys to really support access to affected population and vice versa. They are access to us as well and their feedback to us. So thank you very much David and we will now turn to our colleague Ramsey who is the senior protection cluster coordinator officer in Maiduguri in Nigeria. So Ramsey we do understand that the ongoing return and relocation of IDPs is one of the main concerns for the humanitarian community in Nigeria. How has the issue of access affected the sustainable return and the integration of IDPs? Over to you Ramsey. Thank you online. Good afternoon from Nigeria to colleagues online. In years indeed a major protection concern and actually a concern to the entire humanitarian community given the fact that the conflict is in its 13th year and we still continue to see new displacement insurgency going on, active hostilities between the non-state armed group as well with the government I mean with the military of Nigeria and we think with such a situation there have been a lot of advocacy with the government to ensure that return is for the delay to the reasons for which IDPs fled the areas of origin no longer exist before return can take place. So right now we have a return of IDPs to most local government areas where they come from but most of them are situated in the local government capitals and are unable to go back to their areas of origin. So we see that most of the return areas are still areas that are hard to reach so you find out that most of the returnees are not reaching to their original areas of habitat but they are remaining going back to IDP camps within the areas where they've been returned and most of those areas where the original that come from are not accessible to them also not accessible to us monitoring workers and most importantly we have due to the ongoing military hostilities the military don't trenches around the key major towns that prevents with the purpose of preventing non-state armed group members using vehicles penetrating areas controlled by the military and such a step has led to the IDPs having limited access to farmland and the population within the East Nigeria are predominantly people that are engaging farming for livelihood and for income generation and for the fact that they cannot access farmland due to the parameters set by the military as to how far you can go it is a serious access issue and has led to several negative coping mechanism thereby resulting to that being a protection concern for us even those that are engaged in farming they are limited as to the kind of crop that you can plant they are expected not to plant crops that will grow very high because it may prevent the military from identifying any non-state armed group members is infiltrating their control area so we we also had an experience where recently a few months ago the government instructed humanitarian organizations not to provide humanitarian assistance in areas where IDPs have been relocated to as mentioned by the government that they feel that the continuation of humanitarian assistance in the return area will further hinder the ability of the IDPs to be self-reliant so we thought that was an issue given the fact that most of these areas where these individuals have been returned they cannot be engaging any meaningful livelihood activities humanitarian actors are also not able to provide sufficient basic support to the needs of these individuals given the fact that we already have a large portion of IDPs that are in need of assistance we have people fleeing from areas controlled by the non-state armed groups who still need a lot of support we also have refugees returning from nearby states I mean nearby countries Niger, Cameroon and Chad so this situation is compounded and it's affecting the assistance that has been provided to the IDPs we also have another access related issue that has protection implications with the explosive remnants of war we have a situation where the demining action taken by the military is for two reasons one is if there is military advances targeting non-state armed groups there is demining activity that is taking place and also for humanitarian convoy but when it comes to areas of return we haven't seen much action taken by the government to ensure that areas of return are demined before relocation take place so we've had a lot of incidences where IDPs and our returnees have been exposed to IEDs we've had children killed and most of these individuals given that they cannot engage in farming they go around searching for metal crafts to be used for income generation so children may not understand what is an unexplosive otherness material and what is a toy so we've had situations where children playing in the field where we're killed because of unexplosive or remnants of war within the communities we also have an issue of housing land and property where individuals are unable to access their housing their land and their property and these are just some of the factors that exemplify the need for consistent collaboration between access and protection thank you Houda thank you Ramsey I have a follow-up question to you actually like you mentioned many many challenges regarding explosive ordinance remnants of unexploded ordinance as well and the fact that the assistance and the engagement with non-state armed groups the fact that you only engage with non-state armed groups I know in Nigeria can be criminalized so faced with all these challenges how have the access working group and the protection sector work together to address issues related to lack of access and protection of the population over to you Ramsey thank you Houda in practical terms there are several overlapping issues that comes in play when you talk about access and protection and in Nigeria our work with the access working group has been also done in close collaboration with the same court given the fact that most of what we do is to be is based on negotiation with the Nigerian military and like you mentioned negotiation or engagement with non-state armed groups in Nigeria is considered illegal given the fact that their perception that if you engage in non-state armed groups you're going to be supporting the illegitimacy and the government of Nigeria doesn't want to see any negotiation or engagement with non-state armed group members so most of our access and same court discussion is done primarily with the Nigerian military and for this we depend on the access and