 Welcome. I'm Karla Koppel. I'm one of the vice presidents here at the US Institute of Peace. And it's my great pleasure to welcome you to this conversation. The United States Institute of Peace has existed for over 30 years. We were created by an act of Congress as a nonpartisan national institute dedicated to the proposition that peace is practical, possible, and cost-effective. And for me personally, it is a great pleasure to be hosting this conversation this afternoon. I actually have worked with some of the folks on the panel for over, I don't know, a decade and a half, almost two decades, on issues related to attention to gender issues and women's inclusion in peace processes around the world. And while we've seen progress, I don't think that progress is really commensurate with the evidence that including a broader range of voices in peace processes leads to more durable outcomes. And so the more we talk about that, I think the more we begin to demonstrate that including those voices in those conversations, it can be transformative and will make a difference. And we host this event at the end of hosting jointly with the United Nations, the mediator support network conversation, which really is foremost gathering of peace mediators around the world. And they've been together first in New York and then in DC, speaking over the last several days about cutting-edge practices related to mediation and negotiation and conflict areas around the world. And also, we have this conversation on the final day of Women's History Month. And so it's a wonderful convergence of a time to shine a spotlight on the importance of gender issues and inclusivity in peace negotiations and a confluence of different events taking place across Washington DC and around the world. It's my honor to turn the floor then over to Kathleen Keenast, who is our senior gender advisor. And I know that's not exactly your right title right now. But our sage-wise woman within the US Institute of Peace dedicated to ensuring that this agenda is woven into all of the work that we do here. And she's done a tremendous job. And I can say from US Agency for International Development, where I came from, that the issues related to engaging women in mediation was something that came really bubbled up from our field programs writ large. Because what we saw was the added value that women played as mediators in the work that we were doing globally and that therefore was an intimate part of moving forward in a conflict resolution and peace building agenda, but also a development agenda. So with that, I give the floor to Kathleen, who will introduce an exceptional panel from whom we'll be hearing this afternoon. So thank you for joining us on a rainy Friday afternoon. We will brighten the afternoon with our brilliant comments, I'm sure. Thank you, Carla. And thank you all. It's a great turnout. And it's nice to see so many familiar faces for this afternoon's panel. So today's event on mediation and gender, the latest in research, practice, and policy, is indeed a wonderful way to cap this month of women's history. But it's important to take a moment, especially for some of you who may not be familiar with this terrain, to just note that in 2000, when UN Resolution 1325 on Women, Peace, and Security was passed by the Security Council, one of the challenges was really how do we make peace building efforts more inclusive and gender sensitive? So we know that without inclusion, and particularly the inclusion of women in the peace process, peace agreements are less durable and less effective. But 17 years later, the fact is we are still working very hard to bolster the participation pillar of this really important and what I would call game changing resolution. We do want more women involved in official delegations at the formal negotiating table. But we know that this is more than just a numbers game. And in fact, in 2016, there was an important research study entitled Making Women Count, not just Counting Women by Tanya Paffenholz, who argued that making women's participation count is more important than merely counting the number of women who are included in the peace processes. Instead, her report contends that the key focus should be on the influence women are actually having on the overall mediation process. So she pointed out six findings. And I'm just going to highlight them very quickly to frame our remarks from our experts today. First, the study was a longevity study. So it wasn't just one time. They were working on this for about five years. And it did find that women have made substantial contributions to peacemaking and constitution-making negotiations, and to the implementation of final agreements. So we've made progress. Second, it noted that the strength of women's influence is positively correlated with agreements reached and implemented. So I'm going to introduce this idea of influence and how we actually bring this into our research in a few minutes. Third, the involvement of women does not weaken peace processes. On the contrary, the presence of women strengthened the influence other additionally included actors. Fourth, women's inclusion is not limited to direct participation in the negotiation table, but there are multiple modalities that we need to track in this process. And that quotas do not necessarily mean influence. So it's important that we keep all of these on the table at the same time. Fifth, a specific set of process and context factors work hand in hand with either enabling or constraining the ability of women to participate. I think you're going to hear more of this today. And when women were found to be influential in particularly multi-stakeholder negotiations, it was often because they pushed for more concrete and fundamental reforms. So today, we want to highlight some of the progress and especially how we are doing in terms of research pertaining to the role of women in mediation. And how is this research actually shaping our policy and informing our practices? I'm very pleased to have been asked to moderate this distinguished group of experts. And I think their bios are with you. But I'm going to very briefly introduce them to you and then begin the conversation. And indeed, they're going to keep their remarks fairly brief so that there is more interaction with the audience. So be thinking of your questions as they speak. First, I want to introduce to you right to my left, Lone Jensen. Jessen, I'm thinking Norwegian there. Sorry. Yes, Jessen is the Department of Political Affairs, Senior Political and Gender Advisor. She heads up the Department's Gender, Peace, and Security Unit, which is now a standalone unit in the policy and mediation division. Her work in this unit is cross-cutting beyond conflict resolution and mediation. It includes women's political participation and gender consideration. To her left is Miss Tericita, otherwise known as Ging Delis. So if you don't mind, we'll go to the informal. She's well known, I think, for many of us in this auditorium today. She was a key presidential advisor on the peace processes in the Philippines. She served this role twice, first time 2003 to 2005, and then again in 2010 to 2016. She has now joined the DPA standby team for 2017 as a senior mediation advisor on gender and inclusion. To her left is Irene Limo. She is the coordinator of Accord's peace-making