 Good afternoon and welcome. On behalf of the United States Institute of Peace, we are delighted to welcome you here to the first day of the fifth capital level meeting of the Women, Peace, and Security Focal Points in Washington, DC. My name is Kathleen Kinist. I lead the Women, Peace, and Security portfolio here at the Institute. I'm also joined today by our president, Lise Grande. Thank you for joining us and many other folks in the room that I'll introduce shortly. Let me begin by saying how much we appreciate the opportunity to partner with the State Department's Global Women's Issues Office in the planning of this most important conference, which will no doubt yield critical inputs for women around the world and for the WPS agenda for years to come. We welcome the opportunity to strengthen crucial partnerships between governments and civil society. We look forward to pursuing this WPS agenda, which truly remains a key avenue for progress globally. A special welcome to Ambassador Guida Gupta, the new Secretary's Office of Global Women's Issues. Congratulations. We welcome the co-lead of the American and Romania focal points, Lieutenant Colonel Manuela Buccia, Romania focal point. And our US focal point, Cat Fodovat, senior official with the Secretary's Office of Global Women's Issues. For those of you who may not be familiar with the Institute of Peace, we are an independent, federally funded institution founded by the US Congress nearly 40 years ago and dedicated to the proposition that peace is possible, it is practical, and it is essential for our country and global security. Thanks to our leadership, USIP has been committed to women, peace, and security for the last 12 years with the dynamic energy of both staff, government partnerships, global efforts, and certainly the dynamic energy of civil society. USIP became the secretariat for the US Civil Society working group on women, peace, and security about a decade ago and is now made up of a 65 member organizations committed to building awareness and engaging with the US government on key concerns on women in conflict and ensuring women are a significant part of all peace processes. As an example of this commitment, USIP awards annually the Women Building Peace Award, which honors courageous women in civil society who risk their lives to create peace in their communities and in their countries, leading movements for justice, security, and inclusivity, despite often being very overlooked in these efforts. Just yesterday, and I hope you received the flyer, we opened nominations for the 2023 Women Building Peace Award. It will be open for the next month. We invite you to submit a nomination identifying an exceptional woman who is building peace in her country, in her community. For further information, please see our website. The Women, Peace, and Security Agenda has long been championed as a pathway for designing and implementing policies that improves women's inclusion in all facets of peace building. As we convene to discuss today the adaptability and the evolution of women, peace, and security as a framework for implementing policy change, I'm very honored to introduce our two keynote speakers today to share their experience and work on this most important agenda. I'm going to introduce both of them and then they will come up one at a time. First, Assistant Secretary Anne Wittkowski directs the Bureau of Conflict and Stabilization Operations at the US Department of State. With over three decades of experience in government, Assistant Wittkowski has worked on issues ranging from promoting democracy and stability, humanitarian affairs, counter-terrorism, and arms control. She is the recipient of several State Department Superior Emeritorious Awards and the Department of Defense Medal for Distinguished Civilian Service and the Secretary of Defense Medal for Outstanding Public Service. Thank you. Our second speaker is Jamila Bijio, who is the Senior Coordinator for Gender Equality and Women's Empowerment at the US Agency for International Development, otherwise often referred to as USAID. She has previously served as a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, Director of Human Rights, and Gender on the National Security Council. Jamila has led the interagency launch of the US government's first national action plan on women, peace, and security, which she was recognized for by the Department of State with a Superior Honor Award and the US Department of Defense Secretary of Defense Honor Award. Thank you both for joining us today. We look forward to your comments. And please join me at the podium. Wow, it's great to be here. It's great to see all of you. Thank you, Kathleen, for that wonderful introduction. Good afternoon. Can you hear me? Good, OK. I'm so pleased to be here with such an exceptional group of leaders from civil society, distinguished representatives of government, so many parts of our dedicated women, peace, and security community from around the globe. I'd like to begin by thanking our focal points network co-chair, Romania, and the host of our first plenary session, the US Institute of Peace. Thank you, Kathleen, and thank you, Liz, and thank you to the Institute. I would also like to thank the distinguished speakers and civil society panelists joining the session today. In addition, I'd like to thank Ambassador Large, Gita Rao Gupta, and the Office of Global Women's Issues for coordinating this capital level meeting. It is a distinct honor to join you in this important conversation. Colleagues, this week we come together to continue turning women, peace, and security commitments into action. From my vantage point, the Bureau of Conflict and Stabilization Operations, that means delivering tangible change in communities affected by violence, fragility, and conflict. The OECD has identified the scale and severity of gender inequality as one of the most significant multi-dimensional risk factors present in the majority of conflict-affected fragile states. Similarly, the Women's Stats Project found that gender inequality more than doubles the country's chances of being a fragile state. The data also reveals that promoting more equitable laws, customs, and practices builds security, stability, governance, and economic growth, effectively improving outcomes for all. There have been notable steps in many gains over the past two-plus decades in advancing women, peace, and security principles. And these advances would not have been possible without the dedicated advocacy and moral compass of civil society, which is a vital source of policy analysis, critical perspectives, and essential partnerships. Just as importantly, civil society also holds us, government, accountable to our commitments. Around the world, women leaders and women serving civil society organizations are risking their lives every day to defend democratic values, advance human rights, and build peace in their communities. As we work together to accelerate turning women in peace and security commitments into action, we must take to heart the priorities of local women leaders and take tangible steps toward deepening meaningful partnerships with our civil society counterparts. For the Bureau of Conflict and Stabilization Operations, this is particularly salient as we lead implementation of the US strategy to prevent conflict and promote stability in our priority partner countries and region. Haiti, Libya, Mozambique, Papua New Guinea, and five countries of the Coastal West Africa region, Benin, Cote d'Ivoire, Ghana, Guinea, and Togo. The strategy aims to address the drivers of instability and conflict through long-term support to partner countries' efforts to build resilience and forge a more peaceful future. From enhancing local gender responsive early warning systems and community dialogue to strengthening human rights and economic inclusion, the strategy reflects an understanding that empowering women is a critical part of building sustainable peace in fragile places. I want to underscore that for all of these countries, advancing the women, peace, and security agenda is woven into our innovative approaches in every one of these places. Under the strategy, we have developed 10-year plans for each partner country. These plans make a commitment to more meaningful and deeper partnerships with local governments, with civil society, organizations, and international stakeholders. In effect, the strategy aims to pursue U.S. foreign policy differently by placing greater priority on participatory, locally driven solutions. For instance, we know from hard-learned lessons that it is essential to respect and support the agency of local actors, especially women peace builders and human rights defenders who can drive change in their communities. And similarly, we know that those who are closest and most vulnerable to challenges know best where opportunities for peace and stability in their communities lie. Strong, meaningful partnerships are the foundation for a sustainable impact and effectively addressing the long-term causes of fragility, inequality, and conflict. Just two months ago, I was in Papua New Guinea, a priority