same court working group that is led by Ocha and access being with the NGO forum in Ocha as well it is important to note that when you're talking access the only way many people get to understand the implication if they understand the protection risk if you're talking about population having access they do not have access to farmland how with a little man or someone within the government that doesn't have a protection sense understand the implication of that so in order for access to be to make a greater impact it has to be linked to the protection risk associated with the lack of access so this is where we have a lot of collaboration with the access and same court working group to jointly identify access issues attach that to the protection risk and then present to the relevant stakeholders so we have joint position paper we have our regular meetings with the access working group to highlight key issues we've been created a WhatsApp group for the access same court and protection working group where we commonly share information discussions and prepare for advocacy for example in locations that are inaccessible what we do because protection has community based structures community groups that are established in most of the local government areas we use this community structures to provide information good you're back go ahead yeah so we in locations where we have we do not have access or areas that are hard to reach they are NGOs and the UN have policies that prevent them from going to hard to reach in inaccessible areas but those policies do not apply to community based groups so we use the community based structures that protection has to under to have like information access issue protection issues from the field that can be transmitted to the access colleagues with the same court colleagues and for easier advocacy for example we also have regular meetings with the military to discuss access related issues as well as protection issues some concrete examples we've had was the situation where we had the military occupying schools for example we have we have a discussion with the access and same court working group we came up and identified the various schools the military are occupied our children do not have access to education the protection implication of that so basically we've had several collaborations we've even had situations where we called on actually two weeks ago where we mobilized our protection actors in the field to understand access related issues same court related issues how do they engage the military in the field when they have protection concerns given the fact that they are on the front line so how do they engage the military is important to understand the difference between access same court related issues and protection issues we've had a lot of capacity building activities we developed our request for information the RFR tracking system that we work on along with the access and same court colleagues to be tracking information that we act of the military so basically and right now we are actually discussing a joint briefing session for donors to be held by the access as far as the protection sector so basically these are some of the initiatives we've undertaken along with the access access working group thank you many thanks Ramsey this was an excellent presentation and I think it's time to turn now to our special guests who will provide us with a non-UN perspective I turn to Dr. Ashley about how these challenges have changed over time and how or whether protection responses have also changed over to you Dr. Ashley thank you Huda so I think I have a presentation that's just about to pop up but just in terms of background one of the things that I was asked to talk about was a study I co-authored with Steve Zick called presence and proximity it was about all of the challenges we've talked about today I came out in 2017 so I'll talk a little bit about that study it was co-sponsored by OCHA and NRC and we spent really six months Steve and I traveling from Central African Republic to Iraq to a number of contexts interviewing humanitarians and communities and trying to understand the state of access and protection this study this presence and proximity study followed up on another study which had been done five years prior to that I called to stay and deliver and that was really a reaction to the post-9-11 bunkerization of aid agencies that we saw so it feels somehow appropriate five years on from this presence and proximity study to be sitting here with all of you trying to revisit some of those findings specifically in relation to protection and issues of coordination and the ones that we've been talking about today so that's a little bit of background my specialty although I began my career as a as a humanitarian aid worker is negotiating with armed groups and trying to understand engagement with armed groups so I'm going to touch on all of that in my remarks and really trying to respond to some of the things that Sophie Ramsey and David also brought up so the question that we can move on to the first slide but the question of proximity and presence for humanitarians and is an enduring one with the main dilemma being around getting access to populations or at least ensuring populations have access to assistance and protection but also ensuring that protection is not forgotten in that equation that it is not mainstreamed out of existence that it is is part of an access approach and that's difficult that's incredibly difficult in the highly fluid and challenging and violent environments in which humanitarians work today what we found in this report and it will be no news to anyone listening is that presence and by extension access was clearly linked to protection that you know protection requires this kind of access and should be an integral part of any access approach I think we've come a long way in terms of incorporating that into access negotiations into the cluster system into working groups as Sophie touched on but there's still a lot of challenges and there's still a lot of preconceived notions around access being first and protection being a secondary concern but as Ram as you talked about often access and protection are so deeply intertwined that if you don't address them holistically as part of the same approach you're not going to be able to meet humanitarian needs in a sustainable way you risk marginalizing already vulnerable and marginalized