unit supporting the implementation of the African Union Mediation Support Capacity Project and other peace-making interventions undertaken by Accord. She's responsible for the execution of the strategic direction of the unit through training, policy development, and applied research. And then to her left is Sophie Close. She is a programming and policy engagement on gender and represents conciliation resources in international fora on gender and peace-building. She previously worked across the Asia-Pacific region for governments, the United Nations, and non-governmental organizations. We will be joined in a few minutes by our colleague, Jenny Bouvier, who is our senior advisor on mediation and peace process here at the US Institute of Peace, where she has been since 2006. She was also seconded in 2012-13 to be an expert for the United Nations standby team of mediation experts. So with that, we are going to begin. And I want to welcome Lonnie to the podium here, who's actually going to set the framing for this discussion on the latest on guidance on gender-inclusive mediation strategies. So thank you very much, Lonnie. And thank you to all. So thank you very much, Kathleen, and to Jenny, and to Carla for this warm welcome. Oops. Can you hear me now? Yeah. And also to the Mediation Support Network for including this agenda item in your very busy schedule. I'm going to give you a very brief introduction of the context of this guidance and its development. I'm sure most of you are aware that DPA, the Department of Political Affairs at the UN, is the primary entity for peacemaking initiatives. But we also have a guidance and learning function. We provide guidance to the department, DPA, but also to the UN and beyond. And I'm sure most of you are aware that we have issued a number of guidance, such as the guidance for effective mediation. We have guidance on conflict and natural resources. But within the Women, Peace, and Security Agenda, we also have issued another guidance. I brought it with me. This guidance for mediators on how to address conflict-related sexual violence in ceasefires and peace agreements. So very briefly, in the run-up to the 10th anniversary of Security Council Resolution 1325 back in 2010, the Department of Political Affairs took on 15 very specific commitments. The most relevant here, of course, on mediation, protection, addressing conflict-related sexual violence, and women's effective participation in conflict resolution, including mediation. And the specific deliverable that we took on in DPA was to sensitize and train the UN mediators and mediation actors, and provide them with actual guidance. So to achieve these commitments, we developed a very innovative curriculum. And we launched a series of high-level seminars on gender and inclusive mediation processes with our implementing partners, CMI and PREO, and with the financial support of the Ministries of Foreign Affairs of Finland and Norway. And based on the dialogue and the exchanges that we've had in these high-level seminars, we have now had a total of nine. It's an initiative that's ongoing. And we had recently an expert group meeting to vet this guidance that you all have in front of you. We launched this guidance on Monday in New York, for many of the people who are here with the Mediation Support Network. The intended audience of this guidance are first and foremost the UN mediators and envoys, but also senior mediation actors from all spheres of life, regional organizations, member states, and very much civil society and international and national NGOs that the guidance very strongly promotes working with. Sorry, oops. I should have done that already. So yeah, I think I mentioned all of this already. Sorry, I'll try to keep up with the slides. So the content of the guidance is that it combines process design and gender-sensitive approaches to the key thematic areas of mediation. We have modeled it after the effective mediation guidance that we came out with in 2012. So therefore, it's very brief, and there are no concrete examples. In terms of the structure, we start out with definitions. It looks at concepts and basics assumptions behind the guidance. It includes information and guidance on how to put into practice the gender dimensions of the international normative framework on women, peace, and security. And it then goes on to introduce a gendered perspective in mediation preparedness and process design. And then we go on to address the substantive issues in a peace process, including security arrangements, how to address conflict-related sexual violence, in particular women's political participation, power sharing, and constitution, as well as the drafting and the implementation of peace agreement. And I just want to add that most of these areas are big enough to justify guidance, a separate guidance in itself. But we have learned the hard way at the UN that if you want mediators to read these kind of guidance notes with all the many priorities and time pressure on them, it has to be really brief and it has to be really practical. So we have tried to condense it down to what we think are really the key messages and the key considerations that they need to take into account. In the interest of time, I'm going to skip over the premise behind the guidance and these basic assumptions, because I will get to that on the following slides. And I'm going to summarize the content of the guidance you have in front of you within 10 core messages. I think that's the most time-effective way to do it. And the guidance sort of combines and deals with the what and the how to. So if we look at message number one, both one and two actually deal with the why. Why inclusivity with regard to women and civil society is so important in mediation. And Kathleen already and Carla also mentioned the various and the growing number of research evidence that shows that when women are included effectively, it increases the chances of success and sustainability. The second message in the guidance is that women bring different views and alternative solutions that can help promote not only accountability of belligerent actors. Women can also help with the long-term social sustainability and the credibility of peace agreements. And they can help generate greater sensitivity to neglected human rights dimensions of the conflict and of the recovery period. This, of course, also speaks to the underlying fundamental right of women to be part and fully consulted of these decision-making processes, whereby their future is essentially being shaped. But for a normative organization like the UN, this ought to be a given for any mediator. The third message is the importance of gender-sensitive conflict analysis. And I know we'll hear more about that in this panel. Context. Contextual analysis needs to take place. So rather than assumptions about gender relations, we should...that informed peace-building interventions. For instance, we say that we must investigate what women are actually doing to support peace rather than assume that women connect to cross-conflict divides. We need to look at what can possibly enable participation rather than assume that women just need more confidence-building. We need to assess how conflict has disrupted or changed gender relationships. We emphasise the need to take an intersectional approach to analyses. Notions