 Welcome everyone to CSIS and thanks for joining us this afternoon. I'm Jennifer Cook, I direct the Africa program here at CSIS, but I want to thank my colleague Dan Rundy, who's Director of the Project on Prosperity and Development, for organizing and hosting this event on development challenges and opportunities in the Sahel. I want to say thanks also to our distinguished panel, particularly to Santiago Martinez-Caro, who has come all the way from the Canary Islands, where he works as General Director of Casa Africa, which is a Spanish government kind of think tank, public diplomacy institute working on Spanish-African relations and in deepening engagement. I also want to say thanks to Vivian Lowry Derrick, who's President and CEO of the Bridges Institute, former Assistant Administrator for Africa at the U.S. Agency for International Development, was at the elections this summer and Mali as an observer, and to Ambassador Bill Garvalink, who has many things. He's Senior Advisor to the Project on Prosperity Development, former Ambassador to the Democratic Republic of Congo and had a long career on humanitarian and disaster relief with USAID. And finally, to journalist and author and screenwriter Donovan Webster, who's been engaged in the Sahel and the Sahara on a variety of topics over the years and has spent a good deal of time on the ground there recently. So we're here today to look at the development challenges of the Sahel region, which are multiple and complex. And to hear from our panelists what they see as the priorities in addressing these challenges and how best regional, bilateral and international actors can assist in resolving them over time. Dan's asked me to say just a few brief framing remarks and then I'll turn to him and to the panel. The Sahel is obviously a vast region in geographic terms. The Sahel matches from the Senegal on the west coast of Africa to Somalia in the Horn. For the purposes of this event, I think we're going to focus really on the core states of the Sahel, Mali, Niger, and Mauritania to some extent Chad. Although as we assess the challenges of each of these countries and collectively, we also have to look at the broader region both to the north in the Maghreb and the broader West African region. Amid all the talk recently of the Africa Rising narrative, I think the Sahel stands out as a conspicuous exception for their enduring fragility and the development and humanitarian challenges that they're going to face if left unchecked and that are going to endure well into the future and as I say, if left unchecked will likely worsen over time. These states each have their own unique political, economic, and social characteristics but they all share a common set of challenges that contribute to their basic fragility. These challenges are all interconnected and self-reinforcing in many ways and they create in the Sahel, I think, a perfect storm of humanitarian need, underdevelopment, ecological crisis, and weak governance and insecurity and crime. These are landlocked. Recurrent droughts and the impact of desertification and climate change have undermined the viability of what are largely agricultural-based economies. Economic fragility and weak governance have created instability as marginalized groups including semi-nomadic groups in the north and fractious political elites within the capitals kind of compete over what is actually a very small national pie. With weak and at times corrupt governments delivering little in the way of security services or economic opportunity, you've had criminal networks largely based on smuggling, on narcotics trafficking and a growing kidnapping industry as the most lucrative kind of livelihood in much of the poorer regions of the north. These then have helped fuel insurgency and the rise and expansion of violent extremist groups including Ansardin, Al-Qaeda, and the Islamic Maghreb and Mujahud, the Movement for Unity in Jihad in West Africa. These groups and insecurity in turn creates disaster and humanitarian crisis, which then reinforces the cycle going forward. The crisis in Mali has generated the big headlines in the last year, the collapse of the state in Libya precipitating I think we're all familiar with that story. Elections in Mali and a French intervention in the past year have kind of put us on a little stabilized the situation somewhat but the big challenges still lie ahead. We mentioned in the title of this opportunity, I think the big opportunity is the awareness that the Mali crisis has given us of how these various development channels, challenges combine to create insecurity that is really of international import and the big challenge is keeping that sense of urgency around this even as the immediate crisis has decided to look forward into the future and prevent conflicts going forward. I have a bit more but I think I'll stop because I want to leave it to our panel to explore these and talk too long already. So welcome again and Dan, looking forward to this discussion and welcome to our panelists. Thank you very much, Jennifer. Thanks for your partnership on this. I want to thank you for those framing remarks and I'm very much looking forward to the panel. Let me make a couple of comments to kind of tee up this conversation. When I think about the Sahel, I think of this as sort of the perfect 3D challenge. This is a defense slash security challenge. This is a diplomatic form policy challenge and this is certainly a development challenge. When Hollande, the president of France, went to Bamako after the military action earlier this year, he brought his foreign minister, he brought his defense minister and he brought his development minister with him. I think that speaks volumes about how the French were thinking about this and how we ought to be thinking about this. Obviously this has a very complicated region, many development challenges, challenges of governance, challenges of food security, water scarcity, certain sorts of health challenges, nutrition challenges and food security challenges that exacerbate many of the other issues that are on the table in the Sahel. Add to that the challenges and the collapse of what happened in Libya and you've got a really nasty cocktail. But I do think what I think is also very interesting is that if we had had this conversation in September or October of 2012, this was not on the radar screen for the United States. I will just reference and remind everybody that Mitt Romney during the second debate raised the issue of saying Mali has been taken over in the northern part of Mali by al-Qaeda type individuals. Variety of very clever people made fun of Mitt Romney, including Bill Maher on HBO, the New Yorker, the Francis LeMond, New York Times editorial, and the Guardian all said he was an idiot for saying that. I think Mitt Romney was right and I think people have come around to realizing that that's the case. I do think that this was not on the radar screen 18 months ago and I think that we're in a very different place in the fact that all these folks, all of you have shown up on a Wednesday afternoon before the holidays. I think speaks to the fact that this is relevant and I don't want to go away. So I do think that we've got a series of development, defense, and foreign policy challenges in the region. I think we have an excellent panel to unpack these issues. I'm going to give the floor first to my friend, Ambassador Santiago Martinez-Caro, to paint an additional level of detail from a European perspective. Ambassador Martinez-Caro, as my colleague Jennifer points out, is somebody who runs Casa Africa, which is sort of a Spanish public sector think tank focused on Africa. He was an ambassador in Malawi, Zambian, Zimbabwe, and has traveled to 50 of the 54 sub-Saharan African countries. So I think he's really an excellent European partner to have this conversation about the cell hell with us. So I'm going to turn the floor first to Ambassador Martinez-Caro. Ambassador. Thank you very much, Dan. The first thing I would like to say is that I don't really know what I'm going to tell you this afternoon. The reason being that I listened to podcasts and I was told that this was a beautiful machine. And for the first time, this is what I'm traveling with. And since Dan doesn't want me to give a presentation, I started writing. I've got some 3,000 words written here because I don't know in what order I wrote them. I can't move them around. I can't see the document. The joys of technology. So I mean, this is basically for work, for doing this is basically useless. Next time bring a laptop. I'll bring a laptop. It's fine for watching NFL Pass. Amazon Prime and Netflix and reading books, but certainly not for writing unless you have a memory. Second thing I would like to comment is that I'm not here representing my country. The Spanish ambassador, my friend Ramon Gil-Casar is sitting on the first row is doing that. And I'm not representing my country because I am in my country. I'm a native born American, apart from being a Spaniard. And I did think that in the capital nation of my country, it was very cold outside, but it usually is colder inside than outside, at least since Monday when I arrived here. Just to give you an idea, I went to the region of the Sahel. I don't like the word Sahel. I don't know, Jeremiah, whether the map is... I have to press one of these buttons? Pick one. Which one? Any button? Okay. Oh, there we are. Okay, so I don't really like the word Sahel because Sahel is all that and all the way to Eritrea, incidentally. But I mean, I'll just leave that over there. The red slice is... But I did travel to the region with the Spanish foreign minister. We went to Niger, we went to Burkina, we went to Mali, and we went to