populations you risk creating new conflicts or exacerbating old ones and we found in context after context that there were both really great approaches to doing just that despite the issues around coordination but also again this mindset of not being able to do all of that and in a lot of these contexts that we looked at from Iraq to Syria agencies were not directly present they were subcontracting they were monitoring remotely they were using community-based organizations in a way that it became very difficult to understand the risks on the ground and to program effectively for that there were many kind of layers of subcontracting but not a lot of coordination and information sharing as we've been talking about today the kinds of tactics and techniques of using community-based organizations in the example of Nigeria that's a good practice we found a lot of challenges to establishing that kind of good practice and we also found that where agencies struggled to be present in an area they tended to ignore protection simply because those concerns those issues are much more nuanced they're much more difficult to detect you need that on the ground insight David talked about this as well in South Sudan if you're not physically there talking to populations understanding what different people in different communities need and where the threats are coming from it becomes again very hard to address as opposed to meeting food needs through food distribution something which feels more straightforward although there are of course complexities there as well a final point which we've touched on a little bit but not much is that when it comes to armed groups and protection concerns whether they're state-aligned militias or non-state armed groups who exist in opposition opposition to each other or to the state private direct advocacy is incredibly important being able to talk to belligerents on all sides is incredibly important in terms of the long game of socializing and furthering protection and human rights concerns you have to engage and you have to have that that kind of presence now because this is often done best directly you need that presence of course ad hoc negotiations for access through or through community acceptance and directly maybe the only way of working in a certain context but there are of course sacrifices and you don't necessarily have those kind of sustained advocacy strategies either because the armed group is seen as quote-unquote off limits or unreceptive or people simply don't know where to begin because they've been in this posture of of not talking to or not being present directly in those areas where armed groups are that is not to say that community links aren't important or that the community cannot provide important advocacy or information or support approaches to protection David talked about this with South Sudan specifically with regard to unity state right and as Ramza was talking about with regard to Nigeria sometimes the challenges of any direct engagement or any advocacy to the non-state actor side are to seem insurmountable in the current context but one of the things that we express concern about in this report and which I remain concerned about is that those strategies of protection that element of protection that engage with non-state actors often falls by the wayside particularly since 9-11 since we have the kinds of counter-terror restrictions and other restrictions which make that very difficult so if we move to the next slide I'll talk a little bit about what I think has changed and hopefully that sets us up for a bit of a debate well a lot and a very little at the same time has changed there are new conflicts new dynamics new actors which I'll come to in a second but then is now you know whether or not there's protection as part of an access mindset it's incredibly uneven it depends on a mix of external and internal dynamics politics personalities perceptions who the head of a certain mission is even can affect whether or not an agency is able to establish presence or able to find a modality to work on these concerns and all of these are dynamic and shape the degree to which one can kind of stay and deliver and have this approach when striking change is in places like Somalia where you know four or five years ago there was a much more forward-leaning risk posture much more political willingness to kind of take risks to be able to have a holistic approach to access and protection to try and push back out into areas to find ways to negotiate with our own groups it's the exact opposite today I think we're seeing some change in posture with the famine trying to get back out trying to get into areas controlled by Al-Shabaab and things like this but there's been a huge sea change which doesn't necessarily have to do only with the conflict dynamics but has to do with other internal dynamics that are inside the humanitarian community inside the UN family inside those coordination structures and things like that and the issue and we see it again in places like Somalia so severely is that the consequences of not pushing forward of not having those modalities is that when there's a famine like what we're experiencing now or near famine-like conditions in many areas the inability to reach this population to our suffering is there the ones who pay the price for that there are also new challenges as well and that can't be underestimated the word new is kind of tricky of course I think there are probably new variants to old challenges and I'll explain what I mean in a second so one is working with kind of stronger authorities or strong states who are suspicious of and seeking to control aid and access who don't want the kinds of negotiations with armed groups amongst other things don't want certain protection concerns talked about or addressed would rather that you just give them the aid and leave it at that the conflict in Ethiopia is one the deadliest conflict in the world right now where I think agencies are really struggling with some of these issues and one where protection concerns exist in a very complicated and often compromised relationship to principled access but I could go on I could think about the Houthis in Yemen the Taliban de facto government in Afghanistan and so on but we're also seeing different types of groups so in Central African Republic we know for example that the Wagner group has been responsible for more violent targeting of