 Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to what should be an absolutely fascinating panel. My name is Gideon Rose. I'm the editor of Foreign Affairs and I have the distinct privilege and pleasure of moderating, of herding these incredibly impressive cats over here, to my right, in a discussion on fragility, conflict, and humanitarianism. We have a spectacular group here, and I'll just sort of go through them. We have Nancy Lindborg, who's president of the USIP, who has served in a number of positions at USAID and at Mercy Corps and elsewhere. We have Elizabeth Cousins, who's the deputy chief executive officer of the UN Foundation, who's also served as ambassador to the UN Economic and Social Council and as an alternate representative to the General Assembly and was also at USUN. And we have David Miliband, former Foreign Minister of Great Britain, who is now the president and CEO of the International Rescue Committee. We have Ambassador Linda Thomas Greenfield, who is the assistant secretary of state for the Bureau of African Affairs and has had a long and distinguished career in the Foreign Service. I think it's fair to say that what distinguishes all of our panelists is not just their intelligence and deep concern for humanitarian issues, but their range of experience, practical and intellectual, in grappling with complex emergencies and complex humanitarian crises from a number of different perspectives, inside governments, inside international organizations in the NGO sector. And the sad truth is that when the more one learns about the kinds of problems that exist in the humanitarian sphere these days, the more one realizes how difficult they are to solve and how great the need is to try. And so we are lucky to have them with us today to help discuss these questions. Let me start by addressing the question of fragility. So let's do a simple little terminological question. Is fragility the new failed state? Is there something? Is this just a PC term for states in crisis or states in trouble or failed states? Who wants to tackle what fragility means since it seems to be the new term of art in the field? Let me start. I think I'm on. Since I looked at this list of the top ten fragile states and six of them are in Africa. But yet if we look across Africa and we look at fragile states, they're not all failed states. So I don't think fragility is a new term for failed states. But it's a description of where states are and what kinds of abilities they have to respond to crisis. So that you know in a fragile state the infrastructure, the development is not there to respond to a crisis. And these are the kinds of states that we need to be concerned about in terms of building their capacity, giving them strength because fragility implies weakness. So helping them build their strength so that in a situation of crisis they're able to respond. They're prepared to respond. They have the institutions, the infrastructure, the capacity to respond to a crisis that they might not be able to respond to in the current conditions that they are in. I would just build on that by saying first of all I think there isn't a shared, deeply defined understanding across a lot of different actors as to what fragility really means. Where I think we see it as the most useful definition is when it's both weak and ineffective and also illegitimate in the eyes of its citizens. What we're seeing in places that aren't in Africa but places like Syria for example where you had a middle income country that has now lost almost 60 years of development gains in five years of conflict is where you have illegitimacy that is a critical part of fragility. And so as we look at how to make this a usable term there does need to be a greater understanding across a broader set of institutions as to what are the indicators of fragility in both of those domains both legitimacy and effectiveness and how to use those indicators in a way that prompts useful action. I think that from my point of view there's an additional element in the debate about what a fragile state is which is that historically it's been about the capacity of government to meet basic needs and to withstand external shocks. I think the additional element if you look at how the OECD and others are defining fragility is that they are consumed by internal violence and I think that the aspect of internal cohesion and internal coherence is now an additional element in the fragile state lexicon because what we're seeing with 30 odd civil wars going on around the world at the moment is states that are imploding as well as states that are suffering from external shocks and I think if we have that lens we understand that fragility encompasses a notion of crisis as well and that seems to me to be very important at the moment. I just had one point which is there have been many generations of effort to get common definitions and I think I just would underscore Nancy's call to do more to try to get commonality across not just definitions but the data that underpins it and the one thing that I think is widely recognized and really a significant challenge in the sphere is the paucity of data in these contexts. There are such significant data gaps that really need to be filled in order to understand precisely the kind of conditions and capabilities that we're talking about. A century and change ago the organizations or the states that are represented here would have been grappling with these areas of the world and these kinds of problems through the prism of colonialism. Half a century ago they would have been grappling with them through sort of Cold War jockeying of propping up brutal dictators in a our own despot versus the other guy's despot. Now having sort of lost the taste for colonialism and direct control having no real need for the geopolitical jockeying they seem to have lost interest in these areas in general and bequeathed them to the humanitarian community both international, subnational and in the humanitarian departments of their own governments. Is this sort of a progress or is it a sort of a sign that no one really cares about these areas because they're not strategic prizes enough to be the centerpiece of mainstream state action like in the past? Let me start with the 50 years ago because if you look back there's an interesting article that was written in January 1957 by John Kennedy and it was after the election, the re-election of President Eisenhower and John Kennedy had spent the early 1950s touring the world actually. He'd been to Southeast Asia, he'd been to the Middle East and he came back and he wrote this piece, it was entitled A Democrat Thinks About Foreign Policy. I think it was in Foreign Affairs actually. And he said there were two great trends that would define the second half of the 20th century. Trend number one was the drive for independence. This was partly fueled by some time that he'd spent in Algeria. He was appalled at the way the French were engaging in Algeria. It was also, it was interesting given what happened in Vietnam later. But anyway, trend number one was about independence and trend number two was integration and he saw in the European, in then what was called the European Economic Community, but he saw elsewhere a great trend towards integration. Now what's extraordinary is that the drive for independence was clearly a successful one and decolonization or independence was a defining feature really of the 1950s and 60s. But now between 20 and 30 of the states that became independent are actually imploding. So you've got disintegration in the states that were independent and the moves towards integration that he foresaw have evidently stalled because the global system is far more defined by fragmentation than it is by political integration. You could say that there's economic integration but there isn't political integration. And so it seems to me that what we're struggling with or what we're facing now is not trends of independence on the one hand, integration on the other. You're finding a minority of states that are disintegrating, which picks up your failing states. On the other hand, you don't have the ordering that came out of the Cold War and no one should obviously be nostalgic for the Cold War but it did provide some order to the global system. And in the sort of places where IRC is evident, the lack of order is evident. But it's also the case that while you don't have colonial relationships you do have regional proxies that are fighting out, notably in Syria which Nancy mentioned. And I think that's the sort of lack of leadership that is, or the loss of leadership that's evident. And so there isn't an international bulwark against the kind of disintegration that we see around the world at the moment. Can I jump in here? I think one thing we have to be very careful about though is creating the impression that there are sort of two universes, one of fragile, failing, disintegrating states on the one hand and the other not. I think it's a much more variegated reality. You have countries who've been through searing conflict and deep poverty and managed to make remarkable strides. I think about a country like Rwanda, for example, or a country like Ethiopia. There are so many different kinds of trajectories that countries who've experienced very deep conflict and very embedded poverty, deep legacies of colonialism, et cetera, have managed to grapple with and overcome. There also are the opposite stories. But I think we have to be very granular in looking at specific contexts. The other point that I would, I think, make, it's not just humanitarian instruments and actors who are deployed in these contexts. There are peacekeepers, there are mediators, there are diplomats. There's a wide range of actors, capitals, who are very engaged in countries that are not seen as peripheral at all. I think the challenge is that the tools that we have in our mainline institutions, whether they're diplomatic tools or development tools or humanitarian tools, still are probably