 Hello everyone. My name is Ilyas Uadamou and I work for the NGO Action for the Development of Local Initiative in Niger and I am Deputy Executive Secretary. With Adli, we have been working for a long time supporting communities in ensuring protection on a daily basis. I am very happy to be with you today and to moderate this session on the role of community actors in access to protection as part of this year's Global Protection Forum. As you know, the humanitarian community currently focuses primarily on access of humanitarian actors to populations in need of protection. In this session, we seek to put a spotlight on the second part of access of humanitarian work, which is to expand the understanding of access that is about this daily protection. For example, which support can we offer for women and children who must cross a checkpoint to make sure that this checkpoint is safe? It's for example, which communication can we have with police stations in specific markets to make sure that markets are a safe place to sell and buy in all safety. So this is what we want to talk about. Therefore, we want for this session to be a framework to raise awareness and to influence actors to make them understand that among us actors protection, we acknowledge the critical role of communities in their own access to protection. We will try to create a moment of reflection about tangible actions that we can conduct so that power holders within the current humanitarian system can undertake actions as a minimum, not undermine community protection action and ideally to better support and enable such actions. As you will see on the agenda, we will hear several people. We will first hear the opening remarks of this session, then we will hear some speakers about community self-protection and we will then hear three examples in Burkina Faso, Yemen and in Colombia afterwards. We will take a moment to talk about, to allow participants to ask questions and we will then hear practical steps by INGOs or the Global Protection Cluster which measures to undertake to support actors in their work. So during this session, we will ask you to share your experience. There will be some opportunities to do that thanks to tools such as Mentimeter. We will have some polls. You will be able to add recommendations. So please have your phones or computers ready to be able to participate for this session. We will mention that later. So just before we dive into the presentations and the discussion, I would like to introduce our speakers for today's session. First, we will hear the opening remarks by Joana Darmanin with the head of unit of humanitarian aid, thematic policies at DG ECHO. Then we will follow the presentation of Melanie Kessmecker-Wissing who is a protection advisor at Oxfam. Then we will hear the experience of Regis Zougrana who is protection assistant for AGED, our fourth speaker is Mustafa Bazarra, project manager for protection field and medical foundation, FMF, and he will talk about Yemen. The next speaker will be Padre Jesus Alberopara who is the coordinator for the Fundación Solidaria Agil Giosena FSA in Colombia. Then we will hear Hannah Jordan who is the regional protection advisor for the Norwegian Refugee Council. Then we will follow the presentation of Samuel Cheng who is the global protection cluster coordinator. Finally, we will hear the words of Sarah Brod, senior policy specialist for the Swedish International Development Corporation. These will be all the speakers we will hear during this session. So without further ado, ladies and gentlemen, I would like to welcome Mrs. Joana Darmanin, head as I was saying of unit humanitarian aid, thematic policies at ECHO, and I invite her to take the floor now for her opening remarks. So I give you the floor now, Joana. May we see Eliasu and a word of welcome to all of you who have joined online for today's event on the role of protection, community protection actors, case studies challenges. Joana, we're not hearing you. Have you become disconnected? No, I'm here. Can you hear me? Nope. Are you here? Okay, maybe. Better now? Okay. I continue. Stop me. Okay. Joana. A word of thanks also at the beginning to Oxfam and the global protection cluster for the invitation. I think as Eliasu mentioned, we are all rallying around a key concern of protection of conflict affected populations, which is one of the serious concerns in too many humanitarian contexts. And this is one of the key areas that we have been focusing on as donors over the past year. So today's discussion is something that we very much welcome. Another issue that is very dear to our heart and also key for today's discussion is the perspective of stepping up our support for local actors. And this is also in line with the Grand Bargain. And here I just wanted to flag that DGECO is currently working on the development of guidance on localization. And a number of you may have participated in the consultation that went between June and the end of August. And we are now reflecting on the outcomes of that consultation. Turning to the focus of our discussion today, it is widely recognized that supporting community based actors leads to empowering communities, strengthening their resilience and addressing the needs of the most vulnerable members of communities, including in hard to reach areas. It also improves the effectiveness and sustainability of our activities. And as such, the approach also places the agency right and dignity of people of concern at the center of programming. And I think today's event will certainly highlight a number of good examples where this is already underway. I want to also touch upon questions related to the issues of humanitarian access. Today's armed conflict, as we are all seeing, are increasingly complex and they are posing significant challenges for humanitarian actors to secure access to those persons that are in need. As a humanitarian donor, we recognize that in humanitarian context, engaging with all parties to the conflict is absolutely key in order to ensure that vulnerable communities are not left behind. This is a clear precondition for safe and effective humanitarian work. We all understand that access can be limited due to various reasons and this certainly requires humanitarian partners to adapt advocacy strategies to the specific context, stakeholders, and patterns in order to address these obstacles. Also, from this perspective, and this is something that we here repeatedly coordinated advocacy for access, giving, for example, a prominent place to local actors is often critical. And as a donor, we welcome and very encourage such an approach. While often access is seen as humanitarians going to populations in need, I mean, the present session will focus on another aspect and certainly a more interesting aspect, which is the access by crisis affected communities to protection services and support. The session will showcase the role of community-based actors, including national and local organizations, civil societies, and community protection structures and leaders in this element of access. Indeed, community actors can play a key role in terms of negotiating for an enabling access for external protection actors, thanks to the influence that they have with networks and possible pre-existing connections with duty bearers. Of course, the issue of trust and understanding of the local context and relevant mechanisms is something which puts them at the heart of this process. I am also pleased that today's session will feature recent research conducted by Oxfam, and this was supported by DG Echo on community-led advocacy and negotiation for protection, which also includes some important