civilians since 2020 than either state forces or the main opposition forces and how do you engage with the Wagner group well I think that's an issue that a lot of agencies are debating and incredibly worried about and frustrated by because it's quite frankly not very easy in places like Haiti gangs or other actors that don't quite fit into our topology of armed groups or the old ideas of the armed groups we should be negotiating and dealing with are posing severe access challenges I say again that these are new variants because these kinds of dynamics have been around in Haiti and elsewhere for a very long time militias and mercenaries like the Wagner group are probably as old as war itself and criminal groups and gangs are nothing new but they're existing at a scale and with regard to protection challenges and access challenges that I don't think we've seen before the nature the mutation if I can carry the COVID metaphor along has changed and is an important thing to consider you know are our coordination mechanisms are our ways of working fit for purpose with regard to those contexts the report itself went into lots of things around self-generated risks and things around the nature of remoteness and remote programming I'll probably skip that but my my underlying conclusion is that if we're talking about access that protects and that protects everyone that's still not a common mindset or approach and a lot of the knowledge sits informs like this one it doesn't always trickle down it's at the mercy of these larger dynamics but I think as the speakers have illustrated today we've made a great deal of progress and one of the ways in which we've made progress has been working together and this is where I come back to access working groups you know what our report and what my entire body of work on humanitarian action has underscored is that humanitarian actors are most effective in creating change for themselves and for the people they're trying to serve when they can find ways to effectively work together this means sharing experiences especially in high-risk environments where agencies are fearful of talking about the real compromises of access and protection where they might be in competition with one another within the UN or for funding or for presence people like to capture their areas and say that this is where we're working etc and don't necessarily want to share challenges that an agency also working there might be facing as well demands for taxes protection concerns diversion all those kinds of things are often kept quiet unless we have forums and modalities to talk with one another because of course there are huge individual legal organizational risks to a lot of the protection challenges and the things that we've talked about today so what Sophie was talking about at the outset all of this only works if we have collective participation in the forums that are there and those forums actually work to create tools joint operating principles that are responsive to what agencies are actually grappling with do the principles make sense is it safe to talk about these challenges in those forums I think again with modalities like access working groups but also things like security consortia and collectives like and so like country level fora that exists to coordinate national and national NGOs we have really come a long way but I think it's important to also be honest about the challenges and how they kind of reemerge rematerialize in these sort of new variants and ask ourselves very hard questions about okay you know country to country based on personalities politics the winds have changed are these modalities for working together actually fit for purpose but I'll leave it there and hand it back to you Huda thank you very much thank you very much Ashley actually it's a it's a very good transition to the Q&A session since it's it's really open our eyes and provide us with the external also points of view from the UN centric approach it's very important to work together in order to address all these challenges and colleagues I invite you to post your question or to raise your hand if you have any direct question to our panelists but I will already received a few questions and I will start with the straightforward one to Ocha and I think it's for Sophie it will be very easy for you to explain that since you are leading as Ocha both the access working groups and the same coordination working groups and the question is about the collaboration and overlaps colleagues are asking how can we work with both working groups when they do exist together and what is the difference in one context when we only have one of these two platform is there any difference are there any complementarities over to you Sophie thank you very much and indeed it's a very good question and how to avoid duplication and I think like a lot of colleagues in the shield experience like multiple like forum of coordination so the civil military coordination working group is really focusing on engagement with the actors and mostly like I would say like military actors so what we're seeing usually it's an information sharing and a dialogue between like the humanitarian community and the military actors and see how we can make sure that there is no compromise on the you mentioned principle and making sure that there is a clear distinction between like a humanitarian and military actors so usually in this forum you would find like military actors peacekeeping uh operation would be represented so it's really like about like this kind of coexistence of humanitarian actors and military actors when we're looking at the access working group it's much more like a humanitarian forum and the idea is really to have like different skills and expertise so in the access working group and it would vary from one country to another but usually we would have like an expert on advocacy we would have like the protection cluster we would bring some colleagues from the logistic cluster we would bring some colleagues from security and UNDSS or INSO so it's a very different platform in a way that it's more kind of coordination among humanitarian actors to decide on how we should work together having a common voice a common approach to gain and sustain access to a specific area so I would say that the humanitarian access working group is a more kind of like humanitarian platform the sim called working group is a more a platform of dialogue