 Thai U.M. would think that discussion and debate on capacity development in migration would never be complete, comprehensive and inclusive if they don't include the main actors of human mobility that is to say the migrant themselves. In this context and consistent with the established practice of the IDM and to provide the migrant with the opportunity to make their voice heard and to interact directly with other stakeholders. I'm glad to present this morning this session through which we will listen to interesting self-empowerment stories and to concrete experience of migrant empowering themselves and contributing to capacity development of their fellow migrants and ultimately to their host and origin countries. Yesterday one of our panelists representing the UNICEF Mr. Khan referred to a migrant, a young migrant with the name of Anas Ansar addressing policymakers in a gathering in June. I'm quoting the young migrant said one way of making migration safer and better for young people is to have us part of the discussion that exactly what we are trained and aiming from this session is to make the migrants around me part of the discussion to provide room for interaction discussion with you. I'm sharing the podium with three distinguished capacity development agents if I may say so. First there Mr. Jibril Diallo who serves the African Renaissance and Daspora Network ARDN as president and chief executive officer. In this role Dr. Diallo leads the ARDN global pathway to solutions initiative which aims to popularize the United Nations sustainable development goals and spread the goodwill of the United Nations in close consultation and collaboration with partners including the office of deputy secretary general of the United Nations. Then I have on my left Ms. Zrinka Braulu who is the CEO of Migrant Organize a grassroots national organization that provides shared organizing platform for migrants and refugees to connect, build, come and ground and grow their power. Ms. Zrinka is a refugee from Sarajevo where she was a journalist and where she worked with leading war correspondent in the 19th. She served as commissioner on the independent asylum commission the most comprehensive review of the UK protection system. Last but not least on my right Ms. Lucia Broula who is the founder of the executive director of the NGO prevention Madalena's in Switzerland which promote actions related to domestic violence sexual harassment and sexual exploitation and human trafficking. Lucia Amelia was a victim of human trafficking when she was 20 years old coming from Brazil to Switzerland when she believed she was signing a contract to be an artist her own experience was her inspiration to create Madalena's and work with support information and prevention prevention related to human trafficking. Lucia Amelia is also a multi-talented artist awarded nationally and internationally for her literature work. Without much ado and after we'll come in my panelist I will hand over the floor to Dr. Jibri Diallo to lead us through what I hope would be an interactive discussion. Mr. Diallo you have the floor. Thank you very much. It's an honor to be here and help to have as much of an interaction with you all as possible because our goal in the time to come is to see how we can have perspectives how we can have lessons that are learned that can help you member states that can help you representatives of social civil society organizations to move forward in terms of the interconnection between the actors the actresses in the field and you the member states. We have two the way forward is as follows one we will have our two panelists share their perspectives as to how they came about being where they are as migrants what are the challenges what are the difficulties that being faced with how did they manage to overcome those difficulties what role do they see you especially a member states could play and then also what is the interconnection with the work that I am doing in terms of giving us this kind of space so we will maybe start with you and then go on to go ahead please thank you very much I will try to do the riskiest thing and that is to use a clicker and a PowerPoint and we'll see how that works. Good morning everyone I'm delighted to be here and very aware of my privilege today and to be here and to have a voice in this meeting in the city and this and have this platform. I'm chief executive of migrants organized which is based in London with ambitious of becoming international force we do do work across United Kingdom and also visit other countries and cities and provide training and share our experiences so that's what I'd like to do in next ten minutes and for the rest of the session. There we go challenge is it so I was born in Sarajevo in Bosnia and Herzegovina many many years ago and when I was a teenager I danced in winter Olympics opening ceremony so I'm somewhere there in the middle circle and I'm still very emotional and tearful every time I see any Olympic ceremony because it reminds me of the best that we can do as a world together and I had a very happy childhood and that happy childhood became this just eight years after the Olympics and this is my street this is where my mom still lives and some of you who are as young as I am will remember that there was a terrible war in my country and lots of destruction I was a young journalist and I ended up working with international war correspondence because I spoke English and they helped me leave in 1993 and this year is something that I call my flip year which means that I was 25 years living in Bosnia and now I'm 25 years living in London and so I'm half and half but from now on if I stay in London I'm gonna be slightly more British than I am Bosnian at least in terms of timeline when I first came to Britain I was completely unaware of what I call the unwelcome committee which is the tabloid press and I wasn't aware of how migrants and refugees are portrayed and understood because I had this confidence about not having done anything wrong and leaving the country that's being torn apart and the city that was under the siege and not so much that I had a sense of entitlement but I I hope that world understood and perhaps because I was a journalist I thought that people are watching the news but tabloid press was putting a completely different spin on that experience and and that was really difficult to understand and over the years that got worse and a couple of years ago the Migration Observatory at Oxford University has done a study they looked at 43 million words in in British newspapers and what they found is that the term is commonly associated with the term migrant was illegal and and that's how public conversation was being conducted fortunately that is not the only public conversation that's happening in the United Kingdom and that's what I do and that's where where migrants organized come comes in