Mauritania in four days. We spoke, well, we spoke, he spoke, actually, with either the president or the prime minister of all those countries. And we got of those four countries and we got four different number of Tuaregs, ranging from 50,000 to 5 million, depending on who was counting them, four different origins to the problem, four different types of problems, and four different solutions to those problems in those countries. So the Sahel is rather complicated. And two weeks ago, I was in Ivory Coast, I was in Abidjan, and I was moderating a panel. Thank goodness I was moderating the panel because the panel was the African Union representative, Burundian ex-president Pierre Bouyoïa. We had Michel Dominique, who is the EU representative for Sahel. We had the EU commissioner for international cooperation, humanitarian aid and crisis response, Kristalina Georgieva. We had an ECOWAS commissioner, and we had a representative of Sahid Jinnit, which is from the United Nations Office for West Africa. And each one of them had a different version to give of what was happening in the Sahel. And everybody, everybody who is alive today has a strategy for the Sahel, everybody. There are six main strategies in that area. We've got the European Union strategy for security and development in the Sahel. It covers Mali, Mauritania and Niger. We have the United Nations integrated strategy for the Sahel, published this very same year, which covers five countries. The European Union only looks at three. The United Nations goes a bit further. They look at five. We have the United States integrated strategy. We have the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, Sahel Regional Strategy, also 2013. We have the African Union Strategic Concept for the Resolution of Crisis in the Sahel. We have the West Africa Regional Conference in Action Program for Stability. And we have another different thing. The European Union led Global Alliance for Resilience Initiative, Agir in the Sahel and West Africa from last year, which is handed over to the Club de Sahel from the OECD based in Paris. I'll come back to the EU strategy if I have the time. But the fact is that what we are, when we talk about the Sahel is one of the poorest regions in the world. And it faces simultaneously the challenges of extreme poverty, the effects of climate change, frequent food crisis, rapid population growth, fragile governance, corruption and resolved internal tensions, et cetera, et cetera. According to all the reports that have been published lately by think tanks and by the United Nations, neither poverty, neither climate change, neither food crisis, neither population growth are factors of increased violence and conflict. It sounds strange, doesn't it? Well, that's the conclusion of those reports. But what they do have in the area is political instability of one sort or another. And that is a factor of conflict. The fragility of the government impacts, of course, the stability of the region and the ability to combat both poverty and security threats which are on the rise. But the main idea that I would like to let you know or leave on top of the table is that the Sahel as such is not a different region from the rest, from the Sahara, and is not a different region from the southern part, the one in grey, and from the Gulf of Guinea. It's all interlinked. Those blue lines you see there are the trafficking routes. Through Guinea-Bissau, you've got cocaine from South America. You've got heroin from Asia coming in through Nigeria and going all the way to Egypt. You've got movement of arms coming down. And in other maps, you've got human trafficking going up and down. Basically, the Sahara has never been a border, has never been an obstacle. It has been like a sea, navigating, where people were navigating up and down. And what we are seeing in this area is that one, the trade routes that have been used for centuries are still very much in use. Two, that water is not a factor for those trade routes, but the crossroads are. And three, that the division between the Sahara, the Maghreb and the Sahel was provoked by the colonial powers, notably France, when they arrived in the middle of the 19th century. And you have crossroads and cities, some of which we are now reading about in the press relatively frequently, which went from 30,000 people in the 17th, 18th and beginning of the 19th century to 3,000 or 2,000 people in colonial time, and are now up to over 100,000 people in the same places in which the caravans were stopping, also with slave trade and human trafficking at the time, in those very same places, cities of 100, 150,000, 200,000 people are now in place. Are they all Tuaregs? Depends who you listen to. If the president of Niger told us there are only 50,000 Tuaregs and that the Tuaregs are a legend, they're not Tuaregs. If you listen to the Mauritanians, they are, everybody is Tuareg, including the Nigerians. If you listen to the president of Mali, he was a provisional president, he said that he would not dare to give a number of Tuaregs. So the Sahara is not a desert in the classical sense of the world, but an inhabited region where there is a lot of activity. Contrary to common belief, again, as I was saying, the Oasis were not built where water was found, rather they were located in trade routes, and water needed to be found subsequently. In the desert, one does not live of what the desert offers you, but one lives off trade and everything is up for sale and trade. Actually, the two biggest sources of income of the local people are one, of westerners, and let us be very clear about this, everybody pays the ransom. Every single country pays the ransom, regardless of what they say. And the second is tobacco, cigarettes, even more than cocaine, and even more than human trafficking, which is at least interesting to know. But if we do recognize that there is an inextricable link between security and development, we have to act, I believe that us allies have to act in support of the Sahel state's national policies because each of those states has a different policy. Incidentally, the security in the Gulf of Guinea, which has become the most dangerous area in the world for piracy, and where the highest insurance premiums are now being charged by the insurance companies, is having a terrible effect in that area, and of course it's increasing dramatically the price of goods, food, and commodities, which are disembarked in Benin and in Nigeria, and then have to be transported up to areas where there is practically nothing, like Niger and Mali. But again, when we have a development strategy, we have to be extremely careful because the European Union has a lot of tradition and a lot of money to spend in that area. I think the US is rather absent in that area, incidentally, but that is a personal opinion. But the European Union is also trying to not impose, but convince of ideas which work in Europe and which make a lot of sense on paper, which are perhaps not as interesting for those countries there. I'll give you one example. The European Union has told ECOWAS. ECOWAS is the West African regional organization, and they are rather active in issues like transportation. They have said, okay, we finance the roads, the Chinese build them, and then the trucks are overloaded, and therefore the roads last for six months or two years or whatever. And so we are going to continue giving you money and funding for transport, but we are going to impose a reduction of 30% in the weight of trucks. Now just everybody here would think that it's a good idea. You then preserve the roads, the infrastructure, and everything else. Well, the impact if that goes through is going to be terrible. For one thing, the price of the goods transported are going to go up dramatically. Second, the number of trucks is limited. They are what they are, and therefore there's going to be at least for a while 30% less food and commodities arriving to the populations up north. And the price is not only going to go up 30%, but since they have to invest in new trucks and buying other trucks, the increase in price can range from 60% to 80%. And this is what the European Union is doing. But we have humanitarian issues there. We have millions of people under food insecurity. The pledges are, for 2012, amounted to about 70% of the needs. In Kazaafrika we have the World Food Program, with one of the six logistical bases, and they're based in our building. Short-term needs, which other speakers are going to talk about, road infrastructure, education, health, water supply, et cetera. Again, the security issues are also important. Over the past 50 years, there have been recurrent episodes of violence that have shaken the Sahara and Sahelian areas. States have competed for control over their respective boundaries, which are completely artificial. They have fought secessionist and extremist movements, and they have had to cope with the toppling of regimes. And never before, and that is a fact, has the intensity of this violence been so great. The situation today is distinctive insofar as the number of armed conflicts in Africa as a whole has actually been declining since the year 2000. But again, and this is, I think, important, there is no factual evidence that the necessity of resources or that food security issues lead to increased conflicts and violence in the region. And an OECD study also shows that migration and instability are not associated. The OECD, by the way, the West Africa club of the OECD has managed in this seminar, which I attended in Abidjan, at the same table for the first time in many years, the Sahel countries and the African coastal countries in the Gulf of Guinea, with Morocco and with Algeria, which gave a perspective