of masculinity and femininity develop in interaction with other power factors such as age, class, race, producing a multitude of masculinities and femininities in each context. It is essential to focus on these interactions, for example, by paying attention about how conflict affects different groups of men and women and sexual and gender minorities. Conflict analysis is by no means an objective undertaking. Who leads the analysis? What the focus is on? Who provides the sources of information? All these factors shape the conclusions that we have within our analyses. We need to take time to think about these issues and whether any preconceived notions on our own behalf or our organisation may influence the type of analysis that we undertake. We also emphasise the need for a participatory analysis in line with our intersectional approach. Participatory approaches to conflict analysis can reveal the views, experiences, needs and ideas of people affected by violence. It can lead to more insightful analyses and sustainable responses. However, we recognise achieving equal and meaningful participation of different groups is very difficult and requires careful design of the process. I won't go into examples because I think we've got some wonderful people here to draw on, but we work closely with our colleagues in Colombia in undertaking these. And we're applying the analysis that we've done over many years in the conflicts that we work to then go through and design programmes that specifically look at ways in which we can go about doing more inclusive peacebuilding in the context that we work in. So thank you so much. I welcome your questions afterwards. Cheers. Thanks so much, Sophie. And really, for both you and Lomi, helping us frame what we're talking about here, I think this is very important. You can't ask good questions in research unless you know what it is and how you're framing it. Irene, we look forward to your comments and talking about the African Women's Mediation Network. Thank you very much. And I think my voice is better than a few days ago. And I will still try to speak a bit louder so that you can hear me. My name is Irene Limu. I am from Accord, the African Centre for Constructive Resolution of Disputes. It is based in South Africa. And we work with the African Union and other regional mechanisms to a certain extent as well to the UN in providing African solutions to the African problems. And in the context of women, peace and security and gender peace and security, Accord has been working on these issues for 25 years now. And in that context, and going back to the work that we do with the African Union, last year, December, we worked with the African Union in co-hosting a workshop of African Women Mediators. Women who have been mediators in Track 1, who have supported Track 1 processes, who have supported Track 1.5, 2, 3, all the way up to community level mediation processes. And this was quite a unique moment or experience for those who are there because you would have Madame Catherine Panzer being there, and you would have 26-year-old Fatima Askira who's been supporting the community in reintegrating the girls who were abducted by Boko Haram and other community-level mediation processes. So it also gave us an opportunity to reflect on what do we mean by mediation and peace processes in our contexts and who is a mediator and who can be part of this process. And I will look at this with this background, discuss the emergence of all these networks. We have been having these networks in the African continent. They are not new. We have country-level networks of women mediators and women who are supporting peace processes in different countries in Burundi, in the Democratic Republic of Congo. We have them in Kenya. We have them in Central Africa Republic. And they are not new. And, I mean, Africa is not the exception here. We have these other networks in other countries, in other continents as well and in other countries. Now, that draws me to the question of why do we have these networks then? Why are we having the networks and we're doing 17 years now and we're still struggling to get there with regards to women's participation, voice and influence and impact in peace processes. Now, the women in December highlighted one thing. And they mentioned that they've been part of these processes, particularly on track two and three. But no one ever comes back to them and says, well, what you're doing is connecting or is contributing to Agenda 2063 that the African Union is doing or is contributing to silencing the guns by 2020. Now, and that led to the discussion towards creating a network for the African women mediators that seeks to bridge and bring together the experiences of all these women who've been part of these different tracks. Straight from leading community processes or the way to leading political transitions in high conflict politically charged contexts. Now, what does that mean? What does the presence of this network mean for mediation support in the African continent? Now, I will just draw a few of this, of what I think this network can help. The African Union, the regional mechanisms, as well as other actors working on mediation to be able to strengthen mediation capacity to effectively address and deploy the mediation interventions in Africa. And I did mention it is something else. We could all be in a network, all of us. But it is a different thing to have a network that have the right skills, that seeks to respond to particular gaps. And that indeed means we will need to go back and look at what are the gaps that we have when we talk about mediation support. What are these gaps? So that when you're having a group of women and a pool of women, you know women ABCD would be key in addressing this capacity gap. Now, looking at the network, one of the things that we've seen with regards to linking community processes to what is happening at the African Union level and the regional level is that we're still getting we don't have a framework yet that links all these processes. So for us, this network seeks to be that link that gives the opportunity to those women who are doing the mediation at different levels to be part of the formal agendas that the continent is working towards. Now it gives us also a platform to document the experiences of the women who are doing this process who are supporting the processes but have not had the opportunity to be able to have a platform where they can share their experiences. So for us, this is also going to be a very good platform to reach out to as many women mediators who we don't know and hear about the experiences, their challenges, what they see as lessons learned. And to go with this, our call is already working with the African Union to document the experiences of the women who, some of them we have had, but most of them we have never had of, but they are either supporting directly or mediating directly peace processes or working in creating spaces for women to be able to be part of these processes at the community level. So we're working on documenting those experiences as part of operationalizing this network. One of the other points that was raised during the meeting was the women wanted a platform where they could have some peer exchange and learn from other women who've been in these processes before. And one of the key