recommendations. This research is part of a broader project on collective protection advocacy, and I would like to take this opportunity to encourage you also to look at another interesting product prepared by Oxfam together with ODI on collaborative advocacy on the protection of civilians in conflict based, for example, on CAC and the AWEPA agendas. The research has stressed the importance of complementary advocacy and collaboration between international, national, and local organization. In the second part of the session, we will also have a chance to listen to three interactive presentations, as Ilyas Oori mentioned, from community protection actors in Burkina Faso Colombia and Yemen. These will give examples of how community-based actors support communities' access to protection and share the challenges that they encounter. In the last part of the session, we will also have a chance to learn more about the recommendations and how to address the different barriers and advance on the role of community protection actors. While the community protection actors play an important role, the most effective influencing strategies seem to be based on complementarity, mutually reinforcing action at the global and also at the local level. So, it seems like we have a very, very interesting session ahead of us, and I'm sure that you will all enjoy this panel. As Ilyas Oori also mentioned, please be as interactive as possible, and we greatly count on your participation. So, without much more ado, I will hand the floor now to Melanie Kessmaker-Wissing, who is the Protection Advisor in Oxfam, and Melanie will present the main results from the research on the work of local and community protection actors. Melanie, over to you. Thank you very much, Joanna, for these opening remarks. And hello to everyone. So, our talk now about what community self-protection and community led protection mean to us in this session, and then I will focus on the initial research results that Joanna has already referred to, that are on how community actors influence duty bearers to ensure access to protection. As you certainly all know, everyday community actors carry out actions that help their communities access protection, and this could be helping a survivor of violence access medical or legal assistance, or it can be negotiating for a woman or child to be able to pass safely through a checkpoint on the way to school, on the way to the market, or to access humanitarian aid. And for us, this is what self-protection means. It refers to what people and communities do to ensure their own protection, and the way that external actors can support community self-protection is through community based or community led protection. These are approaches that support the capacity and the agency of affected communities in their own protection. And the difference between the two is within the degree of the power that communities hold in the action. So, for instance, the question whether it's external to all the community itself that initiates specific actions. Before I go into the research results, we would like to gather some of your thoughts and experience on this topic through some interactive questions. So, please participate by clicking on the link in the chat box that you will see appear. We have a total of three questions. We have the translation of the questions while here in the chat box because it didn't fit into the multi-meter platform. So, please give us one example of when a community member would need to convince or influence a duty bearer to prevent violence on community safety. So, I would give an example by just, for instance, negotiating at checkpoints for people to be able to pass through to school, to the market or to access your internet. And I see the first example is already arriving. We have, for instance, the situation of large-scale evictions and high repeat. Yes. Reducing or preventing the recruitment of children. Another example of recruitment of children. When armed actors come to take crops to steal goods, yes. Recruitment again. When armed actors are present in the village market, making people feel unsafe. Also, in the case of night bread patrols, making complaints to community leaders who are texting humanitarian assistance. Getting past checkpoint strikes is basic healthcare. To have no armed present, not access present in schools. Lots of very, very interesting and pertinent examples. Access to markets and land. Again, getting past checkpoints. Preventing forced displacement or forced relocation as well. And we will hear actually an example of forced eviction later in one of the examples. Great, lots of examples here. Then I suggest we move to the next question. The second one, which is holding markets to ensure daily access to prevent or respond to violence in the community. Who does this sort of work? We have one response so far. Let's see what the others are saying. Yes, the answers are coming up. Community leaders, women leaders, traditional leaders, humanitarian actors, women's groups, indigenous, human rights, yes, lots of community actors I can see here already. Great, women, traditional, local governments, local authorities, more community actors. And let's move to the last question. In what ways do community actors facilitate access to services and stakeholders to prevent or respond to violence? Through capacity building, through speaking local languages, through direct dialogues, communication and advocacy, through sharing information, building trust. I've also seen in the chat books some other examples of advocacy referrals, yes, negotiating access. Can I hear with a few more, please? Thank you, dialogue, yes. And we will hear more about dialogues in one of the presentations. Thank you very much all for having shared your thoughts. And I will now in the next slide move to the early results of the research that you're animation, which we conducted into that commission, looking at community led advocacy negotiation. We have a snapshot of the results that we will share after the event and the full report will be available later this year. So I want to focus on four main things. And the first one is important to a family and community networks. Community production actors have extensive networking relationships in their communities and that includes extended family relationships. And they use them to influence the behaviour of duty barriers. These networks are most effective when they existed before the crisis. And they can also be built during the crisis. Speaking the same language is another important point. Community production actors understand local duty barriers and speak the language. And this is not just the actual language, but also knowing and understanding the ideology of duty barriers for history, motivations, goals, pressure, pressure points, values and cultural influences. And community actors use multiple tactics. They can include approaches that are familiar to international actors, but also range of context specific approaches, including community dialogues that have been mentioned. Another important factor is the complementarity between local, national and international actors. And a strong collaboration between them and between a diverse range of actors with different backgrounds, perspectives and networks gives strengths to the to effective influencing and negotiation where everyone can play to their strengths. Managing the risk is also very important because this work always entails risk of course. And for community and local actors, there is actually quite different from the ones that are faced by national and international actors. The latter either the end of a response, but