between military actors and humanitarian actors so that's how I would make the difference there is a complementarity and usually in Ocha it's the same person who is at the same time the access person and the sim called person so in this case like the Ocha person would also bring like the information that are like shared in the civil military coordination working group into the access working group as one element of information on how to gain access but that would be like I would say like civil military coordination support access and access is using like all kind of channel and information that are available to have this really like big picture on how to gain and sustain access very clear thank you very much Sophie there is also a question to David about the work when you mentioned that we sometimes rely or many times rely on local national staff and local actors when we negotiate access because they know more the context and they have this connection with the community but the question is the following don't you think that relying on local staff and local actors is a way of transferring the risk as well over to David and Ramsey feel free to compliment thank you thank you Huda and thank you for whoever posted that question I think there's always a degree of risk but obviously the whole purpose of conducting a protection risk analysis is that we try and limit the transference of this risk right so like I mentioned I gave the example of Southern Unity former Southern Unity sorry the idea of the protection risk analysis is that we talk to local partners these are people that are already there we're not asking someone to go on our behalf we are asking people who are already part of the community and we are telling them right so what do you think should happen I think the key message here is always community engagement is always asking the community for what they think is best is there a risk of transmitting is there like a possibility of transmitting risk definitely but the idea of a protection risk analysis is to limit it as much as possible this is this is my opinion at least I don't know if anyone else disagrees thank you I don't know if Ramsey you want to compliment and I link that to another question in the chat about how can we work concretely on localization if it's not a way of working for humanitarians it's not part of our modus operandi concretely over to you Ramsey thank you in Nigeria and like many humanitarian operations a significant portion of the frontline agencies and those implemented protection consist of national NGOs so for the protection sector we are keen on ensuring that capacity building are provided to national NGOs and I see one of the question in the chat box was supporting national NGOs as far as donor support is concerned and we understand that the challenges some donors face with ensuring that our localization strategy is implemented is the vetting process the procedures the check and balances the relevant standards that some donors would expect of a national NGO so what we've done like for example the recent allocation of the Nigerian humanitarian fund the NAShip we try as much as possible to see how the local NGOs that qualify for funding can be supported if they do not meet the relevant criteria set by OCHA how can the international NGOs and the UN ensure that there is this consortium approach where national NGOs are also considered when it comes to funding allocation so the localization can only be achieved if the capacity of these national NGOs are built because if you want to have a solid project implementation first you need to have the required staffing and to have staffing you need budget so if we can outsource funding possibility for local NGOs it helps to ensure that the localization is materialized and that we've tried as much as possible to see how we can organize donor meetings we've asked some of them organized before and we are trying to see how we can take donors from Abuja capital city to visit locations where the national NGOs can have direct engagement with donors to see what they are doing probably that can influence their funding possibility for local NGOs thank you thank you Ramsey any reaction from Sophie or Ashley before giving the floor to colleagues who raise their hand and I will ask Julie and colleagues who are supporting technically to unmute Lili maybe we start with Lili thank you so much given this chance so I am from Myanmar let me know one thing so related protections or especially in the in the Myanmar have the more many of the minority growth or marginalized especially the Rohingya community I would like to know especially one thing in the any any approach community approach at the times the most a group a group of community they are still happening still less at the time how to engage with them and because of they are now the officials financial policy because that group can't register it to receive the financials how can to handle that group to get protection fully and the or the that's once once one another one is the how to promote the Khagya that's community or a technical or protections get ins I hope you will get my point I would like to know is the any example of or in the other countries and that's minority growth what how to overcome this issue to get the to get the citizenship rights and the other human rights or international human human rights law human rights and international humanitarian right law and the recovery thank you thank you man I hope that I understood the question but I understand it's a beyond also the access but it's about access issues for minorities as well and how we can defend that and find ways to advocate for that if I understood well any anyone um Ashley maybe if you manage to cover a little bit the issues related to access for particular groups vulnerable groups especially minorities over to you yeah I think this is a very difficult one certainly when we're doing the last study yeah we're kind in the Rohingya was one issue that humanitarians were at that point it's beginning to grapple with and that's of course one of the issues where I think we've seen that there's when you're encountering such an enormous kind of blockage politically it's very difficult for humanitarians to to overcome because it's no longer a humanitarian issue it's it's a political issue and then humanitarians are very much caught in the middle but then of course there are other things and I think someone else