things that was highlighted and the African Union is working on as well, is a generational linkage where you have very seasoned, very few seasoned women mediators and you have a side of women who would want to support these peace processes, particularly the formal processes, and they would like to have a platform where they will exchange with the likes of Terasita on what really works, what can I do better to be able to support a peace process, formal and informal. And that indeed will be a platform for the women to have that peer exchange. And with that, I will link that to the mentoring process for young women who are already perhaps supporting mediation as part of a technical teams or mediation teams and are interested in being part of the actual mediation processes or negotiation processes. That platform as well and the way the network is designed is to accommodate that mentorship approach with regards to young women interested in mediation processes. Thank you. One of the other points which I'm sure you will all identify with is being told we don't have enough qualified women who can support mediation processes. And one of the purpose of this network is to bring these experiences to the table and say, look, we have them. They have been doing a lot of work just that you've not heard of them, but we have women who you can work with in supporting these peace processes. Now, as I conclude, when mediators and special envoys and high representatives go down to the communities where they're supporting the peace processes, well, sometimes they have challenges in accessing the community and challenges in accessing actors who can support them in their peace processes. Now, the network is designed in such a way that the African Union and the regional mechanism can already avail the women who are in the network to the special envoys and the high representatives. And for them to already see the actors or the friends of the peace processes that they can already engage with when they go to the ground. Well, the women and the organizations who are part of the platform have expertise from time immemorial on supporting peace processes. And indeed, one of the duties of the network which has been highlighted very strongly is that the members and organizations are expected to provide technical support to the peace processes and also strongly engage in parallel peace processes to support the formal peace processes. And with that, I will leave a few of the comments for the question and answer session. Thanks very much Irene and for bringing the practice of what this really looks like and how you're doing it in South Africa. We're going to go to another continent now and we're going to ask Jenny Bouvier to talk about her work with Colombian women mediators network. Do you want to sit there or come to us? Whatever way works best. Whatever you're comfortable. We'll just need your microphone. There we go. All right, thank you very much. In listening to my colleagues, I was thinking that really what many of us are talking about today is the question of process design. It's a very technical field. It's a field, however, that really shapes what the agenda will be and who can be at the table to discuss it. And I think we are learning and I'm very sorry that I missed Kathleen's introduction and Carlos as well because I'm sure that they laid out the ground the whys of what difference it makes that women are at the peace table but also the question of all the other many places that women can be where they can have an impact on process and where they can open up the process to gender perspectives and to gender dimensions of both conflict and peace. I'd like to talk a little bit about a project that we have worked on at USIP in Columbia for the last few years. It's still an incipient project and therefore it's a project that's in development, I would say, and we have not, I'm not pretending to be exhaustive about the project. I hope to write about it but it's not even ready to be written about, frankly. So I'm just gonna give a few elements of some of the methodology that we used and the pedagogy that we used to create what became a network of women mediators. And I should say at the outset that we had the vision, or I had a vision. I had a vision, I found people that shared the vision and I think we were all dreaming of this idea that women would be able to mediate conflicts in their zones, in their conflict areas because many of us knew women who were doing precisely this. And in my many travels to Columbia, in wherever I went, there were always women who told me stories of negotiating with armed actors. It was illegal, it was highly risky, but it was necessary for survival and they did it because it was necessary for survival. So the basic assumption of this project was not that USIP would go in and train women how to mediate. The basic assumption of the project was that women are mediating and perhaps we can generate collective knowledge among the women who are mediating about how to get better and better at it, how to learn from each other and also how to make these women visible and value the work that they were doing. And in fact, one of the things we found is that many of the women after the first round of the first national encounter that we had, many of the women came up to me or said openly in the forum, I've discovered that I'm a mediator. I didn't even know there was a term. I didn't even know there was such a thing. And I think that brings me to a first point is the question of definitions. We spend a lot of time thinking about definitions. What is mediation? I noticed that Lona in your wonderful guidance for mediators starts out trying to explain what mediation is. Well, you can take that mediation definition. I think it has a lot of very important elements. But if you bring it to women mediators in zones where they may not read and write, they may have a very different concept. And I think we struggled at the beginning with, do we all try to agree on a consensus definition? And in the end, we decided these women are all mediating in armed conflict. And we can call it what we want. We can define it how we want. They may have slightly different elements in terms of mediators representing communities. And I think that was the biggest divide that a mediator is not an impartial entity. A mediator is someone who mediates on behalf of a community with armed actors to be able to get basic human rights met, to be able to gain access to roads, to be able to get medicines when they need them, to be able to go and bring children who have been recruited by armed, illegal armed actors back from their communities. So I think the first phase of this was really thinking about what are we talking about? We've gathered you all here. Why have we gathered you here? And let me say a word about selection. Why did we gather who we gathered? First of all, we did this through a process of personal contact. This is highly risky. This is not something we could advertise for women who are mediating with armed actors to come and come to our conference. This was a very quiet behind the scenes project. It was a project that had certain security risks and we explored those and we created security protocols with the women right at the beginning. But the basic criteria for engaging or for selecting the women we did began with whether or