 Welcome to today's IID debates event looking at dimensions of racism and anti-racism in development sector storytelling. My name is Juliette. I'm the Events Officer at IID and really delighted to have been part of the organizing team for today's event. I'm going to be on hand throughout the next hour and providing some technical support. So if you do have any issues at any point please do get in touch with me via the chat. That's it from me on housekeeping which means I now have the delightful job of introducing Gabriella Flores-Zavala who is a senior strategic engagement and communication specialist and our brilliant moderator for today's discussion. Gabriella over to you please. Thank you very much Juliette. On behalf of the International Institute for Environment and Development a very warm welcome to all of you who join us for this very special edition of the IID Debate Series a narrative for change how racism and storytelling can impact development. My name as Juliette said is Gabriella. I'm a senior associate at IID and it is my pleasure to be the host of today's event. Today 17 October is the international day for the eradication of poverty and it is not a coincidence at all that this event takes place today. For many years as all of us know the aid and development sectors have been criticized for perpetuating racial stereotypes and bias in storytelling. Some organizations many of whom are present with us today are beginning to acknowledge and address the dimensions of racism that exist in their development narratives but we need to do more. We need to explore more closely these challenges and explore potential solutions and as communicators in the development sector we need to take a hard look in the mirror and continuously take a hard look in the mirror to understand if our storytelling is helping or hindering our efforts to deliver change in the countries and communities that we search. This event is part of IID's work on race and racism which stems from IID's recognition that addressing racism is inextricably intertwined with its mission to help build a fairer more sustainable world. As I know that we're all keen to hear from our brilliant speakers I'm going to ask the lovely Juliet to drop a couple of links on the chat for those of you interested in finding out more about IID's progress today. I'm now absolutely delighted to introduce four incredible women in the development sector women of color in the development sector who will be sharing their knowledge and experience with us. First Natalie Larkin is an advocacy and engagement manager at IID and I hope you forgive me for reading out loud her bio because I don't want to miss anything. She leads IID's work to address racism in internal discourses and external narratives about sustainable development. Her work builds on her experience designing and delivering strategies that engage Black people and people of color in environmental and development lobbying and campaigning. She is co-author of IID's report, Discomfort to Discovery, Exploring Racism and Anti-Racism in Development Narratives. We are also pleased to have the great Joan Okitoy. She is a freelance communicator and a part-time writer interested in telling the stories of women of color in hashtag global death and on how these women are reclaiming their space in a sector of racial injustice. She will tell us more about global death in a moment. We are excited to have Marielena John who is the senior racial justice lead at UN Women. Her current work concentrates on developing an organization-wide approach for applying an intersectional racial justice lens to UN Women's global programs and policy efforts. She brings to the position a special interest in the role of creative arts and she is also the author of the novel Unvernable which explores race, class, gender, and resistance to enslavement in the context of formerly enslaved and colonized people. And finally we are thrilled to have Sheila Patel who is a bit of a legend in the sector and the founder and director of the Society for Promotion of Area Resources Center, Spark, an NGO that has been working since 1984 to support community organizations of the urban poor in their efforts to access secure housing and basic amenities and seek the right to the city. Sheila is also one of the founders of Slam Dwellers International, a transnational social movement of the urban poor whose board she previously shared. Before hearing from our first speaker, we would like to do something that everyone loves, that's right, a Mentimeter word cloud and Juliette is putting the instructions on the screen right now. Thank you Juliette. We recognize that talking about race and racism is complicated and oftentimes malicious all sorts of feelings and reactions from all of us. So to check in with ourselves before we start, we invite you all to include one word about how you are feeling as this event starts. Thank you very much. Let's give ourselves a minute to respond. I'm going to add my word myself. So Juliette, if there are enough words, shall we start having a look? Interesting, curious seems to be what's popping up more, interested, excited, inspired, hopeful. Well, I know we won't be disappointed. We got another word in the chat from someone who probably can't access mentee telling us they feel blessed. Thank you very much for that. Really good to see all this positive feeling as we start this super interesting and important discussion. So while we