 You are listening to the Make Change Happen podcast from IIED, the International Institute for Environment and Development. In this episode, recorded for World Refugee Day, researchers from our urban development and energy teams, along with local experts working in Nairobi, discuss how and why refugee populations in Africa and the Middle East are shifting from camps to cities. Welcome to IIED's podcast, Make Change Happen. I'm so glad you could join us today. I'm your host, Liz Carlisle, and I am Director of Communications at IIED. I have some IIED colleagues here in the online space with me, who I will introduce you to in a moment, and we hope to be joined by some special guests. I think for us, the Make Change Happen podcast is really important. It's trying to make us think about change. And not for a long while has the word change resonated so strongly in the world. I think we're seeing around us with the COVID pandemic and the Black Lives Matter outpouring of support. These have really demanded that we change our way of working, our ways of being and our ways of seeing the world. And I think today's conversation is also pushing us to see the world differently, to see that we're prepared to think about people, think about their roles in a different way, their lives and how these play out. We're launching this episode for World Refugee Day, June the 20th. And this morning, I'm going to be talking to researchers here at IIED, my colleagues, Dina Dajani, Lucy Earle and Kevin Johnstone. And I'd like to take a minute now for them to introduce themselves. Lucy. Hi, Liz. Hi, Dina and Kevin. As you know, I'm a researcher in the Human Settlements Group. I'm working on a big research project. It's just started comparing the well-being and self-reliance of refugees and other forced religious people in urban areas and camps. So I'm particularly interested in how displaced people experience life in towns and cities. Great. Dina. Hello, Liz. Hello, Lucy. Hello, Kevin. My name is Dina. I'm also a researcher at the Human Settlements Group, and I work with Lucy on a project, on the project she mentioned, protracted displacement in an urban world. I've been working on several research projects with refugees in the past few years, both in the Middle East, as well as refugees who have settled in European cities in Athens, Berlin and in London. Great. And Kevin, I know we've spoken before on our energy podcast, but please do introduce yourself again today. Thanks, Liz. Hi, Lucy and Dina. I am an energy access specialist looking at ways to bring energy to everyone around the world. Recently, I did a piece of work looking at the crossroads of energy, gender-based violence and deforestation in refugee camps in Tanzania, focusing on cooking. Fantastic. And I also am happy to welcome, or we will be welcoming at some point in the program, Difford Aubrey, who is the Inter-regional Advisor for the UN Habitat, based in Nairobi, and Michael Oviso, who's Dean of the School of Development and Strategic Studies at Museno University in Kisumu, Kenya. We'll be very lucky in having their contributions to some of the points we're making today. So going back, World Refugee Day, June the 20th. This is a huge issue for us, and it is growing in importance. And what we're trying to do is to think about the different ways in which we perceive this issue of refugees and displaced people. And it's a great moment to ask Lucy and Dean, perhaps, to clarify for us what do we mean by refugees. The UNHCR website, the UN Refugees Agency, says here that there are 70.8 million forcibly displaced people worldwide, and 25.9 million of those are refugees. Yeah, Liz, so when UNHCR talks about refugees, it is talking about a specific category of people who've crossed an international border, and that's really important. So I actually did write down the definition of refugee, just to make sure I got it right, but it's somebody who's forced to flee because of persecution, war or violence. They have a well-founded fear of persecution for reasons of race, religion, nationality, political opinion or membership in a particular sort of group, and they're unable or afraid to return home. But obviously, you also have people who have been displaced because of persecution, violence and conflict, but haven't crossed a border, and we refer to them as internally displaced people or IDPs. And then you have a whole category of people who are displaced for other reasons, for example, climate change or disaster or a big development project like a dam. And in some cases, those people also cross borders. Whether or not you can then call them refugees, that's a bit of a point of argument amongst specialists. So it's quite clear it's complicated and probably no agreement entirely on what the figures are at any given point. But what we do know is that this is a big issue. And I think by the time we've recorded this podcast, it's likely that 1,300 people will have been displaced in some way. So this is something we need to focus our attention on. So I think perhaps we could start by looking a little bit about sort of the impact of the camps, what they are and how they work. Who would like to start off us in that direction? Maybe I could start with some of the work we did last year with the energy team, Liz. That would be great. I think just to give people a sense of how it works and what we mean by that would be really helpful. Great. So we were tasked to look at cooking specifically, but also to understand kind of the effects of cooking on deforestation and gender-based violence in three refugee