partner country for the U.S. strategy to prevent conflict and promote stability. According to UNDP, Papua New Guinea is ranked second lowest in the world for gender equality. While there, I met with local human rights advocates and grassroots organizations. They explained in detail the vital frontline services organized within their communities, including those that aid survivors of sexual violence and expand networks for women's economic empowerment in agriculture. I heard powerful examples of civil society leaders developing local solutions to meet the needs of women and to build more inclusive systems, despite limited resources and opportunities to safely participate in the political, social, and economic sectors of society. I share this example to highlight how important it is for policymakers to recognize, work with, and learn from community leaders and women-led organizations. Civil society groups in Papua New Guinea are playing a crucial role in identifying and responding to the needs of their communities and thereby advancing the core principles of the Women, Peace, and Security agenda on the ground. We must work in tandem with them as we seek to ensure local ownership and foster long-term stability. Overall, in each of the partner countries, we are striving for a shared vision on how best to approach local challenges. We conducted hundreds of consultations to develop the plans under the strategy, and we intend to continue this consultative approach to deepening our partnerships with a wide range of stakeholders as we implement the plans. These partnerships with the local civil society will drive tailored, tangible, on-the-ground solutions that we believe will have lasting effects and address some of the underlying causes of instability, violence, and conflict. Another point I want to touch on today is related to the unacceptably low rates of women's participation and decision-making in peace and security processes. We are too often without the diverse perspectives and innovative solutions necessary to tackle complex and global and local challenges. Within the Bureau of Conflict and Stabilization Operations, we have observed that nearly every conflict is rooted in some form of exclusion. Our experience shows us that inclusion is necessary for durable peace. In practice, this means creating mechanisms within negotiations that actively engage and include voices that are usually excluded from decision-making. We do this by advocating, advising on, and supporting the use of mechanisms such as inclusive selection criteria and decision-making procedures, national dialogues, quotas for direct representation, and support structures for women, such as technical assistance and funding to support representation. We use a gender analysis of conflict lens to define our problem sets and make recommendations. We advocate for women's inclusion in our engagements with our international partners and our partners in the community with our international partners and with parties to complex political negotiations and peace processes. We design and manage programming to support inclusive implementation of peace agreements. Inclusion goes beyond any one institution or a particular decision-making effort. Inclusion has a ripple effect that can be felt for generations. We must catalyze and invest in inclusive processes now to support more resilient communities that prevent crises and conflict in the future. To illustrate further how we are putting into practice our commitment to advancing women's direct participation in decision-making, let me describe some work we are proud to be undertaking with civil society and international partners on atrocity prevention. We are working to advance women's participation in local, national, and global systems to anticipate and prevent atrocities and design gender-sensitive responses to atrocities. We recently partnered with local communities in northern Nigeria to advance women's leadership and decision-making in community-level early warning of potential violence and early response mechanisms. Through this program, communities have developed joint protocols to respond to threats and incidents of violence, including gender-based violence that are specific to the security needs of women. Our local partners are now working to sustain these efforts by supporting the integration of trained female early responders into traditional decision-making forums. Looking more broadly across the U.S. government, the Interagency Atrocity Prevention Task Force is refining and expanding our Atrocity Prevention Toolkit to incorporate conflict-related sexual violence. We are increasing our engagement with civil society networks to work in a trauma-informed manner with survivors. We are also incorporating CRSV risks into early warning, prevention, and accountability options for U.S. diplomacy, programs, and analysis. Put a different way, we will not wait until the outbreak of a crisis before building up and building out our capacities, engagement, and programs. Early warning is meant to enable early action. Consultations with CRSV survivors while ensuring this is done in a survivor-centered and trauma-informed way are vital to developing our response toolkit. And of course, we are working closely with our global partners to consider concrete next steps to prevent atrocities. We are collaborating with governments that have prioritized addressing this issue, U.N. representatives of the Secretary General and civil society, among others. If we wanna overcome the structural drivers of violence, we must prioritize and invest in women's direct, meaningful, and safe participation in conflict prevention at all levels, at the local level, at the regional level, at the global level. Let me end by underlining the vital importance of strong, meaningful partnerships with civil society in addressing the drivers of instability and fragility. My team in the Bureau of Conflict and Stabilization Operations is committed to playing our part and will continue to advance women, peace, and security in every way we can do so. And with that, I look forward to hearing from my colleague, USAID senior coordinator, Bijio, our civil society panel, and I wish all of you a fruitful and productive outcome of your meetings in the week to come. Thank you. Thank you so much, Assistant Secretary Wieckowski, such a pleasure to follow in your footsteps and welcome your leadership at the Bureau for Conflict Stabilization Operations to have this commitment to recognizing that we must invest in women's contributions to peace and security to advance progress on these goals. Thank you. My thanks, I'll repeat to USIP for hosting us today for their steadfast leadership in partnering with the US government. You heard their role over more than a decade in helping to support the US government's commitments and work on women, peace, and security. I know many of the partners here as part of the Focal Partners, Focal Points Network enjoy similar relationships between government research institutions, civil society, and that is such a rich and important relationship that we are so grateful for here in the United States. My thanks to the State Department's Office of Global Women's Issues for your work and in gathering us today for the other Focal Point leads and for all of the work that you do in your countries. We will advance progress only because of the partnerships that we have and so we are very grateful for this ongoing dialogue and opportunity to exchange and reinforce each other's work. It is my pleasure that I was asked to speak on this critical topic of partnerships with civil society. At USAID, we have set ourselves an ambition to partner more with local leaders and organizations around the world. In fact, we've set the target of dispersing 25% of USAID's resources to local partners by 2025. That is a commitment that we're putting more of our resources to local actors so that they are helping to lead solutions to advancing the development, the peace and security priorities that we all share, that we are strengthening with these resources, we are strengthening local systems and we are responding directly to the needs of local communities. This is a commitment we've made across all areas in which USAID works across all sectors and one that we are proud of and that will take a real change in reforming our system to be able to deliver on it in that way. I want to share another ambitious goal that we've set that I hope you will also welcome. So we have committed that across USAID and the State Department that in this coming year in 2023, we will invest $2.6 billion in foreign assistance programs that promote gender equality around the world, doubling our previous investment. And I highlight these two goals given how critical they are to the topic we have here. We know that our efforts are more effective when local organizations and leaders are driving the change, when they are informing and designing the programs and have the opportunity to take that work directly forward. We also know that by investing in gender equality, we will further our goals on climate resilience, on economic growth, on