finish filling in and perhaps having a look at the work lab, I would like to invite Natalie Larkin who will share with us some key insights and findings from her research into race and racism in development storytelling. Natalie, over to you. Thank you, Gabriella. Welcome, everybody. I'm just going to talk you through a few slides and then we can get into the nitty-gritty of the conversation. If you could go to the next slide, please, Juliette. So just by way of a little bit of background, IID has been working on this topic of anti-racism in storytelling and broader discourse since about 2020. We worked with an academic to produce an anti-racist narrative analysis framework. And what that did was allow us to have a analytical tool that we could use to actually analyze pieces of our content. And so we worked as an institute to talk about what that framework should include and to validate it, I suppose, to some degree. And as part of that, we had a really rich institute-wide conversation about anti-racism and racism, both sides of the coin. And we were thinking about how it showed up in IID storytelling, but also in the storytelling of the wider sector. We used the word narrative and storytelling in different ways at times, but it's important to note that we were talking about our external storytelling, but also our internal discourse and the language and the narratives, the system of stories that we had. So we used narrative thinking about the entire, I suppose, sets of beliefs and the world views that make up all of the stories that we tell when we look at them as a whole. So we put the framework together. We worked in small groups to analyze four samples of IID content that we've actually published. And I'm going to just share a little bit about that framework and insights from the process. If you go to the next slide, please. So the framework had six dimensions. I'm going to very briefly talk you through them. One was color blindness. And this was essentially a dimension that said, okay, at the moment, our narrative is being blind. It's not really recognizing and acknowledging the racial injustice that sits within and beneath the inequality issues that we work on in sustainable development. And those could be racial injustices that are very present and contemporary, but also racial injustices from the past. And it was really apparent that there was a key issue there. And I'll talk about that in a bit more detail. We talked about the white gaze. This was a dimension that was really looking at storytelling where we were always comparing the ways of organizing society, that affluence and lifestyles of majority white Western countries, we would compare and construct and contrast them with countries that had much lower incomes, countries dealing with extreme poverty. And of course, countries that were in fact majority black, even though we often avoided thinking and talking about the way that race really polarizes affluence and poverty. So we talked about the white gaze. We talked about savourism in storytelling, which we're all much more familiar with. We talked about being West centric or Euro centric for those of us that are based in Europe and having storytelling that always centered and prioritized European ways of understanding the world. As our dimension also included a, so our framework also included this dimension of neutrality. It linked very closely with not being able to talk about racial justice within our work, but it actually applied to things like data. So we would use things like GDP or the SDGs, these big metrics and targets in ways that are very neutral and never able to really pick up or speak to the nuances of racial oppression and how that can impact on a country's position within an index, for example. And lastly, one of the dimensions was exclusion. This sense that our storytelling can be quite exclusive in relation to authorship and who gets to tell stories and who has the resources to tell stories, but also inclusion in how selective we are, what type of stories we tell. Do we tell stories about national liberation struggles that had huge contributions made towards health or vaccination or tree planting? So we had these measures and not only were they useful in helping us understand our storytelling, they really have led to some rich discussions. So if you go on to the next slide, please. So these conversations were very broad. We covered a lot of ground. They were extremely productive for us as an institute. And so it's really hard to sum up the nub of the findings. But what I did want to do was just share maybe our top three or most regularly discussed top three insights just to help kick the conversation off. So what we really found as a useful insight is this sense that our storytelling is not recognizing racial injustice. And I mentioned this as I described the dimension. We're not talking about, for example, the ways that financial flows in climate are quite racialized. We're not reaching majority black countries or organizations with those funds. We're not talking about the fact that governance has been quite seriously disrupted in, for example, East or West African countries. And much of that is closely related to the colonial experience in those countries. So where there are quite profound racial injustices are directly related to the inequalities in development, we are not recognizing them. And that silence actually is a big part of perpetuating racism. We talked about