of the whole of the area and doesn't give this sensation that Sahel is a specific region. Okay, going a little bit to the European Union and I think with that I would what the European Union is doing the origins of the strategy in the Sahel is the upsurge of Akim. Akim is the Al Qaeda for the Maghreb against Westerners. The increase of drug trafficking towards Europe and also the migration issue which are very closely interlinked. The strategy of the European Union has four key themes. First, that security and development in the Sahel cannot be separated and that helping these countries achieve security is integral to enabling their economies to grow and poverty to be reduced. Secondly, we work on the principle that achieving security and development in the Sahel is only possible through closer regional cooperation. This is currently weaker than it needs to be and the EU has a potential road to play in supporting it. That is what the strategy says having listened again to the four leaders of the four different countries with four different opinions, I don't really know or see how the European Union can achieve this but anyway. Thirdly, that all the states of the region will benefit from the considerable capacity building both in areas of core government activity including the provision of security and development cooperation. And fourthly, that the EU therefore has an important role to play both in encouraging economic development for the people of the Sahel and helping them achieve a more secure environment in which it can take place and in which the interest of the EU citizens are also and this is what Dan asked me to tell you but now I have to say what I think is going to happen in the region and with this I am going to conclude and what is happening inside the European Union is that the French who are willing and they have proved it both in Mali and now in the Central African Republic to put boots on the ground which is very convenient for the United States that does not want to put boots on the ground are trying inside the European Union to be on the defence and security issues what the Germans are in economic and banking issues. Now are they going to achieve that? Goal, I hope not and if I have any say in this which I won't but if I have any say in this I'll do my best to prevent that one, two the issue of the Sahel and this coming from somebody who lives at I live one hour and 45 minutes by plane from Bamako and three hours from Madrid which is the capital of my country what is happening is on issues like migration, security terrorism threat etc is a complete divide between the European Union the south, Portugal Spain, Italy and France extremely worried about our southern neighbours and the north of the European Union that have absolutely no sensibility about what actually is going on there that divide in the European Union in my view is one unsurmountable and two is only going to get worse as time goes on and the problem is there for years to come and the third thing is that once more and now I'm putting my American hat on is that the French since the American Revolution have a tendency to appear and disappear in the as popular in the American public opinion and now they are popular again and I remind everybody that in this country a few years ago you couldn't buy French fries anymore because the name was changed after 9-11 so they come they come from time to time they mention Lafayette everybody here and the French don't really tell you what they want or what they do or anything and the corporation is operational and tactical and only that and I believe that the United States is lacking a strategic medium and long-term perspective on Africa in general and particularly in that region in this hell so if you get all this mixture and what's going to happen and that the problem is here to stay and it's going to stay for a number of years what is in my view going to happen in the next 18 months to two years one is that the piracy issue is going to grow and therefore we are going to see a multinational solution like the one in the Horn of Africa and in Somalia with different characteristics of course but we are going to see that trend on the one side and on the other side that militarily other conflicts are going to start appearing in that area and we have the president of Libya we have NATO pulling out of Afghanistan and I think that the less bad option or the situation in which all of us could feel relatively comfortable is for NATO to sort of start looking south and into the Gulf of Guinea and into the Sahel region and I think that that is probably what is going to happen now that is very important because now what we see in the international community is a complete lack of leadership in the region the European Union is incapable of leading because of the internal problems I was mentioning the United States does not want to lead either in that region of the world so at the end the best of the worst options is probably for NATO to start looking down towards Africa and the Gulf of Guinea that happens the whole scenario of transatlantic relations is going to change dramatically because we are going to have at least three parts so we can have a triangle but we can also have a square if we include Latin America in this sense there is a very interesting Atlantic initiative which you Dan know very well about and which certain people important people are starting to talk about but this is basically what I wanted to say and I have no idea I keep looking up and down but thank you very much for bearing with me thank you Ambassador I didn't expect a Spaniard with an American passport to remind us about freedom fries and also about about France but I do think that there are some very constructively and I use that term constructively provocative remarks and also reflect a lot of experience in the region and very very helpful I take in particular that achieving security and development in the whole hell will only happen through regional security and that security and development can't be separated I think there are two messages that I hope that you all take from Ambassador Martinez very frank and open as they say in diplomatic circles and constructive thank you I want to hear from two folks who have been in the region many times and really have a good handle on some of the development challenges both at a granular level and also at a country level I want to first ask my friend Donovan Webster who is a journalist who is occasionally a photographer as he would describe himself for National Geographic but also has been involved in several non-profit organizations that work with on water and education and health issues in the Sahel and has been a recipient of U.S. African Development Foundation grant funding my friend Lloyd Pearson who was a formerly assistant administrator for Africa and the Bush administration then ran the U.S. African Development Foundation which makes critical grants to small civil society groups in Africa in zones including in the Sahel directed me towards Donovan and I know that Lloyd was correct in when he suggested Donovan as a speaker so Donovan I'm going to give you the floor and if you could paint help us get a better sense of some of the development challenges on the ground as you see them and just some of the experience you've been all over this region and I think it's particularly helpful for folks to hear from an American like yourself who's been all over the region Donovan over to you OK I want to start by saying this how do I click with the pictures stuff I'll do it for you Thank you because I'm like a techno peasant I'm as well this is sort of like one of those jokes like how many people does it take to click the clicker but what I want to say first is this the United States is 23rd in the world in education we are 7th in literacy we are 170 something in infant mortality the Sahel countries beat us everywhere how is that possible ok just ask yourself how is that possible we're the richest country in the world the only things we're the best at are incarcerating people per capita and defense spending we spend more than the next 24 countries below us in defense spending how is that possible ok I'm going to say that you know I did a movie called Running the Sahara and in it I led three guys with Mohammed Iqso the head of the Twerk people across the Sahara desert from Senegal all the way to the Red Sea and among other things the special forces brought me beer on occasion and you know I just I sit there and look at that place they they're competitive with us or beating us as the poorest countries in the world in all of the things I just talked about education infant mortality how did I do that what's wrong with us so about 2000 and about 2000 I've been going there since the 1990 something and the Mohammed my friend and I got to talk and we said you know what they need is what the people here need is water and you're exactly right by the way Santiago in terms of it being an ocean because it's just trade routes they need water they need education and they need hospitals at least a little bit of medical care when we were doing Running the Sahara the most popular guy in any town we ended up in or at any well was the doctor who was from Stanford and because everybody knew they were going to get sick and they wanted medicine ahead of time okay that's simple I mean the runners hated it because they were like we want to be the man and Matt Damon and na na na na but that's what they wanted they knew they were going to get sick because what happens is is that the animals get the water first and wells because the animals and camel milk is great when it's fresh that's all I'm going to say sure that's not good the animals are what make the