touched on housing land and property protection efforts to get people documentation in Afghanistan for example this was a helpful success story getting women ID cards getting women deeds to land that they had inherited but didn't have the paperwork didn't know how to get the paperwork didn't know how to get all of the the things in order so I think they're where the context is politically open enough it is possible to to design the approaches which cater to different parts of the the population there's so many more examples we can think of I guess but again I think it also comes down to how much can humanitarians overcome the political and conflict-related barriers because often minority populations are targeted they are the train of the conflicts in a way so I think that's one selling point where I think you run into these blockages and we haven't always come up with solutions for them but I'll hand it back to you to others on the panel for better examples on that front thank you I don't know if colleagues would like to add anything because we have we received many other questions in the chat and we have still Lily waiting but she couldn't I think unmute herself so I will give the floor to Diane if Diane can unmute herself if yes hello yes we hear you thank you very much thank you very much for this discussion I think I will go in French it will be more easy for me so um I'm Diane Felicité working so my name is Diane Felicité and I'm working on humanitarian actions I have a question about equality of tenders and inclusion so I often have the feeling that it's something that doesn't seem to be urgent we always have the feeling that many things many important things and priorities so what I would like to know is the question is for those of them most not only for the for the lady from Russia so is it something relevant if for we hope and do we have a clear example for us in some countries have you worked on the quality and could you share some examples with us I think it would be a a good thing to to highlight what you're doing and how you're working on these topics someone who's working on the the quality of tenders what kind of advice could you give us in order to have to work on a permanent basis with the the work the work the work the work so so maybe as we have we're discussing that we have a very important and relevant topics as I need to be addressed she speaks French she understand French but the the two questions were about access and gender equality and the other one on how to integrate access working groups by local actors without feeling that they are just bothering or adding any any weight so Sophie over to you now thank you very much Diane for the question because I think indeed it is a gap and we need to do more to include like gender elements in the access working group and the access analysis overall what we do see is that in some context gender is taken into account and I would like to share maybe like two example where we do have like a gender analysis when it comes to access constraint the first one is Afghanistan where Afghanistan is tracking really like access issue that are really specific to women and women access to assistance access to health but also like like woman gender related access constraint where we see for example female worker not being able to have movement clearance so we clearly have like on a monthly basis a snapshot that reflects on all this gender related access constraints so this is one of the good example and we hope that this could be replicated in all the context we have another example like in Yemen where we're looking at also all the access constraints related to madam and the obligation for female staff to be accompanied by a man to go through certain check point and this is reflected also in the access analysis this being said this gender lens is really like a minority I would say in the access working group so thanks for raising this issue I think we would welcome definitely like more access access and gender elements in our analysis we also see like in some context like for example men of fighting age they don't have the same access as all their civilian to assistance because they're way to a distribution or like that they will be targeted and protection concerns so we do not necessarily like collect this information so in your context I would definitely encourage you to reach out to the chair and the co-chair of the access working group and propose some elements of gender analysis that could be collected in a systematic manner so that we can have an evidence-based approach on our side at OSHA we also have a gender a focal point who recently like advise us also to include that so actually from OSHA at quarter there will be more guidance on including gender aspects and analysis in the access working group and this should be released early next year so your question was really topical thank you thank you very much Sophie before giving the floor to other participants I will read the question in the chat do you think that some organization are more successful in accessing such as ICRC and if so what can you and do to improve so um any volunteer maybe maybe Ramsey or David David over to you hi thank you I think there's definitely I think it's it's very contextualized right so I think there's definitely certain actors who have um better access than others in my case I am I am the biggest fan of the NGO form for example in South Sudan because the NGO form obviously represents not the difference with the NGO form is that it represents NGO perspective NGO experience NGO demands which we all know are sometimes quite different than the UN experience and the NGO has been quite vocal and quite let's say political insensitive when it comes to saying things as as they are and when I think also obviously you need to keep in mind that if you do that you need to take a risk so the NGO the NGO form took a risk and they said things the way they were and now they've generated tremendous respects towards them so now whenever we want to talk about access we cannot talk about access without talking about the NGO form like the NGO form has to be present when we talk about about access so I think there's that is definitely a thing that is definitely something that happens is it a bad thing not necessarily the the key is how do we use that or how do we benefit from that to the best of in order to to achieve the best results thank you thank you