peace and security. The research is there, the rhetoric has been there and now USAID is taking steps to ensure our resources are there. This investment, as I noted, extends across all sectors in which USAID works. And with the gender equality investment, we align these resources and have as part of this a commitment to put local women and youth led organizations at the heart of our programming. And we do this recognizing that by doing so, we can help build safer, healthier, more prosperous communities while supporting the local partners who are on the forefront of these efforts and who will continue to take this work forward. As you all well know, who are living and striving to do this work. And it means, for example, that for USAID, we will be investing more of our peace and security related work in direct partnership with local organizations and we will be investing more of it towards our women, peace and security goals. So for those of you in local civil society organizations, know that the USAID missions in your countries are working to partner more directly with civil society and are working to do more on gender equality. We have created as a resource a new website called workwithusa.org which is meant to help organizations around the world learn how to partner with USAID and know that we are reforming our systems to try to make that an easier process as well. So I start with this because I want you to know that when the US government is standing here with all of you to talk about how critical partnerships are with civil society to advance our women, peace and security goals that we are taking new steps to not only strengthen that dialogue but to also demonstrate how important that is to us by directing more of our resources into this direct partnership with local civil society around the world. Let me give an example of what this looks like in the relief and recovery space. The United States has been a leading donor in humanitarian assistance around the world for decades. And as part of that work, we've been committed to addressing gender-based violence from the onset of emergencies and to partnering and supporting women-led organizations and their role in supporting humanitarian response. We have, in the last few years, renewed our commitment to these issues and have just recently launched the Safe From The Start Revisioned Initiative. This builds on a commitment that we made in 2013 and we have now renewed that and said that we will be doing more to protect all individuals, specifically women and girls, from all forms of gender-based violence and emergencies. Safe From The Start Revisioned, what we're doing with it now is calling on the humanitarian community to not only add to but to change conventional humanitarian response. And let me say that again because I think that's the level of commitment that we are collectively striving for, to not only add to, to not only say, okay, now our humanitarian response will include some more programming on gender-based violence over here and some more partnerships with local women's organizations over here but to actually set the ambition for ourselves that we are changing the conventional humanitarian response. 20 plus years into the Women, Peace and Security Agenda with not enough progress towards the vision of UN Security Council Resolution 1325, I hope you will join me in recognizing and agreeing that that is the level of ambition that we need in our systems now. And that's one of the central tenets of Safe From The Start Revisioned, our recognition that to change the humanitarian, the conventional humanitarian response as I've noted, that one of the key steps in doing that is to collectively shift power to crisis-affected women and girls and to recognize them as experts, providers and leaders. So this initiative includes a commitment that from the start of all types of crises, our response includes a few priorities. First, with the focus on addressing gender-based violence from the onset of emergencies that we are committed both to bringing to scale effective gender-based violence interventions at the field level and to amplify gender-based violence expertise. So to scale the capacity in organizations to be able to do more on gender-based violence prevention and response programming. But in addition to that, the initiative also includes commitment that we increase the accountability to all women and girls in emergencies. The humanitarian response should be aware of and should be prioritizing the specific needs of women and girls in the crisis. And to do that, we recognize that we need to drive increased representation and leadership of women and girls, specifically of women's organizations in decision-making structures and in the delivery of humanitarian aid. We recognize that this is key to effectively meeting humanitarian needs, building resilient communities and advancing transformative change. And this is a key shift for the humanitarian community to actually recognize that women-led organizations are frontline humanitarian responders. They are frontline responders to crises and are frontline responders to delivering relief and recovery. As you know, in countries affected by crises and the local organizations that are here with us today. And we know that you face and these partners face structural barriers to being able to meaningfully participate in humanitarian planning and decision-making and they have limited access to financing. And so what SAFE from the start revision does is just an example of the ways in which the US government is trying to put this commitment into practice to say that we want our humanitarian resources to help ensure that all are free from violence in humanitarian crises. Then we need to put more resources into gender-based violence programming and expertise. We need to be more accountable to women and girls and we need to ensure that women-led organizations are seen and invested in as frontline responders and are at the decision-making table. And I'll say that this commitment is one in which we are both striving to put more of our resources towards these goals and we are encouraging more in the humanitarian community to join us in that same towards those same commitments. And so trying to reform our own process and encourage others to join us in those reforms. So know that we are investing in this work worldwide from Afghanistan to Ukraine from the DRC to Nepal. We're trying new models of doing it. We have a new partnership with CARE that's amplifying women's voice and leadership and transferring resources directly to women-led organizations. We've been funding the Women Peace and Humanitarian Fund in Ukraine and Haiti as examples of a way of directing more resources to local organizations and we're also working to build more of those direct relationships with local organizations as well. So this is just an example in relief and recovery. Know that we are striving to do the same as we look at politics in public life and we look at commitments that we've made through the Summit for Democracy, for example, to invest more in women's participation in politics and civic life and recognize what barriers they're facing and investing in local organizations to help address those, to build the support of local partners in early warning and early response to train journalists on conflict and gender-sensitive reporting to ensure gender-based violence programming is survivor and trauma-centered. So this is a commitment you hear that crosses across sectors. It also crosses into our policy space. So as you will see, hopefully, our new Women Peace and Security Strategy, our implementation plans have been also informed by direct dialogue with civil society and will put at the heart of this critical commitment for the partnerships and strengthen partnerships with civil society organizations around the world. So thank you for the opportunity to share with you this example of the kinds of reforms that we are striving to do. We ask you to help hold us accountable as we continue to try to change our system so that we are partnering more directly with local civil society organizations around the world and we invite other governments, other donors, to join us in this commitment. Thank you. Thank you so much. Is the mic on? Yes, okay. Wonderful. Thank you. I wanna thank both of you for your comments today. Helping us really look at, yeah, these are the drivers of change in this room and we're gonna hear from some of these drivers of change now. And so I want to also let the audience know that we well toward the end of the discussion have an opportunity for you to ask your own questions. So please be thinking about them. So this year's theme is really focused on advancing the adaptability as well as the evolution of women, peace and security as a framework for policy change. Top down, bottom up as we say. It goes both directions. And civil society also creates the horizontal axis. And so we have joining us today both the top down and bottom up and the civil society. So I'm looking forward to the discussion. This is how we're going to do it. I'm gonna ask each one of our panelists a question as