community actors and their families stay behind. International actors may trigger dangers to local actors and their families and they might transfer risks to local actors as well. So if we can look at the next slide, we can look at some of the recommendations that come both from the research and recent discussions with national and international protection actors that we've had in different events in round tables lately. One is to strengthen local to global and back to local complementarity and facilitate local actors access to decision making platforms and resources. We also need to foster equal partnerships, cultivate trust between different actors and invest in building sustainable relationships. We have to recognize the skills and experience that are at all levels with each actor and in territorial capacity building. We need to invest in managing risks, initial risk management and support mechanisms into partnerships and also exit planning. When it comes to funding and program design, we need more flexible funding and we have to move away from pre-set deliverables and the local deliverables outputs and outcomes to be decided by communities. And finally, we have often heard or recommendationally we learned about gathering, learning and good practices when it comes to community lab protection work and providing direction on principles and quality standards on it. Thank you all and back to you Ilyas. Thank you very much Melanie. Thank you for sharing all these very interesting results. So we will send to you and we'll listen to you while talking about the way the communities and the community actors are doing some advocacy and advocating and negotiating the access and you also mentioned about how the community actors can base their actions and it's extremely interesting and now I will ask you to move on to three concrete examples from Burkina Faso, from Yemen and from Colombia. We'll tell us how the approaches of the community actors are so we can have the access to protection and the first example will be given by Ritis and he's a protection assistant for the association for the management of development and environment in Burkina Faso. Thank you Ritis, you know how the floor. Thank you very much Ilyas and good afternoon and good morning, good evening everyone. Our presentation will focus on how the community actors can facilitate the access to protection and I would like to summarize and give you some elements of context of the current situation in Burkina Faso and the needs for protection in 2022. Must be said that currently that this current security situation is very difficult and volatile and we also are facing a crisis. We have an increase in the risk related to protection because the situation is worsening and furthermore we're also facing a food crisis and it exacerbates the current situation and it may present some risks. For example, protection being refused are the most necessary services being refused. The political crisis after the coup by the military at the beginning of the year 2022 and in September 2022 with some constraints on human rights and violation of human rights but furthermore we'll also have displacements of many people in the country about the humanitarian needs in 2022. It must be said that more than 3.5 million people are in need of humanitarian needs and more than 2.1 million people need protection and most of them need this protection against gender-based violence because we know that the the regions close to Sahel are mostly impacted with more than 55.2 percent of the people in the region are impacted and so on a population of one million more than one million people living in the area. So we have to close school and it has of course an impact on many pupils and students and of course health institutes have to close their doors and is worsening the current situation and the health crisis. So while facing all these needs and because of the current situation so we have to have new brand new initiatives so we have the we have the action plans a community-based action plans so so in order to help the community-based institutions so they can describe the current threats and the current needs and can make recommendations for specific aid in order to mitigate the risks. This is a very efficient way to help the members of what we call the SPC the management centers and management departments so and the community-based protection structures so they can plan initiatives and so they can strengthen the the protection effort in the region. So let's move on to the next slide. So we also have what we call a community-based dialogue so it ends it's about advocacy and we need to support all the communities so they can get access to protection and this activity allows the members of the SPC the community-based protection services so they can send advocacy notes on specific topics for example sexual violence gender-based violence rapes kid kidnappings so they can actually define efficient activities in order to prevent these violations of human rights in order to counter this and prevent these violations of human rights. Next slide please. We also have a mapping mapping activity of these community protection centers and this it's it's at the core of what we do so we can make sure that this member of these communities can get access to this protection that we are working hand in hand with communities with the SPCs so we have mapping of all the available services and they've been distributed among their communities so it makes things easier for and better access to these protection. Next slide please. So we can note that we have some very good achievements we must say that the fact that we have the SPC these community protection centers really helped us to reduce the number of violations of human rights of human rights so we have these discussions and negotiations and and the presence of these local authorities of local community leaders the representatives of the community protection centers of men women and customary authorities and the host communities participated to these meetings and we have a very frank and open discussions and we can't take on the contribution of everyone and to be as honest as possible and so all the actors are expressing themselves and the the talk about the problems they're facing and they try to find solutions with the authorities and they try to draft some road maps and action plans and it must also be noted that these SPC have received some funds thanks to the community protection plan and the activities for social cohesion for example we had the healthiness days or hygiene days for host populations and IDPs. Let's move on to the next slide please. So now we have a testimony of Mrs. Sao she's a member of the community protection center and the women's community association in the district of Wendu. With this testimony she shows that thanks to A, G, E, D and Oxfam the woman in the region has been able to to draft some protection plans and thanks to that being able to receive some funds, thanks not only to the municipality of Dori but also from the from the SCR and I saw that children believe so so thanks to the SCR they have been able to have like empowerment activities and for the protection of children and girls. Move on to the next slide. There was another testimony that thanks to the early warning system we were notified of several sexual and physical aggression and rapes at the bridge linking the town center of Dori to Wendu and in some Wendu neighborhood places so with this fact the community protection structures have undertaken advocacy with the authorities to have more safety in these places and they also have led awareness campaigns with