 Hi, good morning everyone. All good afternoon and welcome to today's webinar on inequality and COVID-19, how grassroots communities are taking action. This event today is part of a series that IID is co-hosting with the International Centre for Climate Change and Development and is hosted in partnership with the Global Resilience Partnership and is also part of London Climate Action Week Digital. My name is Juliette Tunstall, IID's Events Officer and with that I will hand over to Andy Norton, IID Director to give some introductory remarks. Many thanks Juliette and welcome everybody. As Juliette said, I'm just saying a few brief words of introduction. This event is part of a series of four, marking Salim al-Haq moving on from IID after many years of incredible work for us and taking up his other hat as Director of ICAD, that's the International Centre for Climate Change and Development in Dhaka, Bangladesh, full time. The events are co-combined with ICAD as an expression of a vibrant forward partnership that we are committed to from IID. The conversation at this event will feed into a London Climate Action Week discussion, kind of wrap up discussion on resilience on Friday, looking at resilience and climate action. So I encourage you all to check into that as well. So many words about the impact of COVID on inequality, which has been dramatic in really all environments, all countries at all, respective levels of wealth. In informal settlements have been particularly vulnerable to the health impacts due to the difficulties of distancing and hygiene, lack of services, and also these are people who generally can't miss a day's work due to the precariousness of their existence. And in terms of economic livelihood impacts, the impact on poorer people in informal employment has been obviously very secure, very severe in most environments. They don't have security, they aren't reached by policy measures which flow through the formal recorded economy. They don't generally have stores of wealth to see them through hard times and they lack voice and power to engage with authorities. And within the informal economy, this kind of precariousness also has a really marked gender dimension as well, which I'm sure our panellists will pick up. I've been documenting lessons from IID as have many others, also on the amazing ways that grassroots organizations and social movements have been responding to this crisis. Things like shielding the vulnerable, combating misinformation and communicating accurate and useful public health information, identifying households or areas of communities in precarious situations to help target assistance, sometimes opposing punitive responses from authorities such as slum clearances and closing markets which are vital in many cases for poor people's livelihoods. So the impacts of COVID-19 need to trigger a reshaping of conventional views and narratives on agency and representation. Our grassroots partners from IID work directly with more than 14 million people in more than 50 countries and work with communities at the front line of the impacts of both the climate crisis and the pandemic. IID's motivation to learn and partner with social movements and grassroots organizations is to transform business as usual and multiply the potential of such organizations to be changemakers to advance climate justice and to ensure that money and power get where it matters to the front lines of these crises. We're really delighted to have a panel with an incredible depth of knowledge on grassroots organizations and these responses and also people who are engaged in many of the responses that I mentioned earlier. So now let me hand over to Salim. Salim, please take it up from here and many thanks to everyone for joining us. Thank you very much Andy and good afternoon from Dhaka Bangladesh to everybody. So it's my pleasure to moderate this discussion in today's joint IID-ICAD webinar, which is going to be looking at the issues of climate COVID-19 and what kind of collaboration we can do and particularly the inequalities that Andy has already mentioned. Before I introduce the panelists and what I'll do is I'll ask each of them to give their own introduction as to what they are interested in and what they work on and then share their thoughts for how we take things forward. But let me frame the discussion from my perspective in terms of what we are hoping to achieve as we go forward. Andy has already pointed out the problems that we are facing with the COVID-19, the pandemic, the public health problems that poor people in vulnerable communities, particularly in the informal settlements in towns and cities around the world including here in Dhaka, but also the impacts of the lockdowns that are being put in place sometimes quite punitively on people who need to get to earn their daily living and their livelihoods. And then finally as we emerge from the COVID-19 situation and we have economic fallout in many, many different spheres, people are losing jobs, industries are collapsing in Bangladesh, the garment factories which employs millions of women have just lost billions of dollars of orders and are just shutting down one by one. So the future looks quite bleak. On the other hand, the future also is a potential change situation because we are seeing such a major collapse of the economic system and the health system and the environment systems around the world. And it's global and not particularly located in any particular country that we are now in a position to challenge what is sometimes called the old normal and say that we don't want to go back to the old normal, but we want to create a new normal going forward. And what that new normal might be, there's a lot of talk about a green new normal green investments, but I think today's discussion is a more on the new normal that can reduce inequalities. We don't want to go back to the old system where the poor and vulnerable were suppressed, repressed, did not have a voice, were not listened to, were not taken into consideration when investments were being made going forward. And what we want to do is to take this opportunity to shake things up a bit and see whether we might come out at the other end with a better system that recognizes the agency, the ability, the activities of grassroots level workers, people, households, organizations all over the world and see how we can build on that and enable them to be part of the future forward looking development pathways, whether they're green development pathways, equitable development pathways, economic development pathways, nature-based development pathways, whatever terminology people have a preference for, we can use, but we just wanted to be particularly focused on ensuring that nobody's left behind, that the poor and vulnerable, the various categories of vulnerable, disabled children, women are not left behind. And so we are extremely lucky to have a great panel for sharing Fox experiences and in particular, Fox on ways forward for us to discuss. And then we look forward to having a lively Q&A discussion coming out of this. And as my colleague Juliet has mentioned, these will be recorded and these will become part of the ongoing series of discussion. This is not just a one-off. It's also part of the London Climate Action Week and also part of the IID ICAD series and I'm very proud and very happy to have this series together with IID so that in a very personal level, it acts as a bridge from my nearly 15, 16 years working in IID to my new incarnation as the head of the International Center for Climate Change and