not quite geared well enough and acutely enough to engage in some of these most difficult cases. And so that's, to me, the kind of cutting edge of innovation and thinking really needs to be about what we need to do next to be more effective. And I think you've really hit a key point here, Elizabeth. And that is, so currently about 30% of our overseas development assistance goes to countries that are considered weak or fragile. That is, out of, you know, there are about 50 that are classified loosely by the various indices as fragile. Not all of them are low income, some of them are middle income, but on that list about 30% of our overseas development assistance. For the last 20 plus years, our development paradigms have been very focused on investing in growth. And they have not been focused on looking at how to ensure that growth is accompanied by the kind of governance structures that are inclusive, that are effective and accountable, and that focus on state-society relationships. And so what you get are over and over again like Syria, you get investment or choose a country that like Rwanda or we just saw with Sierra Leone where you get your investments washed away because the state isn't strong enough to either manage the conflict or withstand the natural disaster. I mean, Sierra Leone I think is a really good example of what you're talking about, Elizabeth, where it actually did finally start to be emergent from a very vicious civil war, and then it got slammed by Ebola because its systems were just not strong enough yet. We really need to refocus our development tools to be a companion to our humanitarian investments so that we don't keep losing those development investments because of the cycles these countries go through. And I would just add that the important component of this is resilience, that we help, we use humanitarian assistance to help countries who are in crisis, but the resiliency that is needed for them to withstand the next crisis is not there. And so I like to use the analogy that we race the ball to the goal but we never kick it to score the point because there's another crisis and we're running back to get another ball and in the meantime the goalie of that country is not able to withstand the power and then it gets pushed back. So we're constantly re-running our assistance programs to deal with crisis because we never get our countries across the goal line. Okay, so let's press this because one of the interesting challenges, of course, is to go from humanitarianism and crisis relief to development to from dealing with conflict, to preventing it, to building the institutions that can have or can foster sort of stable, secure environments that can provide more autonomous growth and healthy societies. But we seem very, how shall we say, unable to actually generate that kind of institutional development in other countries. And is that because we don't have the tools, as you were saying, Elizabeth, or is it because it's just really, really hard to do? In other words, providing relief, if you give enough aid you can provide a bed for the night, you can provide an aid package, you can provide a medicine. But generating a healthy institutional development inside a country that doesn't have it, is that a problem with the scale of our efforts or just the nature and the ability of the challenge? I'm happy to jump in. First, I think it is important to recognize it is really hard. It is really complicated and it's very hard as outsiders, frankly, to do certain things in other people's contexts. I think one has to be very mindful of the authenticity of institutional development and growth. I would just point to three things that I think we need to really get to grips with in when we think about tools. One is the issue of risk and how to be more risk tolerant in the way we think about development assistance in particular. The second is the issue of time frame, how to be more patient about time frames because institutional change and development takes time. It has in every single one of our countries. And the third is context sensitivity. And I think that's a very challenging one and it varies from situation to situation, but I think it's something that requires a whole range of tools from intelligence tools to different ways of thinking about diplomacy and assistance in order to develop those kinds of responsive antennae in these kinds of contexts. And I would add a couple to that list. And the first is I think there has been a shift in how we understand the goal. And for a number of years we all talked about building strong and effective institutions, but as if they were isolated from the societies that they served. And so the shift has been more a talk about state society relationships as a way to understand effectiveness of institutions. The second is when I was at AID, the drought hit Kenya. You know what I'm going to say. We finally assembled data for the first time to Elizabeth's point that the data sets are not actually what we need and learned that year after year half a billion dollars of humanitarian assistance was going into the North Arab dry lands of Kenya while all the development assistance went to the South, the productive South. So we need to shift so that between our development relief, our diplomats and our security sector people that we have a shared understanding of what is the problem that we're trying to solve so that we're building the kind of institutions that grapple with the risks that are inherent in a particular context. Can I just follow? I think all three of my co-panelists have made really great points but if you link the two parts of the discussion so far, this part of the discussion about fragility and then the part of the discussion that's lapsed into the discussion of humanitarian and development assistance, it strikes me that the terminology as well as the institutions that we use are not fit for purpose for the fragile states that we're talking about and even the discussion of humanitarian on the one side and developmental assistance on the other. The implication of the fragile state analysis is that the division doesn't make sense. At the moment, I think I'm right in saying about $6 billion a year is spent in the top 20 fragile states on humanitarian assistance and about $25 billion a year on humanitarian assistance, on development assistance in the same countries. But they're spent through different institutions, through different timelines, different actors and that doesn't make sense for all of the countries that have been mentioned, Kenya, Ethiopia, even the Rwanda example. The humanitarian versus development paradigm doesn't really work and you can see that followed through on an institutional level. If you think about the UNHCR is struggling today with the fact that it has a refugee mandate but two-thirds of displaced people around the world are internally displaced people, not actually refugees. And so I think that the implications of what all three panellists have said are actually pretty profound for the way in which we conceive the purpose and the institutions and the organization of the project that we're engaged with. All of you guys have experienced with different institutions. They're not only different facets of the problems, they're different organizational routes to getting at them. So what is the proper role of, let's say, the NGO sector? What is the proper role of the national policy sector? What is the role of the international sector? And is there some ability to coordinate those various mechanisms? We were just watching the Ebola crisis play out last year and one of the notable things of that crisis was just how dysfunctional and uncoordinated the response was across the board. And is there any kind of hope when all the different people from different sectors are going about their own tasks in their own ways without any kind of overarching coordination? If I could just start and thinking about the Ebola crisis, one of the elements that, and in any crisis that we have, one of the important elements that we tend to forget is the country and the government and their ability to harness all of the activities of organizations that want to come in and help. In some countries, there is a huge and strong willingness. We invite the countries in. Some of them have capacity. If they don't, they seek it. In those places, it works because they're welcoming the support. In other places, it's almost as if humanitarian assistance is an imposition on a country. And so working with those governments and getting those governments to buy in to the support mechanisms and tools that are being provided to them becomes a huge challenge. And we have to figure out how to bring governments into this process and bring the people of the country into the process. We can't impose help on people. So you look at the case of Liberia, where you had a willing partner, a willing government that welcomed the international community with open arms. And it's worked. You look at Guinea, where the international community was not so welcome. They were approached with a bit of skepticism and a lack of confidence. And we're still trying to make that process of dealing with Ebola in that country work. So let me press you on that. Is a suggestion there or the implication that successful aid requires what in the military would call a sort of permissive environment? We need some of that to be successful. If you don't have a willing partner in the government, it's going to be harder. It might work, but it's going to be harder. So if I... Building on that and following on David's comment, you know, it's... There's a humanitarian action has, you know, built on international humanitarian law, has very specific principles that enable humanitarian actors to go in and not work with the government, especially important in conflict environments and especially important when you don't have a willing partner, but you have an urgent mandate to save lives. Where I think that has become complex and really deserves a