camps in Western Tanzania. One of the camps has been there since 1996, and two of them were set up in 2015 as several hundred thousand Burundians flee the violence and political upheaval in Burundi. What we found is from our kind of brief look there, what we could tell is that most people were reliant on wood and some people preferred charcoal and that kind of brings in some of the issues around cooking and the individual preferences and these kinds of things. But the main issue to look at is that women and girls are kind of the custodians of energy in the household in this context. And so they're tasked with a lot of the so-called chores around cooking, cooking food, the prep, the cleanup, all of these things, and most importantly, tasked with getting fuel and actually UNHCR provides a distribution of meals. But yeah, the means to cook that meal is up to the refugee. There are a lot of limitations on refugees getting fuel. So there's political issues. They don't have freedom of movement. They're only allowed about four kilometers outside the camps legally to collect the fuel. And if you go further than that, it's it's actually illegal. It brings in confrontations with community members and over scarce resources. And then, of course, you have women and girls trekking many, many kilometers over many hours to collect the wood itself and bring it back. And this obviously leaves them open to all sorts of protection issues, to violence, to rape and even murder. And at the same time, interestingly enough in Tanzania in some of the focus group discussions, you know, we discussed kind of what the coping mechanisms and other strategies. And of course, they had so many different interesting solutions. And one of them, you know, that clearly comes to mind is why don't the men go? And they said, yeah, well, of course, you know, it's an interesting solution. But in fact, if the men go, it's it's quite common that they disappear altogether, which has implications on the household itself in terms of, you know, missing someone from the household and distributions and let alone, you know, the human cost of this. On top of all that, there is the issue of deforestation, which the Tanzanian government and UNHCR are very concerned about. Normally, you see refugees as the scapegoat and clearly from satellite imagery. Since 2015, there has been increased deforestation around the camps and usually it's blamed on the refugees collecting wood. And of course, these camps are 300, 350,000 people. And of course, there's going to be a high contribution of deforestation by the refugees, but you also have other issues of land use change, host communities, the communities that live closest to the camps, kind of changing the land that they use and to grow more crops, to trade with refugees and so on and so forth. So we can see that cooking really is quite a complicated subject and there's many different issues and it crosses political, economic, social sectors. So it was quite eye-opening for us to kind of, you know, take a look at this as quick as we did. But, you know, it brings up a lot of questions around cooking and protection and providing energy for refugees in camps. So already we can see a huge complexity, can't we? In terms of a group of people trying to live their lives as normal, but in a place where they've just effectively arrived and been put and then the communities around the camp trying to, I suppose, deal with both the threat and the potential of that. So you've talked about gender impacts, you've talked about environmental impacts. Lucy, Dina, do you want to contribute any thoughts here? Yes, I think it's, what's interesting to note is also that refugee camps, when they're established, they often draw new populations of people from around the country to those sites and because refugees come often, come with humanitarian assistance. So there will be people setting up a refugee camp providing food aid and they'll be providing services like schools and hospitals. And actually, those camps can draw relations to areas which may not have had very many people living there previously and that can really exacerbate as well the environmental impacts which Kevin mentioned. But I think what's really important to note actually is that the majority of the world's refugees are not in camps. And although camps sort of, you know, draw people's attention, actually I think it's around 60% of the world's refugees are in towns and cities and only a minority are in camps. And Jordan, there's a really interesting example of how things are already skewed towards camps. In that, there you've got, Dina probably has better figures, but you know, hundreds of thousands of Syrians refugees. 80% of those refugees are in urban areas, but 80% of the funding goes to two main refugee camps there. And that's kind of a skewed up, skewed situation. Dina, do you want to tell us a little bit about that? Yes, absolutely. So officially there are around 650,000 refugees, Syrian refugees registered in Jordan, but it's estimated that around over a million, so 1.2 is the total number. And that is one of the issues that actually differs between working with the refugees, supporting refugees in camps and urban areas, to supporting refugees in camps, because a lot of the refugees in urban areas are unregistered. So although a percentage of them are, many of them actually do not have access to any of the support or humanitarian assistance that can be provided if you're a registered refugee. So like Lucy said, most refugees live in cities and a huge amount of these refugees, a significant