communities to reduce their vulnerabilities faced with these risks. Next slide please. With these activities we can also note some major challenges in particular the protection response and especially when it's led by the community itself has a weak rate of funding and for some actors or donors is not an operational priority the increase of protection incidents because of the safety crisis and the destruction of water infrastructures depriving deliberately the population of their rights to water to education health care and to information. There is a weak capacity of a fast response to urgent needs of populations when it comes to protection because of the lack of flexible funds easily usable to facilitate the access to protection services. There's also the fact that many local organizations do not have a strategic vision on protection matters. This stares the priority of international actors such as Oxfam, DRC and NRC that is taken over the logic of localizations wanting that local actors are placed in the center of the response. Next slide please. With these challenges we recommend the following recommendations to work to strengthen protection programs thanks to community protection approach in ensuring funding and in the long term in favor of protection action to facilitate the access of protection services. We also need to strengthen protection mechanism and the localization of the response while having flexible funds to meet urgent needs when it comes to protection and to make sure that it is sustainable. We also need to lead actions, advocacy actions with the government and to have stabilization missions and peace missions to strengthen the protection of civilians and of their goods. Next slide please. Thank you. We are reaching the end of this presentation. Thank you. Thank you Ilyasu. Thank you very much Regis for this presentation and for these examples that show us how communities develop action plans to guarantee the protection of the population and yes I thank you very much dear Regis. We will now move on to our next speaker who is Mustafa Bazzara project manager of protection at Field Medical Foundation in Yemen. Mustafa the floor is yours. Welcome. Thank you Ilyasu. Hello everyone. Today I'm going to talk about community-based protection and our experience and the challenges that we faced in the field. Next slide please. As shown in the picture since 2015 Yemen is in a war and remains one of the largest humanitarian crisis and aid operation in the world. The crisis is a result of an armed conflict that escalated seven years ago. It has killed and endured 10 of thousands of civilians causing huge suffering for Yemeni people. Next slide please. Most vulnerable people suffer from protection threats such violence, coercion and deliberate deprivation. Women are looking at them as inferior to men and young girls also married before the age of 15. Child brides as usual exposed to sexual and physical violence and emotional abuse. domestic violence is rarely reported due to social stigma and shame. As we all know Yemen is a tribal country which means there are cultural norms and attitudes that cause more discrimination against vulnerable groups. One of these groups is Muhammed machine, an organized one. And here in Yemen is called the Muhammed machine Akhdam meaning Serpent. Next slide please. In the Muhammed community young men got involved in the fighting with parties as a negative coping mechanism due to lack of income of education or fraternities in order to support their families to make in smith. This causes many challenges like the lack of medical treatment when endured and support for mental health issues or trauma. So their families are exposed to harassment and abuse while their men are away as well as Muhammed children face difficulties to get enough education over fraternities and also face bullying and harassment from their peers in the school which led their families to engage them in begging to survive. So FMF supports CBBNs by adapting AGD approach in order to engage the community in the process and to get enough info about the protection threats that they face. So I will present to you two examples of how CBBNs help their communities to access protection. Next slide please. This is a picture of a displacement site in Addaal, a governorate where the Muhammed machine got an affection notice from the land owner and as shown they leave in makeshift shelter with the terrible condition and also they can't be moved. CBBN members flag it out the issue by communicating the CBBN focal point via WhatsApp group in order to inform the protection officer to advocate and to advocate and to the relevant clusters for relocation. They also communicate with the community leaders to involve them in the mediation with the land owner to extend the affection notice. Also at that moment CBBNs informed the local authorities about the issue in order to push them to find another suitable location. The collaboration between the local authorities and the clusters was successfully in finding suitable location to have safe access to services. Also the CBBN helped the protection monitors and the cluster teams to gather information when conducting the multi-cluster land suitability that looked for potential protection risks. Next slide please. The other impact that is caused by the tribal tradition is the discrimination against women where women are more exposed to the risk of GBV during displacement due to their economic instability, lack of proper living conditions and surface providing. Also women have taken some measures like sleeping in groups and walking together to feed firewood and water in order to avoid any protection threats like killing, rap, sexual harassment and assault. Also authentication is common practice due to the lack of latrines. Next slide please. As shown in the pictures, this is an IDV site called Wadi Al-Qarnain Abin Governorate where IDVs were having difficulties accessing water because of an issue with the water facility in the village. Because of that everyone was forcing to go fetch water from the main tank causing overcrowding at that location which lead to harassment and abuse of women and girls. Also some women were forced to walk long distance to fetch water due to not having enough water which exposed them to more protection risks. So the woman came and told CBBN female members about what they were exposed to. So CBBN raised the issue to the CBBN focal point in order to advocate and send the FMF protection team to assess the situation. After that the protection team conduct a visit to the site and conduct FGDs with the help of CBBN members and gather info and assemble the participants. The result was that FMF implemented a quick impact project and engaged the community as a cash for work. Also the project was by raising the existing main tank and adding three more sub tanks as well as installing solar lamps on the site. Also CBBN played a role in organizing groups when fetching water to avoid any possible crowding. Next slide please. Here we have some challenges that we like to share with you. First lack of specialized protection services to mitigate and address protection risks. Second increased vulnerabilities particularly in areas where national facilities are malfunctioning and destroyed. Norms and traditions have caused many challenges including difficulties in resolving issues with mediation. Also preventing women from participating as a CBBN member in some areas that have deeply rooted norms. Fourth difficulties when trying to communicate with the CBBNs due to poor network coverage. Next slide please. Here we have the recommendations. First increasing and mobilizing