 Thank you very much. Good afternoon and good morning. Kind of 12 of our posts joining us today. And let me, I want to present you basically an institutional update that we provided to our council meeting two weeks ago in the interest to bring you up to date on how we're progressing as an organization. I think it's very important to look at this now. So let me let me say that I'll take questions following this program and throughout the meeting although there will be a couple of other presentations before we go into the Q&A. So let me start with the presentation. Some examples of the great work that you all are doing throughout the world every day. Thank you very much for all that you do. It makes me proud and it's a great honor for me to serve as your director general. We had two, three now new member states to join us at the council meeting and one new observer Kuwait. I'm very emboldened by that and I've had it as my goal for a long time to reach 180 by next year. I don't think we'll quite make that but we do 175, that's still respectable. We are moving toward some membership and little by little I'm sure it will happen. Here's kind of where we are at this point. We now have counting both global and internal level three humanitarian emergencies. We've been between six and eight all year long. We have nine armed conflicts from West Africa to South Asia and so we have to do our own. Maybe that's not the right verb to use with humanitarians. We have to continue though the good work that we're doing recognizing that no amount of humanitarian work will produce a political solution but it does save lives and keeps hope alive that we'll get solutions. Also complicated by the number of records setting natural disasters. There's an identity and tribal politics in which we have this strange irony that presidents and prime ministers are trying to protect societies that don't exist anymore because we're all becoming much more multi-ethnic, multicultural, multi-religious, multi-lingual of the trend of the future and it's a double loss because we are putting, they are putting us in danger and they are denying their societies and economies the contributions that migrants always make. So we're heading out toward a global compact on migration. This was decided in the September 19, 2016 UN General Assembly in New York based on the New York Declaration. Two global compacts, one on refugees, one on migrants. This one is well advanced and we have a number of our global compact team here who can answer in greater detail. We are unlike the global compact on refugees which is basically in the hands of UNACR. This is basically headed by the special representative secretary general, a distinguished Canadian jurist Louise Arbor, former high commissioner for human rights here in Geneva. He is going to be the secretary general of the global compact intergovernmental conference to be held in Marrakesh, Morocco in December of 2018. We also have two co-facilitators, the ambassadors of Mexico and Switzerland in New York, Juan Jose Gomez-Gomacho and Yerga Laugher. We also have a great interest, a strong interest by the president of the UN General Assembly, the former foreign minister, the current foreign minister of the Slovak Republic and a lot of others who are involved. We have been heavily involved understandably because we have such an engagement in migration. We supported the drafting and made a lot of contributions to the papers for the six thematic sessions that were held both in New York and Geneva, three each. We have contributed through urging all governments to hold national consultations. We participated in regional consultations and we have also taken on board a prominent civil society consultant paid for by us but independently helping to make sure that civil society's voice is heard. At the stakeholder conference that was held just last week in Mexico in Puerto Vallarta, we had a full day of civil society consultations the day before the actual start taking conference started. We have held our seventh global meeting, a regional consultation process here in Geneva and it was devoted solely to the question of the global compact and then of course the international dialogue on migration both in New York in April and in Geneva in July both sessions were devoted to the question of the global compact. I think the key question for IOM is that of a follow up. This is going to be, I can assure you, a non-binding document will be one that will agree on certain principles, certain commitments that we all undertake primarily devoted to saving lives and ensuring that people can get to the jobs that need to be done to provide the skills that need to be available and to be more and more regular migration less irregular migration and much more attention to the human rights of all people on the move. People ask what is the advantage of being in the UN. I see many getting much more public and media attention because people now understand what that strange acronym IOM means means UN migration. So you now can proudly say to anyone, ask you what do you do you can say I work for the United Nations all of the United Nations is big. What do you actually do? I work for the UN migration agency. So it becomes clear to everyone even for our families and our loved ones and our friends. So I think it's a good thing. Thanks. So again if you go back to 2008 when I came on board as general, I had three principles called the three P's. One was professionalism because we have to become more and more professional. I want us to be the most professional agency in the UN system. Nothing less than that is worthy of us. Secondly I wanted to insist on partnerships. We cannot try to do migration alone and if we are given the lead for the follow-up and the review mechanism for the global compact on migration we will need still a lot of partners. And we are growing partners every day. I mean we have many new observers who came on board at the meeting two weeks ago. But the third one was what I call proprietorship. In other words state ownership of the organization. I didn't realize when I put those three P's together how important they were going to be. And the proprietorship is particularly important because it got us through the working group on budget reform which is a member state working group. The first budgetary increase we had had in about 12 years. 