David Ashley have you a bit made during your research and study this comparison between actors and the factors that make some actors more like successful if we can use the word than others in accessing affected population or how to reach area over to you sure I mean the humanitarian community system whatever we want to call it is incredibly diverse right and one of the things I've looked at in different pieces of my work are what gives different actors the capacity to negotiate access whether it's their willingness to tolerate more risk their ability to be frontline responders or support frontline responders and work in partnership with them and there are a couple of things we can talk about we can talk about funding modalities having bilateral funding from donors can be can complicate the way that you work where you work and how you work in ways that having public donations such as MSF having the kinds of agreements with donors basically no strings attached funding that ICRC has you know they have complete freedom to decide as they wish in a way that I think a lot of their multinational NGOs do not for example they might be funded by USID who earmarks funding for them to work in specific areas of interest and that might be driven by political interest rather than humanitarian interest or to work on certain things or to package what they're working on even when it's humanitarian in a way that responds to those political constraints organizations like ICRC and MSF they have less pressures we can say frontline responders and national NGOs are in the position I think of you know their presence their links to community are what enables them to access funding and to continue working however they often don't have core funding which means they can't really invest in things like insurance training for their staff the right kinds of vehicles equipment the overheads that would help keep them safe or help them to develop the analytical tools which would further safe efforts for access so I think it's better at looking you know we tend to look at organizations and stereotype them or put them into boxes it's more helpful to break down these capacities another capacity is you know the organization's core identity do they see themselves driving into conflict areas while others drive away which I think is part of the ICRC's mentality right it's this idea that we should be there we there is no excuse not to be talking to all belligerents in the conflict we have a mandate within international law to do that so I think there are these different building blocks that one can learn from not every organization can have all of them but we have to kind of consider those and break those down when we're assessing who does what well and who compliments others well thanks Uda many thanks excellent Ashley colleagues I think that we have also I don't know if pronounce your name correctly borders no if you can unmute yourself if you want to intervene now yes please unmute yourself and we we don't hear you you are on mute can you unmute yourself yes bonjour tout le monde bonjour hello everyone in the Haiti we are living some experience and talking about access is talking exactly about what we are going through it is good to mention tools and to have tools especially in French to train partners and to have the help of UN agencies to master these important stakes in the response of the humanitarian actors I have a huge problem of access with my partners for two months an armed group is blocking some resources we need a special infrastructure to talk about 80% of local organizations working or are handled by women led by women and women in this community are taking risks to save children at night for example it is very important today not only to share experiences and to give best practices but also to support technically and help with this new crisis this story of access is really a priority it's essential when we get calls during the night saying that we have found a child with a bullet in the head and women who are doing it after the swing who are in the hospital cannot always go and get them and bring them to the closer hospital the armed groups when they are very strong there is a lot of confusion but when they are politically strong and then in this case humanitarian access seems impossible today we really need to understand how to support this element of the chain and help communities to face these challenges these women I'm talking about have left their own family sometimes and we have other women who are in need and this issue of access today theoretically we're talking about it theoretically now but it is a reality practically it is crucial it's not human some don't have access to water for example and we also have cholera the disease that came back in our country it's there was an alert warning this morning at nine to say that we need to have a meeting with the protection team and I know that I won't have any answers to give to my partners of this subgroup what we are living here in Haiti is urgent this is really moving from Haiti directly with the very concrete examples with with raising the voices of all these women who couldn't even raise their voice and explain all this impact of access restriction on the protection of these women and children thank you very much and I think that one of the calls is about technical support and capacity building and I see that Kistella in the chat is sharing the statement that GPC made on Haiti on the 18th of October but we need also to do more and when it comes to the translation into French to the available tools it's also well noted and I think we need to do much and more when it comes to diversity of our tools in terms of language and proximity to the different communities and local community any last comments before turning to our colleague Julia for the closing remarks Ashley, Sophie, David, Ramsey There was a question in the chat just to see if we can provide some feedback to the panel Yes, Ramsey, please go ahead Yeah, there was a question about our engaging the non-state armed group there was a question related to that and just to clarify that according to the Nigerian law there's nothing that prohibits humanitarian actors from engaging directly with the non-state armed group but the issue we've had is the structure of the non-state armed group is much complex that there is no defined leadership that you can engage with as compared to what we have with