I introduce them. So I could introduce them all at once but you would probably forget something I really want you to know who they are. I'm gonna begin right here on my right and I am going to introduce to you Sanam Nagaragi, under Leni who is the founder of the International Civil Society Action Network. She will refer to it as I can. All right, just so I know you well. She has been really a part of the civil society leadership and leads an organization that is active in 40 countries focused on preventing violence and promoting peace and human rights. Sanam has led the groundbreaking initiatives including being a drafter of the seminal UN Security Council Resolution 1325 and I'd be remiss if we weren't going to start there today. So Sanam can we just begin with how in the world did you have a, first of all somebody gave you a pan and you started riding but tell us how did you get engaged in this area? Thank you. Can you hear me? Thank you very much. It's lovely to be here with everyone. This was not a very gendered chair. If I sat back my legs would be dangling on the edge because it's designed for much taller people. So sorry that I'm sitting on the edge here. So if I go back and it's really a pleasure to share the story because so many of my partners who were with us back then are also in the room. For me personally it started when I was 11 years old. I was a child of the Iranian Revolution. I was sort of spat out of the country. I didn't see my father for seven years. My uncles were in jail and the women in my family my mother was in standing in line trying to figure out where my uncles were and whether they'd been killed overnight because there were spades of executions happening at the early start of the revolution. So in a way a lot of this question of how women become the actors when a crisis happens was for me something that I saw in my own family from a young age. And I had this very naive sense of belief that I wanted to avoid other people in other countries going through the trauma of what I had gone through because when your country splits apart or when you have a crisis internally for all of you it's a historical moment. For me it is a perpetual return decade after decade and it's a non-ending story and multi-generational. So that was my initial motivation. I wanted to stop others going through this kind of crisis. I was inspired by what happened in South Africa and the idea of conflict transformation. We were talked about conflict prevention because the genocide in Rwanda had happened in the early 1990s. But I was working at an organization in London and one of the things that we discovered was that the while the men talked systems and structures and theory and concepts it was the women who were talking practical issues. And at one point I remember talking to a colleague of mine and I said, okay so if a conflict happens who is at the front lines dealing with it? Like who's on the ground actually responding? And you kind of put your glasses on and all of a sudden you see women. You see women hiding the men. You see women protecting the kids. You see women negotiating with the security actors and so forth. And in 1998 we had the first international conflict conference on women and conflict in London with women from 50 countries around the world. There were people who had been fighters, women who had been fighters and had come out of that space. There were people who had been victimized. There were women who were peace actors. Four years after the Rwandan genocide. A woman stood up on stage and she started talking about having to think about peace and reconciliation and thinking forward. She was from Rwanda. I later discovered that she had lost 100 relatives and had been picking up body parts. And I sat in that room, I was about 28 years old and I come from a very large family myself and I thought if one person in my family had been killed during the Iranian revolution or at any point would I have the heart to do what this lady did? Would I be the kind of person who would be angry? Would I want revenge? Would I get depressed? What would I do? And I have been very fortunate. I have not had to answer that question personally. But what it did for me was it galvanized me and that was really the moment where this group of 50 of us sat together and said we need a new vocabulary. We need to go and have a new framework, a policy framework. Out of that came the women building peace campaign. It had a policy pillar. I had a very scary lady boss who said to me go to the Security Council and get a Security Council resolution. I was more scared of her than about anything to do with the Security Council, frankly. I came to New York, we had partner organizations. It was very much a civil society led effort with organizations in New York and then this big campaign going around the world asking women in Uganda and elsewhere what do you want? What do you want in this resolution? So the drafting was really a culmination of what came from civil society on the ground. All of us sitting there and I'm a writer so I did have a pen in my hand and doing our version of the resolution and then really taking it to the governments and saying you guys can't deal with civil wars. Our international system isn't designed to deal with internal conflict. You need us, we are building peace, you need our help. And that was the message we went into the council with back in 1999, 2000 and it was Namibia and Bangladesh which were the first countries to come on board. Not the United States, not England which is not the UK, which is my own country. Now the US is my country as well. But none of the Western countries really came on board with it until much later. And when they did, they came and understood women as victims. They didn't understand women as agents and actors of change. And this is why this agenda is so important and so global. Thank you. Thank you, Son. Bina Rubenbois is a poet, educator, mediator. It's on, don't worry. They're running it, we're here. Mediator and peace activist. And she is the founder of the Coalition for Action on Resolution 1325 and Alliance of Women's Organizations working for the full implementation of the agenda in Uganda. She's also the founding executive director of the Center for Women in Governance. Rubina, this is not your first time to USIP nor your last, we're so glad to have you again. You have really decades of groundbreaking work in civil society. Was there a moment that drew you in to this agenda and recognized what you had to do to be a part of it? Could you share that with us? Where did it begin? Thank you. Thank you. In 1980, I was a young woman beginning my life. I had a job, I had a husband and two babies. One was one year and 11 months old, a beautiful baby girl. And the youngest was five months old, a lovely baby boy. And so we had elections when this baby boy was five months. And unfortunately for me, my husband had joined this political party that didn't win the election. And so after that election, this political party became a target of the government. And we had to flee into exile. My husband left first. He was lucky and he just flew out of the country. So I stayed behind with those two small children. And when he left, I didn't even know where he had gone because somebody came and told him late in the evening that if he didn't leave that night, he would be arrested next day and he could be killed. And so in the morning, I woke up without him with my babies and I didn't know where he had gone, but I knew he had gone. So six months later, I get a letter from him. I'm in this place and I need you to get ready to come. The funds on the account should be able to buy you air tickets and you can join me. And so I start preparing to follow him with my babies. And the new president devalued the Uganda shilling. And so the money I had became worthless. I couldn't afford even one air ticket, leave alone two. So I had to leave my country by road with two small children and a suitcase of their clothes. At that time, the border between Uganda and Kenya was not as developed as it is. Now there is only one building with two border posts. At that time, the border for Uganda, there was about a kilometer between the two border posts. So I took a taxi to the border posts and I had to walk that one kilometer with my little baby on this side of me with a suitcase, with baby's clothes, I was holding it and leaving my one year and 11 months old daughter to walk beside me. That distance of one kilometer was too long for her. So somewhere in the middle, she started crying. She started sniffling and then she started wailing. And I didn't know what to do, but I knew at that time that I didn't want any other woman to go through that. And so I went into exile. When we returned from exile, again, I had just gotten my master's degree and I started doing work for an organization that was involved in peace building and there was war in Uganda. Armed conflict between the government and the Lord's Resistance Army. And this organization would take me to Northern Uganda to visit women in the IDP camps. I still see the faces of those women. I still hear them