amount are unregistered. And that leaves one of the few options they have in terms of livelihoods is the informal economy, where they could be subject to more exploitation because of the lack of any rights they have to protect them. Okay, so we have this situation where I think the camp situation that Kevin has described, and then we have this situation where there are a number of people living in cities in some way or other, and this challenge of registration. Before we leave this understanding around the sort of the impacts of camps, I think Lucy, you were going to talk to Michael Aouiso from Messeno University on some of the kind of security issues around where camps were, you know, how people made choices as to where to house people, where should the camps be, where should refugees be housed. So I think we are going to hear from Michael. Kenya experienced a large influx of refugees around about 1990, 1992, you know, with the conflict in Somalia, the conflict in Sudan. This then forced the country to make decisions in terms of where to house the refugees. For Kenya's part, two major considerations were made. The first was domestic considerations. In domestic considerations, Kenya, of course, was thinking about what are the costs that come with housing refugees, social costs, economic costs, environmental costs, you know, health costs, security concerns, and so on and so forth. For example, Kenya thought about socially how would this create conflict between the host communities, particularly whether they were going to be hosted or not. If these large influxes, for example, were housed in Nairobi, what would that mean for the populations in Nairobi or populations elsewhere in the country? And so Kenya then chose to house them in the northern parts, which sparsely populated and we have huge chunks of land where we only have pastries moving back and forth in those lands. So that was one consideration. But also economically, this also then did mean that Kenya would not have huge economic costs related to housing refugees, for example, in Nairobi, the capital city. But putting them in the northern part of Kenya then would also mean that the economic costs were negligible, so to speak. Another consideration was to do with the environment and of course, what environmental impact would this mean to the country and to the regions where they were housed. And of course, putting a refugee camp in the general northern part of Kenya then would have some environmental impact but not so much as opposed to, for example, creating a whole region, for example, in the White Highlands of Kenya, which is the red basket of the country and housing refugees there. The other consideration that was made was to do with security, the security concerns. And here, we talk about both security, national security, as well as the stability of the country. The security concerns were supposing, for example, that these are refugees coming from Sudan and there's some kind of retaliation from the Sudanese government or from any other war infections that might have made them to actually become displaced. Then containing them at the border would mean that such a conflict would not find its way into the Kenyan territory and would be contained at that level and therefore not affect the general Kenyan population. So in terms of security concerns, those were some of the concerns that made the country, Kenya, host refugees at the borders. Also, if you want to talk about stability, then it meant that if Kenya had camps and big camps such as Tadab and Kakuma somewhere in the heart of Kenya and let the local population, for example, got wary of hosting refugees, got tired of the problems, challenges that came with hosting refugees, then it would lead to a situation of instability on the part of the country. Instability can also be seen from the point of view of a possible, for example, attack from a faction from the other side. We saw, for example, historically, attacks by different communities, different factions in South Sudan and those spilling into Kakuma refugee camps, for example. So then that would pose the instability question for Kenya. Having spoken about the domestic considerations, Kenya also has foreign policy considerations that they make when hosting refugees. One of them is the reputation that by hosting refugees, Kenya then would have a reputation regional. Remember, one of Kenya's foreign policy agenda has been to appear as the regional peacemaker. That is key in terms of reputation that Kenya is a good neighbor, Kenya hosts refugees, but also in hosting the same refugees that Kenya also makes and has made efforts to pacify warring factions, for example, in Somalia as well as in Sudan. Those are some of the benefits that Kenya considered. One other benefit has got to do with the question of attracting humanitarian aid and the benefits that come from the national community as a result of that. So those also are considerations that Kenya made in hosting refugees. Yeah, I mean, I think a lot of the work that we're doing, IID, is trying to see how refugees can actually benefit from being in urban areas. There are so many negatives attached to being in a camp, the environmental ones, the issues around violence, also the massive cost of keeping people in camps and the lack of dignity and lack of opportunity that is there. I mean, being an urban refugee, being a refugee in a town and city, that's not easy either, but the research we're doing is trying to show how towns and cities could be much better for refugees. But although I personally would think