Development in Bangladesh. But we continue our joint activities going forward in this area is a particularly interesting one that we have been working on for many years in the past and we want to continue to work. So we are segueing, we are using the COVID-19 crisis as our sort of organizing thought but we want to segue from that into the future and from my perspective into the climate change future but there are many other futures, economic and social that people are quite welcome to discuss. This webinar is a big ideas webinar. It's not going into the nitty-gritty details of activities unless you want to share anything in particular that you think is relevant that we can learn from and we can scale up. But I welcome all our participants. I won't go through the list and introduce everybody. I'll introduce you one by one and ask you when I give you the floor to share, spend about a minute or so telling us, telling the audience about yourself what you do and in particular what your interests are what you've been doing and then share with us what you feel are the things that we need to be thinking about going forward as per the questions that had been given to you earlier. So I'm going to start by giving the floor to Sheila Patel who is based in Mumbai and has been working with the slum dwellers, shack dwellers international around the world for many, many years and is a true warrior on behalf of informal group settlements in cities around the world. Sheila, you have the floor. Thank you, Salim. Thank you, Andy. This is a wonderful way for all of us, the speakers yourselves to share our thoughts which we've been doing through emails and conversations. And I hope that through this process we share our ideas and possibilities with all the audience. My name is Sheila Patel. I live in Mumbai. I'm speaking from my home. It's in the afternoon. My day job is as the director of SPAR, which is an organization that works with two social movements called the National Slum Dwellers Federation and Mahila Milan, which work in large medium and small towns in nine states of India. I'm also a member along with the federations of shack dwellers international, which is a unusual but interesting organization whose primary membership are these federations of the urban poor from 32 countries. We have a modest secretariat in Cape Town. But our goal is to demonstrate that poor people and their networks in order to get agency to get voice and to produce seriously good knowledge that breaches the ceiling of informality in which we are stuck. We also need a global network. And so apart from that, my final identity is that for the last two years, I've had the privilege of being a commissioner in the Global Commission for adaptation, in which Salim myself and Dr. are deeply deeply committed to what is called the local lead action track, which is seeking to produce resilience in the face of their inequalities and inequities in development, but also looking at them through a climate lens in order to ensure that any investments that comes in becomes one that expands their resilience and ensures their social justice. So, through all these different processes, the most important thing for me that COVID-19 has reaffirmed is that we require in the new normal to invest in producing long term sustainable networks of those who are disenfranchised. And I'm here talking about the urban poor, but I'm talking about communities of rural poor farmers, waste pickers, fisher folk, tribal networks. The point is everybody who is feeling left behind to be able to have a voice and a choice in the transformation that they are involved in. And therefore what COVID-19 has proved to us as have passed challenges is that those communities that are organized that understand how to navigate information, how to network, how to seek help, how to demand accountability, are more likely to achieve those possibilities for their neighborhoods than those that are not organized or who have just been passive recipients of aid and assistance, which at this moment unfortunately is coming as charity. In reality, it has to be an entitlement. People didn't invite COVID into their homes. People didn't want to live in dense, difficult circumstances and informal settlements with no water, no sanitation, and an amazingly sad situation where global institutions like the WHO and others did not have ideas of what people in such circumstances have to do. These people have had to produce these alternatives, deal with the challenges and cope with those difficulties in a situation where many of them having combated evictions, neglect, have now demonstrated to the cities their own resilience and are actually looking at COVID as an opportunity to remind their city and their nation about four to six decades of complete and total neglect so that they can work together and find solutions. And our collective challenge is to make sure that those solutions happen. That once the crisis of COVID affecting everybody, it doesn't recede back as it has happened in many past pandemics. And the idea is that we look at ways by which we all gather together to explore this crisis and deal with it as a planetary challenge rather than something that has to be locally addressed. Yesterday we had a meeting of the Global Commission and I just want to end with some things that I heard which really are remarkable. Christina Georgina who is one of our chairs said that the global economy is shrinking at 5% and later we heard Grenada and Fiji say their economy is going to shrink by 15 to 20%. So you see that global averages don't represent national and local realities and the same goes for poor and vulnerable communities who are not all the same. So how do we deal with this granular differences? How do we deal with how it impacts men women and children? How do we help them make a representation where they don't just become a statistics? Those are our challenges. And we hope that the global networking that we see amongst grassroots networks and a lot of institutions helps what is happening globally where multilateralism is fading in the face of very, very shrunken self-managed realities that many of our governments are seeking to do. So I'll stop there. Thank you, Salim. Thank you very much, Sheila, for sharing your thoughts. Just to remind all the participants that we have a Q&A box where you can put up your questions and we will take them after the speakers have done their first round of inputs. And we will also be looking at the results of the Mentimeter. So those of you who haven't already logged on and put in your thoughts and shared them, please do so. My colleague Juliet will then share the results with us after everybody has spoken. So it's now my pleasure to invite Suranjana Gupta, who is from the Hauru Commission. Suranjana, would you like to share a little bit about first introduce yourself and your work and your organization and then share your thoughts with us. Suranjana, you have the floor. Hi. Good morning. Good afternoon and good evening to all of you. And first of all, it's an honor to be on this very distinguished panel of speakers. I'm from the Viro Commission. I'm based in Bangalore in India. And for those of you who are not familiar with the Viro Commission, let me just quickly say that we are a global network. We focused on grassroots women and their leadership in solving problems that impact the everyday lives of communities and our work on climate and disaster resilience very much builds on the idea that grassroots women are very much leaders and drivers of resilience, not merely victims of disasters and