sharing their stories. I still see the faces of the children in the camps. I still see the numerous graves of little children that died by their tins on a daily basis. I would return to Kampala and think about it for a long time. And then this organization did me a favor. They started holding what they called the gender talks every Thursday at four o'clock. And so I would go and attend these gender talks. And then I learned about gender work. And then I learned about what we could do to make the situation of the women in these IDP camps better. And so I resigned a very good job with the Ministry of Finance and went into civil society. And I've never looked back. I'm gonna stop you there because we're gonna take... Because I'm finished. Oh, no, because we're at your feet listening. Thank you so much, Rabina. Sebastian Asorio is the Women, Peace and Security focal point for Chile. Thank you. He's a Chilean Foreign Service diplomat who has multitude of government experience, including your cooperation and development agency working during your national membership into the UN Security Council and with international cooperation. And the UN Security Council and with International and Human Security Division on peacekeeping and the WPS agenda. Thank you for joining us today. Your experience as a diplomat has really taken you from all sorts of perspectives, which we're looking forward to hearing. But how did you get involved with the work on women, peace and security? We're glad we welcome every man in this world. So we're glad to welcome you to this panel. Okay, how about what's involved? It's just by chance. You might hold it a little... Sorry? Just a little close. Okay, like that. Okay, in 2014, when we were part of the Security Council as a non-permanent member, I was working in the back office in Chile. Someone gave me the woman, peace and security issue and started to work in that. At the same time, Chile was working in the second nap. So I involved in the second nap in that moment. But for that year, in 2014, 2015, the nap was taken by the National Defense Ministry, not by the Foreign Affairs Ministry. So the involvement of civil society was really, really little. And we don't ask the civil society too much information. We don't have... How can I say? We don't complain or we don't merge with the civil society in the good way. Just with some academic specialists in women, peace and security, all them women, it's not a need to say. Just three especially... Academics are specialized in the agenda. But for me, and why I think it's really important and it's given me a quite important change was, and it's a little bit personal, my ex-wife who gave me the possibility to understand the structural discrimination and the everyday violence that all women suffer every day. Not just women in conflict, that women in a secure and safe country like Chile, they suffer everyday violence who is structural and remain in many cases in our framework, in legal framework. And she gave me the possibility to read some interesting authors like Judith Butler, Beatriz Preciado from Spain, and the one more I love, Roxana Gay from Haiti. And I think it's Canadian in Haiti. And I think that was changing my mindset and giving me the possibility to understand how deepest is the violence and how deepest we need to research, to look to do real change. The second, back into the world, our second NAP was really limited. We had a problem with our army. We limited the second NAP to our army, and we need to look at this limited plan but take some good points that the military now has, they are really compromised with the agenda. And this is real, it's part of his vision, and I think it's an opportunity for the future. Thank you so much, Sebastian. We're going to come back around to talking about that. Rachel Firth, I feel like we're about 20 years away. I know, it's so far away. Rachel is the founder and managing director of the Global Office Consulting. She's been involved in policy formation for global health initiatives in accordance with the Sustainable Development Goals and has supported the national strategies for maternal and child health in Africa. She has delivered global campaigns, advocacy initiatives in the gender and global health space. Rachel, there's no surprise what I'm going to ask you, but how did you get involved in this field of women and girls? And just a little bit about your organization, since you work both at the local nonprofit as well as national and international. So you're through lying. Tell us about that. I am through lying. Yeah, thank you. Lovely to be here with you all and definitely getting a bit of imposter syndrome on a stage like this and in a room like this. So bear with me. So yeah, I work with... Do you want to put your... Hello, up here. I work with women's rights organizations, institutions and initiatives to design and deliver strategies and campaigns that move issues into policy and funding spaces or to mobilize the public around that issue to build voter support around whatever that issue is. So I've spent a lot of my career working with smaller civil society or women's rights organizations. These organizations are doing work such as midwives in Pakistan who are figuring out strategies to reach villages and women who are cut off from the floods. Local organizations in the US who are fighting to uphold women's rights to family planning and abortion. Climate activists and a lot of other organizations and institutions that are figuring out how to have more impact with their money. So through this work, I've been working with these types of organizations for about 15 years and it's pretty much the same thing that I see over and over again. Great ideas, amazing solutions, powerful advocates, smart women and no money, just no money. And so there's only so far we can ever go, right? With any of this work that's going on, it can be amazing work, but if you're not communicating about that work, then the work's invisible, no one's hearing you. And if no one's seeing you and no one's hearing you, no one's funding you. And so it's no surprise that we've been having the same conversations that we've been having for the last 15 or so years and I'm sure that's resonating with all of you. So I started Global Office with the goal of working with more than one organization at a time because I guess I was bouncing around smaller organization doing a lot of this work and really looking to not only support organizations in doing these campaigns, but to connect across organizations and spaces, the people resources and create partnerships between organizations so that we can have more impact together because women's rights is very low, very lowly resourced as we all know and we are not going to be able to compete against the millions that is being put into communication efforts from big business and right-wing political parties unless we start to get really, really creative in how we communicate around this work. And so I've been working with organizations and networks of organizations to do just that, use the tiny amount of resources that we have to have a greater impact together. And so yeah, I think that pretty much covers what I do. Yeah, no, that's great. Thank you so much. Well, now you've met the panelists and now we're going to talk more about what has been going on. So now I'm gonna come back to you. We've seen over the last, certainly the last decade, a global backlash against gender equality. How do you think the inclusivity of the WPS agenda can be emphasized by engagement with civil society? How do we make a difference? How do we make a difference in civil society? So just to situate where I am right now in terms of ICANN, when I left alert as after I did the advocacy, I came to the States. I worked with Women Waging Peace. I got a call from Swanee Hunt who said, I'd already done a report on how women contribute to peace processes. She said, will you do another report? And I said, unless I can do research, there is nothing new I can tell you. So I led a 15 country study. We designed it to go and look at how women contribute to peace processes. We looked at their role in disarmament, their role in security sector reform, their role in transitional justice and so forth. And that body of work then became part of our advocacy to say, look, this is already happening. How do you draw from the experiences and good practices to make, to standardize it? I went into the UN system. I did trainings. I did, and I kept thinking, oh, you know, if we just give the information to the system, they will do it. After a few years of doing this, it was like, no, they're not gonna do it. You know, we all know this. So I started ICANN. Visaka told me, yes, we need a new organization. And the idea behind ICANN is that what we have is, I have a very small team, but we spearhead an alliance of independent women-led peace-building organizations in 40 countries. We have 100 partners. And some of those partners, like Rabina, are national networks. So it's really a cascading effort. And the whole thing is, I don't need to have an office because she's in Sri Lanka, she's in Uganda, Syria. You