not they had been mediating and we thought that they, we thought, or people we knew thought, that they would have something to add to a conversation on the topic of mediation. So we had a set of criteria that we pulled together. I think the first thing, if I can find it, the first thing that we looked at was finding a local partner. This was a project that I did not want to do alone from outside as a North American in a region that has historical relations with the United States that are not always the best of relations. And I have developed very good relationships of trust over time with many people, but I also, I wanted to work with someone who is from that context. And I looked around for an academic who I could partner with. And I found a book by Esperanza Hernandez Delgado who was at the time was at the Autonomous University of Bucaramanga. And she had written about experiences of mediation among indigenous Campesino and Afro-Columbian women. And that seemed to me the exact partner that I was looking for. Because I had actually a fair number of contacts at the more formal level of peace processes with the women negotiators, with the women who had been involved at the local level in different kinds of victims organizations or mayors organizations working on behalf of victims. And we, I invited her to think with me and conceptualize with me what this project would look like. And it was very much shaped by the two of us in collaboration with many of the people that we know in Columbia that are doing this kind of work. So we identified the women who already had the experience. We also defined kind of an ideal number of what we thought the project should look like, what would be manageable. And we decided that 30 to 40 was probably the ideal number, thinking that there would be some drop-off. We'd have people who at the last minute got sick or whatever. But that 30 or 40 would give us a good, a good mass of people. We also decided that we wanted to have a number of different kinds of diversities represented in this group. So the first diversity was that we sought to include women who were ethnically from different groups. And in the Colombian case, the indigenous and the Afro-Columbian were key. We also wanted peasant women who represent a large portion of the Colombian population working outside of the urban areas in the Campo. We wanted to have representatives of the state present. And we sought mediators at the national level, as well as local level. And some representatives, we did end up with a representative from the Ministry of Justice who was doing mediation training herself. We wanted representatives of victims groups and women's organizations, thinking that these women and many of the others as well would have the capacity to replicate what we were trying to generate in the process. And so the power of the experience of collectively learning more about mediation and expanding capacities would have a possibility to be extended beyond the women who were just in the room. We had representatives who were cultural workers or journalists, and they ended up providing a very interesting analysis in many of the discussions about culture and the importance of culture in mediation and how it's used. I remember one woman talking about the ceremonies that she would do before she was an indigenous woman, the ceremonies that she would do to prepare herself for mediation. And we talked a lot about planning processes. And I think that the project itself had a long planning process. This was not something that we just put together and then put into practice. I think one of the most important elements, too, was the geographic variety, because we actually anticipated and hoped that this would be a project that would be replicated in different regions around Columbia and that the women that formed part of this corps would actually become the trainers and the conveners for a similar process in their regions. I could say a lot more about methodology and some of the criteria that we used in the methodology, but I would just say it began with conflict analysis, and we found that we had a very rich conflict analysis because we had so many regions in the room represented that we were able to identify commonalities and differences in a way that many of us had not been able to. And the women themselves had not been able to because those kinds of contacts with other parts of the world that the internationals take so much for granted are not very present among people living in Columbia. Its very geographic travel is not always the easiest, particularly if you're dealing with women who do not have a lot of resources, which we were. I think the last element of diversity that I did not mention, but that proved to be critically important to the spirit of the group was we had five ex-combatant women among the 30, and they were ex-combatants from different armed groups that had committed to and signed peace accords in the late 1980s and 1990s. And what we found just briefly, and I won't go into detail, but if there are questions, I'd be happy to expand more. What we found was that in convening a group of very diverse women to learn from each other about mediation, we actually created a space for reconciliation between very divided sectors of society who have now been able to go out and try to replicate similar experiences of bringing in other women from the network who represent differences that have been particularly hard. For example, women's organizations are inviting ex-combatants to talk to them about their experiences of why they joined the war and why they left the war. And that has actually created all sorts of new processes that I think have been very important to, as a preliminary step to thinking about a possibility that Columbia could be reconciled one day. Thanks so much, Jenny. We look forward to your book, and especially how mediation can become a form of reconciliation. I think that is really provocative, and we'll want to hear more about it. Ging, you could bring us all together here before we get into Q&A, and we would, yes. We'd love it if you could comment on your colleagues' ideas, but bring it from the perspective of what you have been doing over the last decades. Yes, I'm a late addition to the panel, and actually we had spoken that maybe I come from a practitioner's experience. We have, I have led the, through as a cabinet minister in charge of the peace process, had oversight over the Philippine peace processes. It is not just one process. We had five tables, in fact, of different types of tables, but the one that is best known is of the the peace negotiations, the peace process between the government and the Moro-Islamic Liberation Front, and we had thought, and maybe just to bring the discussion into what, into maybe some of the latest of actual practice is just to share our own experience in having brought women right up to track one. Because, yes, that has been quite established in the process between government and the MILF, and I will just illustrate by bringing the image. Last Monday was the third anniversary of the signing of the Comprehensive Agreement on the Bank of Moro. March 27, 2014, the parties signed the Comprehensive Agreement, which marked the end of more than four decades of war in southern Philippines, and which was done after 17 years of protracted negotiations. So, on