climate change. And it is this idea of grassroots women's organizations as agents of change and resilient development that is really the foundation of our work. So as the advisor on community resilience for Viro Commission and someone who's had a very long association with Viro Commission, I've been involved in supporting and documenting and analyzing the work of many, many grassroots women's organizations who've been involved first in disaster recovery and now much more in disaster and climate resilience building. And I've also been very much involved in looking at how grassroots organizations learn from one another, how they transfer their lessons and how they are scaling up their work through peer exchange and peer mentoring processes. In terms of today's discussion and the COVID crisis, I think it's very clear to us that we're now being forced to confront all the ways in which we as the development community have failed, right? I think that all the fault lines, the inequalities are very starkly visible now to us and as in other disasters, it is the poorest and the most marginalized whose precarious and fragile living situations are the worst impacted. And I think in terms of what are the kinds of problems that organizations are dealing with at the grassroots level, we are seeing that rural communities and grassroots women are experiencing huge losses in income. It's not just their own incomes and the closure of markets and the supply chain breakdowns, but also the fact that with lockdowns in cities and daily wage laborers having no incomes, the remittances that come from people who are working in cities and sending money home to their families that has also stopped. We know of course that most low income neighborhoods and poor communities lack access to good infrastructure. They are even in the best of times poorly connected to roads, to markets, and they have poor access to electricity. They lack water supply. So they're experiencing very serious food, income, water shortages. And of course they have very poor access to health care services, which all of this means that grassroots women are having to bear the brunt of this crisis. It means that they not only have their income cut off and the inability to access markets, but they also have additional caregiving responsibilities at home. So I think that while we are confronted by the things in which we as a development community have failed, I think on the positive side, what is evident is that where grassroots women and their organizations are able to address the crisis are able to protect the well-being of their families and communities. We are, in fact, we need to look more closely at those areas because that's pointing us to what has actually worked in development and where have development investments actually worked for the poor and the marginalized. So we're seeing, for example, that grassroots women's leaders are the front lines of this crisis. They have organized relief. They know where the most vulnerable households in their communities are. They have, they're part of these trusted networks that are very much connected to one another. And so during the sort of when the lockdown occurred and people had to move very quickly, the organizations were well connected and agile enough to organize emergency supplies, whether it was through food supplies or through medical aid, they were able to deliver to two vulnerable groups or vulnerable households within their communities. Many of them created community kitchens where they pooled in supplies and fed communities. They have been organizing themselves to go door to door and explain to communities one by one what the crisis is about, how to prevent people from getting sick, why quarantining is important, what kind of entitlements are available through government channels. As you know, the supply chains have collapsed and so a lot of grassroots organizations are bringing together buyers and sellers and connecting them in different ways. Some, for example, in the Philippines are doing things through WhatsApp groups where people say, you know, what kinds of produce they have available locally to sell, others want to buy these. There are other groups, for example, in India who are collecting vegetables and food supplies from people with kitchen gardens and then packaging these and selling them or to those who cannot afford them actually providing these grocery kits. As you know, there are many announcements being made by governments on what kinds of social protection resources will and grants will become available to communities. Unfortunately, many of these are not so clear it's difficult for communities to understand the procedures by which they can access this. For example, in India you have the public distribution system which is supposed to provide subsidized or in this case free food grains to people, but there's all kinds of procedural things paperwork that has to be completed so you have groups who are helping and assisting vulnerable people to access government resources and women's groups are also working very closely with local government to help them identify and target those who really need assistance. And, for example, to monitor, you know, quarantining to report those who are infected and also to give feedback to government. So I think the question is, why, why and how does all this work. And, and the answer to that is that all these organized women's groups and networks have gone through a process of organizing themselves from, you know, whether they are self-help groups who are connected to larger federations, whether they're cooperatives, they have, they're all part of larger organizations who see themselves as focused on mutual aid support and advancing the well-being of their communities. They don't see themselves merely as projects who function only when they have, you know, sort of resources to fund certain activities. They have an understanding of themselves that is beyond projects. So one, one sort of big idea there is the idea that these are organized networks who have commitment to improve and develop their communities. The other is that they have access to resources or money. They, they, they, some of them have their own savings in the form of a small group funds. They also have access to community funds and these have been absolutely crucial in their ability to support women to help the most vulnerable people in their communities. The elderly people with disabled people in their families who haven't been able to access food or other kinds of informational resources. And essentially, these groups have all in the process of doing development work in their communities mapped and surveyed and they have very deep hyper local information about their communities, which is updated regularly. It's often in real time. It's much more accurate than information that the government updates every five years. And so these communities are bringing invaluable resources to dealing with this crisis. And finally, I just want to emphasize the idea of how important it is to invest in such communities and networks in a long term basis. So in any disaster, if you, if you speak for example to the person, the chief of fire services in any country, they'll tell you that in order for the fire services to function, the entire system has to be constantly functioning like a well oiled machine. The fire engine can't be brought out one day suddenly after it's been kept in a garage for five years. So I think in that same way, dealing with disaster or crisis, you cannot expect women's groups or networks to suddenly