the world without refugee camps would be a much better world, it's a complicated issue because there are a lot of sensitivities with host governments about who refugees are and a kind of desire in many cases to keep them in one place, basically under relatively sort of strict control. I mean, this compares contrast from one country to another. But there are these sort of security considerations that do come to the fore for many governments about refugees and keeping them within a valid geographical area. So I guess moving our focus from camps to the cities, I think Lucy, you and Dina were just talking about how there has been this gradual shift. And you mentioned research. Presumably this is the new research that you're undertaking with the GCRF. Can you tell us a little bit about that? Yeah, so the GCRF is the Global Challenges Research Fund and that's some UK overseas development assistance of being used to fund research in a lot of different areas related to humanitarian and development challenges. So we have funding for a three-year project from the GCRF. And it's looking at the issue of protracted displacements. So we're looking at refugee situations and situations of IDPs where they've been displaced for more than five years. So just to interrupt, Lucy, for our listeners, IDPs, just to reaffirm these are internally displaced people. Yeah, that's right. So yeah, we were talking a bit about IDPs earlier. So those are people who are displaced by conflict or natural disasters or climate change, but who haven't crossed the border. And we're looking at IDP populations in our Afghanistan study. In Afghanistan, you have people who have returned from, they were refugees and they crossed the border to speak with Afghanistan and they've returned. And sometimes they've been displaced again internally or they've been displaced within Afghanistan because of other forms of violence. Also looking at Ethiopia, Kenya and Jordan. And the idea of the study is to do a comparison between populations and camps and populations in urban areas. And look at the differences in experiences of well-being, of livelihoods and of potentials of survival and being able to live a life, sort of have a sustainable livelihood with dignity. And we chose those countries because they have both camp and urban populations. But one of the first things we're going to do is a household survey. And when it's safe to do that, we'll be surveying around 400 or so refugees in camps and urban areas in each of those four countries. We should be starting to get some preliminary findings. Perhaps in spring next year, if we're lucky, maybe a bit later. So it's really exciting. We'll be able to actually bring the voices of refugees into your thinking around this and to be able to get those voices higher up the policy chain, I guess. But what's really interesting about this research and quite novel about it, well, the urban camp comparison is novel. That hasn't been done on a big scale before. But what's really interesting is that we're also in each of the four cities where we're doing this study. We're setting up a participatory forum. The idea is that we're going to be bringing in, bringing together refugees, post-communities, refugees often living in formal settlements or we're bringing in formal settlement organizations. Bringing them into forum with people who have, who run the cities, people from the mayor's office, people from other parts of government and service providers. To start talking about solutions for refugees that work for hosts as well. And that's really important because I think often voices of refugees are just not heard in local planning processes. I think that's something that Kevin's mentioned before as well in relation to the Tanzania study about the lack of voices. I think particularly women's voices in local planning processes. And I think that's what struck me when I was preparing for this and why I said earlier about this need for us to see things differently. To see the opportunities and perhaps prepare for those in a way that people haven't been able to because they haven't been able to hear the direct experience and voices of refugees when making these decisions. I know Lucy too, you've been talking to Dufford Aubrey who is working at UN Habitat in Nairobi. And I guess it'll be great to hear from him around how towns and cities can prepare in more positive ways for large numbers of refugees so that they get the right kind of support for sustainable urban development. I think it's a very important question since the majority of displaced populations, refugees, IDPs are now coming to cities. And I think one thing is important to try to understand the longevity of displacement. The finding displacement trends ever increasing and particularly in complex crises and in conflict situations. So if it is expected that displacement should be protracted, there is a lot that cities can do. I mean, what we're hoping is that IDPs, refugees, those people who are forcibly displaced can be put on track for self-reliance as soon as possible so that they can contribute to the local economy, they can contribute to social development, etc. And cities can really support that a lot by ensuring access to education, ensuring access to the health system. But also in terms of planning, ensuring that they can be accommodated within the urban fabric through densification approaches or city extensions. And we've seen, for instance, in Iraq, a lot of progress in accommodating IDPs within extensions of cities. And the Aromia region in Ethiopia, for instance, where 11 