people stay alive so the animals get the water first and if there's any water left the people get it but there's sometimes not water left so sanitation suffers everything suffers that's just how it goes and so we started building wells and then we started building schools and then we started building hospitals which Stanford University has graciously taken over the hospital part which is good because I'm not good at that kind of stuff and it's made an enormous impact a friend of my Lloyd Pearson a friend of mine who was director of African Development Foundation which is an arm of Congress he's retired now we're trying to start something called the Sahel Freedom Fund because I've been mostly doing it in Niger and we have more than 200 wells new wells there now that the African Development Foundation helped us with on 28 of I believe and the enormity of what fresh water can do to people is unbelievable Muhammad said to me if their animals die they have to move to the city and then they get malaria and they die and they have no money it's that simple it literally is that simple so I really Sophocles gave long speeches and his friends killed him so I'm going to give a really short talk here but I mean it literally is that simple I've been all the way across it several times I know a lot of people there they call me the white twig I know how to speak the language it's an amazing part of the world and all we have to do literally all we have to do is give them a little bit of water you know provide them a means to water educate them including the women including the girls and give them a little bit of health care and then let a fire under them because those people every morning wake up with nothing and they make something out of it that's what I got thanks very much Donovan thank you I'm going to ask my friend Vivian Lowry Derrick to go next Vivian was the administrator for Africa at USAID and has had a distinguished career in international development since then working on education and civil society issues as well as with a particular focus on gender as well among other but has been working on Africa and African issues for a very long time and if I can say it this way I've always thought you were working on Mali before Mali was cool so I'll turn the floor over to you Vivian thank you Dan and thank you for focusing on the Sahel when there's so many other places that one could be putting on one's energy so I unlike Donovan and Santiago really prepared something but I'm not sure that it's absolutely appropriate given what we said so what I'm going to do is just kind of um compress it so I started off by talking about the four sets of issues that we see now in the Sahel and I'm not going to repeat them because the other panelists and Jennifer have said them very succinctly but they are security issues governance issues they really didn't talk about a lot I just want to say that we need to think about compromised institutions the development issues and I'm going to go back and talk more about the environmental degradation and the recurring droughts and what that means and then lastly regional issues a lack of regional coordination and trust going back to something that you said Santiago 1960 and there are multiple stakeholders that are trying to deal with the current situation in these four issues that being governments, militaries donors and civil society so what I'm going to do is make the case for civil society and the military so I've got my two artifacts that I'm going to talk about and here's the this is Corporal Amadou those are quite interesting conversation starters yes so but I think that there's some agreement on priorities and three big challenges and Santiago you may or may not agree with these but first of all I think that there's agreement that security issues of dealing with AQIM and its offshoots are absolutely essential before you can begin to really delve into development in a meaningful way secondly food security and taming recurring is essential there's this saying the hungry stomach has no ears and so I'm going to go back to that and then thirdly as we start thinking about restarting or increasing sustainable development after the Mali crisis when you start to think about economic growth you can't get there without civil society and so I think that we can use development issues to really promote peace so let me suggest that we can't make progress towards dealing with the challenges without the central role of civil society and the military to start with the case for civil society and when I'm talking about civil society I'm talking about everything between the extended family that you see in many places in the Sahel and the state so it's school it's voluntary associations it's NGOs it's the private sector it's political parties and I think that this is really a potent force that can be mobilized to change policies and it can be politically organized to really change governments you don't have to go to a coup if you really use civil society well and civil society when it's mobilized can really demand peace and the example of that is Mozambique if we can go back to that and it was civil society particularly women saying enough of this we're not going to have it anymore that ultimately led to the peace discussions in Mozambique and so you can have effective development in fact when civil society is mobilized and USAID noted in one of its recent evaluations that and I'm quoting our impact multiplied tenfold when we work in close coordination with the international community and local leadership local leadership civil society so in terms of development civil society I think is really important when you start thinking about women and those of you who know me knew that I was going to come to that point but this is a necklace that this group from put out to celebrate 1325 and women women what's 1325 1325 is the UN resolution that calls for women's involvement in peace building and peace making and so here we've talked about five or six different things that women can do contributions that they can make to development and women lastly are important as development watchdogs now Santiago you talked about all the money that's going to come to the Sahel and a lot that's going to Mali as well well we know that corruption is a big problem and if we are able to have watchdogs and women really do do this then we're going to see a better use of all that money because if this money is squandered it's going to be that much more difficult to get it again alright so my second big agent for development and security is the military and this is corporal amadou now some of the militaries have been the source of much of the mischief that we've seen particularly in Mali but there's a potential for rank and file soldiers across the Sahel to be agents for security and development so let's consider this man because to me he is really key to development in the Sahel there are multiple factors that are impinging upon him first of all is he going to get paid if he's not going to get paid then why doesn't he turn to AQIM because they have lots of money because of the kidnappings that we were talking about earlier he also has to he is a soldier so he has to consider mission doctrine of terrorism, loyalty to his country and it was the humiliation of the Mali forces in their inability to counter the Tuaregs and tamed the jihadists that sparked the the coup in Mali so corporal amadou also has to have religious considerations is he a traditionalist does he approve of Sharia law for his country again something that he has to think about and is he respected I mean all of us want to have some element of respect does his government appreciate his military or is he dismissed has he been trained to respect civilians and to not violate women we've all heard of all the rapes and violations that ostensibly have taken place by the Mali and military so there we have this poor man with all of these factors impinging upon him but there's an opportunity now for him to participate in rebuilding security and to contribute to development particularly to have a job in his post military life so in terms of security this is now referenced specifically to Mali the Mali and military is being trained by the French and the Germans but beyond but beyond the I'm not gonna go there beyond the traditional training these troops need to have training in human rights they also need to have training in reinforcing the doctrine of civilian control of the military and that in that way they can make a major contribution to security they can also build some cohesion within the military because if you have training with troops from different parts of the country then they are likely to be able to have to be able to forge some closer feelings but this military can also be an arm for development soldiers can get skills training for employment in their post military service this has happened in Zambia military soldiers in Zambia are trained to be agricultural workers both during their service in the military and after so I think that we need to be very careful and nurture Corporal Amadou because he really is a key let me just add parenthetically that these armies can also when they're restructuring integrate women in a major way and so that Corporal Amadou can also be a mentor to a woman who is joining his army so I'm going to end with an observation on agriculture and food security as I said before you cannot achieve development or security without adequate food it's the nexus where civil society and the military can work together so the Sahel crisis we all know has resulted from poor rainforest, failed harvest rising food prices and then it was aggravated when the migrant workers returned from Libya and then it