stop and start functioning. What makes them function is the fact that they have been organized as networks who are building relationships and solving problems and influencing decision makers over a long period of time. And this keeps them going. And this is what this engagement in everyday development decision making is very crucial. So I'll stop there. Thanks. Thank you so much, Ranjana, for some excellent points, particularly the investment in building social capital of the groups themselves rather than have them atomized working as individuals. I'm now going to invite Marty Chen to take the floor share a little bit about her own and I can expand some thoughts on the questions that we're addressing today. Marty, I have the floor. Thank you so much, Salim and also Andy, and it's such a pleasure to be on a panel with IED and Sheila and with Wahru Commission, because the WeGo Network has collaborated with all these groups over time and particularly with SDI and Wahru as grassroots partners during Habitat 3. I represent WeGo. It's Women in Informal Employment, Globalizing and Organizing. And we are a 23 year old network of organizations of informal workers and we seek to empower informal workers to secure their livelihoods through stronger organization, enhanced collective voice, providing informal workers and their organizations with the data and evidence they need to demand a better deal, to demand a more fair and favorable policy and regulatory environment. And so WeGo is part social movement. We have helped build and strengthen national, regional and international networks of organizations, the International Domestic Worker Federation. Regional organizations of home-based workers called home nets in South Asia, Southeast Asia, Eastern Europe, Latin America, were about to form home net international, street net international, and a global alliance of waste pickers. These networks in these four sectors have affiliates in about 90 countries with over 4 million members. But WeGo is also a think tank, if you will, part think tank. We have, for instance, a dedicated statistics program which has worked with the International Labor Organization, the UN Statistical Commission, the statistical offices of different countries to get improved data on the informal economy, because as our founding chair, Hila Bhattav Seva says, statistics in the hands of workers is power. And my focus is on the economic inequalities, specifically on the livelihoods of the working poor in the informal economy, who rely, as Andy mentioned, on daily earnings with limited savings or food stock to fall back on. Thanks to our collaboration with the ILO, we now have a global estimate of how many informal workers there are. And the estimate is 2 billion, which represents 61% of all workers globally. And when you move to developing countries, 90% of all workers. Since COVID, the ILO has estimated that 1.6 billion of these 2 billion have lost their livelihoods, which means that the economy at the base, the base that's the informal economy has shrunk by 80%. So COVID-19 has both exposed and exacerbated many existing inequalities, the fault lines that Surajana spoke about. And what we see is the inequality between the tip of the economic pyramid, where people have immense wealth and profits. And at the base of the economy where they rely on these daily earnings has only been further exacerbated. Because the crisis of the pandemic, come lockdowns became, became immediately a loss of work, a loss of income and a food crisis immediately overnight for these workers, food became an issue. But in the best of times or in the normal times before COVID, it wasn't very good if I wouldn't call it best, I would just call it the normal times before COVID. These workers were stigmatized, they were penalized, they were criminalized. They were accused of engaging in illegal activities, of having low productivity, and they and being associated with crime and grime. While all that most of them are doing is trying to earn an honest living in a very hostile legal and policy environment. And COVID has brought us all of this into focus and COVID has brought us back to basics. Everyone is concerned about health and food and childcare and schooling. We're reminded of the basics of life through COVID. And in the process, we are reminded of the frontline workers who provide these essential goods and services. So around the world we've been clapping and singing in their honor, but I don't think all of us recognize that most of these frontline workers work without worker benefits or social protection. So you'll have frontline health workers who don't have health insurance in the US of A where I happen to be based. The organizations in the Wigan network have been responding to COVID-19, like all of the organizations we've heard about. And they've done this as individual organizations. They've appealed to government for food, cash grants, preventative health measures. They've facilitated government relief because often the governments don't know how to target to the informal workers. And they've appealed to government that informal workers be recognized as essential frontline workers, domestic workers, street vendors, waste pickers. But with the major caveat that if they're allowed to continue to work during lockdowns, they be provided the PPE and other preventative health measures. And these organizations have provided relief. They've self-organized around providing relief. And we get stories of immense solidarity, mutual aid, and also basic humanity. I've read stories of informal worker leaders who are entitled to a food ration, let's say in India, but they know that down the lane is a migrant family not entitled to the food ration. And so they give their food ration to that needier household. These organizations have done their best to keep their members linked to markets. They've appealed for recovery packages, inclusive and supportive of the working poor. And the networks and have come together, the regional international networks, and come up with their own platform of demands. And the planks of this are that informal workers are and always have been essential workers. That the global economy cannot recover without us and economies must be reset to align with the principles of exclusion. And the three principles of their platform is nothing for us without us. The very central one that Sheila alluded to that the organizations of the poor, in this case the organizations of informal workers, should be involved in any kind of relief. Relief recovery package, the design, the implementation, the monitoring. A second principle is do no harm. We know about police violence in the US against blacks, but there's lots of police violence as we speak as city governments or national governments enforce all of the restrictions. And we know that police are taking advantage of this moment to destroy the infrastructure of natural markets of street vendors. The third principle is to envision some kind of transformation. There is a need for a new a different economy, a new model of work and production that is more equitable and more redistributive that recognizes and values all forms of work. So what we worry about the we go network is post COVID whether we're going back to the old bad deal, whether we're going to revert to a new worse deal and their real threats of that because the owners of capital and corporations together with the state are taking advantage of both the need for public health and recovery measures to grab the gains for themselves. So it, there's a real threat of a new worst