know, we have various partners here, which Ruby is there, et cetera. So it's this thing that, it's creating a community which is really important. We need solidarity. When you're working in conflict, it is lonely work. It is dangerous work. Sometimes a bomb goes off and all you, there's nothing I can do sitting in Washington. But I can send a text or I can write and call and say, are you okay? Is your family okay? So our model is personal support and solidarity across the network, professional support. So advocacy, trainings, you know, all the things that I've done, everything that I did inside the UN, as the first gender and inclusion mediation standby team member, it's like, if I can do it, everybody else can do it. So now I turn those into resources for our partners and for our government partners as well. And then the third element was the funding. So we looked around. There was no specific funding for women-led peace building organizations because peace work is political. We believed and I still believe it cannot, these things cannot sit in the UN system. They get politicized. So we set up something called the Innovative Peace Fund initially with the help of the UK and then with Canada and Norway and others coming along. We just hit the $7 million mark. We just dispersed, you know, in seven years, we've dispersed $7 million, 180 grants in 29 countries from $3,000 to $100,000. I say all this because if it wasn't for civil society, this agenda would actually not exist. When you look on the ground in Yemen and you think who was out there negotiating the release of detainees, it was the mothers of the detainees association. When you look at what is happening in terms of election violence in Uganda and who's preventing it, this lady is with her youth boot camps. Right now in Sudan, I was in Sudan when the transition happened. We said women matter. I was back there in January. The international community has completely sidelined women, civil society, all the revolutionary women that were there, all sidelined. They just talked to the guys. Look at what's happened. Look at what's happened in Afghanistan. If we don't listen to the peace actors, and I talk about peace builders and peace, and these are actors, not just generic women, but the ones who risk their lives, this agenda and peace in the world will not take place. So civil society is the heart. It's the engine. It is the commitment. It's the real people who are doing the work. And I'll end with this. Unfortunately, I've been doing this for almost 30 years, and I work with many governments, and every three years I get a new person who becomes my focal point in government X or Y. It's like starting at first grade again. Okay, I'm sorry to say this, right? Civil society has the expertise. It has the history. It has the knowledge. It has the trust in places none of us can reach. When the bombs went off in Sri Lanka, Visakha knew which communities to go into. I went in with her. I didn't go in with the government or the UN. You go in with the locals. This is no longer about state-to-state conflict. Even if they're state-to-state conflict, there's all these other forces. So we can't do this without the ecosystem of civil society, and that's something that we need to understand, that the expertise and the commitment and the care and the trust is there, and they really need to be supported, and we collectively need, because each of us has a different comparative advantage. Thank you. Absolutely. I think you really hit on critical in that critical partnership. Rabina, tell us more. What does it look like day-to-day in the work you did? Sanam just mentioned the youth boot camps. What's a youth boot camp? One of the things that we do, because we believe that for this agenda and the national action plans to be successful, they must be rooted in communities to address the root causes of conflicts in communities. Uganda is a country with a huge youth dividend. 75% of our population are below 35. So it's really young people. It's a young country. And what we experimented with in our last general elections with support from ICANN was to work with the youth that we are already working with because we conduct a five-day residence leadership and peace-building boot camps for young people, and we graduate them then as peace ambassadors. So we got these peace ambassadors together and we trained them in elections observation and monitoring. We had them accredited by the electoral commission and we set up a youth elections observatory in Kampala, the city, which was physical. And it was managed by young people, male and female, but we had a desk for the police. We had a desk for the electoral commission and then we had a desk of what we called eminent youth. These are youth leaders that are in parliament. They are national leaders. And we deployed the youth we had trained in different districts of the country to observe elections. So our youth elections observatory was a mechanism for preventing election-related violence before, during, and after conflicts. I mean after elections. So if there was an early warning signal that they detected, they would call the call center. We had a toll-free line. And if the issue required the immediate intervention of the police, they would report it to the police desk, which was in the center. And then the police would call the district police commander on the ground to provide real-time response. If the issue required the electoral commission, they handed it over to the electoral commission desk. And the electoral commission then would call the district registrar to provide real-time response. So that is how it worked. How do you think the YPS, the youth peace and security and the women peace and security are connected there? We already link youth peace and security with a women peace and security agenda because we realize that the intersectionality between them is very critical for the success of the women peace and security agenda. We look at these young people, many of them are women. More than 50% are actually women. They are female. That's number one. So they are relevant both to youth peace and security, but also women peace and security. At the same time, both youth peace and security and WPS are addressing exclusion. They are addressing inequality. They are addressing marginalization. And the youth in Uganda, and I believe the youth everywhere are labeled. They are referred to as lazy, as entitled, as difficult, as stubborn, causing trouble. And we thought we could change that narrative and get them more involved in constructively in the development of Uganda. And so training them as peace builders, training them as leaders, as local leaders in front of the community governance became very important and so they are mobilizing other young ones and it contributes to promoting WPS as well in our experience. Yeah, you get them very young and you also have the advantage of engaging young men in the whole. That's right. On that note, I'm gonna turn to Sebastian. You were pretty young when you started this. How do you think? Yeah, we were all younger some time ago. I remember you. Tell us so. When you think about the women, peace and security agenda and what you're doing, what do you think are the key parts of the success in Chile right now and what your contribution and engagement of men in this issue? First of all, I think the main good part is we have a government who has defined as a feminist and I think this is a base point that is amazing. Secondly, we have more men compromised with the agenda of women, peace and security but with the feminism and the issue of the need of equality and I think this is the two basis line that give us the possibility to do some deepest changes than a few years ago. In this way, we are working in our third national action plans with three lines, I think three main different issues. The first of all is how we create a plan who respond to the need of the whole territory. We have different problems from security, from the women's security through the country. It's not the same for people in the north of Chile with the certification problems than the southern part. Secondly, we have a wild agenda. We go further than military issues. We are including climate change, obviously. We are including migration and organized crime as a problem. And obviously the peace operation and the participation of Chile in peace operation but more importantly, I think is how we include the gender perspective in the formation of our military and our police. We must transfer the gender perspective in the curriculum, must be the gender perspective part of everyday work in the army and the polices. Yeah, we don't sometimes even get into that, what it takes to have a gender perspective on the security aspect. And yet it is women, peace and security and it's a critical part that often isn't addressed in some of our work. So I'm glad you brought that forward. Rachel, I'm gonna go to you next before I go to the audience. So audience, please be ready and mic runners wherever you are, please be ready. As I watch the clock here a little bit. Rachel, tell us a little bit more