there is this whole welcome movement that is largely invisible in newspapers because people who do good work do it quietly and good news is not news and that's part of the problem so I understand it as my mission as a recovering journalist to take on that challenge so in London and across United Kingdom what we do we try to provide spaces with migrants and refugees work together with British citizens and all other immigrants on welcoming and creating welcoming spaces so what we do a lot of the time is we listen to people because people with experiences usually are the ones who will have the seeds of what the solutions are so we listen what are the experiences of migrants and four doctors walked into my office 10 years ago and they said we need to pass this really difficult exams to be doctors seven years later we ended up supporting three and a half thousand doctors and dentists from 98 countries by organizing training for them to pass these very difficult exams to work as doctors and they're now working in our national health service which is fantastic and more importantly for our government they're paying taxes quite a lot another way of celebrating and changing the narrative is to recognize people who do fantastic work in the community so we have set up women on the move awards and every year in the Royal Festival Hall another very important cultural space the nation nominates women migrant and refugee women that they know who are doing fantastic work in the community these two women who won the award of both working in charities the young woman is going to be a doctor they've both been trafficked and these are stories that are really inspiring other people because they're not stories of victimhood they're stories of resilience and then we make sure that they get platform in the press we're big on Netflix this is Bashar who's one of our Syrian refugees who's just got his first job after he got papers we also work with celebrities and artists making sure that they use their voices to amplify the stories in a positive way and the young woman is now in this picture is now working for mayor of London we work with businesses this is a big campaign by jigsaw fashion label for which they won advertising award which they splash all over London underground proclaiming that immigration is good and why not and we also work with Ben and Jerry ice cream he produced this refugees welcome pint of ice cream and all the donation went went international rescue committee we do this work only because we have hundreds of volunteers last year we had 236 volunteers who mentor people English go to doctor appointments with them and as a result we were given Queens voluntary service award which is the highest recognition in United Kingdom you can get for voluntary service we work with churches faith groups where they raised funding for us we've just become a community sponsors this is a group of staff at Amnesty International who raised 40,000 pounds and our first family is coming on community sponsorship from Iraq on a 6th of November and they're super excited to be welcoming them the most important element of integration work that we do is not only economic culture and social integration but also civic integration and that is the recognition of the fact that we were citizens somewhere else so we can continue being citizens in our receiving countries so we had lots of elections in United Kingdom in the last couple of years and we started this initiative called promote the migrant vote where migrants and refugees even if they cannot vote organized events in which they can have conversations with people who are voting to bring down stigma to change stereotypes to challenge fake news this is young Vic theater who declared they declared themselves to be the theater of sanctuary and if you went to go and see the show you could register to vote so we work on a campaign together with them these are my colleagues going out and encouraging people to register to vote we work with authorities local authorities London national government cities across Europe this is our mayor of London and when he was campaigning we asked him if you're elected will you give us a deputy mayor for integration and he said yes I will so we send a member of staff on secondment and as a result we now have integration strategy for London called all of us where our voices were presented and then the reason why I love compact this particular compact is because it has a very inclusive positive and progressive language that helps us do that kind of work locally and this is a local authority in Haringey in north London which has started a movement called Haringey welcome and we work with young people and children in schools who produce posters but more importantly we work with local authority and they're looking at their practices as as to how they can be more inclusive and reduce the barriers for people who are coming to the country and of course all of this needs to be fun because the shortest distance between two people is laughter and of course we use a lot of art in what we do and we have a poetry workshop and we publish part trees and that's how we teach English as well so because he couldn't be here today and because it's my job to platform some of these voices I brought to you a poem about belonging that the 11-year-old Sultan wrote in our poetry club and it's only one minute and I thought I would end on that note and share that poem with you right now Lucia Amelia Broula you have an experience coming from Brazil resident in Switzerland perhaps you can also share with us your perspective I would like to thank you for being here today and I would also like to thank you all for being here this morning it's difficult to speak I tremble I have the body that jumps but I am alive and I am there I am very happy to be here and share my life experience I was born in Sao Paulo south of Brazil today I am 51 years old and I would like to tell you my story I lived 30 years ago I was a teenager 17 to 18 years old I imagined that emigré who emigré was synonymous with enrichment, instant enrichment of independence and financial stability. Today at 51 years old after my own experience I have the conclusion that living in a foreign country was not synonymous with wealth, good life, good work. Living in a foreign country is synonymous with struggle, hard work, sacrifice, solitude, courage, integration, adaptation and we have to reinvent ourselves every day. Far from our country of origin we have to renounce a lot of things, to sacrifice ourselves for others in order to have a better life than the one we thought was not good where we lived. However, for a young girl with a head full of dreams and little information about international migration it is impossible to clarify things. Every person who has an adventure outside of his own country does not question the difficulties he will face. He has only one