deal. And of course what we want is a new better deal. And this requires that the international development community, as well as economic and urban planners need to recognize and support rather than stigmatize and penalize the 2 billion informal workers worldwide, who represent 90% of all workers in developing countries, and as much as 67% of all workers in emerging countries. We believe, and we know that the current economic system is rigged. It's rigged to privilege the rich over the poor capital over labor, the financial economy over the real economy. It needs to be fixed. It must be fixed. It requires reframing the rules of the economic game and making the institution inclusive. And so what is needed is a fundamental reset, which puts the poor puts workers at the center, not the rich and owners of capital. And the organizations of the poor, both organizations of some shack dwellers organizations of women organizations of informal workers must be included in the reform process and the reform process should start. And with recognizing and supporting the frontline workers who provide the essential goods and services, health food housing childcare elder care transport construction. These are all being done by working for people. And the post COVID transformation needs to focus on these essential goods and services, and those who provide them. The systems for these essential goods and services were so fragile that they broke with COVID. And in the process of transformation, the final point must be led and informed by the organizations of the poor, including the global movement of informal workers. Thank you. Great. Thank you very much for that excellent overview of where we are and also the danger of not just going back to bad normal, but even worse normal from the past. And that is a real danger that we need to keep in mind going forward. So before I invite our last panel is to speak. Let me just remind everybody that you can put your questions up in the, in the Q&A box. And if they're directed at anybody, please let them know also the speakers to have a look at them in case there are any particular questions that are directed at you that you'd like to take up in the Q&A session that will come later. So I'd now like to invite our last panelist, who is Tracy Kajumba from IID in the year. Tracy, do you want to discuss a little bit about yourself and share your thoughts on the topic. Tracy, you have the floor. Thank you, Salim. As introduced, I'm Tracy Kajumba. I work as a principal researcher within the climate change group in IID. And as Andy noted at the beginning, Salim, we are really honored to have you and having this session that is really recognizing the good work that you've done. Salim was one of the people that set up the climate change group within IID and has been working on these inequality issues that links to what we are talking about. But just to note that IID's strategy 2019-2024 focuses on five global challenges and all these intersect with COVID-19. Inequality, the climate crisis, the natural, wild, urban risk and assessable markets, which is all coming up from all what others are speaking. I lead a team on partnerships within the climate change group and we are working with a group of social movements that are working at the grassroots level. And we've been having conversations of how COVID-19 is challenging them in terms of delivering their mandates. And we also work with governments, the LDC governments. The key things that have been coming up are one, the threat to democratic governance. And when this happens, the lockdown has come up with different impacts. Some of them have been mentioned, the police brutality, the shrinking space for people to engage in decision making on how the crisis is managed. Their voices cannot get out anymore. And that really affects the most vulnerable, definitely. The other challenge largely is the digital divide. We are all now working online. We are privileged to be able to do that. But we also know that there are grassroots organizations and individuals who'd want to engage, but they don't have the privilege to do that based on social, economic, geographical parameters. And definitely that leads to exclusion of voices of those that cannot access the ICT services. And that is not only in grassroots organizations, but even less developed country governments that don't have the facilities to do that. The breakdown in the security and protection systems, most of those have been mentioned before the increase in gender based violence with no means of redress because everybody's locked down. And the failure to access relief items for some of the very poor people that are affected. There has been also increase in crime as well because the systems are not functioning as such. The other largest issue coming up has been the multi-dimensional risk management compounded by COVID-19. As much as we're looking at COVID now as a pandemic, but the other crisis that have continued to happen, especially climate impacts. We've seen examples of floods and there's a niche of locusts in East Africa and cyclones. And then we are talking about social distancing, the food is already not there. So the compounded risks actually focus us on the multi-dimensional risks that we really need to tackle and that can get worse because of such pandemics that are disruptive and unplanned for. So as IID, we've been having conversations with our partners and working hard to bring perspectives of vulnerable countries to the forefront with our partners. And ICAD is one of those global resilience partnership and our donors to discuss mechanisms of how do we reach people better because we work has continued. Some of them are not able to access the working online and others. So we've been having those conversations to see how we continue communicating and linking up and working with organizations at the grassroots and other partners in the least developed countries. We've also been working on gathering evidence on impacts at the grassroots level for LDC governments to inform how we do our work and how we need to adjust the methods of work, but also looking ahead what needs to change really. We've been traveling to countries for research work and other things, lots of global meetings and all. We're not doing that. We've continued to meet online to have these discussions to focus ahead and see do we need to change our ways of working? How do we need to adjust to be able to meet some of these challenges? But we're also looking at focusing on long-term resilience and bringing climate action to the forefront because most of these risks are all interlinked and we really need to think holistically about what could go wrong across scale, not just focusing on one crisis or pandemic. And in terms of going forward and like Matt has said, are we heading for the bad, normal or not? So I think this is the time we need to think about investing in resilience building and using tested models from what we've had already communities are doing so much. They're organized. They're all those informal governance systems that are working on managing multiple risks, building their resilience, building their economies. And we have other models like an IID work on social protection, decentralized climate finance, where we have governance structures working from the grassroots up to that national level. So we need a discussion of how we focus on bringing all these risks together than working in silos of focusing on climate or health or disasters, which at the end of the day doesn't really help us. There are community structures