serious revisiting is first of all, you know, if you look at the example of Haiti, where after the earthquake, NGOs got slammed for having created an equally dysfunctional, totally parallel system that hadn't advanced the development of that country and all kinds of accusations flew around that. The challenge is how do you respond in a way that uses often that enormous flow of resources that doesn't otherwise come into a country for the purpose of building a more sustained peace or a more sustained resilience? It's easier to do in a country where you have a willing partner, where there is an act of conflict and where you are not as an NGO associating with a very corrupt or predatory government. It's very difficult to do in places where you do have conflict in a predatory government. And so the question is, can new paradigms like the New Deal for Engagement in Fragile States, the whole grouping of countries that have taken on the fragile label, have pledged themselves to a framework of moving out of conflict through legitimate politics, accountable institutions, et cetera, does that offer an opportunity for NGOs to work in conflict with at least the commitments of the government even if they don't always follow that through? This is going to be a big conversation over the next, I think, few years as we try to sort out how do you move into this new era of addressing fragility, especially as we get into the sustainable development goals? Can I follow that and ask a question of ourselves and see what others think? But if we make it very practical, think of a country like South Sudan, which in a way embodies, it's not the high politics of Syria, but it's 10 million people, 8.5 million of them in humanitarian... Disaster and conflict. Yeah, so 8.5 million of them in humanitarian need. The world's newest nation, 99% support for independence after a terrible civil war. Within three years it's imploding in a terrible way. It precisely doesn't have the kind of well-functioning government that would create not just a permissive environment, but an enabling environment. It's got massive splits in part of the country. It's got enormous resources that compound the problem in various ways. And I think it's an interesting test case for both the potential of the international community to make a difference, but also the limits of it. I'm much newer to the humanitarian sector than my co-panelists, but one thing that has struck me in the last 18 months is the incredible sense of shared mission in places like South Sudan. Whenever I do a public meeting, I get asked, aren't the NGOs in the international community falling over each other, turning up in the same village to do the same things? No, they're not. They're actually localized coordination of a quite impressive kind. But it's not allied to any kind of medium-term plan that could really present a coherent vision for the future of South Sudan. Why? Because we're all enslaved in various ways to local feuding that we don't actually have the power to change. And I think that's the unpermissive environment that is very, very sobering when you think about 8.5 million people in need. I mean, all of you here have real expertise in Africa. And I think it's worth trying to think, well, how does Gideon's question take practical form in somewhere like South Sudan? Oh, yeah. I actually asked Ambassador Thomas Greenfield. I mean, we've just seen with this whole FIFA scandal the United States going in, and in effect trying to clean up an international organization that is sort of in some ways entirely beyond American borders that we are not only peripherally related to. We didn't even care much about soccer until very recently. What is the U.S. as not just the sort of dominant military power on the globe, but often the largest contributor in a variety of these kinds of environments in terms of aid and with a lot of personnel and so forth and a lot of capabilities in the home of a lot of the NGOs involved. Can the U.S. provide the sort of coordinating function that seems to be necessary? Because if we don't do it, will anybody else do it? We can't do it alone. I think it's very clear when we look at situations even in as you mentioned in South Sudan we have to work with other partners. We have to we have to work with the region. We have to work with the U.N. and we have to work with the broader international community. We don't have the capacity by ourselves to make this work. We have the will. We have a lot of the resources and tools to contribute to this to be a catalyst for change, a catalyst for leadership. But I think it's important to have the buy-in of the entire international community and all of our partners. So it's important that we work with the EU. We work with the Europeans. We work with the African Union, the U.N. regional countries that are impacted by a crisis so that it's not seen first as a U.S. problem and secondly as a U.S. failure if it's not successful. Can I just add one point to this? There is a whole cottage industry of coordination, mechanisms and forms and lessons learned and things like that. And in many cases it actually works quite well particularly in the humanitarian arena in others less well. But I think at a fundamental level what really is often the difficulty is the question of the strategy. What is the problem? Is there a shared definition of what the core problem is across all of the stakeholders that Ambassador Greenfield just mentioned? Is there then a kind of shared analysis of what it will take to grapple with the problem? And then the coordination challenges tend to sort themselves out if there's clarity about that. But getting to that is really I think and how we harness the strategic thinking within the various institutions who are at play in these contexts whether it's the UN, whether it's the International Financial Institutions, the regional actors who are so critical and the country leadership themselves is really I think at the nut of it. So answer your own question, how do we get to that point? How do we get past that? If we were to try to get agreement on a strategy in this group with a general group group and an open discussion we would in a one person one vote discussion. No strategy would emerge from this discussion without a sort of very strong moderator or somebody laying down the law, whatever. So how, is what you just said a problem that will never be solved? No, I think you can solve it at times, partially. You're talking about context where information deficits are significant, but I think we're rapidly filling them in a variety of ways so I do think sort of evidence and data are an important part of the question of getting platforms for very open debate of a variety of kinds about the issues that are at stake are a big part of getting to at least a point where you can clarify relevant differences so that you can have a more constructive debate. People and institutions will have different points of view, they'll have different interests, that's fine. But there are ways I think of handling that productively and I think part of the answer is in the openness of the debate we have about the context we're talking about. And I just wanted to, you brought up Elizabeth's list of what needs to happen to get to an effective strategy, completely defines the challenges around Ebola. I mean it started with a dysfunctioning institution, WHO who was slow to ring the bells and bring everybody in, but then there was an utter lack of data because in those three West African countries they did not have the surveillance data that told us exactly what was going on and then there was a disagreement about strategy. Was it medical or behavior? Once those pieces came together, we really had a fairly rapid, effective response that put Liberia and Sierra Leone especially back on a very fast path to recovery. What I think we're seeing right now is we came together as a global community around the Millennium Development Goals and made a lot of progress with a shared understanding, a shared data and moved ahead. What that didn't give us were some of the critical shared data points and discussion platforms and articulated goals of how to address these fundamental issues of conflict and fragility and that's what is importantly being addressed in the redo effort around the SDGs. I want to get to the SDGs. One second. David wants to jump in. There's too much violent agreement on this panel. I want to come in on two things. One is we have a very, very different reading on Ebola than the general sense that's come over so far and although it might be very undiplomatic I might venture something about American leadership and how it fits into the wider questions but on Ebola I would add very, very strongly in the diagnostic of what happened that in 2014 in the first half of 2014 there was deep, deep, deep resistance in the governments of Sierra Leone and Liberia to admit that there was an Ebola crisis of very serious proportions. The lateness in the game wasn't simply an international community, WHO response problem has been said which was part of the problem but there was also deep resistance in the country. Secondly our reading is that the international focus on expensive secondary care on medical treatment billions of dollars pledged to emergency medical centers. Those centers never got built those that did get built didn't get staffed, those that were staffed didn't actually have people reporting to them when I was in Liberia, people didn't dare go to the emergency treatment centers because they knew that if they died there'd be no way for their relatives to come and recognize their bodies. There was a huge political chasm between the authorities national and international and the people so from our reading it wasn't the focus on secondary care that made the difference Thirdly, in the end what beat back Ebola was community response it was in the two provinces that we work in most, Kenema province in Sierra Leone and Lofa province in Liberia 200,000 people each or so in each community