cities were required to create spaces in the planned fabric of the city for IDPs. There's a lot of cities can do with the local private sector to see how this labor market of refugees and IDPs can be utilized and brought into the urban economy. So there's a lot that can be done, but it does require investment. It requires investment in your health and education systems in urban infrastructure and in supporting the private sector. And cities quite often just don't have those resources. They don't have own source revenue and fiscal transfers enough to be able to accommodate sudden changes in population. And that brings it back then to how we can use development assistance to support increased fiscal transfers or to increase the resources available at the city to be able to do that. And I think in the longer term, there's a clear economic argument that prolonging humanitarian support might not enable IDPs and refugees to make an economic contribution. But then advancing development support early could enable self-reliance and their economic contribution sooner. So it requires cities to be able to really do what they can do to support displaced communities. We need also a change in thinking in terms of how development actors can get involved with that process. UN Habitat is increasingly involved in these kind of displacement crisis situations simply because IDPs more and more are coming to cities and refugees as well. Some of the work we've done, for instance, in Sinjar is involved working with the cities but also at the legislative level in finding ways to ensure housing, land, property rights, tenure security for people returning. For example, the Yazidi population didn't have land rights to begin with. So we've introduced a social recognition of land rights which was adopted by the government of Iraq and has enabled return of thousands of people. Similarly, in Somalia, now in Baidoa, we're involved with planning and extension of the city in a kind of a mixed-use plan but ensuring that the IDP population will be included in that planning process and we'll find long-term solutions in this planned city extension. And we're also seeing the potential of smaller towns and cities to accommodate displaced populations. Quite often, because of the economy of larger cities, we find that displacement mainly takes place into the larger cities but we do feel that by supporting infrastructure development in small and intermediary towns and cities it would be possible for them to also absorb IDP refugee populations and by doing so strengthen their own economies. Yeah, I think that's really important because there are certain countries that have been host to refugees for decades, if not even longer. And so although it seems odd to plan for an influx of refugees, actually in some places, having that sort of responsiveness and resilience embedded in your planning process is probably quite a good idea. And I think Dina could say a bit about Amman there given that city's experience of receiving refugees over, I mean, I think it's more than decades, right? Yes, absolutely. In fact, in many ways, Amman is a refugee city. It's one of the longest inhabited cities in the world since Neolithic times but there was a plague in the 1300s and that unfortunately the city more or less died and then the first to resettle it after that were a group of Circassian refugees who were fleeing persecution from the Russian Empire, walked through the Ottoman empires and ended up settling in Amman. And since then, of course, it has hosted numerous refugee populations, two flows of Palestinian refugee populations, Iraqi refugees, Syrian refugees, Armenian communities, Chechen communities. And of course, in many ways, it's been one of the most welcoming, it has a history of being one of the most welcoming cities in the world. Things like you mentioned in Tanzania, things have hardened politically over the last decade as well for several reasons. But there is still a lot of solidarity as well. So this question of welcoming rich and vibrant groups of people, I mean, there are benefits and costs, aren't there? And the question of support and livelihoods, can you unpack for us a little bit the economics, how it works really? What are some of the threats and challenges and some of the opportunities? Well, I suppose people often see large numbers of refugees coming into country as a threat in terms of taking jobs and accessing services. And although, yes, there are impacts on sort of, you know, you've got more children in schools, you've got more people wanting to access healthcare, and there are people looking for housing and looking for jobs. And there are impacts on those markets at night. We should also be thinking about how, yeah, how we harness the sort of skills and experiences of those populations. And I think one of the things that for me is really important to note is this question about sort of humanitarian funding. So humanitarian funding is often very significant. And at the moment, at one point, it was reported that one camp in Jordan, Zatteri Camp, was reported that $500,000 a day to run. And that camp, I think, was established in maybe 2013. It's been around a long time. And you think about the amount of resources that camp is absorbing. Then you start to think, well, what could you have achieved in Jordan's towns and cities if that money had been some of that money been invested in services for everybody? What kind of industries might have sprung up, or would you have managed to improve the situation around water security? I mean, these are kind of really