objective in mind that his dreams must be realized. When I left Brazil with a contract to work as an artist in Switzerland I did not know that my nightmare had only started. Young people like me have entered the country by putting hope into an artistic contract for eight months. We waited for the prostitution and the forced consumption of drugs, the humility of all these forms and the different demands of the employer, the emotional use caused by the nostalgia of the country, the nostalgia of loved ones, the difficulty with the language, the climate and gastronomic adaptation, solitude, daily sufferings and the main causes of suicide, of depression among young artists. Deshumanité signifies the absence of humanity, atrocity, cruelty, the element that I use to describe the reserve treatments I speak of 30 years ago, the artists of Carbaré in Switzerland, from Morocco, from Brazil, from Thailand, from Africa. I knew. I witnessed the critical situation of colleagues who were savagely beaten up by the owners of Carbaré or by the clients. There were many cases of deaths. We received news of the artists who died in the rooms, in the streets, in the forests, bodies found in the woods. And the cause of death was reported as suicide or overdose, but we knew that it was the punishment for the disobedience. Many mothers cry until today for their daughter. Nationalities are different, but the cries are universal. By telling this story here at the UNO, I realize that 30 years have passed. My involvement with the themes of sexual abuse, sexual exploration of children, the treatment of human beings and domestic violence has been so intense over the last seven years that I founded the UNG Prevention of Madalena to react to preventive treatment in order to prevent young people like me, young people from my country, are wrong to follow the same paths as me. With the Madalena, we have a preventive work by visiting schools, an important information to the students who are at risk of receiving proposals from foreign workers without knowing if the source of work is reliable. Our UNG wishes to encourage women, young students, women and men in general to achieve their studies and try to invest in professional training that allows them to sell and live in Brazil. Immigrate, yes, but with the proper preparation. I know that the fight is serious and we will win our fight only if we use education, culture and literature as weapons. Thank you. The two statements are supposed to be snapshots into experiences that migrants have in the individual communities. Within the framework of the theme of this conference, how do we strengthen partnerships? How do we go from these perspectives into like a zoom lens kind of style? And from where I sit, my organization, we are present in 80 countries and we try to see how we go from this to enter into the broader picture of connecting migrants with SDGs. And as I mentioned yesterday, we're using three entry points because if you take my own continent of origin, Africa, I'm a national of Senegal, most of the people who are candidates to living the African continent are young people. So what programs do we do in order to make it worth their while for the youth not to vote with their own feet in order to leave the continent and go to what they think would be the El Dorado, that kind of pull and push kind of factor. So we're pushing to establish right now an SDGs youth core, volunteer youth core and some of you governments here present are supporting our initiatives in that connection at two levels. One, many of the African countries have voluntary work on associations. So how do we do exchange programs through those work on associations? And then two, yesterday in the discussions when the eDiaspora was mentioned during the lunch break, a lot of experience were shared about how immigrants from where they are can contribute their knowledge to their countries of origin at two levels. One, being physically present in the countries of origin and examples were mentioned. I mentioned that when I was director of communications of UNDP, we had a major program which is still going on called TOCTEN, transfer of knowledge among expatriate nationals. But then the immigrants were established in countries where they cannot necessarily move physically to be in their countries of origin. But now with the modern media, with technology, they can give so much of their own time from where they are. So that within that framework, we have the short term and the medium and long term initiative regarding the youth. I'd very much like to hear from you all in terms of your perspectives on how you can meaningfully engage the youth. Because I am a first generation literate, my parents have not been to school. I cannot go back to my hometown and say to the youth, you should stay where you are, you should not go to Europe. How about yourself? How come you are where you are? So that it has to take more than being a professor or lecturer talking to the youth. It has to be worth their own while in their own terms. Second point is one of the biggest challenges that we have right now in Africa is really the restlessness in higher education. That's where you have a lot of the strikes. That's where you have a lot of programs. So we have an SDGs university initiative that is having partnerships between African universities and universities in particular in the United States. 350 universities historically black and are willing to do this program. This has been going on for 10 years. And within that framework, as you know, there are three types of universities in the continent. The well-established universities which draw a lot of the resources. But then you have new universities and then you have rural universities. And the idea is to leave no university behind. But then when you're talking about universities, you have to also go down and make sure that early childhood, primary and secondary education are taken care of. So we're taking universities as low-hunging fruit. But then we go down to secondary education. The third and final point I always mention to my friend that the mayor or the governor are the first points of contact for the populations so that we've had experience. And I'm very, very grateful to IAM to enable us to share our experience. We have an organization called the Global Alliance of Mayors and Leaders from Africa and of African descent, which is the largest organization of mayors of color that has been fostering this relationship between Africa and people of African descent. So when you take those three points, the youth, education, local governance, then you wrap them around through two languages, sport and culture. Then that enables you to move forward and try to achieve the 17 sustainable development goals by 2030, working with the United Nations system, working with you, our governments, our representatives, working with civil society organizations.