that will say a lot, but if we build systems to build capacity to respond better to multiple risks, maybe that could be helpful in terms of being prepared for such and planned for risks. And there's also the fear that resources might be diverted to addressing the pandemic because there's no clarity or certainty when this is going to end. And yet the other threats still continue. The climate has as the disasters, the economies are breaking down. So I think for the donors for private sectors that are thinking of investment, we really need to think about that. Otherwise, if we divert the funds, then that increases the vulnerability of the very poor. And then if the pandemic's happened, then they find a system that is already broken down. I think we really need to think about that to build back better. And the collective voice and power of the informal community at the informal community level, community institutions, informal governance systems and social movements really needs to be focused on because we've got a lot of evidence how people are supporting each other to manage the crisis where global systems and governments do not know what to do with this. And that social support and mobilization really needs to be supported in terms of funding grassroots organizations and building their capabilities to be able to respond to the economic, social and health impacts going forward, because they really play a big role and they have the numbers, they are represented almost across scale. So that is something that we really need to focus on. And then we need to improve the digital capabilities for grassroots organizations, LDC governments and others, because as much as we shifted very quickly to different ways of working, there was no preparation, people prepared to shift to that. They are those that are ready and nothing, they don't feel any impact, but they are those that are struggling. We've been doing meetings last week with some of the grassroots organizations and a study that we are doing. And one of them reported that to participate in a Zoom meeting, they have to pay 20 pounds for one hour. And we're doing these meetings, we're not paying them to engage in the meetings. So those are the kind of things that we need to think of and prepare for so that they are multiple channels and levels of engagement to ensure that nobody is left behind. Yeah, thanks, Salim. That's what I would say for now. Thank you very much, Tracy, for those excellent comments. Now, let me remind our speakers that there are questions in the Q&A box. And if they're addressed to you, then I'll give you the floor to respond to them. But before we go to the Q&A, I'm going to invite Juliet to share the results of the multimeter. Juliet, you want to put stuff on the screen. The first one was on words, correct? The inequalities as COVID-19 aggravated, and we asked you to add one or two words, and we had a word cloud generated from that, which has health as the number one, and then economic agenda, I would say as two and three. We also have food security. We have income. We have wealth and social class and a whole bunch of others as well. Access to education, racial inequalities. I think that's an extremely important one in the context of all the left lives matter events that are taking place around the world, particularly in the US. So that's an interesting word cloud. Can we have another? And the next one. So the question was, what bottom up actions is your community or organization to respond to COVID-19? There are quite a few different responses to this. I think PPE to healthcare workers, health and hygiene support, social, local businesses, listening and finding out about people's experiences, working with communities to assist them, technology, crisis intervention, food, financial support. There's quite a few very interesting number of actions that different people seem to have been involved in. And perhaps when we collate these, we might be able to follow them up. Let me take this opportunity to make a plug from my side. My organization has been preparing a series of blogs from vulnerable communities around the developing world who are taking actions to highlight the actions that they are taking. We call it voices from the front lines. And we would love to hear any such voices that people know about. Please do get in touch with us and we will then follow up with you and find a way to capture those voices. I'm not going to read through all of the elements in the slide. Excellent. So I hope you'll be able to capture them in the write up for the event afterwards. So now let us move on to the Q&A session. And I'm going to pick one or two, but then I'm going to hand over to each of you to pick the ones that you think are relevant for yourself and answer them. And that will be the closing round of interventions from everybody as we close up. So the first question is actually from Simon Anderson at IID, one of our IID colleagues based in Edinburgh. He says to all panelists, it seems from the COVID experience that main leadership of government has been a failure. Examples are UK, US, India, Brazil, etc. And women leaders have done better jobs in many cases. Examples are New Zealand, Scotland, etc. How can grassroots movements demand more and better female leadership of national policymaking and implementation? Well, for the interesting question, I should also add here a personal comment that my country is also led by a female Prime Minister Shekhasina. So I hope she proves this adage true for Bangladesh as well. I'm going to ask Sheila to maybe pick up that comment and respond. And then if anybody else wants to come in, do let me know. Sheila, do you want to take that? I do, but I don't really know whether we have answers because we also have women leaders who are terrible. So I think what we require is a new generation of men and women who have ambitions of being transformative and who are able to move away from this present obsession of producing wealth at the tip of the pyramid, of seeing value in investing on a planetary basis. These are really serious and courageous concepts that we find most of our even national and local leaderships still don't have. What we are seeing today in the world is a sort of a regression or moving away from globalization which wants equity and social justice and pushing for a global economic alignment as a result of which today if one thing collapses, everything else collapses. There's also no resilience at that level. So no answers, but very concerned about one shot solutions. I'd like to have such leadership everywhere. Excellent. If anybody else would like to respond. Tracy, yes, please go ahead. Thanks, Salim and Simon for asking the question. It's true that most of the organizations working with women and women are taking leadership. And it's not to say that the men cannot. I think what we need to do is to engage the men in these discussions because most of the times the way we've done our gender equality work. We've sort of focused on women and lift the men out. And the men have also got the bias. These are women's issues anyway. We don't need to know about them. We need to do more on engaging men to understand the vulnerabilities of women, their contribution, their capabilities. And not only that, we also need to understand impacts from the men's perspective because they're also impacted in all these things. And then also get their views on how this could be managed because studies that have been done on male masculinity and climate change have found out that when men are impacted and their issues are not