it wasn't the emergency care centers what happened was that community mobilization crossed the chasm of distrust so that people did realize that the posters that were up with the billboards that were around the country saying Ebola kills were actually speaking to something real that there were very practical steps that could be taken to contain Ebola where the international community did make a difference I think was in two areas the testing of whether or not people had Ebola or whether they were actually suffering from another disease like malaria because at the beginning of the disease it was four, five, six days before lab tests came in by the end it was three or four hours and secondly in the beginning of the disease 70% of spread was coming from dead bodies and the burial teams that went in to actually dispose of the bodies it was a much more granular practical level of engagement that made the difference and so I think that we've got to beware the story that says it was a late response but then the international community came in with secondary care that helped people survive that wasn't our experience at all of the Ebola crisis the not to turn this into an Ebola conversation but I would just the point I was making about a difference in strategy is really about you know it echoes the HIV AIDS argument about is it medical or is it behavioral and the public health community continues that debate around both issues and so it's what strategy prevailed I think the learnings out of Ebola will give us a different sense of what to lean on hard when but both were important and both contributed ultimately to the final resolution before turning this over to discussions with our participant audience here I want to get to two subjects one is the STGs and the other is complex so let me just start with the STGs so we have the we have the MDGs which are coming to their end of their life there's been this massive effort to focus on the next challenge and we have the STGs coming up as a vast array of targets will this represent a significant advance in humanitarian thinking and action and development understanding and action and development will the shift to the STGs be a positive here's what we've learned we've now incorporated this in new goals that will create a positive framework for future action or is it just another sort of okay this is done now we would another thing and no actual learning no actual progress are people optimistic about the shift to the STGs I think there's I think people have very different thermostats about the STGs I think people widely recognize the opportunity at this moment in time to set a 15 year global development agenda that follows on from the MDGs picks up the unfinished business and uses the substantial accumulated evidence of the last generation really to think about smart development strategies that have enduring impact I think people are excited about that opportunity they will have very different views about the quality of the of the proposal on the table at the moment what I will say about that having been a bit involved with it in the generation of the proposal that's out there now to me is absolutely astonishing I would never have guessed it two years ago when this started that we would have gotten cross regional broad based international agreement broadly speaking to put governance and conflict at the center of this development agenda it was very hard fought there are still a multitude of sensitivities but we have what many people know is now called goal 16 in the proposal for 17 sustainable development goals that not only puts peaceful and inclusive societies front and center as a development issue it includes all the issues that we've all been talking about are relevant in that space that go to the development question so the quality and inclusiveness of institutions the representativeness of decision making corruption issues efficacy of basic service delivery especially questions like access to justice that's pretty powerful and I want to say two things about how I think that principally came about and it's not again comprehensively agreed it is broad based it is growing and it is cross regional one was the leadership of countries for whom these are profound daily realities so the leadership of Timor-Leste, of Liberia Sierra Leone, Guatemala Nigeria a wide spectrum of countries who would are willing to say these issues are relevant to us as development matters as daily bread and butter issues it's got to be here enormously powerful and second evidence I mean I think it all benefited a lot from those of us who've been working in this field for maybe too many years the world development report in 2011 that took a couple of decades of data about this pulled it all into one place and very powerfully said here's the authoritative evidence base about how conflict and fragility affects development and that I think is now has percolated through enough and then all of the follow on work and updated data and analytics that really helps make the case even where it's politically sensitive so I think that's potentially very impactful it leaves a lot of work to do in implementation but is extremely important I'm not trying to be contrarian at all I promise you I have two major concerns one is that the scale of 17 goals and 169 targets it's almost as if those who are doubtful about the capacity of the development or humanitarian sector to provide something practical have come up with their dream scorecard because trying to even advanced industrialized countries running 17 goals and 169 targets is incredibly challenging if you've got the best government in the world and so if you're talking about countries with fragile institutions I have a fear that the infrastructure and the bureaucracy of just running industrial complex is going to be really tough secondly I have a really serious concern about whether or not civilians in conflict are going to be helped by these goals and targets and the fear is as follows that across the 16 goals that are not the one dedicated to conflict there's no specific mention in the targets of civilians in conflict zones so if you look at the goal on women and girls there's no mention of education for girls in conflict zones there's no special mention of violence against women in conflict zones and the rationale is that all of the targets are written in aspirational inclusive terms we want all children to get a good education my fear and this is born of experience in government is that if you don't have a specific target about priority groups then the bureaucracy doesn't follow them that they get missed out there isn't the accountability in the middle and senior management for whether or not kids in conflict zones get an education so 315,000 children, Syrian children in Lebanon today are not getting an education are they going to get closer because of the way the education goal is framed under the SDG my fear is not and on the conflict goal I think Elizabeth has spoken really well about the way it's come about and it's been born of pressure but the defensiveness of other countries has made targets in goal 16 incredibly aspirational so a fair justice system is an incredibly long-term aspirational goal and for those civilians trapped in the 30 to 35 countries that are consumed by conflict my fear is it is going to seem incredibly removed from the reality that they're facing in the South Sudan or the Syrias of this world and that lack of bite in the way that the targets are framed means that if you are let's take the Nigerian example if you're living under Boko Haram in the northeast of Nigeria does the pledge to a fair justice system really speak to the life that you're living my fear is that it doesn't without hogging the mic what specifically could you how would you have done things differently that would actually have been better 43% of the world's poor living conflict states these days we're trying to deliver for the 43% of the world's extreme poor who live in conflict states I would be saying at a minimum by 2025 you want 75% of kids in education by 2030 you want 100% of kids in conflict zones in education violence against women it would be an extraordinary achievement simply to limit violence against women and girls to the levels that were pre-existing because in emergencies are of evidences it triples to limit the violence against women and girls to those pre-existing levels would itself have been important and would have put the focus on UN and other institutions on whether or not they're actually redesigning their services to meet those goals so I would have been looking for much greater or my fear is that the lack of precision is going to leave all of us who are arguing for the interests of these people we're going to be arguing against a set of international bureaucracies that say yeah but that's not what we're mandated to do I do and I know this what it does as well I think you raised really important points David I would argue from a glass half full perspective that to have gotten to this place where goal 16 was even included represents such a profound shift of acknowledging that issues of justice and security and accountability are important and are central to moving forward the overall agenda towards peace and stability is groundbreaking and it gives all of us an opportunity to build on that to bring it forward I'm sure a lot of the issues that you raised that Elizabeth can probably talk about fell out in the negotiating table which was probably intense and complex however I believe that it gives us an opportunity to think about the ways in which justice and security are inextricably linked to the cessation of these spirals of conflict that we see so many of the countries that are in those 50 weak conflict affected states categories that they get trapped because of the lack of that and all of the leaders who I've talked to in the last few months here at USIP coming from Afghanistan, from Iraq from Rwanda, from countries that are grappling with conflict they all