difficult questions to answer, but camps are meant to be temporary things. But yet people aid agencies and donors pour money into them sometimes for decades. And they're often perhaps not in the most appropriate places, as we've been talking about. I mean, camps in Tanzania are really quite remote. Camps in Kenya are also in quite sort of semi-arid, quite difficult regions. We're pouring aid money into those places when actually perhaps supporting refugees to live in urban areas and supporting the systems that they use would be better for local economies. I mean, it's hard. We don't have the data to prove that, but I think slowly with our research, that's something we want to start looking at. So I suppose sort of things like how you integrate the sort of different approaches to the right to work. I know that you've said to me the sort of the right to work quote unquote is highly contentious and political and quite difficult to understand. And I get that. But presumably if people are going to be there for a long time or they have skills to bring or there's a particular recipe that can combine with a local community, presumably the different ways of doing that are things to think about. Are there other sort of benefits or approaches that you think are worth mentioning now or reminding us of? I think there's one thing that I think I've admitted to say is that most refugees in towns and cities get no assistance at all. And although it's different actually in the Middle East right now because there are so many refugees in towns and cities as Dina mentioned, but in most of sub-Saharan Africa, if you're a refugee in an urban area, you really don't get assistance. And this has really come to the fore recently on the issue of COVID. There was an announcement by the authorities in Uganda that refugees outside of camps would get no food assistance. I mean, there was an outcry. We heard from our partners who, you know, refugees who organize refugee organization in Kampala. I mean, there was an outcry about this. You know, these are very vulnerable people and they were being excluded from food assistance and were told, well, if you want food, then go back to the camp. And this is like a real affront to the human rights of refugees who should have the right to the freedom of movement and the right to freedom to work. And yet so often these rights are denied and they really are some of the most vulnerable relations. I mean, this is sort of assumption that refugees who go to camps these refugees may have well have been living in urban areas before they were forced to flee because of conflict. We have an assumption that all refugees, you know, that they know how to till the land and that they're all rural people. I mean, that's really not true. And I think that there's a lot of assumptions around who refugees are, why they are where they are, that need to be broken down. And if people are vulnerable in living in urban areas, then we need to be sort of getting the humanitarian community to think about how to assist those people. And in some ways it's not, as you've said, it's not just about assistance. It is about participation, isn't it? It is about working together to sort of build self-reliance and local integration. Dina, do you want to add anything on this last point around, you know, the pros and cons of funding models or the right to work or different approaches we might be able to see? Yes, I'll just follow up on Lucy's example to mention, despite all those issues that urban refugees in particular go through, refugees do seem to choose urban areas. So for example, refugees that are in camps in Jordan did not have any choice. They were directed to the camps when they crossed the borders. But numbers indicate that at least 17,000 left, even though outside of the camps, if they did not go through the process in a certain way, because there were no permits to become urban refugees, you would lose a lot of that humanitarian assistance. So we know that people still prefer to be in cities. So like Lucy said, you know, the need to be able to recognize that and support that so that people can live the dignified lives they want to live rather than direct them in certain ways. And so although there are no large-scale studies on the motivations of refugees, I think that's where the project that Lucy spoke about, that I'm working with her on, can really make a difference. Thank you. Is it fair to say that, you know, for those of us not engaged on the issue all the time, you know, there tends to be this reinforcement of camps type presentation through the media when crises happen. But actually what I'm hearing is there is a considerable amount of innovation and different thinking and approaches and methods for trying to change the relationship and understanding around how people fare in either cities or camps and their motivations and how they can contribute. Is that fair? Is this a space that's opening out to new ideas? Lucy? Yes, I think it is. It's a slow process. IID's actually been involved in this type of work for quite some time. We ran a project called the Urban Crisis Programme that had funding from DFID and worked closely with the International Rescue Committee. And through that project program, we were trying to bring urban development specialists together with humanitarians and kind of bridge that gap. They do tend to speak very different languages. They work different time frames. You know, there's sort of humanitarians about saving lives, acting very quickly. And yet you have to do that carefully in urban areas to make sure you're