was further aggravated with the terrorism that we saw in northern Mali so you've got this really potent recipe for misery and Mali the drought situation has been overlaid with the instability resulting from the coup the refugees are still out of the country local and regional markets are disrupted so food prices are higher some crops were destroyed by locusts farmers were unable to plant last year so many of them incurred major debts but also they sold their seeds so this is going to be really hard to restart the farming agriculture service in Mali but again civil society can help women's groups can be formed into brigades to plant to fertilize to learn about the environment and here is where I think that USAID can be helpful because USAID has this program focusing on resilience which is marrying humanitarian assistance with development and so as USAID is moving forward on this if they focus on civil society if they focus on women then I think that we could see some positive movement military training also can incorporate the environment and agricultural components and for those of you who work with militaries please encourage them to focus on incorporating the environment and agriculture components into their training there is this feeling among so many so many citizens in so many countries that there is something that is second class about agriculture and that one shouldn't be dirtying one's hands to be involved in agriculture but agriculture and food security is essential so if militaries if civil society can rethink their views of agriculture then we can see something positive coming out so I don't want to end on a negative note I want to close on an optimistic note so if development programs are encouraged to target civil society we may see more rapid progress if we promote civil society and it's community organizing power then we're likely to see better outcomes and we need to harness the power of militaries for development and so the situation in this can change there is adequate funding because the EU has pledged this five billion euros five billion euros this is a lot of money so if we have coordination among the donors consultation and project implementation with civil society and local partners and reorientation of the militaries we can see some real progress and we might be able to bridge some of the religious and ideological divides and give sustainable development a chance so I thank you thank you very much Vivian, thank you that was very very helpful let me ask my friend Ambassador Bill Garvelink if he could wrap this up in this conversation up my sense is maybe it's hard to do but I think we've talked about a number of security challenges we've talked about a number of development challenges you've been in the region many times and so I think we were having an interesting conversation before this event about the development challenges and talk a little bit about those development challenges given the context that you've just heard but also talk a little bit about where's the United States what the United States should be doing or should be doing because I get the sense that if I look at Mauritania, Mali, Niger, Chad we have an aid mission in Mali we don't have one in the rest of those countries we have very limited instruments in terms of what we can currently do now so I think there's there's some things we are doing certainly we're doing a lot in Mali but I get the sense we could be doing more that we may need to think about doing additional things in the region so over to you Bill thanks it's always interesting being the last speaker I've been crossing out things that I don't have to say and I'm really left with very little here so I'll make a couple of little observations if I can go deep that could come in here I'd like to just make a couple of observations about what everybody said in general about the Sahel and sort of repeating what folks said and then talk a little bit about emergency response to the droughts the recurring droughts and then a little bit about what's going on for the US government in development in the Sahel now that I don't work for the US government anymore I can say what I think what's working and what's not you know first of all as people have said the Sahel is a very inhospitable place suffering from deforestation all these sorts of things that are going on and it's a very fragile environment and it's getting more fragile and realistically the Sahel over the past 20, 30, 40 years has been a development backwater nobody pays attention to the Sahel unless there's a drought or maybe now with terrorist activities but it's generally been forgotten by most development agencies and as Dan said the US government has more to say about this in a few minutes but the US government has closed down most of its missions there it used to have missions in virtually every country now virtually nothing and that's true of most donor agencies there's a drought we worry about Sahel for a year then we forget about it and then a drought happens again so this is sort of the characteristics there are marginal populations and they're mostly nomadic ones and they've got a lot of very long-standing grievances that have not been addressed the institutions are weak governance isn't so hot there's a lot of corruptions we've talked about that and so there's all kinds of problems that have been in the Sahel for a long time now we have some additional things Libya we have more weapons skilled soldiers and one people don't talk about too often the one mediator in the Sahel region Gaddafi is gone and this was one of them and he's not a leavening force out there anymore now you have Mali and some of the traditional long-standing grievances coming to the fore with traditional groups as well as the terrorist organizations that are more active there generating lots of IDPs displaced persons and instability which affects everybody in doing development in the country but when you look at it when you look at all these things nothing has really created too many additional problems in the Sahel maybe the terrorist groups a bit but the instability the insecurity in certain regions the problems the poor governance it's all been there for 30 or 40 years it's just getting a little bit more complicated now and it's getting a little bit more attention but there isn't this has been going on in the Sahel for a very long time and one of the things I just want to make a few comments about is droughts there used to be droughts that sometimes led it to famines every decade or so now it's every two or three years it happens again and again and again and from my perspective and disagree a little bit with you Vivian we're not handling it as an international community in a very effective way what the studies have shown from the 70s and 80s and 2005 I'm going to go to the boss here comment on 2005 he's been on time out there and 2010 and 11 the lack of calories is not a reason for the high malnutrition rates and the high death rates for girls, women and children under five that is not a factor in fact in the northern areas of Kenya or sorry of Niger, Mali and other areas in the nomadic areas are lower than in Bamako in the wealthier sectors of society where markets are working and food is available what the problem is is bad health care bad water, no sanitation malaria very weird that's the poor choice of words unfortunate weaning techniques for children after two weeks after birth you're drinking polluted water and mixtures of things where the international community these are the things the international community has to focus on it doesn't make any difference how much food you ship into the Sahelian region it's not going to make any difference and it has not made any difference as you go through these droughts and again I think the world food program is just an appeal for a billion dollars for food for marginal populations or vulnerable populations perhaps that makes sense but in general food is not a requirement in the Sahel it's a development problem not a food shortage problem and we have to take that seriously and that has very long or broad implications for what we do that's a long term project that's not something where you ship in 100,000 tons of food and you forget about the Sahel and get on with the next thing it doesn't work like that it's a long term program to change weaning patterns to provide decent health care to make sure there's proper sanitation hygiene is a very important in the business it's to wash stuff that's really important for these populations that's where the international community should put its focus and deal with the root causes of these recurring droughts otherwise it's just going to continue and it's going to fester and it's a recurring problem that costs the international community a pretty penny this is expensive stuff that is a necessary thing to do if you look at the I'm looking now at the United States from the emergency response in 2012 we're starting to see some changes instead of just pumping in food the food for peace office did some long term funding for sanitation they did some cash programs it's the Bureau of Food Security started providing some money in the Sahel for the first time which is different from what they do in their food security activities there have been much more attention to water, sanitation, family planning and these sort of things so the emergency response in 2012 certainly of USAID and food for peace in these organizations was different and better much more nuanced and much more thoughtful now on top of that there are programs that are focusing more on land tenure economic opportunities jobs for young men which is really important in the Sahel governance issues as well as women and then the