4% year for 3 consecutive years. Staff has gone 1,310,500 member states from 59 to 169 that should say but that's alright. And the budget from a quarter of a million to 1.8 billion. Joe F. He are a new director for resource management and I were talking we had hoped to reach 2 billion this year. But with the cut back in the refugee resettlement program we lost the extra amount that we needed to top 2 billion. We crossed the 1 billion mark the first year that I was here in 2008. So we are continuing to grow. It's an exponential growth and it's not so much the dynamism of your leadership. We are riding the crest of a wave. Migration is now a priority for virtually every government in the world and those for whom it's not a priority they should catch up. Growth in the structure. More and more and I want to compliment particularly our HR colleagues here because you've got here now training in career development is expanding exponentially and it's still not enough but it's so much better than it was. We have a rotation program, midstly popular with us now getting into the habit of telling our fans knowing ahead of time you're going to be in a place for 5 or 6 years, you might have settled down put your roots down but not too deep because it might be painful pulling them out but realize that you're in the cycle of 5 to 6 years like that when I was in the Foreign Service of my country it was every 3 years. If you were a really hardship post say you were in Somalia they'd let you stay an additional 2 or 3 or 4. If you were in Paris or Tokyo you'd better start getting ready to move before 3 years is up because there's a long line up for you. Rotation is working more or less. There will be criticisms of OECD deferrals. Most of them after they go to a post they didn't want to go to they come back and say thank you very much for making me do what I didn't want to do actually very few have said that. We have here gender and geographic equity I have to make a confession here. There's a lot of work to be done it's partly because the way in which we were founded by 12 Western OECD countries in 1551. By the way we had a birthday a week ago today and nobody recognized it. I only was 61 years old or on the 5th of December. But on gender and geographies we have to set this as a goal or it won't happen so we have to have a goal to not only to achieve greater equity but also equity in terms of equity. You can have the numbers and still lack the grades. I was pleased yesterday we had a very good meeting. I'm so proud of our interns here. About 35 or 40 we always have a good meeting yesterday. I was so pleased to see that the geographic and whether the gender equity was great we had about 10 women to every one man but the geographic is improving too so I want us all to make that effort to ensure that we are doing as we should do. I'm going to say something here that's not on the script at all but if you see what's happening now in Hollywood, in big business, in other areas, senior people now are being called to the carpet for bad misbehavior and I think we have to send, I will be sending out a message before the end of the year to all of our chief submission, regional officers and to everybody at Headquarters saying we have once again to be absolutely certain that there is no, start with no sexual harassment no sexual exploitation, no sexual abuse and no gender based violence on our watch. Worst thing we do if you ever, if you're something like this with our beneficiaries, it is extremely bad for the individuals and their families, extremely hurtful. It's also terribly damaging to the reputation of our institution and our ability to accomplish what we're there for. So I'll just say that is one thing we really have to work on and I've talked to Headquarters' suture already about getting a message out. It's just to remind everybody. Excellent, please. Frontier issues. I borrowed that from the first CEB. I thought it was a nice phrase so I used it. I don't know if it's right or not, but it sounds good. So post-GCM follow-up to post-global compact, I'm hoping that they will see the wisdom of having IOM do the follow-up. We have to do three things it seems to me and we haven't structured it yet. We have to make sure that there is some kind of an annual review of the commitments we've made. Maybe it'll be in writing, I don't know, over reporting. In some kind of a global, like a high-level conference every three to five years to measure whether we have really honored the commitments that we entered into in December 2018. The second thing is we would have to try to help those countries who made these high-level commitments but don't really have the capacity to fulfill them to try to help them to develop that capacity. And then thirdly, I see the global compact as a very dynamic process that signing a document in December 2018 is the end of the beginning because you're going to have major issues that are going to be bracketed out. You can't come to agreement on them because countries of origin and destination disagree. It doesn't mean the issues are unimportant. It means they're unresolved. So we have to keep that dialogue going and I would hope that an IOM secretariat would help lead the UN and the larger community including civil society to keep that dialogue going and to resolve some of those issues. So that's kind of how we see it and we'd have some kind of a secretariat and I've even suggested that initially and this should be very popular within the UN, we wouldn't even need any start-up money for that because we could draw down some of the $30 million reserve that we have which was intended to stay at about 6 million and if we get the member states agreement we can draw down from that fund already that's started before we go cup in hand asking for money from the member states. Holistic is going to be extremely important. We have a reputation of being a can do but can't think organization which is totally false and out of date stereotype but we have to impress upon the rest of the UN system that we really do serious policy. We do it all the time. Look at several of our directors here. Our departments are doing policy all the time humanitarian policy, trafficking policy returns all sorts of things. Our whole human resources policy, gender policy but we have to find a way to make it more graphic to them probably by taking on board a senior migration guru whose name would be instantly recognizable and they would say okay they're getting serious about this. Data is going to be extremely important in trends analysis so we become a major, a much more major source of migration data and analysis. Again we'll have to do it in partnership. Some kind of a consortium arrangement. We're