resource in order to strengthen protection services. Double the evoids to support the capacities of vulnerable communities and groups in order to increase empowerment and resilience. Third support educational programs in order to contribute to the overall evoids to reduce the negative traditional norms and beliefs. Thank you and over to you Elison. Thank you very much Mustafa. Thank you for sharing these examples showing that accessing the network allowed to reduce some problem of forced eviction or of violence based on gender linked to the excess of water. But thank you also for sharing with us the story of the challenges that you are facing and the networks that you are supporting. Thank you. We are now moving to our last presentation. It will be a presentation by Padre Jesus Albero who comes from Colombia and is the coordinator of the FSA. I will give you the floor now. Good morning, afternoon or evening for all of you who are participating in this great protection forum. I'm going to give you a brief overview of our area of work. We work together with the NRC and we are dealing with matters in the department of chopper, the area of chopper and in the northwestern area of Colombia. Colombia is a country with 70 million people and we have been dragging behind us armed conflict with far-left organizations and throughout the past few years we've seen the onset and development of far-right groups clashing against the authorities and in these clashes in these war there are many political and strategic interests that actually affect the whole of the country. So right now the situation and our humanitarian crisis is really deep and this really impacts on many things and we are seeing the recruitment of girls and boys, abuse of women, violence against women, gender-based violence and right now in Colombia we see 10 million people who are victims of this armed conflict and it is producing a lot of problems, confinement, displacement, threats, homicides, etc. And you know we've had a peace process that should have been ongoing but what concerns the area where we work well in Colombia we have certain ethnic minorities and in this region I'm talking about is where we have most of our indigenous population 80 percent we have black communities their 15 percent indigenous population is 10 percent and a five percent of mixed race people but also considered indigenous people and our region would have half a million population and I would say as well that most people are victims of this conflict and there's a deep humanitarian crisis and the result or how this translates into reality is confinement, displacement, horse recruitment and amongst all this this great humanitarian crisis the Catholic Church is here and we have been working for many years trying to help the indigenous peoples and I'm going to talk about our accompaniment work and how we help these communities you can see on the map and how whatever they work the work that they live they live in the mountains they live near the basins of rivers and how they're affected by armed groups in the past few years from the viewpoint of the church exercises to accompany people and to help them to help these communities these ethnic communities who are who lived in their own territories and they have their own ethnic authorities if you will indigenous authorities so we have been trying to strengthen the capacity of organization their self governing power everything that has to do with being self-determined and as a result of the armed conflict it has been hugely difficult to be able to have communities strengthening those powers so this humanitarian accompaniment that the church carries out in the church but not just the church also there are many other organizations also the UN organizations are there many NGOs are working with us as well we just try to go hand in hand with indigenous people and we have done some case studies so we can see what's happening what has been a community protection work well we have we've decided I beg your pardon to go with the living plans or life plans of the indigenous people and this means self community self-protection for the communities and this means that we have helped the communities so they can formulate and organize their own internal rules of engagement so they could follow their own traditions and in Colombia the indigenous people work very well together and you have the warden the indigenous warden is a figure that is the person that protects or is seen to protect and is culturally a very important figure and in fact they are represented by a staff and they use their own language they use the staff these wardens and they representative of the power and the strength of the communities and near the river Balbo apart from humanitarian aid we have provided again accompaniment access to health services and health facilities we do a lot of advocacy work with the local authorities and with the regional authorities and the national authorities and this is one of the main big problems in Colombia for the whole country is that there's a vacuum of power of institutional power particularly in some of these regions and together with this accompaniment the church and other organizations and the communities we have we have had to deal with a lot of armed conflict drug trafficking the cartels criminal organizations organized crime organizations and we thought the only way forward is political negotiation it is dialogue that's the only way forward for us and in this respect we have been supporting the peace process that started in 2012 let us remember the with the FARC the oldest gorilla in Colombia when they laid down their arms and signed the peace agreement with the government with the government and we have been trying to implement such agreements however there are other interests that are many other groups and since 2017 we try to initiate or bring about another peace process with the national liberation army but this wasn't very successful because with duke's government between 2018 to 2022 and there were many problems with because they didn't want to continue implementing the peace process and they didn't want to negotiate what happened what happened was that the whole of Colombia and particularly in chopper as a region these liberation army has spread everywhere and their activities arrive and also there are other groups that are dissident groups from the guerrillas that didn't each actually didn't want to go into the peace process these are far-right groups and here we call them there's one called the Gulf the Gulf plan and and they are military organizations and of course there is still you know the drug trade there are other organized crime organizations that exploit this to their advantage so since 2018 what we have seen is a huge and deep humanitarian crisis we have just worked with the communities and as I said we have tried to do a lot of actions implement a lot of actions the work with working with women working with the girls and work through educational instances and now we have a new government the government of president petro we're thinking this is the government of change and we have a new policy called total peace all out peace and our advocacy work which is through humanitarian dialogues is something that we're doing constantly and systematically and thanks to the alliance that we have with the nrc and being supported by the Norwegian embassy from the church we have managed to move forward in our negotiations with some some of the groups some of these guerrilla groups and some of these armed groups and we have held some exploratory dialogues and as I was saying this is always been done hand in hand with the