food, health, water and sanitation issues so they're layering on top of each other and they're starting to work good that's the resilience you mentioned first time in a disaster response we're starting to see the emergency activities with the long term development activities as Dan mentioned there's a slight problem with the commitment of the US government we have one aid mission in Mali and in most of the other embassies we have a food for peace person but that's it and then a regional office in Senegal so it seems to me if we're going to mount a serious development effort in the Sahel we have to look at our staffing now as we were talking about we have booted out of half the places in Latin America maybe we could open some of the positions in Africa and in the Sahel one for one, one for Bolivia, one for Ecuador one for Russia there you go and maybe we could just move people around a little bit just like we closed them 20 years ago or whenever we did but there are things that can be done and there's in fact I think there's some good signs about we're finally looking at the drought situation we've got to link development and just as an observation from where I sit it may make sense it may have been an important thing maybe to have the French and the African force intervene in the Sahel and training of the military is a great thing diplomatic initiatives are underway but none of these in my sense will deal with the root causes of the Sahel unless there is a very robust development program that goes along with this and I guess to your comment I can see the U.S. is a bit active on the military side, training with their trans well, yeah, they have their Trans-Sahara partnership program and they're starting to do things in the development area where I don't see the U.S. presence unless I'm missing it, it's in diplomatic side here I think the multilateral agencies and some of the European governments have a very big focus to my sense we're pretty quiet I guess maybe we're tied up in the Middle East I'm not sure what we're doing but I think we're a little missing when it comes to the diplomatic side if we're thinking of military, diplomatic and development the one that's not there is the diplomatic side but those are just a few observations and with that I'll quit Thank you very much, thank you Bill Yeah, Jonathan, please Perfect Bill Really the last time I was in Chad I couldn't believe it I'm in the capital and I get dragged in to the U.S. Sorry, trivia question, what is the capital of Chad? And they say to me you're going up to the Tibesti and I said yeah which is way up in the north it's way the heck up there it's right next to Libya which is a real fun capital and and they're like well when you come back tell us what you learned they didn't even go there I mean it gets to your point exactly Bill you know they're not interested in reaching out it drives me crazy that's all I have to respond to that just a minute I guess having been an ambassador I would disagree with that I think the dilemma is and we've seen it in Benghazi and other places you have to be very careful where you go if you're an official American and it's tricky business and if you're an ambassador that's your number one security for your embassy and mission is to protect your people and so you have all kinds of different security folks looking at these the situations and I would be low to send my folks into a difficult area if there is any suspicion of kidnapping and that sort of thing you have to be very very careful and I would bet that's one of the reasons we only have a mission in Mali so you send a probe Bill I think thank you for putting your finger on that and thanks for your response because I think this is one of the dilemmas which is I think one of the dilemmas which is okay this is a very dangerous area I think we've talked about this in terms of kidnappings I think Santiago referenced the dangers I think Vivian talked about so the role of the militaries both in terms of there's sort of frankly terrorists and bad guys a lot of people with guns running around in this region and so how do you how do we be effective developmentally in such a tough environment let me click that to you first and then maybe each of the panelists might out given that this is so tough an environment and given this is such a governance space how does the U.S. player how does the U.S. be developmentally effective here how can other donors be effective here and how do we how do we negotiate that issue I don't know that's probably a think tax right you're supposed to write something give me two weeks and I'll come back come down from the mountaintop and come up with an answer but in the meantime what's your take on that issue and you have to go very carefully and move very slowly and work with all the tools that you have in an embassy in the U.S. government and that's why the mixture with the military with the African force that's there and to find out just where you can go and probe and do what you can do one thing I would consider which I think probably would be heresy for a lot of folks but it might be interesting in a place like this is in Afghanistan we have provincial reconstruction teams that were a mixture of security folks and development people and state department people it has that technique has had mixed results but I think in general has done some good things and I don't think it's quite the nasty environment that Afghanistan and Iraq were when those things were started and that may be a way to to begin to move out into areas that otherwise operate and it's a starting point and then hopefully it can grow and security will improve but that's a way to as you say probe out there and take a look with a different mixture of people. So I want the audience to take away a couple of things one is we have been forced to close aid missions in three or four countries in the last 12 months Russia, Ecuador, Bolivia we have a cap on the number of aid missions in the world and it's a negotiation with the Congress it's a negotiation with the State Department seems to me I think as Bill was saying you could open some but I also think this issue of PRTs and I think that's a very interesting twist given the challenges I think that Donovan was outlining and sort of Bill was responding to in terms of saying this is a very dangerous environment it's complicated so we're talking in think tank terms about this is a governmentless space where bad guys with guns driving around in pickup trucks waiting to kidnap people and kill people so it's darn dangerous but at the same time we've got a lot of interests at play here and so something like a PRT approach might be a way to respond I'm going to ask Santiago to respond but I'm going to like the other two panelists to reflect on that as well Santiago Well me having been an ambassador I have I have had actually two experiences in my life with US ambassadors armored vehicle one was when Ambassador Dells armored BMW broke down in the driveway to my house on a Friday evening and it was there until Monday morning we couldn't leave the house until Monday morning because nobody could move that thing off the driveway the second one was when I was sitting inside another armored vehicle which came was bought after that incident by the American taxpayer with ambassador McGee and the ambassador of the United Kingdom in Zimbabwe we were surrounded by the Zimbabwe police who decided that they were going to actually burn the car with us inside I simply got out of the car and they didn't shoot me and I said well I really have to go and they said well now get back in the car and I said no after what you've told us I really have to go and so anyway I don't think that I think that people do get on the terrain people do know it seems to me it honestly seems to me that the United States could be a little bit more active in Africa both on the development field but of course that is there are financial considerations and those also have to be taken into account and politically I actually miss the US in Africa if I may just put that on the table I miss the political the political weight that the United States can can put forward you were ambassador to the DRC and therefore the Great Lakes Region which is still an ongoing problem and in my view either the US steps in again because it was done by Clinton steps in again or that area is still going to be a source of conflict in Africa having said this there is one thing I would like to point out Africa is going a lot better than it was years ago 7 out of 10 of the highest growing country or the fastest growing countries economically in the world in the last decade are in Africa Lagos for example and we are talking about basically the area Lagos has a higher consumer base Nigeria Nigeria has a higher consumer base than both India and Russia in many ways the problem is a problem of distribution of that wealth and of that growth but you were talking and I think that we do have to talk about women and the Sahel of course goes into Senegal and there are the way women manage new technologies the way women who happen to be in my humble opinion and I said that before and you said yay please say yay again women in my humble opinion happen to be the backbone of the African continent and the way that they are using and doing more things I think are very important but unless we really get our act together on what you mentioned also governance for example and those type of thing Africa is going forward but it could leap forward and that is something that we have to balance development aid sure development aid, development presence but also political clout political weight and political pressure on issues like governance on issues like regional cooperation