captured in the assessments, the impact still reverts on the women. If they lose income, they'll become a the impatient and violent. It's still be violent on women and children, which becomes a compounded impact on the whole of society. But then I also wanted to add that when you look at government where Simon is mentioning most of the positions are actually held by men, the boardrooms are full of men. And if we don't make them understand the reality of what is happening and the vulnerabilities that different communities or groups are facing, then definitely these issues will continue being left out. And lastly also, we need to focus on the issue of intersectionality, because you might be male or female, but there are also other factors that might lead to your exclusion. Either it's religion or it's race or it's sex orientation or it's a migration status or whatever. So we need to analyze vulnerability from the different intersections that can really impact different people. Thank you very much Tracy. So let us move on to another question. And as you can see the questions have been elevated due to people adding thumbs up to them. So I'm going to read the ones that are at the top and we'll do a few only we may not be able to do all of them. So the second question is perhaps some examples of actual actions taken would be useful that I think we've already heard some of those. And how would you describe the connection between COVID and climate change if you're talking to local government. This is from Celine de Cruz. And let me also read the next one. And then I'll invite our speakers to respond to anyone that they feel like. This is from Megan Megan rolling at Thompson Reuters I think it seems to me that we are still stuck with this tired narrative of women and informal workers just to just as two examples as being quote unquote vulnerable groups, but at the same time agents of change. Can it be reframed to reflect the reality of people's lives and diverse actions and if so, how. Okay, so I'm going to invite everybody to respond to any one of those that they feel like or you can pick another question as well. And I'll let people take the floor as they wish Sheila you want to go first. Oh, I'd love to go first. In fact, I wrote down that I'd like to answer Megan's question. The way I look at it is that when when you work over long periods of time and observe communities of the poor. They workers with a networks of residents living in slums. What you find is that women in marginality, manage resources quietly and invisibly. What they demonstrate is an amazing ability to balance survival strategies. Most of us as social movement facilitators and supporters do is we look at ways by which you explore the transition between that sort of management and a new form of management in which the solution comes out of the duty bearers commitment to bring in resources and what local communities can do. So from what Tracy said, what usually happens is that development interventionists come in. They look for the male leaders to talk to them. They don't go to the women who automatically received at the back. And so within SDI we try first to create a alignment between the conventional traditional male leaders who may have more access to different institutional rights and the real managers who are women and we reconcile them to explore a way by which they work together and we reconstruct solutions that they experiment with. And they work with anybody who has tried to make investments and informal settlements without the participation of the poor you will find that they walk away from things that don't work for them. We say that poor people have to be part of the solution. It means that hard earned resources that do actually come there must be involving communities in the design. And you'll be amazed. I mean you may feel tired about these things but these are still not mainstream development processes. You still have a project framework in which NGOs go in work for two three years. You have to leave because there's no follow up money. In reality development interventions have to be decadal for transformation. You can't take five and six generations of deprivation and solve it with a quickie three a project. So these are the real challenges and that's why you need social movements to hit back and say create a range of possibilities that are all under the umbrella of the movement. We are not talking about cookie cutter solutions. We're talking about a range of possibilities that are nuanced and changed. And just to give an answer to Celine's question a very simple thing which is happening right now during the COVID crisis in Mumbai is that many of the residents who live next to open drains know that if those drains are not cleaned right now. They will be flooding. If there is flooding of water that has been stagnant with stinking and disintegrating garbage. It'll be worse for the households who are stuck inside. And therefore working together with their municipalities. They're looking at ways by which local community people can be asked to work on these as a means to solve the city's problem as well as the community's problem. Now this is something which was observed by local communities aggregationally brought up to the city and then looked at. So I hope that answers both your question. I'm happy to be challenged a bit more. Thank you very much. I'm told by my colleagues at ID that we are coming near the end in our time allotment. So I'm going to now invite the speakers to maybe take a couple of minutes to wrap up the final talks and also answer any particular question that they feel they'd like to take up. Let's move on then Marty would you like to go next and and answer any questions that you feel you'd like to do and then wrap up as well in the next couple of minutes. Yeah, two things. One, picking up on the narrative issue. The narratives that we're tired of are the narratives that stigmatize and penalize the informal workers but also people who work in informal settlements, both informal settlements and informal livelihoods represent the poor trying to secure a niche within the communities let's say and against a very hostile environment and to blame them for being somehow illegal when state and capital can take public land and privatize it to build yet another mall. For us is is egregious. You know the capital gets away with informality and the one factor of production that gets blamed for informality is labor and the poor. We've got to change those really dominant narratives that are affecting the mindset of the people who plan these cities planning these economies and this brings me to the question that several people raised about how do informal workers organizations of slum dwellers women's organizations gain political strength. They gain political strength through organization right, but the organizations of these workers also need allies and the allies can come from the legal profession from the academic profession. And they need those allies to help challenge not only the dominant narratives but the dominant models and paradigms in each domain. We fight a lot with mainstream economists they are the priesthood of capitalism, and they are the ones who don't really say well we need to tax the informal workers when we don't tax Amazon I mean so you have to fight with each domain of practice whether urban planning economists social protection law. We have to remain even human rights lawyers don't understand informal employment. So we have to engage and help the organizations of workers engage with each of these dog and dog