the side of government, several rounds of negotiators had been at it, and a roller coaster of a peace process, intermittent peace broken by high levels of violence. When we reconstituted the peace process when President Aquino took over, it was very consciously with the intent that women would be sitting more prominently on the table. And as it happened, then you will see this image. There is a picture of that signing where there are 17 people on stage, and of the 17 people, no, 16 people, five women. So almost one-third, one-third. That included, on the government side, three of the signatories to the peace agreement where we men, including the chief negotiator, Miriam Coronel Ferrer, is the first woman, I believe, to sign a major agreement on behalf of a party in conflict representing government. But aside from her, the other two signatories were one Muslim woman on the side of government, who had been a member of the panels from very early on for at least five years, but at least four years by the time this was signed. And who was at the time that she started, she was not a cabinet member, but at the time that the signing happened was already appointed cabinet minister for the National Commission on Muslim Filipinos. The third one was headed the government negotiations on the annex on normalization. The structure of the, the structure of the architecture of the peace agreement, in this case, the comprehensive agreement has some other framework agreement on the Bangsamoro. The framework agreement said there shall be four annexes, so four annexes were thereafter negotiated, one on transitional arrangements and modalities, second on power sharing, third, well-sharing and revenue generation, and fourth, normalization, plus an additional addendum on Bangsamoro waters. The negotiations on normalization for the side of government was led by a woman, deputy, she was a deputy national security advisor. Aside from her, three, two other annexes the negotiations were led by women, the one on well-sharing and revenue generation was led by a regional director of the National Economic Development Authority, so someone who was part of the government bureaucracy on economic planning, and then the transitional arrangements and modalities. Aside from that, the fifth woman that was on the stage was the head of the secretariat for the government panel, a young woman, early 30s, a mother of two at the time, the talk started, but during those talks, and I just want to show you how real this is. She got pregnant, she gave birth. One of her problems, every time there were negotiations in Kuala Lumpur was how does she bring the milk that she had expressed, how does she bring that home? These were real women, in track one young women, but our legal panel was also led by young women under 30 at the time that we started, moral women, Muslim women. There were two that succeeded each other. Our legal panel at any one time had three women and one man. He was, well, he was very gender sensitive. He had to be, but this young women went through the negotiation process into the discussions in the legislature, providing briefings for the congresspersons whom we asked to sponsor the bill that went in. Aside from that, all of the joint committees and the, yeah, because we thought that it would be good to see how women can come in, not just on the panel, of course, that's the main role, but that there are many other parts of track one that have to be filled and are in a particular case have been filled by women. So in the joint committees, the ceasefire committee which had several levels, the international monitoring team, the joint committee on cessation of hostilities and the local monitoring team, the joint committee on cessation of hostilities did not, never had a woman, but the international monitoring team would embrace the role of monitoring also human rights and development brought in women. And then the agreement was further expanded under this panel, was further expanded to have a civilian protection component. And there were NGOs that were contracted to be part of the civilian protection and of the four NGOs, two were led by women, one of which was an all women contingent. The work of the civilian protection is, well, yes, if there is a problem and there are civilians caught in the middle, then you have NGOs that go down and help them help to deal with that crisis. The normalization committee, well, I already told you that on the side of government that was led by a woman. The independent bodies that were created, we also tried to make sure as much as possible and we knew it, the burden was ours to make sure that there was a woman there because the MILF hardly, it was difficult. For them, although later, I will also talk about what they began to do. We spoke, the independent bodies, they're supposed to be independent, so they're always led by a foreign person. We asked the states, whom we asked to assist here, please try to appoint a woman. They only did it once, it was very hard to get our international partners. We were doing much better than our international partners, that's what I'd like to say. But what were these? There was the independent commission on policing. That structure would be both parties agree on the head and then both each side nominates a representative and then another person also. So every time in the government, we would do it. So what were these? So it was the independent commission on policing. We got our highest ranking woman police officer to sit on that. There's the international, there's the transitional justice and reconciliation commission. We got one of our human rights, our human rights women advocates to sit on that. There's the third party monitoring team. We got one of our more longest serving civil society peace advocates to sit on that. The independent decommissioning body, that one, there is no woman there. This is really military. Unfortunately, our women military are not yet there, but I'd like to say that the graduates of the Philippine Military Academy this year, seven out of the top 10 were women. Now some congress persons are saying they will have to put quotas to limit the women, but we'll fight that for sure. But so pretty soon, we even in the decommissioning body and the very military part architecture of the processes, we will work hard there and hard. Of course, as Etwa said, it's not just that women are there, but if you study all of the things that were signed, all of the products of these bodies, you will see it's not just the numbers of women that matters, but you have to have women there. In order to make women matter, women have to count. You understand what I said. What other things happened? The partnership between the women in the track one with the women, the civil society, when they went into lobbying, the planning between the civil society lobby for the law was predominantly women. When we had the last day in the law didn't pass, it was women who filled the galleries of Congress and put out to the surprise of the Congress security, pulled out their shirts to expose a T-shirt that said, palpac ang Congress. What's that? Palpac is, well, as the word sounds, failure, big failure of Congress. So, and as well as the crossing over to the legislators, we worked with women in Congress to be special sponsors of the bill. And they were very important, especially