authorities in all these territories in the case I mentioned in this indigenous community and through the river of san juan and the other rivers we've been working on this on establishing this dialogue and opening these spaces to talk with the leaders of these guerrillas of these armed groups to see how we can reach some co-habitation agreements how we can reach some minimum requirements for coexistence and we've been fighting to achieve this coexistence agreement and to make them to materialize them and these agreements include the right to life so that leaders are not murdered or persecuted because right now in this very region over 54 leaders have been murdered and for us that is a huge number there are permanent threats so through these dialogues that we hold within the communities we managed to remove the threats to leaders or to reduce those threats and to allow them to remain in their communities however there are instances in which we need to remove them from these communities and there is worth the church and the nrc has decided to create a fund to protect these leaders in order to relocate them and there the church has these safe houses for them to stay at we also have another very strong protection strategy it's what we've called churches as peace sanctuaries these are priests or nuns who are throughout all the territories in all the parishes or admission centers and they are there and provide accompaniment on a daily basis both to community leaders to communities to schools and they go there so as to advocate before the state or before the government or before armed groups and we all this to mitigate this humanitarian tragedy right now in these moments we are currently waiting for Petro's government to start because they already said they would start some peace dialogues with the ELN guerrilla in this region because here they hold great territorial control so we are we are expecting to see what will happen and here's where the church can act to facilitate these meetings to bear all these initiatives like indigenous guards to guarantee the respect for schools and I will now finish okay apparently there's an interaction it would be nice if you could go to your conclusion because if you could do your conclusion of your speech thank you yes I was about to finish and I wanted to say a number of recommendations a series of recommendations that were actually mentioned but the speaker this morning one of them is to advance in a national humanitarian program we've been working on that already as part of several society we think that with all that with international cooperation we will be able to advocate before governments and those who hold the power not only governmental power but also business power because there are many interests in the region for this and the entire UN local coordination team and humanitarian teams they are all working to articulate and coordinate the efforts in the territory and this should continue lastly I would like to say that we need to manage not just financial resources but also the presence of staff not only of international organizations but from national representatives that can help us manage this humanitarian crisis this is like a very general overview I thank you for your time and we will keep on working for the end of this war and armed conflict thank you thank you very much mr albero for all these many examples you you mentioned it's very important now we'll have to move on to the Q&A session the question asked by our audience to the our speakers and we have a question from from mr mustapha entourage and the question if I can find the question so have you be able to to see some change in terms of the satisfaction of your beneficiaries do you have some info about this and then we'll start maybe religious and then we'll move on to mustapha thank and the question was out how at the very end of your projects are they are your beneficiaries satisfied by your projects thank you very much iliasu and about this I would say that the the town of duri so in the suburbs of our wendu so we have the action of the community protection centers has been extremely positive because thanks to the advocacy and the raising awareness among the population it really helped us to reduce the the risks and mitigate the risks of protection most notably the cases of rapes for example we have more than 10 rapes per month and after a few weeks we only have to do six six rapes per month but in dupont and around mendu and and we now I don't get two or three rapes so I would say there was no such a threat for the local communities thank you very much Regis and I will give the floor to mustapha to hear his answer maybe you could say a few words mustapha sorry could you could you correct me the question was to know is are you the beneficiaries of your projects satisfied with your your project are they are you see I've noticed any changes among in the satisfaction of your beneficiaries mustapha can you hear me yeah after finished the the project we contacted FGD to see the satisfied of the beneficiaries and we saw that the beneficiaries the beneficiaries is also justified and we didn't go to fetching water from long distance also CBBN organized the the the groups when fetching water in order to avoid any crowding or any harassment and abuse over to elaso thank you very much mustapha and I would like to give the floor to mr albero and the idea was to know what was the most difficult part of you and most with your job and most notably with how you could influence the the main stakeholders in including the armed groups albero you have the floor yes I think the most difficult part has been to reach the leaders the heads of these armed groups that is why they've decided to change strategies so as to avoid any responsibilities they know that there is an imminent peace agreement that they may be subject to international law so for us because we open these dialogues it is hard to reach these leaders this would be the first difficulty and the second one would be there have been and there have been some an important turnover in these armed groups and so it is very difficult because they change over and over and when you go and talk to them and you tell them that they need to abide by international humanitarian law and that they should not recruit boys or girls or kidnap or commit any sexual abuses against women they don't have this knowledge and we have to face this to overcome this hurdle and that is why we need to provide training on ihl because they don't have any training of on this they are in these groups because they are being paid or because they are brought to this to this group so that would be another obstacle the third one or the third difficulty would be that it is quite difficult for us because right now in some areas there is some work of law enforcement agencies and armed groups and as facilitator they might think that you are involved in legal issues that is why we conduct this mediation without any authorization we follow our own religious principles and lastly a very important obstacle is when there are leaders or people from the community they decide to they decide to to go with these armed groups and then start threatening their own families and communities and this is bringing a lot of problems to communities so great thank you we'll listen to some very concrete examples of activities carried out by the community actors and now we are going after having listened to all these interesting examples of the quality of quality done with the communities themselves to ensure that the protection so we also listen to the to the speakers talking about the the challenges and all the recommendations