already working with Gallup World Poll, the Mackenzie Global Institute, the EIU of the Economist magazine and other name groups. We'll be doing a big conference in January with OECD and UN DESA in New York so that'll be in Paris and then structure reform review that I will leave for my successor because I think it would be unfair to presidents that person that they should come and do what I did when I came in 2018. That's how we got the current structure but it needs to be reviewed now and probably revised. And then this is going to be major because IDPs are bracketed out of both compacts, refugees and migrants. So we will need to do, make sure that we're continuing to be the lead on IDPs which we are in most countries. Economical, good stewards of our member states' monies quick results, accountable human rights, emphasis, etc. And then, but that's basically it. Okay, I apologize for going a bit longer than I was supposed to, but I wanted to give you more or less the same briefing that we offered to the council so that you have the same information. I apologize to our colleagues online because they may not have been able to see the slides. Okay, so I think I'm supposed to move on now and turn this over not other than our director of human resources, Madison Division. Yes, thank you. Thank you, DG. When I was asked today to speak a little bit about HR, I thought about what would be a topic of interest to you and we have many topics to choose from. I'm very proud that we have made a lot of progress over the past year and years in different areas including on different policies, benefits and entitlements, our services in Manila and Panama in occupational health as well. We are about to deliver on mental health strategies. So a lot of work has been done and I chose today to maybe talk about staff development and learning because I think it's a topic of interest to all of you and if you would be interested to read a little bit more about what we have done and what our plans are for the year to come then I encourage you all to read the HR strategy 2016 report which I present to the member states. This strategic framework also gave us a lot of information or direction around staff development and learning and together with the training advisory committee, I don't know if everybody knows the training advisory committee is a committee that helps us providing direction in terms of spending of our budget. It's quite a substantial budget and we invited representatives from the country, offices, regional offices, HQ departments to help us set priorities with regards to organizational requirements. So just to let you know, DG already spoke about it thanks to your support and support of the member states with regards to budget reform. We were actually able to double our budget, the training budget over the past few years and the training advisory committee as I said has helped us to ensure that we use that money in order to set priorities. So you can see that we have reached about 7000 staff with that money last year and I think this is not actually all the staff that have received training because these are only the people whom SDL knows of and have been registered somehow. So usually through a cost chair agreement so we believe there's many more people that have benefited from training but these are the ones that we know of. So I think in terms of money per staff we made great progress and I'm very thankful to the member states and the support of senior management. I'm also very proud on the SDL team in Manila, Panama and here in HQ that they were actually able to spend all that money, which has not always happened in previous years and every year at OSI budget committee regional directors asked me greet what have you done with the money and if I can show that I spend it then we can have a little bit more. And it's a great effort to do so because a lot of the money is decentralized to regional offices and so it's a constant follow up but we have been spending 100% of this training to the benefit of staff. You will also see that the majority of the staff trained are those in the field. We only have a very small headquarters and we want to reach the maximum number of staff in particular national staff in the field. So I would like to ask Daniel, our head of staff development and learning to talk maybe a little bit more about the resources that we have available in terms of staff training and then Divina will just talk a very little bit about our learning management specialist. Just a little bit, only a few minutes about our new learning management system initiative through which we hope to reach even more people particularly those in fields and those in remote locations. So Daniel, over to you. Well thank you very much. I would like us to take a few minutes to explain a little bit what we've been working recently and I mean our main priorities work for staff so we hope that everything or the things projects that we're moving forward are actually of benefit of use particularly because we try to divide them into different modalities so you will see here four different modalities of these training options. We're going to eat along each of it but just to let you know we've been working in partnership with the divisions on development of e-learning content so you might have already taken the ethics and content course and some of these other initiatives which we've been working recently. We're also partnering with other UN agencies to get content which is also available in our e-learning content from UNICEF and High Commissioner for Human Rights. We're also happy to mention that this year we have rolled out the project management training as a four day training package with the support of the regional offices and we continue with the rollout of the project development training and other initiatives such as the cross-barchal communication training which we just recently piloted. These in addition to other thematic trainings, face-to-face trainings that are conducted in partnership with the various divisions with the office of the Ombus person and some others. We continue also with other innovative initiatives so in staff exchange you might have heard of which is an activity that we've been carrying out since 2014 focusing on various areas such as training for RMOs, HR colleagues, procurement and other thematic topics and this is basically an opportunity for national staff, diverse staff which is our priority to basically travel to a different mission, different location, learn with a