the Muslim women Congress persons in putting a real human face, putting the human story behind this peace process of what was happening on the ground. That was so important. And then the other role, this one was, I just need to mention that communications is such an important part. It's not maybe really considered as track one, but if track one doesn't have that, then you don't get the public support that you so much need. Just three main points after that. Yes, well, I've already mentioned the bridging, the bridging of track one with the other tracks. Second, very much part of the inclusion process was to make sure that we weren't just doing, that it wasn't, well, of course, the gender is a very important part. But also that there was generational representation. So we had grandmothers in the process, but we had these very young women as well. Geographical, so five tribes in the Bangsamoro. So we made sure in the Bangsamoro Transition Commission that the five tribes were represented there, and then the sector and the discipline. Let me just end with things that happen when this process goes. Of course, there is what happens on the table and the sorts of documents that come out that are very different from the ones that came out. The way we shape, the way the development, the peace dividends are now shaped very different from the way it was that happened before, which is course through the base commands. Their males took care of it, and after 10 years, you don't know where the money went. You don't know where the projects went. So we made sure that that's not there. So in terms of that, but there is also what happens in terms of continuity and future of peace processes. We got so many young people involved here whose professions will be, whether they are lawyers or foreign service, as happened, they have seen how their profession can be put to this peace process. And I see all of these young women aged under 30 at the time that we started, they are going to grow old and going to be so much better than ever we were. But the other thing is that woman, that police officer, the highest ranking woman police officer who was assigned to the independent commission on policing, before she retired, was already appointed to head the Human Rights Compensation Board for our Human Rights Compensation Program for Victims of Marshalo. So many years later. That first legal, that first chair of the legal team took the foreign service exam and topped it. And so she would be on her way up the foreign service ladder. The one that headed the normalization committee bill because there's been a change of government now so people shifted. But before that happened, she was appointed with a term in the National Police Commission. So what happens? They get involved in the peace process. They go on to other very important work. They bring the gender perspective there, but they also bring that peace perspective there in the National Police Commission. Well, despite all the terrible things that are happening right now with our police, we know that there is that woman there that's trying to keep things straight. I think it's important to see, not just that moment when they are there, but to see where that moment leads to other things that makes the important work to be done. Be done from a women's, with a women's perspective, with an understanding of dynamics of minorities and marginalized and women who will know how to fight for all the things that need to be fought for on the table, in the hallways, on the streets. I'm looking at our head organizer at the end of the table. We have three minutes and I apologize to four minutes, our audience that, but we also were graced by having Ging join the panel. So we're very pleased about that. I am going to, nevertheless, I want to hear what you're thinking. We might not get to the answers when we're live, but I think it's really important to hear from the audience. And so if I could just do a rapid round of either comments or questions in four minutes. And I know you want to, and you, and do I have anybody else? Okay, I see four people, please. And use your mic because we are on webcast. Thank you. Introduce yourself. Seems to work, yeah. My name is Jonas Bamman. I'm from the Center for Security Studies in Zurich and I'm also the technical secretariat of the Mediation Support Network. So first of all, thank you so much for this inspiring input and lecture and for taking the time. If I'm not, or in the time that I'm not the secretariat, I'm working a broader project looking at religion, culture, and mediation. And on that I'm starting a new project that tries to look- Is this your question? Because we have only four minutes. Yes, I'm heading into my question. And in that framework, I'm starting a project that looks at specifically gender and mediating in conflicts with a religious dimension. And I want to see from your experience does the how of gender inclusivity change? And if so, how does it change when you deal with conflicts with a religious dimension? Thank you. Thank you so much. Hi, my name's Lacey Christ. I'm a student journalist at the George Washington University. The majority of you have elaborated that since the passing of Resolution 1325, gender sensitive mediation has improved, but much more needs to be done. How have cultural or social norms prevented or supported the incorporation of women and mediation efforts and peace agreements? Thank you, sir. And I'm going to come back to the right side. Yes. You have to turn on the mic there. Okay, I'm sorry, Malcolm O'Dell. And I was very struck by your, the Colombian story of the women that particularly jumped out at me, something which I think we all want to know about. I wondered if it's true anywhere else. She started by telling us that when they went to begin the whole process, they actually found the women telling them stories of their successes, the things they'd done. And from that, they built a learning process in which the women not only learned from each other, but the facilitators learned as well. And I wondered if this business of, because I found this very, very powerful in the work I've done with women's empowerment and with community mobilization. When you get people telling stories of their successes, they learn, look what they can do, it's even better. And then what their action plan is, we don't need to teach them anything. They will create it themselves out of their own experience. And we become the bystanders. Yes, we can add something when they've completed their action plan and they're ready to move, we can say, well, how could we help? But I wondered if that had been the case in any of the other programs. And I came late, so I may have missed it. Kim Okum. I know you had your hand up and. Turn this on. Hi, my name is Mindy Reiser. I'm Vice President of Global Peace Services, USA. This is a question for Irene. I do differ with the last comment. I'm wondering, South Africa has a wonderful array of higher education institutions at various levels, so do a number of African countries. So I'm wondering what kind of directions the academic institutions are going to provide resources and training. This can be at the grassroots level, it can be at the governmental level. I speak having organized a program in Durban bringing peacemakers from Burundi to meet other Africans and share their experiences. So