about how you have engaged civil society in terms of how you see this adaptation and evolution of the women, peace and security agenda. And what do you think is missing? And you can come back to the funding issue. I know that's big. Yeah, yeah, no, no, that's fine. So yes, one other piece that I should tell you about is that in 2020 we set up a network called Women in Dev, which today is a network of about 10,000 women who are working across all different types of development and social justice organizations. And together we're collectively advocating around transforming funding practices, advancing women's leadership and instilling feminist leadership models. But specifically it's about how we share resources, knowledge, experience, ideas across the ecosystem and also when young women are joining the sector, it being a community that is helping women understand really what it is going to move the needle on GE issues because I think a lot of women come into this sector thinking I want to work with the UN or I want to work with government or WHO. And there's an entire ecosystem of organizations who are doing enormous work at the grassroots level that are not getting the recognition because of the communications and funding issue I spoke about previously. But through this work I have a really great bird's eye view of what's happening across the gender and social justice ecosystem so whether it's gender and climate, gender and health, women, peace and security. And we're all saying the exact same things and we've all been saying it for many, many years. It's about inclusive leadership. It's about localization, getting more money, government accountability. So if we're all singing the same song and we've all been singing it for a good few years, I think we need to be talking more about why it's not working because the situation is getting worse year on year. And I just want to give one example from the work that we do that shows why this is happening. So we work with the International Confederation of Midwives. This is the global representative body for midwifery and they represent the profession in global funding and policy spaces. They have a network of let's say 140 associations all over the world and when I started working with them in 2017 they got 40 grand in funding that year. So how are they meant to represent a global profession that could avert 87% of preventable maternal and neonatal deaths, right? They're the ones who are meant to be representing these organizations in funding and policy spaces and they got 40 grand. So you can imagine how much their communications budget was. So with that teeny tiny communications budget we had to focus all of our effort on just talking to donors. That was it, like everything that we put out, all the communications that we put out was just talking to donors. And it took us four years to go from annual funding of 40K that was probably programmatic to millions, multiple millions in unrestricted funding by year four. But it took four years and at any point along the way something could have happened that destroyed it. There's been leadership and you don't know that you're speaking to. There's been a change over in leadership, whatever. And that's the reality that women's rights organizations are facing all over the world. And it's not going to change unless we're way more radical specifically because we are working in a whole different world now. Completely different world. We were authoritarian regimes ruling the world in 2008 was like 9% and now we're 34, we're screwed. Like this battle has been taking on to different spaces. It's online and we don't have the resources. We've starved civil society of funding for so long that how are we expecting them to now step up in this whole new world where organizations and big business are putting millions into communication and lobbying your governments for the same money that could be going to you. So we need to be getting far more radical or aggressive in the type of funding that we think is going to make a difference on this because otherwise in like another five years, ten years, we're going to be having the same conversation about representation, the need for more money and the need to hold governments accountable. It's too slow and then we have just like a crisis every other week that destroys the gains that we've spent four years, five years making. Thank you. Absolutely. I'm going to turn now to the audience for your set of questions and because we have a short amount of time, I might ask you to introduce yourself and what organization. We don't have time for your commentary even though I know it's really important but if you have a question for one of the panelists or any of them, we're going to take it. If you could just raise your hand and we'll come to, I see two right here and I see a third there and I'll take each one of your questions and then bring it back to the panel. So right here in the middle. If you want mine just standing up so we can see you. Thank you very much. It was very enlightening. Your name please and your... My name is Rokeya Kovir. I am a women's right activist and executive director of a women's right organization and we, from 2007... Can I hear your question? My question is, I was hearing from here and all over the world some critical issues, peace and security, but I have not very recent, you know, for last, you know, eight and ten years or eight... Actually it started 2012. The Rohingya community coming to Bangladesh and now for the last few years it is more and 1.5 million of people displaced and in Bangladesh as such it very, you know, densely populated and we are having humanitarian crisis, environmental crisis, now drug and also arms, all kind of things are happening, smuggling. So now we can see international organizations, they are not coming forward. And in Bangladesh what happened is that women's right organization was getting very little fund, very little fund. As such we know that less than one percent of gender fund, not developed, women's right organization are getting. So how we can see what is the situation because it is... It's a great question. How do we make a difference here? I think the next question is, do you want to stand? Nice to see you. Yes. Thank you, Katrin, and thank you to the panel for very enlightening discussion. My question... Introduce yourself. Yes. I'm Palwasha Hassan. I come from Afghanistan. I recently joined Mina List as program director. I've been working on women's peace agenda for a long time in Afghanistan. And my question is, I guess, towards Sanam more because she has been associated with 1325. One of the things which I see from my experience from one of the most prolonged conflicts that is Afghanistan, that conflicts are not just local dimension. It has regional and international dimensions. And for international treaties and other tools like 1325, I think the obligation and accountability lies two ways. So sitting in capital of United States, I was wondering what are the ways or do anything exist like that to make accountable big countries like U.S., U.K. or other countries who have their own commitment like maybe action plans and others towards other countries where they are involved. How are they, their success or commitment measured is civil society involved here in that kind of accountability? Thank you. Thank you, Palwasha. And please, you have the mic. You have the power. My name is Animo Di. I am executive director of Afia Mama NGO. It means Women's Health. And I am a member of a strategic committee for the African Women Leaders Network in the Democratic Republic of Congo. I was just smiling because the speaker just before me took part of my question on accountability of donors also toward, I would say, population who are benefitting from the donation. And also, secondly, my question to Sanam is how do you see or how can you respond on the question of the nexus between the humanitarian crisis, the political participation of women, and also the sexual and reproductive health and right. Because sometimes funding comes as a thematic, but we have women who sit, if I take the eastern part of the DRC, we have conflict, we have elections coming, and to have women around the negotiation table, they have to come from political parties. How can you advise the challenge of the integrated funding? Thank you. And I'm going to take one more question right here in the pink outfit. Thank you. If you wouldn't mind standing. Hello. My name is Nicola Popovich, director of gender associations, and I wanted to ask the panelists if we have this normative framework now for 23 years, if we know about the lack of funding in women's organization, if we're all singing the same song, if we have a room full with 100 of people working over MPs in security, why are we, why is there such a gap in funding? Why are we, and also the language, funding, it sounds like an altruistic act of something doing, somebody doing us a favor out of altruism. Why is it not an investment in all our future? Thank you. I'm going to begin with you, Rachel, because I think that question was right for you. I thought you'd never ask. There's