coach and then return to their own country and bring back that knowledge. So this is something that we keep working on and we will continue investing in this year. In terms of other additional resources, you might have received some of the monthly messages. One, our SDM monthly message on training opportunities and secondly, share and inspire which is an initiative that we have been doing as an innovative approach to training. So we're basically sharing what IOM is doing, missions worldwide because we have already a lot of great initiatives so we want staff to hear about them and hopefully replicate them within their own offices. We also have some other initiatives on training so one of which is called elements of effective learning. This is a training tool which helps colleagues in order to develop training programs that meet the specific parameters. So before I give the floor to my colleague, I just would like to mention what is coming up for next year. So briefly, we're pleased to mention that we're towards the end of the development of the leadership assessment program which will help shape the basis of the leadership program, the training. This will be presented to senior management for inputs and we will make sure that the training basically addresses the needs of the staff from a diverse point of view and also when recruiting geographic and gender issues. We're also pleased to make sure that we're reviewing the chief of missions training package in order to make sure that we have a way of measuring the impact for our chief of missions and how this actually works in terms of their performance and work. The induction program, I think many people will be very pleased, this will be launched in the first semester of 2018. It will be a combined blended program online and also activity based program. And last but not least, and we have some colleagues this week attending this people management training of trainers which will be a two-day training package focusing on soft skills for project managers on basic communication standards, parameters, negotiation and also how to motivate and encourage staff. So this is in a nutshell what we've been working on and there's another initiative which we've probably have been hearing off, which is called I Learn. And as we have some issues that are a part of it yet of this program, so I'd like to make, I'd like to ask the leader to present to me. Thank you. Some of you may have already heard of I Learn but others may not have, so before anything else I would like to share a brief outline of what exactly I Learn is. Essentially, you can think of it as an online learning hub. So one place where all staff can go to access IOM's full training catalog, complete various learning opportunities and which allows IOM to keep track of training progress and any training taking place globally at any given time. To share some numbers with you on where we are with the rollout of I Learn we started in January 2017 and we have now reached 19 locations globally and access to over 3,000 staff. The aim is to provide access to about 6,000 staff by the middle of next year and rollout I Learn to all of IOM by the end of 2018. If you are already interested and if you would like some more information please do contact us. Our contact details are available on the next slide and we would be very happy to work with you. Thank you so much. Thank you very much. Good afternoon. All the colleagues are speaking on behalf of the SAC or better said I should say Global SAC because now we have a Global Staff Association and we are very proud of it. During the last download meeting we had a bit of an update where the G-SAC was coming from and where we stood with the process of elections. There was one important point that was still pending which was the approval by the council of the position of the chair and we're very happy to inform you that this was finally approved in December and in December this month and so for the first time with the support of the administration and the member states we will have the Global SAC will have a chair that will be fully supported by the administration. That's quite an important achievement for all of us, for IUM as a whole because for the first time not only we will have a SAC that will represent all the staff worldwide regardless of the grade so P-staff, G-staff, national staff will be represented by the Global SAC but also in line with all other UN agencies we will have a chair that is supported by the administration so we will have a full-time person who will be dedicated completely to achieving the objectives of the Global SAC so quite an important step for all of us and we did not prepare our current presentation but we want to still remind some of the key dates that we have had for the setup of this Global Staff Association on 24th of November the Global SAC Election Committee has informed you of the next steps and so we wanted to take this opportunity to remind you what these next steps are and the key dates basically the process for electing both the chair of the Global SAC and the members of the G-SAC has started this process will finish in March 2018 when the Global SAC will be formed in place so by the 22nd of January 2018 those who are interested to run as the Global Chair and also as members of the committee will have to put forward their candidatures to receive their votes for the election process the G-SAC will be formed by 19 members there will be as we said one G-SAC chairperson that will be elected by all the G-SAC members the Global SAC members so not only by the 19 people that will be part of the G-SAC but by all of the members and the person will be elected for 36 months for a no renewal mandate there will also be 18 G-SAC members who will be elected in 6 electoral regions for a period of 2 years so we have divided let's say the Global 6 electoral regions Africa, Asia, the Pacific the Americas and the Caribbean Europe and Central Asia Middle East and North Africa and headquarters so each of these electoral regions will elect 3 members for the G-SAC but all the membership will be elected the chair so the election of the chair is not limited to the members but is open to everybody so just to finish this is an invite and encouragement for all of you who are interested in representing the staff and in defending the rights the instances of the staff to run either as chair if you have the ambition to lead the first G-SAC ever of I-U-N or as members in your electoral region it's quite an important side quite important