talk about security and justice and so if that isn't right in there we don't have an opportunity of moving forward everything you're saying is absolutely right but we need this goal we need goal 16 as imperfect as it is in order to advance on the overall agenda and it's the opportunity to try to operationalize it in a useful and effective way that we all need to grasp you're exactly right about the concerns I think everybody operating in this space would share them I think it's important to think about what this framework does and what it doesn't necessarily need to do in certain areas I mean to me it's a starting point it's not an end point so the big question is what do you do next how do you think about implementation how does the World Bank, the IMF the United Nations, big donors how do they think about what they want to do with their own tools and instruments to be effective in these kind of contexts whether it's Syria or someplace else I think that what you've sort of outlined in a way is part of how I would see the implementation agenda with respect to this and I think it's not clear to me that if you've had the year 2025 or an X percent thrown into a target which is true were the kinds of things that fell out in some of the negotiations that that alone would have made the meaningful difference in Syria it's what you do with that next and so I think some of that can be built into the sort of actions and strategies that people take in thinking about implementation but you're right to name the problem and I think that's part of our collective agenda we're on the same side on this but let's admit to the audience it's a huge struggle in the negotiations even to get tracking of the number of displaced people in different circumstances even at the level of the indicators below the targets there's enormous it's a battle to get recognition this is an interesting one because there was a big debate about whether to have a target about internally displaced persons and my understanding and you can tell me if this is correct or not correct is that within the broadly the broad humanitarian community there were really genuine differences about whether that would create perverse incentives about reporting whether it was the right thing to count at all it doesn't mean internal displacement is it a huge issue but is the right target to tackle it one about counting the number of them when there are so many exogenous factors that are hard to control so it was a legitimate tough debate and I think there are a number of these issues that actually fall into that category where it's not just politics it's actually tough calls one last question on conflict before we turn it over to Q&A for the broader discussion bringing high politics and war back in does violence and war whether interstate or civil does that essentially clear the decks and make all the other kind of stuff impossible in other words if you look at something like Syria where you're going along and then the country descends into civil war if you're not going to stop if there's not going to be outside action to be able to stop the war or to intervene you have to sit by and watch hundreds of thousands of people die and millions be displaced and there will war ultimately trump everything else on the humanitarian and development agenda if it can't be stopped and if that is the case is sort of prevention of conflict and negotiation of settlement the highest and most important aspect of this entire area well welcome to the United States Institute of Peace thank you for that setup and I just feel like you've given me too soft of a ball not to hit it but having spent 20 years of my career working at that intersection of conflict humanitarian assistance development I think that if we don't tackle how to manage conflict and USIP really comes from the perspective of there will always be conflict and the question is how do you manage it and how do you help it become potentially transformative instead of violent because once you become violent once the conflict hits violence you are on a backward trajectory you are losing your development goals you are losing lives you are losing progress and so it is it is the central mission of this institution and I think critical for moving forward on any part of the SDGs if I could add to that you still always have a component of people whether they are in conflict or not and we still have to have programs that reach out to people when you were talking about Lofa County in Liberia and one of the elements of the success of Lofa County is that they knew IRC already before Ebola started they had been in refugee camps and had been organized a long time before Ebola started and brought that experience to bear when they started the process of dealing with Ebola so we have to continue to work with people who are impacted by conflict so that when the conflict ends or if it doesn't end that the people have the resilience to respond to whatever crisis that they are presented with and I think that was the case in Lofa we have a whole lot of people here you guys into the conversation who wants to ask our panelists something and we can have a yes over here hold on one second stand and state your name and quickly the microphone my name is Rajput I used to work at the World Bank worked there for 33 years and now I'm with the School of Conflict Analysis and Resolution I do research on internally displaced persons IDPs yes IDP definitely has to be a component of the new targets because there are 33.3 IDPs currently in the world which has surpassed the number of refugees and if we don't account for the plight of the IDPs I think we are looking at more conflict induced displacement further on because even when people are displaced due to natural disasters and they are not accounted for in one of the development indicators the result is they are further displaced and conflict induced displacement is an indicator of a problem in a society so we do have to this is a very important thing the IDPs have to be part of the policy governance and usually I notice I go to Kashmir and Georgia and Abkhazia and I went to South Sudan and I noticed that hardly there are any policies because you know as it is when you leave things to the government I mean sometimes things get you get by with very little because these are IDPs as opposed to refugees so IDP is an important element of one of the indicators to watch for so another positive we should count IDPs anybody else yes in the back there Ma'am Good morning ladies and gentlemen my name is Rosemary Segero I'm a president of an unprofit organization called Hope for Tomorrow we focus on conflicts and violence prevention I'm past here in Washington DC but I come from Kenya I just wanted to comment on collaboration we have always a missing link here collaboration between the government the CPOs, international and local organizations they don't collaborate nobody knows doing what so without stopping conflicts and violence there can be no development people will rely on assistance because women can't go to the farm they are raped they can't go to fetch firewood they'll be raped so they stay in a fearful manner where there is no solution apart from getting assistance so we should look into protection and prevention of violence and conflicts in this countries as she has just mentioned in conflicts and violence go to the refugee camps and the same refugee camps is where people like extremists and other people come from to terrorize people so how do we solve this situation we need that collaboration coordination and information sharing so please let it be stop of conflicts and violence peace and security especially in Africa where we come from in Congo but what happens there so this is very very important conflicts and violence should be stopped first before we get into actual development because there will be a problem still even if there is still violence conflicts so thank you and how do we collaborate with the government, local and international Farooq Athwari my question to the panellists they mention that conflict is one of the major challenges in terms of peace and development leadership shapes the debate, leadership is the one which has got to set the agenda of how to end it or at least alleviate the problems the leaders of the world are the major countries United States and others when we take a look at the five permanent members of the security council I think they produce they provide 70-80% of all the arms that are used in the conflict so my question is what can be done with the leaders which are shaping the debate and what kind of conflict they have whether it is the question of providing armaments or the question of raw materials and oil that is also helping shaping the debate and perhaps fueling further conflict being one of them I say my response to your question is we have the voices to shape positions in leadership I'm constantly asked by the NGO community by civil society what we can do to help them and my response has been we need your voices to help us we need your voices to shape our policy we need your voices to complain about our policies I regularly get hundreds of emails from civil society on policies and they shut down the system occasionally but they make a difference and I'm not asking you all to send hundreds of emails to me in particular to any of us but your advocacy your raising your voices to say what are you doing to stop the spread of arms in the world and putting those statistics in our faces I think really will make a difference in terms of policy David do you have a different perspective on leadership as the head of IRC than you did as foreign minister I'd say two things one it's very striking if you think about the last hour of discussion that almost every paragraph has involved the interplay of humanitarian or development effort and politics far from these two spheres living in different offices what's come through all of the contributions is the interplay now the humanitarian sector for 150 years has defined