the military the military is structure in a way that you can engage the leader you know where you can meet them but with this situation with the non-state armed groups the guerrilla warfare the tactics they are using there is it doesn't provide an opportunity or structure for us to engage them directly and another important point is to note is the ideology of Boko Haram when it was established their perception about Westerners so engaging them before the poor humanitarian actors at risk so those are some of the factors but there is no legal justification for us not engaging them but the situation and the condition is not conducive for humanitarian actors to engage the non-state armed group members thank you thank you Ramseh thanks to all your contribution and to the very active participation from the participants and I still see questions but we reached the end of our webinar and I would like to turn to Julien for the closing remarks Julien can you please yes I see you now over to you hi Huda I hope you can all hear me clearly good morning good afternoon good evening colleagues I have the pleasure to provide a few remarks at the end of this very fruitful discussion and rich week of the global protection forum while there's certainly still a long way to go together and thanks to the joint efforts and good practices shared with us today and during the whole forum the route towards achieving our common objectives hopefully appears less challenging and key actions needed clearer we're trying to secure and sustain humanitarian access and space as key to contributing to effective protection of persons we work with and for and to better using access negotiations as an enabler and opportunity to strengthen the centrality of protection in our collective interventions and achieving collective protection outcomes access is essential to effective humanitarian action but is not an end goal it is rather a means to fulfill the broader goal of improving the humanitarian conditions of people in need of assistance and protection there is no magic wand or a one size fits all approach as David and Ramsey highlighted protection including the gender lens is essential to providing better context analysis on the risks related to specific interventions and mitigating measures that should be put in place through engaging with local communities to enable access to essential services without it we risk achieving access that does not protect the population cannot access services or go back home safely and we risk finding ourselves back to the well fed dead scenarios of the 1990s Ashley highlighted how access presence and proximity or the lack thereof is closely linked to the lack of attention to protection we talked a bit about localization and how it provides opportunities to ensure access and operational continuity in many situations working with and through local actors and communities enhances proximity of the response but it is unlikely to achieve protection and likely to increase risks for local partners especially if it means international actors abandon the front lines to local actors transfer risks and if we fail to leverage our collective capacity resources and added values using opportunities of access for from non-protection actors such as our food security colleagues can also contribute to protection thanks to clear safe protection observation reporting and referral guidelines to feed our collective protection monitoring and access to essential services and our collective analysis particularly in areas hard to reach for protection actors as Ramsey showed with the case of Nigeria coordination and advocacy for access, SIMCORD and protection are closely linked we should continue to work on enhancing coordination of action across those forums using opportunities for protection advocacy in our access negotiations in our engagement with local authorities leaders armed actors and communities is not easy as Lee showed very eloquently that challenges that the challenges the new variants bring to old problems actually may well be one of the most difficult sensitive and challenging aspects of our humanitarian work but if humanitarian work was easy there would be no need for us all as William Shemali our former GPC coordinator often told us as protection actors in particular but as humanitarians in general we need to be troublemakers smart and enabling troublemakers but troublemakers nonetheless and not shy away from difficulties and challenges I would like to propose a provoking thought as we discussed engaging access working groups to achieve access that protects how about having Ochan a protection actor or the protection cluster to co-chair the access working group in all operations systematically to bring both expertise together on access and on protection I hope that we can build upon this opportunity to put in practice all the shared good practices and learning from those who are advocating and negotiating every day on the front lines and in hard to reach areas to deliver services and protection for those who need it the most for those of you who have never done so I would strongly recommend reading the seminal reports stay and deliver and its sequel presence and proximity to stay and deliver five years on with this I would like to close our October 2022 forum I can say with confidence that year after year the global protection farms has become a great event and platform for various actors from different sectors regions backgrounds and expertise to come together not only to discuss policies and practices but also to shift behavior in order to advance access that protects and the broader protection agenda a special thanks to all the organizers of the forum Maraj and Emma and a huge thank to Peehap and the production team who made this all possible Julie, Natalie, Marcus and all the interpreters thank you to Huda for being such a great facilitator to our panelists and all of you for joining us today and this whole week we've had a great participation in all the sessions of the forum the recording of the sessions and key background documents will be available on the GPC website soon we look forward to future events and learning engagement and collective action on access for protection including our end of year event in December more on this soon with this thank you all good luck stay safe wherever you are take care and have a great weekend for those of you who can take some well-deserved rest goodbye