many reasons that I think that we're not effective in persuading governments and other donors to invest more in women's rights. We, as a global community, like to wait until the village is burnt down before we send the resources for that village, and then we're surprised at why civil society is not more effective. So I think that there's several things. I think that collective advocacy and collective strategies around how you're targeting different donors is something that women's rights, the women's rights community could do a lot better in general. I don't think that WS is probably speaking to the climate activist groups, and everyone's going after these tiny, tiny pots of money, and what everyone needs to be doing, and I think I mean in this context, the focal points from around the world is figure out what your agenda is, cost it, and go collectively to the organizations and say this is what it is that it's going to cost. And whatever budget you've got in mind, double it, and then put half of that money to women's funds in the countries that you're working so that they are actually feeding money into the local organizations who are doing a lot of this work, and who you are going to rely on when shit hits the fan. So let's resource them now so that they can be more effective when the next disaster happens. So I think the one is definitely around collective advocacy, and we're in an ever-crowded communication space, I guess there's like a lot of organizations who are much better resourced than women's rights. You know the statistics on the amount of funding that we're getting for local gender equality work, and they are putting millions into campaigning efforts. And what we'll do is kind of get together and say, okay, let's put about 30,000 to communications and think that it's going to make a difference. People don't even know what W Women, Peace and Security means within some of the governments that you're already working with. So how are we expecting to have any real influence unless we start cranking up the gears a little bit on the volume of money that we're putting to our advocacy and communications work and how we're working together to form a collective strategy around how we advocate to different groups of donors and other partners? So now I want to weigh in on the accountability, I think. Well, there are two things. On the accountability, in this country we have a law called the Women, Peace and Security Act of 2017, and it talks about the fact that if the United States is involved in a peace process, it should include women in the peace process. It's a law. So if somebody breaks that law, whether they are a high-level government official or otherwise, they should be held accountable. Our senior envoy for Afghanistan broke the law. He did not do what the law said, which was to bring women to the table. He laughed at Afghan women. So either if you break the law, you get held accountable. Or some people are above the law. We have to decide what kind of country we live in. And I really mean that because we are talking when this agenda, whether we think, you know, Security Council resolutions, by the way, are international law as well, according to the Charter. When our diplomats do not implement these laws, they are risking the lives of millions and millions of people. One heart surgeon making a mistake or doing something bad and killing a patient can be taken to court and whatever, taken off the register, right? One person mismanaging your pension fund can be struck off. Why is it that there is no accountability for these folks? And I'm sad to say it's mainly men and we know and we see them all the time. And right now, in the case of Afghanistan, it's really dangerous because we are beginning to normalize the Taliban. If the Taliban ends up having a seat at the United Nations, we may as well pack up the doors of the United Nations and go home. Literally. It is done. We are done. So this is not just about Afghanistan. It's about everywhere and we need accountability. That's one thing. On the funding question, when we started our work and we set up the fund, I did a lot of research to see what was available. What is it the donors were saying? They kept saying to us, we don't know who the local women's organizations are. It's hard for us to get money to them. Administratively, we can't handle small grants. So we said, we will do that. We'll do that heavy lifting for you. We'll take the money. We'll do the small grants. We'll do all the legal stuff. And then I went back to England one year and they said, the appetite for risk is very low. And I had a series of my partners from Libya and Nigeria, et cetera. And I kept looking and saying, who's risky here? And then I realized, oh, we're women, number one. Number two, we're kind of brown and black from places that are perceived to be terrorist countries. And when we started to unpack the risk, it was if you're a local organization, you're either incompetent, you don't know how to manage money, or you're corrupt, you're pocketing the money, or you're handing it over to a terrorist. That was the risk, the appetite for risk. I switched that around and I said to them, what is your appetite for trust? Because my partners are trusted and they've built, they've taken 20 years to build that trust. And your $10,000 or your $100,000 or frankly your $1 million is never going to be enough for them to pocket and be corrupt and so forth, because it's their lives, it's their countries, it's their homes. So we need to reframe how we think about funding at the local level. And we need, again, think about the ecosystem because if we're willing to take on the risk and do all the heavy lifting at a civil society international level, and our partners are taking the risk at the local level, don't tell me the money isn't available. We know the money is available, right? So work with us is, I think, what I would say. And frankly, if we don't, this, again, as I said, this agenda is on its knees. We destroyed it with Afghanistan. My organization should not have to be evacuating 1,100 Afghans, which is what we ended up doing. That should have been the role of the governments who said they protected women peace builders and they didn't. So I'm going to shift the responsibility and the power dynamics here. Thank you. Thank you, Son. I'm going to shift to Rubina and to Sebastian because we're nearing the end of our time and I want your final comments as well and in response to our questions from the audience. Sebastian, do you want to begin and then I'll move to Rubina. I'll be quite really short about the money. Naturally, we must spend less in guns and arm in general. So go to this arm and spend more, well, invest more in development. That is a obvious issue. But that might be a compromise of the main countries who produce guns. It's not Chile. It's probably not Uganda. You know what I'm talking about. The second part is accountability. I'm not being more agree with you with the importance of accountability in Romania, in Afghanistan, everywhere. But we need a compromise too with the big countries, with the Rome Institute. Without the compromise with the big countries who are not part of the Rome Institute, it looks weird that we ask for accountability to others if we are not available to do it. So that. Thank you, Sebastian. My message would be that the work that we do counts. It counts. It's effective. It has impact. It touches the real issues, the root causes of the problems and the lives of the people. Whether it is peace-building work in communities or whether it is gender-sensitive humanitarian action. I think we've got to follow your example and craft messages that are positive when we are meeting with funding partners. But I've seen a dangerous trend in Uganda, for example. We used to get funding directly from bilateral partners and I think now the risk appetite is low. But now these funds, the bilateral partners, are giving these funds to UN agencies and then UN agencies give us the money. Now when they do that, of course these agencies have huge capital costs. The running of UN women's office is huge, considered to 10 women's organizations. So quite a lot of these funds are going into... the running costs of these agencies rather than going on the ground to do the actual work. That is a trend that I'm beginning to see in Uganda. But my sisters, my brothers involved in civil society, let's continue to communicate positive impacts over our work. Let's communicate the results. And then when we get the funds, let's use them very, very well and make sure that we are reporting as expected because our work speaks for us more than our wants. Thank you very much. I want you all to... This panel comes to the conclusion today, but it's only the beginning of what I would like to quote here of Sanam, the appetite for trust. This is what this meeting is about for the next four days. Talk to one another, build solid relationships. It's what changes the world for good. So thank you all for your attention. Thank you to our keynoters today and have a wonderful week in front of you. We're so glad you're here with us. Thank you.