and things like that I'm just thinking about when you were assistant administrator you had to work in a lot of complicated places how do you balance this issue of security while also working and having to do certain sorts of development work in some tough places how do you balance that Bill put on the table this issue of think about maybe it's a PRT bridge is it maybe working through local civil society groups how should we be thinking about this especially in the context of the Sahel you put your finger on it I think that what distinguishes USAID is the ability to work closely with local counterparts after the embassy bombings and the decision to consolidate all US presence in the embassy there was strong resistance to that from people at USAID because everyone built that what distinguished us what made us able to do effective development work was the ability to go and establish relations with local counterparts and keep them and be able to see them clearly security US security interests as you said Bill one the day but this idea of building civil society local ownership that's just absolutely key and the other key to me is education investment long term involvement investment in education because you're not only teaching skills that are going to help in terms of economic development you're also teaching values and so that combination to me is really really important and also that USAID through the organizations that it contracts with NGOs can build these relationships that last for literally decades I was president of the African American Institute we had a program AFGRAD and ATLAS that brought people Africans for PhDs here in the United States these people then became ministers and you could have a conversation and a dialogue that you could just peel away layers of both national interest and the whole trust and distrust issue so to me the investment in civil society education long term is what distinguishes us and what long term is going to help the United States regain the intellectual capital after you were talking about it you have been a very patient audience I know there are a lot of knowledgeable folks in the room I'd like to take a couple of comments or questions from the audience we can take a few comments here my friend Bob Berg this woman behind Bob let's start with this gentleman here I'd just like to follow up with the panel briefly on the issue of security writ large the spotlight is quite bright on U.S. official presence just identify yourself I'm sorry but with implementing partners and organizations doing the actual work on the ground there isn't much of a conversation just around securing access for those implementing partners who actually have to go to these locations in these dangerous environments with very little funding and very little ability to have a larger spotlight put on the actual field presence of workers be they local national staff or be they home office staff or international staff in the field and I would just like to hear some comments on that whole aspect of security and partners so let's bunch these comments together I'd like to hear from my friend Bob Berg can I just address that real quick no Donovan we're going to bunch several of them together thank you Dan Bob Berg former senior advisor of ECA I didn't hear some issues that I'd like to hear a little bit more about continuing development and security to nomadic peoples is a difficulty when I chaired the DAC group on evaluation the lowest scores were dealing with donors with nomadic people because it called for a level of cultural social knowledge that donors just didn't have so it's not just a question of do you have staff in the capital city but who's on that staff what are the skills that are on that population growth and regulation planning is a tremendous issue and communications I wanted to just mention that I think the breakthrough is going on now in communications and AID and State Department are doing some things now in Chad in Niger in northern Nigeria that make me feel that distance education finding ways to link with nomadic peoples through AT and through distance education radio is I think going to offer enormous help when we kept the State Department saying what kind of communication strategy do you have to make the people in northern Mali feel that they are part of a nation and that they're integral to the nation's survival and even to this day it's well we're still working on that strategy I mean it's pathetic so particularly when you have next door success stories going on in Niger and Chad on distance education and on communications so those are issues that I just wanted to flag Hi Rachel Yavinsky from Population Reference Bureau there have been a few mentions of population growth including the comment just before me and more discussion on the role of women but I wanted to see if you had any more comments or thoughts on the contribution of gender roles to the challenges in the Sahel but also the contribution of women's empowerment reproductive health and family planning to resilience and to improving the conditions there let's have a left right balance Catherine Marshall from Georgetown University first on the population dynamics just the fact that this is one of the highest population growth rates in the world and I think strategically that issue of the increasing population land pressure must be considered a huge element in the fragility but very little was said here about the religious dynamics and obviously part of the religious dynamics would be within the sort of terrorism and security but you hear people talking a lot about the changing nature of religion and different influences coming in from the Gulf the threat to the traditional Sufi the sort of balance with with the more traditional religion how much do we know about that who knows about it and what do we do about it okay very thoughtful interesting questions sorry we got four but I think one and I ask I'm going to ask Bill Garvelink I'm going to ask you to start first and take any and all or any or all and just you can just go through and make sure we cover each of the questions from various perspectives go ahead push the button yeah that one yes security for civil society organizations NGOs and that sort of thing working in difficult areas hopefully when you're doing that the aid mission and embassy is in close discussion with you guys about what's going on and their perspectives and when I was working for AID and those kind of environments there was usually funding available to to hire security and be careful who you hire but I would there's usually provision for meeting your security needs as well and if not there should be and that should be brought up with the aid mission or with the bureau or with the embassy where you're working so that I mean that would be my comment on that just Bob just you're dealing with thematic populations I should have mentioned one thing and that in my certainly my conversations a few days ago with Earl Gast he mentions media is a very big thing and this is a hail in particular with nomadic populations and the communication gap has been a big factor contributing to the rising tensions and grievances so you're absolutely right it's a tough group of people to deal with and I think a real secret to this is using media in much more effective ways we've got new tools now that makes it easier too so that should be a centerpiece and it is one of the four priorities of Earl Gast who's the head of the Africa Bureau and AID and so I should have mentioned that so I'm glad you brought it up and then the role of women in reproductive health and all that you can't underestimate how important this is in all the difficulties that are out there and this a hail so I don't have a whole lot of information on this other than say you're absolutely right and those are it's got to be a priority for any effective program okay Santiago let me ask you I'd love for you to take on the issue the population issues or also this issue in particular the religion aspect I'd be pretty curious what your take is on that specific issue thank you Dan I'm just going to make a brief mention in some of those countries particularly Mauritania now and in some other regions the fact that you are a western Christian which is the majority in the west not necessarily given but it is makes you automatically a target and what the way we do it is that normally our NGOs work with locals meaning the Spanish European or Spanish NGOs and Spanish Development Corporation and Aid works with locals and employs locals to sort of go out in the field and over the years lots of people have been trained and the response has been very positive on the communication for nomadic people I've actually just noticed that we are on the map there those are the Canary Islands what's there near the western Sahara what's the big arrow gone yeah and there is a very interesting originally Catholic radio now working in that area in distance education and the results are exponential any dollar you put into that I mean it pays back it's very cheap way of furthering education religious dynamics I agree that is an incredible problem the influence of the Wahhabis coming from the Gulf in all that area is very intense and is actually very harmful there are to my knowledge three very serious observatories of radical Islam in the area two of them are in Senegal and one of them is in Mali and they're all run by Muslims they're all run by Muslims very very worried about the increase in radical influence coming from the Gulf area and they come directly it gets all the way to the coast the way to combat that I don't know from a purely religious point of view what there were in that area were a number of Christian missionaries which