achievement and we're all looking forward to the setting up of this new committee thank you we have a moment now to open the floor for field missions and for headquarters colleagues if you have comments or questions if there are any questions please allow a moment for the microphone to start up this is IOM New York as usual we appreciate the town hall meeting it comes very timely a few weeks before the end of the year and helps to set us all on the same page as we get ready to start a new work that's it let me appreciate your presentation and make maybe three points related to the Ferris Barth which is about the council and I would like to make reference to the adoption of the Resolution 1350M supporting IOM engagement in the GCM process and asking IOM to continue to engage and play a central role in the follow up review process the good thing about this resolution that it came with 100% support of our member states it happened shortly before some of us including yourself left to go through Barakta and galvanize the support that we heard there which came in an overwhelming manner and caught in your words many of us including yourself we were humbled by what we heard there and this will also equip us well as we get ready for the negotiation this year in New York and we make sure that we will put it to good use second on the issue of the membership I think this is really not about the numbers you mentioned 169 member states this is more and more about the relevance of IOM which is represented by our global footprint but also by how many member states and how close we move to the reversal membership again both the global footprint of IOM but our closeness and proximity to a universal membership will position us very well as we enter into the negotiation phase I know your target is to reach 175 member states by the next council and that would require a lot of work from many of us including IOM New York which will do our part on this. The set was related to the IBM which proved to be very helpful and recognized as a global process that contributed well to the consultation phase and it puts fit into the stock taking meeting and I'm glad to report on your agreement that the next IBM will be hosted here in New York sometime in March, dates needs to be agreed let me finish by just one quick announcement that on the 18th of December we are celebrating the International Mayors' Day we are honored and privileged to have you joining us here at that date and let me announce and confirm that the president of the General Assembly and the secretary general of the UN will also join you both they have confirmed it and that signifies the relevance and the importance that the UN system as a whole attached to migration over to you. I think that maybe before we continue or before we conclude actually we have an important part of the ceremony today and that is that we would like to inform everybody about the long service recognition of staff members we have a number of members as we all know who have been with the organization for many years we are very proud to recognize the long service of our dedicated staff and there are a number of who have reached milestones within the organization certificates are awarded to staff on reaching 10, 15 and 20 years of service and plaques are given to staff members with 25 years of service and above and L3 duty stations that the discretion may elect to distribute certificates for staff members at the five year service interval and so while IOM has made awards previously in the last few years this exercise was not completed and so this year we are restarting the awards process for staff members who have reached service milestones in 2017 and given the high volume we have almost 600 awards in 2017 alone it's unfortunately not possible to address the backlog for all the colleagues who have reached the long service milestones in the past few years so HRM in collaboration with colleagues worldwide will now continue to monitor the long service awards to ensure every eligible colleague receives an award in the future at the appropriate milestone so this year I think we have to catch up a little bit with the past two years where this wasn't done so by this time all offices worldwide should have received the 2017 certificates for distribution however the delivery of the plaques will take place in the next few weeks so following today's town hall we will present the awards to our colleagues and headquarters but we encourage regional and country offices to also present their awards at moments when it's suitable in each of your missions but I would like to congratulate all 2017 awardees introducing the awards of course is our longest serving member IRM chief of staff who received her recognition for 35 years, 36 years so I think that let me just say that you know we haven't done well by awards under me there wasn't more of an awards program when I came but I wasn't sure I wasn't quite sure about the criteria I wasn't sure how one so many good things in Iowa very hard to sift it down to a precious few and so I was uncomfortable with it and I kind of let it wither on the vines so to speak but the long service awards we've always kept I was reminding the interns yesterday that these are very important awards these are points in your life I never understood until my mother died why she kept all of my grades from the time I entered school my first grade my first grade report card she still had because she recognized more than a lot of us do perhaps that these are all marks along the pathway moving you toward something hopefully ever better and ever greater in the interest of humanity et cetera but the awards are very important for that reason people do and I go around the world seeing our country missions and our regional offices and I see a lot of our colleagues do have these awards framed and posted in their offices I think that's a good thing so I'm very happy to and very honored to be able to present these awards I guess we'll proceed to distribute them now right first we want to say goodbye to the audience oh our colleagues in the field look I always say I'm very much a field person I've been in this business for next year 55 years and 40 of those years I spent in the field so I'm very much a field person and we know where the work really gets done and we thank all of you and through you all of our other regional offices and field missions around the world thank you very much and a very very happy holiday and happy new year to you all thank you very much for all your service