and most notably the recommendations to the international organizations and also the UN agencies and all the humanitarian organizations in order to strengthen and support better all the the actors of protection on the local level I think that given the time we have left we're not going to go back to your recommendations and your advice so now it's open and the it's always the chat box always open and the system is always open saying you can always drop your recommendations if you allow me I'll give the floor to Anna she's regional advisor for protection so I wanted to ask Anna what are the practical actions which according to you the international organization could carry out in order to ease and facilitate the access to protection thank you Anna thank you so much Ilyasu and I really appreciate being here today it's so wonderful to see everybody and to see all of the participants before I speak on some of the barriers I did also want to and please Melanie make sure that I'm doing this correctly just wanted to link over to a mirror board we've actually made that outlines some of the specific recommendations that are that our panelists have spoken about and so in front of you you will see a mirror board that is translated into English French and Spanish and the link is open so everyone should be able to have access to it and we just wanted to provide this as a participatory way to really receive feedback and concrete solutions and recommendations from everyone we will keep this mirror board open for a week so you have plenty of time to go back and to provide some recommendations but we've given you sticky notes and you can add recommendations as well so we've taken the recommendations from our panelists but please add as much as you feel as you wish and it's really just a way for us to also come together and have the way to get your feedback on what are some actual recommendations to moving community self-protection programming and community-led programming forward and so thank you very much Melanie for sharing your screen and then I will just speak a little bit about the barriers and how we can address and find solutions to some of more of the instructional or let's say structural barriers to community self-protection. So as I said my name is Hannah Jordan and I work with the Norwegian Refugee Council now if you're a protection actor who has implemented programs you're aware of the challenges that most of us face namely restrictive log frames strict programming narratives and many methodologies that may limit our ability to collect analyze and use qualitative data conflicting implementation priorities access challenges and one thing that I've observed this week listening to all of the previous sessions and that has come out really strongly for me is that the role and really the agency of community protection actors and the role that these individuals play in negotiating for their own access and protection and the role that they play in identifying strategies to increase their safety the safety of their communities and to prevent violence and also how external actors like INGOs can support and strengthen these strategies to actions and one thing is that I've noticed that these barriers have stood out to me but most importantly there are so many solutions that we have already identified although the barriers that I've mentioned some of our institutional some are structural some are architectural we have capacity to change some of these by creating community led indicators and log frames we are able to remain accountable to our organizations and donors while structurally breaking down some of the barriers that may limit our ability and the ability of our grants to really be implemented and led by communities also by building a central relationships with communities and really being present so we talk about the protection by presence with communities as partners we are able to break down some not all but some of these access and security challenges having broad budget lines gives us the flexibility to also support communities with their own strategies regardless of how that strategy may fit within the structure of the humanitarian system emphasizing cross sectoral integration and multidisciplinary strategies to reduce risk for creatively looking beyond the humanitarian sector we're able to find and use innovative monitoring and evaluation methodologies and systems that have been used for very long time within academia the peace building and development sectors that focus on qualitative practice for collecting analyzing and using data and I've noticed just to wrap up that so many organizations both national and international have already demonstrated that it's possible to break down these barriers and it's possible and they've shared their experiences and lessons learned about how to address these challenges and by breaking down some of these perceived and actual barriers we're able to start actualizing some of the recommendations that we've presented in the session and also throughout the forum ultimately from the outcome of this forum so far I think it's very clear that multiple solutions are available to community self-protection programming and community-led programming and that although we have these barriers we should also be looking at taking steps to address them thank you and over to you Ilyasu. Thank you very much Hanna for all the recommendations and the proposals in order to act concretely that the the mainstay holders can implement in order to strengthen the quality and the efficiency of your practices on the ground I would like to thank you for this and I would like to welcome Mr. Samuel, Mr. Samuel Chung you are the coordinator of the Global Protection Cluster. Mr. Samuel, Mr. Samuel Chung so according to you how can the GPC and the National Clusters support the community actors in their daily activities for protection. Thank you Ilyasu. Thank you very much for giving me the floor. I would just begin by saying deep thanks to Oxfam to NRC for organizing such a great discussion and great to see so much interaction and active participation from everyone online on this critical subject. This is as Hannah has mentioned this is absolutely critical for all of us this community self-protection and the role of community actors in many ways I would consider that this is the litmus test for whether our protection interventions will ultimately result in sustainable protection outcomes. It also holds the key to our discussions around access that protects. To be clear this is not just about localization it's not just about community work this is about how communities have a role in protection and how this can change the game on how we look at access shifting it to really access that protects. We've known for a long time that local actors are the first to respond during times of crisis typically they're also the first to feel its impacts and in most but not all cases they will have access to areas and people including the duty bearers of protection that international actors do not. Given their understanding of the context and all the intricacies of what the protection risks and threats are in a specific place and a time where they are occurring who's perpetrating them what's driving them to do what is causing the harm or why are they not doing what is needed that is exacerbating vulnerabilities. They're the ones who can help identify visible as well as invisible vulnerabilities and to help think of solutions that none of us have thought of leveraging relationships cultural references trust to influence through passion through negotiation through solidarity and even through song sometimes