no missions which are no longer manned because we have had a substantial number of them were Spanish but at least the Europeans we have had to concentrate them in the areas and coming back to the point you were mentioning when I was in last time in Bamako hotel where the French and the Spanish and the Belgium special forces were staying it was a big huge panel because it was for security reasons and for security reasons they had these towers built with whatever and for security reasons there was no water in the swimming pool beats me it makes it tough to swim but there was this and there was this sort of huge panel on the entrance of the hotel and it said jogging tomorrow morning at six and a couple of my colleagues and myself no no no how long can we last jogging with special forces so we decided we were going to go out for a drink at night so we were in this huge hotel for security reasons and when the bosses went to bed we went and had a couple of drinks in town and they are fantastic cities full of fantastic people and it's probably more dangerous to be excessively concerned with security in most cases because they then see who you are probably the best thing to do is what we did we just walked out of the hotel nobody asked us anything and off we went so let me ask Vivian I want you to if you could talk about a couple different things one is you've touched on the issue of gender in your remarks and some of the comments come back to it let's just probe a little bit further on this issue of gender on the one hand and then could you also touch on Bob's comment about cultural expertise because I think part of what Bob is getting at is these are really complicated cultural context you have sub-Saharan Africans if I can call say that in Mali as well as tour-reg nomadic people in the north very complicated tribal situations these lines have basically been arbitrarily drawn so talk a little bit about this issue of this cultural expertise and then to the extent you're familiar with Catherine's point about the shifting dynamics within Islam in the region to the extent you have any familiarity with that that would be great all in three minutes or less just push the button in terms of gender I truly believe that women are the key to resolving some of these conflicts particularly let me give you an example and it goes to the question about reproduction and empowerment and women's empowerment in the Tunisian revolution a group of us went this group FOS had a meeting at the AU summit one of the members is a Tunisian woman there was quite a bit of concern about her because she'd been close to Ben Ali but she had worked on reproductive health and rights and she had that was her entire life she didn't have anything to do with Ben Ali beyond that this was what she was focused on what she talked about was the caravans that went throughout the country and so what we thought this group of us at this meeting at the AU was why not use this idea of caravans in other countries so if you could do something like that in Sahelian countries you can do two things one you deliver information and two you begin to have linkages between women of different countries so that would be my take on how one can build these kinds of relationships find the substantive issue i.e. reproduction reproductive health and the health issues that surround it across countries be able to do to have that commonality that's also true for cultural experiences there's so many African organizations professional organizations that meet that's another way that you build your relationships between and across cultures in terms of women and culture it's terribly difficult because of the relationships in so many countries the relationship with men I don't want to spend a lot of time on that because you tell me to be quick I do want to say one thing about the religious dynamic what this reminds me of this brings in the whole question of Boku Haram which we have not mentioned which is now a part of anybody's definition of the Sahel and just mentioned some of the efforts that have gone on in Kano between the Imam and the pastor this is a well known effort to bring these two groups together and I think that there needs to be between various Muslim ideologies the same kind of intra-faith dialogue just like what's going on interfaith between the Imam and the pastor and that that might be a way forward that would require though leaders senior leaders to really be able to come together for dialogue great thank you very much Vivian I'm going to give my friend Donovan a chance to just comment on some of these really interested in your thoughts about communication issues sort of in the region in terms of some of this distance learning issues that came up and your work in media and then awesome hoping you can talk about this issue of the shifting religious dynamics I suspect you have a pretty good sense at a granular level what's going on there well first off one of the things we're doing I'm doing with James Noctway who's a photographer you may know Jim Noctway I don't know we're doing a thing called Africa Calling we're working with MIT Media Lab and we're getting kids cheap computers there and then they're making music videos and we're using African musicians to make them it's pretty cool so I mean basically what you talked about Vivian you know getting people just to communicate on a wider level will be an enormous thing and with regard to security I gotta say never carry the gun there I've had a lot of guns leveled at me but if you make a joke the guns go away the Tuaregs are all packing all the time I mean we're out in the middle of the Sahara and suddenly there's two lights off in the distance and all the Tuaregs walk to their cars and feel under the front bumper for the gun I mean and yet never a problem I once I'm gonna show you where it is I got stopped with Mohammed and they made us sit in the car all day with the windows up which was really hot and yet they let us go they just said ok it was no big deal so basically in Africa if you're not threatening and you make a joke they're fine with regards to nomads but that's the way that those countries have lived for thousands of years and the problem is is that if they lose their animals if there's a drought they can't live like they used to and consequently have to move to places like Al-Ghadez or Niame or whatever and Bamako and they don't have equipped in terms of skills to live in a place like that so it's just a cultural trainwreck and they all get malaria and they all live in hovels and then the last thing is with the religion the Salafists I don't know how to fix it there's just no way to fix it they're coming and and there's just no way around it when we did running the Sahara for instance I basically just finally said I'm going to do the worst possible thing just so we can get through the Kedal region of Mali and I hired both the civic leaders and the rebel leaders to be our guides together yeah and they were together they were fine they were kind of funny but and they knew each other and I just hired everybody and said you know okay it's two weeks Matt Damon will pay for it and you know I don't know how to fix that the Salafism is going to be a huge problem even Mohammed Iqsa okay head of the Tuaregs expects me you know he's like we had this conversation actually I guess six months ago he said to me I got two problems I got the Salafists in the north and my children like Britney Spears and I pray five times a day I mean he's like totally being ripped apart totally and I feel bad for him I don't know what to do I don't know what to do about it Donovan thank you Can I do one more thing? Yes Women I think you are exactly right I really do I think somehow we could get some sort of group of women together across countries and you know some sort of congress I think it would be enormous I forgot I'm going to give you the last word since you traveled the longest to be here Thank you very much I was going to touch on what I think is I'm going to make four points very briefly the longest one is going to be the first one is the displaced people yeah that is the biggest drama of the current crisis in the Sahel and you are very right Donovan very right when you say that it is the worst problem to solve and it's going to be the one that's going to take the most time and it's going to be the most expensive and it's going to be the most resource intensive why because these people who had to move because of the invasion which we can debate on that because of the invasion of northern Mali they lost their livelihood they lost their their way of living and those subsistence agriculture and animals and whatever to get them back to be able to feed themselves and to get back into their life that is going to take years and three things which I would like to say one is that a reform of the security strategy is needed because of all you've mentioned the Salafists and what not second that we have to take into account that carrying out development assistance projects has become increasingly dangerous the abductions of aid workers and their value in dollars and we have to know that it's going to cost us a lot more money and resources and we need to be prepared to pay for that and the third is that regardless of what we might think and regardless of what Europeans think and regardless of what you can see on CNN from time to time and Fox News some of you watch Fox News the majority of the migrations in that area are internal and not to Europe and I think that that is something that we all assume that they all want to get out and go to Europe and that is not true but the majority of migrations are internal with that we're going to close the panel thank you all very very much thank you