itself separate from politics for all sorts of good reasons independence, neutrality, impartiality humanity there's a very very important principles and in a way that separation from politics is some of the best defense for our staff around the world from people who would do them having said that all of the comments have been about the limits of the humanitarian sector unless it recognizes its engagement with small people politics if not large people politics so that's my first reflection the second reflection is that everything that we have been said notably about the importance of being long termist about the importance of proper risk assessment about the importance of avoiding fragmentation are in a way being said without calling out the elephant in the room which is that all governments including this country face political systems where the pressure is for fragmentation and short termism when I've been very very and some of the legal limits on what for example US funds can be used for provide a very strict set of rules that I would argue limit your ability to take forward some of your humanitarian never mind political objectives the rules that now exist limiting where US diplomats the duty of the way the duty of care to US diplomats is interpreted limits very severely the extent to which US diplomats can get out into the societies in which they are representing the country and I think that it's worth trying to think through what it would mean for a donor community to establish leadership positions it means pushing against the kind of fragmentation short termism and limitations that I'm afraid are encumbering the effectiveness of policymaking at the moment I'm going to bring in a question here from Twitter since we're nothing if not 21st century so this is from Paul Vandenberg by the way the hashtag is hashtag fragility nexus question from twitter so what do you think about what does the panel think about the proposal to dedicate half of ODA to conflict affected in fragile areas in order for these areas to reach the STGs well about 30% already goes to those countries and in my mind it's less a matter of how much but what it's doing and it gets I think very much to some of the issues that David just brought up in terms of making making it more focused on addressing the risks in those countries whether the risks are from natural disaster or from political failure or from corruption it's targeting it so that whatever advances you make you'll have a better chance of being sustained can I respond to that as well I think if we make the mistake of focusing too much attention away from those countries that are not categorized as fragile we stand the chance of having other countries fall into that fragile category so I think it's really important that we not ignore countries that may be one step above fragile even five steps above fragile so that they don't fall down and become fragile states that require our attention so I think we have to look more broadly at our assistance to ensure that we don't lose those countries that might be moving forward so we need an earned income tax credit for countries as well as people can I just add one point on this because I think it's important to reinforce that at the absolute center of our conversation about the next generation of development goals is the commitment to eradicate extreme poverty extreme poverty is manifest in places it is disproportionately and increasingly manifest in the kind of context that we're talking about now so without having to put numerical thresholds and categorize country X versus country Y simply by being committed to eradicating extreme poverty we've made a commitment to that alone captures what we're talking about and if you marry that to some of the how questions how you deliver assistance where you target assistance that Nancy and the rest of the panel have been raising I think then you really have some mileage couple questions here we'll bundle two of them together we'll bundle two of them together thank you very much Marcus Schneider International Crisis Group and I appreciate all of the comments from the panel I would raise one issue which hasn't really been discussed there are those who benefit from fragility and there are those who benefit from conflict and when you look at what do you do to prevent conflict what do you do in post-conflict situations I do think that the point that was raised about the importance of rule of law law enforcement and the capacity to make citizens believe governments are going to respond to their needs more effectively is critical and when you go back to Paul Collier's studies both in terms of conflict prevention and post-conflict group instruction you don't focus more attention on building effective legal systems legal systems that really on the criminal side it seems to me that you have a fundamental problem in getting to your next goals in those countries that are already in conflict that might fall into conflict okay all in goal 16 Mark thank you very much Kathleen Newland from the Migration Policy Institute and an IRC overseer a lot of the criticism of the humanitarian community and the development community has been as I think you mentioned Nancy that they remain that they're not building the capacity of the state locally and society locally and I think that's one of the thing that IRC has done really well and in its field work is training and relying on and giving leadership positions to locally recruited people who then in many cases go on to take positions in government or in humanitarian organizations it's not so clear to me that that is sort of built in to governmental development and humanitarian programs and I wondered if if Lindo or Elizabeth could comment on whether that is in some way a priority for how we address fragility in these states it certainly should be a priority and again my comments about IRC in local county where you built capacity and so even though you were not there the people you trained and put into place were there and this is a complaint that we hear regularly about governments that we bring in our humanitarian and our development programs and their assessment right or wrong is that it's about providing salaries to Americans and not building the capacity of communities to take over the responsibility so I think it is a key consideration for how we do development in the future that we must leave infrastructure and capacity to continue when we are gone just to add to that one of the most important contributions I would argue of the NGO sector is that it is increasingly multi-mandate so that it does not just humanitarian but development it erases some of those sometimes artificial stovepipes and has an enduring and longer-term relationship with communities societies countries on the ground I mean very much what the IRC does that is an invaluable part of the overall system because of the ways that there is that information the capacity and all of the positive outcomes the biggest challenge that I have seen through the years in the NGO community is that it is less able to deliver aggregated understandings of impact so that the more the NGO community can find a way to understand the collective impact in a given country or region the more useful that will be to understand what is the difference that we are collectively making because I believe we are doing just extraordinary work it's just harder to understand that impact because it is so atomized group by group after what we need is more aggravated understanding this is a this is a question from twitter another question from twitter it's from the world food programs Aaron Cochran do you want to know what the panel sees as the impact of food insecurity on conflict and violent extremism and that also climate are we seeing an increase in stressors that are making all the various problems that we are talking about here worse rather than better and our thing is going to get even worse because of food insecurity climate change and other kinds of natural issues over the years so I think they are increasingly linked climate related disasters and food insecurity we are seeing that with increased prevalence of drought and what that does in terms of creating displacement putting the most vulnerable into chronic cycles of crisis and it also has profound economic impact on a country so at every level from the household up to the country up to the region when you have these continual and often chronic cycles of food insecurity there are devastating results and in Kenya what was considered to be a very marginalized part of the country the herders in the arid dry lands oh never mind we won't invest in them that 2011 drought cost Kenya somewhere in the neighborhood of 13 billion dollars over a two year period so food insecurity is critical to grapple with as a part of the overall development package and it's linked of course to poverty and hunger all the fundamental goals that's uh yes thank you Mr. President I'm Mary Boyes and today I'm here in a capacity as an IRC board member the title of this panel is Fragility Conflict and Humanitarianism I'd be interested to hear from the panel your favorite examples if there are any of successes in this space and what you whether those successes for you create a kind of template or model for what might work in those spaces and whether you agree with each other as to those successes it's not just for me but I'm happy to kick off every day I learn about some absolutely inspiring example of what my own organization is doing around the world and sometimes I even read about inspiring things that other organizations are doing so broad minded what are the things that stick in my head one it's the interventions that combine economic and social intervention we've had very little discussion today about what's the role of economic growth in the private sector and my engagement on the questions you remember there was an earlier question about what about the non-fragile states and the point about the non-fragile states is it's much