protection outcomes there absolutely must play a key role in delivering protection and assistance on the ground including through local context specific programs and providing culturally sensitive services their presence within communities before during and after crises means well they're the best place to link immediate response efforts to longer term resilience building preparedness and recovery they make protection happen where it counts and they make that protection stick you know with all that in mind working with and strengthening their agency and capacities of self-protection is a priority for an effective response to any protection situation so what can we as the global protection cluster and the protection community do well first we acknowledge that community protection work community based protection and as we've we focused on here community self-protection is a core and essential to our sector and it should be properly reflected in our strategic planning whether it be humanitarian responses humanitarian needs overviews funding strategies and advocacy efforts and it's also important that these not all be lumped into a generic title of community engagement but instead be recognized as a key modality for achieving protection there also seems to be a need to gather and reinforce global learning and good practices on community based protection and community self-protection more specifically so that it's not just about localization which is important but it is about harnessing them as a means for better achieving protection outcomes including on protection of civilians as well as how we can overcome access challenges on this the global protection cluster is open to exploring how we can better galvanize our membership to provide direction principles standards on community as well as civilian self-protection for all of us let us all collectively highlight the need for increased visibility recognition of community protection actors and their work in both local as well as global fora this includes ensuring that coordination structures particularly at subnational level are proactive in harnessing their expertise and capacities as we design our protection interventions including through area-based and local action plans globally as the global protection cluster is a space for all members of the network it is on us to feature national protection leaders from different crisis contexts and we need to continue to ensure that they have a space at the table and that frontline perspectives and this type of work which we were discussing and highlighting today continues to be amplified across the range of our operational work our advocacy work and all the areas that the global protection cluster leads on on behalf of the global protection cluster and all our areas of responsibility we do want to reiterate that this commitment is central to our work it's reflected in our strategic framework but including in the objective that we want to ensure that the voices of crisis affected people and communities are heard especially the forgotten ones but not only heard but are critical to the design and part of the agency and the capacity and may I say absolutely necessary for us to achieve these protection outcomes so with that I do want to once again thank you all for this and pledge once again our support and our commitment from the global protection cluster to follow on this line of work of community protection actors and community self-protection thank you very much Eliasu back to you thank you very much Samuel for very very specific recommendations we are really looking forward to seeing all these the implementation of these recommendations I'll give the floor to Sarah Sarah Broad thank you very much Sarah Broad she's a specialist she's a specialist at the SIDA Swedish International Development Corporation thank you very much other participants I think this been a very important session and at least I learned a lot thank you for letting me speak for us this is really truly important issue I think during the sessions we have heard excellent examples of how protection actors work with communities to support community self-protection capacities and how an inclusive humanitarian system ensures that all protection actors are recognized valued and supported community self-protection is a cornerstone in reaching protection outcomes and we need to learn how to best support and enable this through adopting a truly inclusive people-centered and community-based approach together with our partners I think for us as a donor there are many lessons to learn and take forward after this event I heard partners advocating for flexible and long-term funding to support principled engagement relationship building trust in addition to sustained access and a strong protection response I think it's also important to better understand and manage risks to avoid just transferring the risks to local partners or to communities donors need to be part of and support learning and exchange on best practices that can influence advocacy guidance and standards and finding ways of supporting purposeful complementarity between local and global actors is key there need to be space for communities to influence and decide outcomes outputs and deliverables and community protection structure needs to be diverse and inclusive to consider the risks to all members of the community I think donors can contribute by not looking at only the number of people reached but we need to understand and accept that protection outcomes needs to be measured in a more qualitative way this could mean support to developing and adopting methods that can capture impact in a meaningful way for this type of interventions there needs to be understanding that projects like the ones we heard about today may need a larger proportion of the budget allocated to staff compared to more assistant focus projects that would typically be more supply focused and finally I think the recommendations from participants included increased funding and support for protection response and for building and effectively using the capacity of communities and groups to increase increase their own empowerment resilience and protection thank you very much for today and for those important insights thank you very much for these very concrete recommendations and comments and very practical comments and I hope that all the participants they really listen to you and they make the necessary efforts to support and to continue all of your efforts thank you very much to all the speakers for your amazing contributions and the quality of the hints and the figures you have brought here we will listen to you and we heard all the results and how we have a very concrete and clear recommendations based on the orientation and are from the main architections including the cluster and I think that all the recommendations are more than welcome and once again unique and I keep on sending us new recommendations so I think that now we are reaching the end of this session but once again from the bottom of my heart I would like to say there was a pleasure to work with you and I would like to thank you all on behalf of Oxfam and NRC and the protection group I would like to thank you all for all your recommendations your interventions for the quality of work that is being carried out as we speak on the ground and we we are keep on working together for have bring a better protection to all the many the male communities and populations so we'll have to thank you all for your contribution to this debate and I would like to say we have amazing discussions thank you very much I would wish you a nice afternoon a nice evening and see you soon