higher education certainly has a role to play. Thank you. Please. Thanks. Katrissa Bonnie from the State Department's Foreign Service Institute. And I'm just wondering with the growing body of evidence about how important it is for women to participate in these processes, what are some of the typical remaining barriers to women's participation, and whether any of you have encountered effective strategies for overcoming those barriers. Thanks, Katrissa. I'm gonna come down to Jackie and sir, you'll have the last word. Hi, Jackie Wilson with Civic Fusion International. You mentioned earlier in the remarks about the necessity of incorporating women into ceasefire negotiations, but I was wondering if you had any examples where that has happened. And finally. Thank you. Good to have the last word. Eldridge Adolfo from the Fulcrum and Adopt Academy. I have a two-pronged question. One is to do with the conflict analysis, gender sense of conflict analysis. The question is, yes, you do the analysis, but how do you use that to incorporate it into actually designing how you then implement the mediation process? And secondly, again, one of the fears is that when we start to have a sort of gender or whatever it is mainstreamed into these processes, how do we prevent it from going down the road of a lot of the other things like human rights and different stuff where we just tick the box instead of actually making sure it sticks along the long way, yeah? Thank you. All right, that was amazing audience. By the way, seven questions in less than five minutes. Now your challenge is that you must keep this under 60 seconds each, because we must leave the room in five minutes. So this is your challenge. And I'm going to begin with Lone. So these are your final comments. You want to go? Jenny, you go first. I'll start with the Columbia one and probably leave the others in my time. And because I'm in this role, I'm going to watch a clock. I know you will. Sorry, I know you will. I would just clarify that we were not looking for stories of success necessarily. And in fact, we didn't always find stories of success. What we were looking for was women that were in situations where they were required to mediate, who were doing it, who often had no experience, but sometimes had results and sometimes didn't. And I think that was important. I think the other thing we found was that there was a complete lack of visibility both among the women themselves and among the society about this role as having any value. And so one of the things we did was create audio visuals. Actually, they created audio visuals. And I won't have time to tell much about it. This is a project that was a spin-off that one of the women decided that she would like to go to the many regions in Columbia and work collectively with the local artists of each region to talk about what mediation is and to create songs about mediation, to try to get the culture to shift toward people understanding that this was a valued role. We also have a film online, Women Mediating Peace in Columbia in Spanish and in English. It's 27 or 29 minutes. On the USIP web. It's available on YouTube and on the USIP site. Great, thank you. Thank you so much, Jane. Well done. Good one. Thanks for the questions. I think they're all critical in terms of the ongoing barriers for integrating gendered analysis into work that we do both if it's policy advocacy or the actual programming on the ground. I think the why is not always one here. There's still spaces that it's not accepted that there needs to be diverse voices in the room. So that some people will need to continue to push on that. The work that we focus in conciliation resources is how to integrate, practically integrate the work. And we do that throughout the programming cycle. What the aim is to be as innovative as possible to be creative. I don't think it will always be mainstreamed. You're going to still have to have specific ways of getting voices that are harder to include in and there will have to be creative ways to do that. Thank you. Irene. Thank you very much. And indeed, it is happening in other countries as well. At least I know for the African continent. We have Burundi, DRC and Ka'a, which has just some of the countries who've been in this conflict for quite a while and the women are actually coming forward to say, well, let's meet together and talk about what we've done, how it's working for us. And with that, as part of the meeting in December, one of the things that came out of the meeting is cross, I wouldn't call it cross country, it's across countries from Nigeria and DRC to see what is happening in Nigeria and what is happening in DRC. So exchanging the women, I would say that, that the Nigerians come to Burundi for that exchange and this would go to the other side. Last comment, go ahead. There is a specific question on South Africa, but I also think it's also a comment in a way. And as part of the network and I think it's also an answer to the what can we do to address some of these challenges is the network that the African Union has put together has a very strong component of higher learning institutions that we have realized we cannot work alone, we cannot say we bring the practice onto the table without a stronger think tank about this person. I'm gonna ask you to turn off here, yes, great. I'll just pick up three and very quickly. On the obstacles, yes, and there will always be obstacles, there will always be people who won't want it. Two things, you don't give up, you nag, you just keep at it. Number two, get some of those men to give up their seats. Second, I don't know about the ceasefire, but the negotiations and the security aspect, the post-conflict, the end of hostilities that was done and that included making sure that the decommissioning of human combatants comes in as a priority. The third one on how do we make sure it's not just become a checklist. That's why I said when women get there, you take care of them, you nurture them, you make them feel how good it is to have been part of it and they grow a passion, grow a passion for it and a passion that grows inter-generationally so that it will not be forgotten. Very practical, thank you. Loné, your last word. Yeah, so in terms of the question related to the remaining barriers to women's participation, I think we all know that track one is still very much a male-dominated field since most mediators stem from the traditional areas of diplomacy, ministerial and ambassadorial post and the kind. Therefore, the need is really for a focus on inclusivity to open up the space for women and this can be very, very challenging. The mediator serves at the consent of the parties and ultimately they decide who they bring in. So while we're focusing on getting women to the table, we are very much also pushing for mediators to have an inclusive approach and it can be a parallel approach or there are many, many ways as you'll see in the guidance of how to do this. Hence, that's why the Department of Political Affairs focus both on training mediators but also providing guidance to mediators and beyond. Thank you. Thank you very much. Our experts here who delivered very well. Thank you. Thank you to our audience. We do have to wrap up but I think it was a very rich discussion. Thank you. I'll create space. Yeah. Okay I found that space in the front is weird.