easier to have economic activity in those states and that's going to make a bigger difference than international aid in those states but so my favorite example is the water project in the Somalia region of Ethiopia that had an economic as well as a social intervention and that was sustainable and run by the local community so that's the second point the second thing that inspires me is when it's local people who are taking leadership positions and so what's in my head an extraordinary women's reproductive health program in the FATA region of Pakistan which is an incredibly difficult place to work but one which nonetheless is empowering women to lead change in their own community in a way that is culturally sensitive and recognizing local need the third point I'd make just to finish off is that we've had no mention today of non-state actors but increasingly our world at least the world of a humanitarian organization is defined not just by states and international organizations but it's defined by non-state actors so my third example of what impresses me is the staff who insisted on continuing to run primary care center in areas where ISIS were in control now I'm not going to say much more about it but for a long time very significant work was being done in very difficult circumstances and what is the when I spoke to the team there how was that being how was that safe it was safe because these were local community members it speaks directly to Linda's point and to one of the earlier questions which is that if it's an international project or an American project it's much less sustainable than if it's a local project and to be a local project it's got to be run by local people so those are the kind of things that speak to me and speak to the needs of the moment because the challenges we're facing and not just increasing numbers of people who are in humanitarian need is that the circumstances in which they're working in which they're living are different from those before they're caused by different factors including the climate and related factors and unless we change the way we operate to recognize those changed circumstances we're not going to be able to make the kind of difference that we want to I'd like to use a political example and that's Nigeria and that the recent election where it was very clear that the people of Nigeria wanted to have a successful election we had a country with 120,000 polling stations there's no way the international community and observers from around the world could have gone into those polling stations in the far-flung areas of Nigeria to provide the kind of election monitoring that was required so it was local organizations with support by all of us but basically local organizations and local people more than 3,000 train who were committed to making sure that Nigeria had a successful election and we're seeing the fruits of that today that they were able to vote out a ruling party which is an unusual event on the continent of Africa actually the next row back we have a couple over here yes you can I go over here sorry hi I'm Mindy Reiser I'm Vice President of an NGO called Global Peace Services USA we heard about the impact of arms and arm shipments and the larger question behind that is the inequities in the economic options available to developing countries I don't need to cite chapter and verse mining companies coming in Myanmar is a great example folks from China trying to develop mineral resources people being paid equitably resources being exploited one needs to talk about the most macro of macro issues how economic distortions are engines for conflict sooner or later comments welcome actually Ambassador let me get you in on that because what David said about what David said about the intersection of economic issues and development with some of the other issues here we have a question about economic distortions and outside actors and disparities with the Africa Leaders Summit this past year and with the focus and attention on the positive growth stories and developments in Africa and many of these countries now the question of the intersection of private sector and NGO and government sector is the private sector a force for good or is it a force for bad how do all these things link up with private sector development I think we all clearly would agree that the engine of change in any country in terms of investment and development and job creation that's going to come from the private sector so the private sector must be a force for good is it always a force for good that's the question that I think I'm being asked and clearly that is not always the case and this is where strong governments that have strong policies that monitor what organizations and businesses are doing in their country where that comes into play and where we play a role is in helping these countries build their capacity to oversee what is being done in their countries to ensure that what is being done is for people to ensure that companies are creating jobs not importing people to do the jobs and this is a message that we regularly discuss with our counterparts in Africa some countries get it and some are yet to get it but I think we have to continue to push it thank you my name is Gulchine Akil I'm from Pakistan I've been working for gender and development in Pakistan and South Asia for quite some time mostly with INGOs and UN systems I have two questions or concerns why there is less emphasis on gender nowadays because we feel it's disappearing there was emphasis I mean although some of the respected panelist mentioned it I think we need to have it especially when we are talking about gender identity and humanitarian assistance or humanitarian programs because we cannot have a sustainable state resilience or all these dreams that we wish for until unless we ensure women young girls are part of it my second concern is about the politicization of humanitarian aid or I would say the health services especially in Pakistan with polio campaigns I think we need to have a clear policy to separate these two things because as a Pakistani I mean I see there are very long term impacts on health services and especially polio like campaigns they are affected so what is the stance of respected panelist I want to know that thank you I'm sure everyone has a comment on that on the first I mean absolutely in the SDGs that are specific to women and goal 16 talks uses the word inclusive I think several times it's absolutely critical that we think about gender and that we include women and we have Ambassador Kathy Russell with us here from the State Department who helps us all remember that but that is it's fundamentally the case on the polio example I think that's less first of all there are clear policies about that and that was violated and I also believe that that's not a case of politicizing aid it's a case of making a decision that jeopardized the future of the humanitarian efforts especially around polio and it continues to play Pakistan you're absolutely right can I just jump in on gender of the next generation of development goals exactly as Nancy said there is one very robust standalone goal on gender it's goal 5 and it includes very specific and very hard issues women's economic empowerment equal political participation violence against women sexual and reproductive health and reproductive rights it's a very strong agenda and there are also targets throughout the rest of the proposal so underscore there's the talk about inclusion but there is also consistently a very strong a lot of conversation about the need for data but especially for the need to disaggregate data and particularly around gender so that you are able to count girls and women you're able to see where they're being left behind and you're able to target assistance and support accordingly so I think that's another reason to have a bit of confidence at least in that part of the agenda we need to get your mic Sarah O'Hagan IRC co-chair I wonder at the risk of opening a forceful conversation like the Ebola one turn us to the question of education for Syrian refugees because it strikes me that this is a classic example of where the humanitarian and development paradigm clash is most acute and I really just want to ask boldly does it expose the fact that we can't mobilize to solve a situation like this even though it really poses a price that no one of the receiving countries wants to pay a generation from now well I think it is worth pausing for a moment on the Syria crisis was in a way it's the defining crisis of our time an extraordinary scale of need 4 million refugees I went to the Tenement Museum in New York last Monday on Memorial Day and this wide eyed guide she was a young woman she must have been 28 she was a fantastic explanation of the influx of refugees into New York between 1880 and 1920 and she said do you know that in that 40 year period 2.5 million people arrived in New York such as small places in New York 40 years and they were integrated into the local community and going through my head was that in 4 years Lebanon has taken 1.8 million refugees Jordan has taken 1.2 million refugees Turkey has taken 2 million refugees and Lebanon has got 600,000 refugees and those are societies that are creaking under the pressure and I think Sarah's challenge on education is a really profound one I mentioned the 315,000 Syrian kids in Lebanon who are not getting an education why aren't they the Lebanese government blames the international system for not funding it the international system blames the Lebanese government for not organizing it NGOs like ours say in all the talk about state institutions there's a terrible neglect of what we would call community-based complementary education we put our own money into helping organize education for 5,000 Syrian kids but the truth is that the system is failing those children and failing that society but as you say a decade of no education for those kids is an absolute it's not just a moral disaster it's an instrumental disaster