 And the motivation for this panel was really a project that we did at UNU Wider about five years ago looking at aid in democracy and how that has manifested in sub-Saharan Africa. It culminated in an edited book volume with Nicholas Vandeval on democratic trajectories in Africa unraveling the impact of foreign aid. And quite a few of our panelists today were part of that project. And so we're revisiting some of the assumptions we had in that project and the kind of framework that we had at that time looking at the role that both democracy assistance and development assistance plays in the democratic process in Africa. At that time we had this framework looking at different elements of democratic consolidation and the potential theoretical entry points in which donors could engage in the democratic process. One was kind of avoiding democratic breakdown on this kind of left side of the spectrum, so kind of preventing return to one party regime or kind of a cessation of elections. In the middle we had this idea about avoiding erosion, at least preventing a deterioration in civil liberties or human rights. And then on the kind of right hand side, the kind of positive pull of the spectrum, deepening democracy, strengthening vertical accountability, reinforcing institutions that provide horizontal accountability like parliaments, and creating or reinforcing competitive party systems. And so we're kind of going to revisit whether some of these entry points are still valid. What we found in the project is of course it's a complex process. One of the key things was that we found a lot of contradictions between development and democracy assistance, often undermining each other in the democratic arena. But to kick us off we're going to start with Lisa Rackner. She's a professor of politics at the University of Bergen. She was a participant in the original project, particularly looking at the case of Zambia. And I think today she's going to focus on the kind of backlash against democracy in the region and the role donors have played there.