not actually preventing sustainable urban development. So these conversations between urban development actors and humanitarian agencies have been going on for a few years now, and there is something called the Global Alliance for Urban Crisis that IID is a member of. That's precisely that. It's a new platform. It's trying to bring together all the different types of people that should be involved in these conversations. So that's humanitarians and development agencies I've mentioned, but also built environment professionals like planners, architects, engineers, and networks of municipal authorities and academics like us as well. So yes, this is open for these conversations, but it's still not a natural habitat. The urban area is not a natural habitat for humanitarians. So there's still quite a lot of understanding that needs to be gained. We like to finish with a question about the change we want to see, hope to see, need to see. So for you, Lucy, what's the change you want to see first and foremost? I'd like there to be sort of change in mindset around refugees' rights to live in urban areas and towns and cities and for us as a collective to be focusing on how we can make those things happen, make urban areas, towns and cities more welcoming, more productive places for refugees. Thinking about how we invest humanitarian resources and supporting those who are most vulnerable, but also working with city systems so that everybody benefits. So improving lives in informal settlements for both the people who were living there already and the newer arrivals. And that's what we're trying to do as IIDs to work with our partners who have been, you know, for many decades engaged in informal settlement upgrading and making sure that we bring in the refugee perspective into those discussions at the level of the community and the local government as well. So as far as I'm after change in mindset, there's no reason why refugees shouldn't be living in towns and cities if that's where they want to go. And I'd like people to recognise that and stop making it happen. And Kevin, from your work, is there a particular change that you think could just make that difference? Yeah, I think kind of building on what Lucy said, change in mindset, change in perspective and giving my own example, I guess, coming, I've worked many years in international development, so I kind of bring that perspective. And the more I discuss with humanitarians in the sector, dealing with energy and the camps, the more I kind of realise that I myself had the wrong perspective. I kind of, there's disjointed planning between humanitarian and development actors in general. So Lucy was talking about the vocabulary of urban builders versus humanitarian and how difficult it can be to discuss. And I think that's the same with humanitarian and kind of development sectors in general. And my own analysis initially was, humanitarians need to really reach out and to development actors and build more on that. But actually, I've had deep discussions actually with my wife who is a longtime humanitarian, has worked in numerous complex emergencies. And after these discussions, I realise actually it makes more sense for the development actors who have the long-term funding structures, who have the long-term planning and the space to think kind of bigger and more development oriented. They're the ones that need to reach out to the humanitarians who are, as Lucy mentioned, kind of more focused on the most vulnerable people and being focused in these kinds of things. So I think in terms of shifting perspectives, it's quite important going forward. That's really interesting. That's a good call to action for us. Nina, from your perspective, what do you see as an important change? So I'll start with a slightly personal story if that's okay. So I mentioned earlier a man's history as a place of welcome and reception, and that's actually how I ended up there. My grandparents, who were forcibly displaced, went first to Cairo and then came to London. And then my grandfather got a letter from his brother who had gone his own route to Amman, sent him a letter to London and said, they're very welcoming here to refugees and my grandparents moved. And yeah, and here I am today. So I think for me, really what needs to be done is to not think of just refugee assistance, but to start to think more about reception and building cities that can be receivers of dignity, a bit like Lucy was saying, to sort of think not of refugees as this population, dehistoricized all over the world, this category of refugees, but rather as a group of people who, if there are structures of reception to receive them, can really thrive and be part of creating really exciting encounters in the new places where they settle, regardless of whether they choose to go back when circumstances permit or not. Dina, thank you very much. It's really heartwarming to hear that personal story and a strong call to all of us to think about this in a different way and to see potential. Thank you all very much indeed for a really interesting conversation. It was really good to hear from you and our partners and colleagues in Nairobi. And we look forward to your listening to this podcast and others in our series. Many thanks. So please leave us your feedback and comments at soundcloud.com slash the IID, that's all one word. There you can also listen to previous podcasts and IIDs Make Change Happen series. The podcast is produced by our in-house communications team. For more information about IID and our work, visit our website at www.ied.org.