for those countries and I think it's a challenge that's very well put just for context 80% of Lebanese parents don't send their own kids to Lebanese schools so you've got a real issue inside the mainstream education system which to me emphasizes the need for that complementary community-based education but in an international system that's very focused on state centric solutions there's a terrible neglect I would argue of community-based solutions and I think that's one of the lessons and frankly there's not going to be a transformation unless there's a different kind of partnership between state-based interventions and community-based interventions certainly in the education space I would just add that there has been a significant effort to mobilize specifically around the education of Syrian refugees called or Syrians both inside and outside of Syria called No Child Left Behind that did mobilize a significant amount of funding there has also been from the humanitarian side there's also been a lot of development assistance especially from the U.S. government in Lebanon and Jordan in particular I think the issues are number one the scale of all of the needs overwhelmed what we're able to do as the international community I mean just the you know every sector is underfunded and overwhelmed secondly I've seen both Jordan's and Lebanon stretch on their policies to let Syrians into the schools in Jordan for example they have tried hard there are curriculum concerns though some of the Syrian families don't want their kids going through that system so that's another but they are they're double shifting it's had enormous impact well beyond what I can imagine happening in the United States ever in terms of letting refugee kids into our schools at that scale and that number I think you raise a really important point David about being more open to some of these other kind of community based solutions that are outside the former school system I think ultimately comes down to we are overwhelmed by the scale of the need and the funds that are going out for this crisis can't possibly meet everything that's required and what it fundamentally gets to is when you have a conflict of that magnitude that has metastasized into a regional conflict with global impact every single system is overwhelmed and it goes to what happens when you have unchecked conflict I can just add bringing in the Africa perspective I think what we've learned over many years is that refugee crises are not temporary and I think the approach to long term development such as education was that this was long term and refugees were temporary and we're not going to put funding into a temporary situation when we look at the Somalia case particularly at the daub refugee camp where we've had refugees there for 20 years we're into the second generation there we have to provide education when Secretary Kerry was in Kenya a few weeks ago he actually talked to refugees who were in high schools and they were quite impressive and I think that just supports the case that we have to provide education we have to prepare these young people for the future if we don't prepare them for the future they become easy, easy targets for terrorists who are trying to bring them into their philosophical sphere and they become my next generation of terrorists we have to provide them with a understanding that they have a future and we have to invest in that future I don't think we can just say we're overwhelmed because the truth is that it's very very hard to figure out what's the political solution to the Syrian crisis in the scale of things it's not very hard to organize education for kids it's not reasonable to say that because we haven't got a political solution in Syria we can't make more of a difference for kids in Lebanon and it's true that the societies there have been extraordinary and it's true that there's double shifts and 20% of the Syrian kids who've gone to Lebanon are in school but four years into the crisis 315,000 of them aren't and what I don't understand is the following point if I was in politics still I wouldn't be of any kind of military engagement on the Syrian conflict if I didn't want to go down that route I would be making the humanitarian effort in the neighboring states who after all in Jordan's case is a very close ally of the United States I would be making that humanitarian case my absolute driver and there are all sorts of reasons why the US and other countries will be very leery in the middle of the military conflict I'm not trying to drag us into that but in that circumstance where frankly there's no prospect of the war ending anytime soon I just don't understand why on how there isn't much much much greater strategic instrumental priority to those needs in the neighboring states because that's the easy end of the policy the very very hard end is in the middle of the conflict but Lebanon Jordan these are the countries not consumed and so I think that there is there's a mismatch between the strategic imperative that the ambassador has just laid out very very lucidly and powerfully and what frankly is an effort at the moment that looks marginal to the scale of the problem so we're going to wrap this up even though we have so many questions and so many things we could discuss we just need to keep it on time but let me just close by asking you guys a personal question and I think it's a good follow-on to that issue David which is I mean in many respects as we all knew would be the case the issues we're discussing are so depressing and the scale of the problem is so great and the mismatch between the solutions and the need is so huge you guys spend your lives grappling with these questions and trying to be positive change agents and do a little better and organize constructive solutions as you realize more than anybody else just sort of the mismatch between the solutions available and the need how do you keep, what keeps you going what is it that gives you hope that things can get better what is it that doesn't lead you to be sort of just overwhelmed and depressed I'll start with Africa it's the young people in Africa as you know President Obama launched the young African leaders initiative and we brought 500 extraordinary talented and ambitious young people to Washington to the United States last year the second cohort of that group is coming on their way now to the United States and when you talk to these young people they are sharp they are ambitious they understand what is happening around them and they want to they want to change they want to make change they want to be engines of change they need the resources they need the mentoring they need the support of everybody not just their government and people but also other countries and partners to share their vision and push forward their vision along with them and I think every time I meet these young people listening at young people in a refugee camp in Kenya and have one young person say I want to be a mathematician I want to be a doctor I want to be a scientist and they are living in a refugee camp if that does not give you hope nothing else will give you hope for the continent of Africa so our challenge is to figure out how to support these young people in the case of Africa 60-70% under the age of 30 how to give them the will to move forward and how to give them a vested interest in the future of their country is a challenge that we all face and that we all have to deliver on I feel like I have had an extraordinary privilege in being able to spend most of my life living or much of many years of my life living in other countries and living often with people who are enduring very difficult and challenging circumstances and I have been so utterly humbled but also inspired by seeing daily bravery daily innovation and it's everyone from the people you're living with in the community the peacekeepers, the mediators, the aid workers such extraordinary commitment that even when there are many solutions that are elusive I'm not convinced they're not out there we can always do better and to me that gets me up every day to want to make change and put energy into exactly those kinds of things David, I'll let you have the last word and I without question it's the people that you meet and seeing how people not just endure but continue to find joy in the midst of crisis and to reach out and be a part of something bigger than themselves that I also find really humbling and inspiring and I also think that if you look at the trajectory of where we've come as a planet actually the trend lines are pretty positive in a lot of dimensions and so I'm an internal optimist and I find a lot of what we've just discussed today in terms of reframing some of the issue sets and how to mobilize our collective energy to make a push on the next round is very exciting and gives us great great cost for optimism great answers from my co-panelist I would say that we're not the heroes of this we're in I'd never say politics is secure but reasonably secure, well-paid jobs and the people who are in the front line are the real heroes and they are the ones who offer inspiration but I think to pick up something that all have said so far the resources for making a difference are greater than ever before and so the danger is not to depression, the danger is frustration that at a time of greater resources to make a more of a difference we're not making more of a difference and I think that's what inspires people to action and always has across the ages The great juror said that we're not at liberty to we're not expected to finish the task of repairing the world but we're also not allowed to abandon it so I think it's a great mindset which is this is going to be an ongoing challenge and I want to thank all of you, not just for the work you do but for this panel clearly there is going to be a need for more of these panels every few years for as far as the eye can see and as long as the USIP will have us and sponsor us and until then, thank you and thank all of you