 Thank you everyone for joining this panel so as some said I'm Frank I work for the UNICEF Office of Research at Inochenti and as you expect from UNICEF I bring in the perspectives of children and the youth in the whole continuum of peace building. So just by way of context we know many conflicts and fragile situations are based on some kind of an identity differential. And this identity can be ethnic, can be religious, can be caste, race, political affiliation, geographical and other times even sporting affiliations, the kind of the sporting teams that people support can be a form of tension and conflict within societies. Oftentimes these differentials are correlated to some sort of inequalities of opportunities or outcomes and these inequalities can be real or can just be perceived. So you can imagine a case where some ethnic group settles in an area of a country that is less fertile in terms of the land and this difference in fertility of the land leads to differentials in economic outcomes and the people that live in the place that has less fertile land begin to believe that their disadvantage is a result of some identity related to the ethnic group although the real confounding factor is the geographical location of where these different ethnic groups are located within the geographical space. We can also identify that there are a race of conflict spaces when there is an affinity towards these identity groups, dominate their affinity towards the national group. So in a country there are these typical questions whether you feel how attached you are to your group compared to how much you are attached to your national identity and I'll show a slide on this later on. So we know some of the worst forms of conflict typically genocide for example are perpetrated along the lines of this kind of identity differential. So one ethnic group whether they are dominant in terms of political space or military capacity using this to systematically malign and eliminate another group altogether and there are a lot of distinctions that exist in different contexts. So we know the children of today and the youth are the future of tomorrow and for those who follow the demographics we know about 60% of the world population now and that 40 in some countries that is small. So and they are going to constitute 100% of the future the children and the youth and the most effective pathway of eliminating this kind of identity differential is through systematically trying to dilute and neutralize these polarizing effects of the identity that drives conflicts in the long run and this can be achieved through re-engineering of these identity affinities. So for example if in my country I belong to one ethnic group and I want to my affinity towards that ethnic group is more than my affinity to the national interest then that creates tension and conflict between the different ethnic groups that live in this country. So over time systematically neutralizing and diluting these affinities will create more cohesive societies going forward and that's where we focus on the children and the youth. So we have these two graphs from the African Afrobarometer studies that look at different countries and as a number of questions is a very reset of data if you want to have a look and these two graphs here show us on the first slide maybe not too visible to read but the question is whether there are different ethnic groups and religious groups in the country whether you somewhat identify there's more that divide you or there's more that unite you as a country and the one on the left shows across the different countries what the perceptions are. So whether there's more that unite or there's more that divide the people in the country and on the other side there's there are these questions about how people feel about their identity so affinity to let's say one the national or their ethnic group and people respond about whether they feel equally towards the ethnic group and their country or they feel more of the ethnic group than the country or they feel more identified with their country than the ethnic group and here with this data we begin to drill down on which ethnic groups which demographies which kinds of people are responding to which questions about how they identify whether they feel more strongly towards the ethnic group or the national identity and who they are where they live and what defines them and we look at also this and correlated to other outcomes within the country that the conflict situation in the country the number of realities the number of actual conflict incidents in the past 20 years and how they have been able to recover from conflict situations and I'm sure those of you who attended some of the the closing session yesterday had about the case in for example in Myanmar where you have different ethnic groups and the dominant ethnic group trying to do this through coercive assimilation of the population whereas there are other approaches to doing this and the intervention that was talked about yesterday was using education actually to be more inclusive of the minority ethnic groups and how they can be included so studying these patterns and how the situation of the countries and the conflict lines that persist have four key takeaways from from this one the number one from studying these countries shows that the heavy-handedness assimilation does not work overall so when one ethnic group tries to dominate the others through assimilation that does not work in general and a more constructive approach will be through integration and sometimes amnesia so you're trying to neutralize the presence of the ethnic groups or some identities that are actually more divisive than cohesive and you can like in the case of Rwanda where it is now even an offense to ask any question about ethnic identity in the country with the hope that over time they will not be people will not be identified by the ethnic groups to foster this sense of identity and continuous bargaining. There's another school of thought about multiculturalist interventions and also trying to institute quota systems where every ethnic group has a quota instead of trying to wish this away through a process of amnesia or forced integration but in general cohesive assimilation would not work and more progressive approaches of integration and amnesia will be recommended. The second point is creating opportunities for more engagement interaction among these different the children and youth from different ethnic groups so again if you look at the adult population they often tend to be more ingrained and more entrenched with their positions in terms of their affinity to the groups so if they are they feel more towards their ethnic group and they are elderly they tend to sustain this this kind of affinity over time so the real opportunity is to educate the children and the youth in a different way that again dilutes and over time neutralize these affinity effects that leads to to conflict so especially in fragility settings the real goal is to promote more engagement and more interaction and I can talk of an example in in Ghana for example where there is a residential high school system so people from different ethnic groups get to go to boarding schools in in different cities so you move from your locality go to a boarding school with people from other identities and that has created more cohesive society and more less tensions in terms of ethnic and religious identities. The third point is also engaging youth and children from diverse groups in finding solutions to race factors we know when these identity differentials and affinities exist they are ultimate triggers that leads to conflict and that could be issues of water stress, unemployment, social mobility, feelings of exclusion and people really not understanding they are the composition of their group in terms of the the national discourse so in cases where people might feel excluded it might just be a matter of they not understanding that the share of their group in the national population is proportional to the representation they already have in government but looking at the numbers in government they feel they are in the minority and they are excluded from from governance so creating engaging this youth to find solutions also tends to foster the the national affinity more than this narrow group affinities and that promotes cohesion in the long run. The fourth final one is making the youth understand that peaceful coexistence dialogue and and their reprehensible dangers of conflict to their futures so often the perpetrators of these conflicts are elderly people who have egos and agendas that are beyond the interests of the youth and we heard from yesterday how the outcomes of conflict can be very differential for different age groups and different geographies so making the youth and children really understand that they stand to lose the most in times of conflict they have their futures ahead of them they have irreparable damage and even including some of these texts in the educational curricula helps them to understand and appreciate the risk of conflict the opportunities for peaceful resolution and this generally leads to more affinity towards the nation then state interests than their group interests and this also facilitates cohesion within the the country so thank you very much and I'll be happy to take questions