companies and change the paradigms. That's the task. The rich, I agree are not going to change overnight. We have to change the intermediate space of institutions and models and paradigms. And that's what we're trying to do. Great. Thank you very much Marty. I see Soranjana is back with us. Soranjana, we are just wrapping up. Yeah, I was listening. I was there. Yeah, I also found this question from Megan Rowling very provocative so I'd like to answer it. I think that coming from as someone who has been at a lot of disaster management discussions. I think that this terminology when you say vulnerable groups, it immediately means women, children, disabled, elderly, and that set of groups immediately becomes the target of external humanitarian assistance. So the point is not that I mean you may not like the wording what it is shorthand for is representing the idea that the moment someone is put in a vulnerable category, they are shoved into a place where they're not allowed to be part of public decision making processes that affect them more than anybody else. And so it's not that people are only vulnerable or only active agents of change. The reality is more nuanced, of course, but as activists and as women's movement, we want to build on the side that gives grassroots women power and doesn't keep positioning them in this place where the outsiders are the only people who can come and save them. That's it for me. Well done. Great, well done. You want to just wrap up from your side as well and then I'll ask you to do so. So I think that, first of all, I think I ID you need to do many more of these. We need to build more consensus amongst those of us who are representing those at least willing to explore these paradigms. And what I find in times of emergencies is that we're so busy working the rest of the time that we don't look at the perspectives that we share that we can strengthen and build on, and we end up contesting each other in little spaces when we have big fights that we have to fight together. I think our like Marty said, we have large battles to fight. Our biggest challenge today is that history tells us that all pandemics and epidemics produce a small opening when the whole world is threatened, or your whole country threatened the elite feeling secure so they suddenly feel generous to stop the problems occurring everywhere so they don't affect them. The minute a vaccine comes a minute a treatment comes all those doors close. And when those doors close, you regress to a space, which was worse than before, because your economy has had a problem, your systems have crashed. You can't dwell into how and why you go into a fallback position of saying, now let's get the economy, let's get the GDP, let's get the foreign direct investment coming back, and all that flows like cream in milk up. So I think, if we are smart, we will align, we will hold each other's hands to our weaknesses, strengthen each other by articulation our research our knowledge, and fight this fight because we can't wait for another planetary crisis to then come again together Thank you very much. And thank you Salim for all the people you have dragged kicking and screaming into the climate space. And thank you. Welcome, welcome. Thank you. So last word to Tracy and then I'll hand over to Andy to close things first. Tracy, would you like to share some final thoughts. Thank you Salim. I think I'll close with an interesting question from Salim, the Cruz, who said that if you're communicating to local government, how do you show them the connection between COVID and climate. I think largely we learned lessons through this pandemic. Exactly what Sheila is saying. The response is so fast. I remember seeing a video of how the trees have grown back the ecosystems are healthier. And these things have been talked about the science has been clear, but for climate we are not responding. We're responding for COVID-19 because we are scared we're going to die. If we can use the same approach to address climate, that would really be a big change so that could be a reflection for us how do we strengthen our climate action faster. And then the other thing is that COVID-19 is breaking down the economic system. And in climate the vulnerability of the people enhances the impacts of climate change. So there is a direct linkage in that. And then the prioritization of funding. There's so much money that has gone into COVID-19 response. But if you ask for that money for climate, it's not forthcoming. I think it's happening somewhere. It's not affecting us directly. So that commitment of putting funds into that doesn't happen. And yet this is a long-term impact. It's a global risk that is affecting everybody. So I think that's the linkage that I see really could be communicated to decision makers. And thank you Salim for everything and everybody for organizing this. Thank you. Thank you very much Tracy. So thank you each and every one of our panelists and the participants and the questioners. I think that was a very, very stimulating discussion. We will share the recording with everybody so we can share it with others as well. Let me conclude with a couple of thoughts from my side and then I'll hand over to Andy to close the proceedings. Firstly, the question that Simon raised on whether being female leader or male leader made a big difference. Perhaps it did. I'm hoping my leader, female leader, Shekhasina Bangladesh proves that at age as well. However, to me, the bigger difference is a leader who listened to the science versus leaders who did not listen to the science. And that is absolutely well established. The leaders who failed to listen to the science or refused to listen to the scientists have ended up killing their own citizens, killing them. And that is absolutely unacceptable. And it's plain to see. How do we take things forward? To me, I have a very great example and I'm a great admirer of the 16 year old Swedish girl Greta Thunberg. She, by just doing something by herself, has galvanized school students all over the world. Millions of them in schools all over the world coming out every Friday until we had the pandemic. And as soon as we had the pandemic, they've gone online. They are now online every Friday, mobilized, working together, communicating with each other. I was invited to speak to them a couple of Fridays ago. I think we need to do the same. Those of us working in this space with the vulnerable communities in different places, different groups, we need to be much more effective at joining forces and supporting each other as we go forward. I think we're beginning to make a good start, but there's a lot more that we can do. And that to me is the challenge for IID and ICAD for taking this forward as we move over the next few years. And particularly in this particular juncture of, you know, the window for thinking about new things which won't last for very much longer. We might revert to the bad old ways again very, very quickly. So I'll stop there. Thank you everybody for excellent discussion and hand over to Andy to close. Thank you very much, Salim. I'm just going to be incredibly brief. That was a really rich discussion. Huge thanks to all the panelists, to Juliette and also Karen Wang from IID for all the work to organize and particularly Salim to you for your great sharing and leadership, general leadership in this space where I can also say we're very happy. We will be very happy to take up Sheila's suggestion of lots of active convening in this space going forward. So many thanks to everyone. Thank you very much indeed. All the panelists.