Saviourism and that there was a big insight that the Saviourism that we were uncovering was not necessarily related to service delivery in the way that NGOs in our sector have often discussed Saviourism in their storytelling. Instead, what we found was that we were positioning ourselves as the Saviour in relation to thought leadership. In relation to our partnerships, there were still huge power asymmetries in our work that were widespread but were kind of glossed over and ignored. So there were some key insights there that were very useful. And I think, you know, being a remiss really not to draw out this insight that many of the themes that we talk about in our work and lots of the language we use to communicate our work is of course really Eurocentric. We do have English as our majority language. We do use quite Western concepts when we're thinking about knowledge creation and storytelling. And that has really sparked some very lively and interesting conversations for us in the Institute. So just a few key insights there to kick us off. And if you go to the next slide, just to close before we go into the conversation as we're coming together here in a webinar with people from lots of different organisations and places, we really, I really wanted to touch on this point that as the International Institute for Environment and Development, we were aware that our internal system of stories, our narrative, is really closely connected to the language and the framing of the wider sector. So there's a real interdependency between us as an Institute and the wider sector as we think about how we shift this narrative and we start to tell stories that disrupt and start to challenge and some of these issues around racism and coloniality and the way we describe our work. We really wanted to think a little bit about what type of opportunities there are going to be going forward to continue reflecting and discussing this topic and hopefully and there'll be some opportunities to continue the conversation that we start today. And I think I mentioned earlier, you know, when we have this conversation, we're really keen to explore the external storytelling, the blogs, the videos, the reports, but also the internal discourse, how we report, how we monitor, how we write strategies and fundraise and the stories that get told in those types of documents. So just hoping that some of those points can be interesting to get us into the rest of the conversation. Thank you so much, Natalie, for so generously sharing with us the insights from your research. Fascinating. I think I was, I took away two key things and one is data and evidence and how we as a sector as communicators may always want our communications to be evidence-based, but are not necessarily reflecting so much on what it conceals in terms of the power dynamics that are driving the continuation of racism in the sector and further and beyond. But also, you know, the role that communicators can have in shedding light on what we don't see and on what we need to see in order to use our work to sustain the power shift needed in our sector. But anyway, you probably don't want to hear much more from me, but from our great speakers. So I'm going to invite Joanne to come in and perhaps based on the work that you do with GlobalDev, maybe Joanne, you can give us a bit of a temperature check on where you are seeing the development sector in terms of its work on this agenda. But maybe you can start by telling us what GlobalDev is first of all. Thank you. Yeah. Thank you, Gabriella. And it's a real pleasure to be with you all. And thank you, Natalie, also for, you know, giving us a taste of what the report is all about and how it's really touching on so many of the issues that we see also in the GlobalDev Communicators Connect. So the GlobalDev Communicators Connect is basically a monthly meeting for communicators or people who are working also in programs, but just want more honest, in-depth conversations about, you know, working in the power asymmetries and the global inequalities which characterize the sector. And, you know, we welcome both communicators from the majority countries and by majority countries, I mean the global south and also from the minority countries, the global north, because the whole point is to just not reimagining how we can communicate differently in the sector and also to create a community where when you're trying to challenge the ideas or when you're trying to expose the racism that is in the sector, in the way that we tell stories or in the language that we are using, you know, communicators don't feel alone because then you're more likely to feel like, you know, this liberation is for all of us. And so this monthly meeting happens within the Healing Solidarity and the Healing Solidarity is basically a platform and it brings together practitioners and international development who are interested again in reimagining the sector. So it was very telling, Nathalie, when you were talking about, you know, some of the issues such as, you know, not recognizing the racial injustice and the stories that we're telling because it takes me back to different sessions that we've had because we started end of 2020 with my friend and colleague Jennifer Lentfer, some of you might know her. We started, you know, the Connect series and one of the exercises that we do is we basically, when we have communicators, we basically invite them to also pinpoint specific words in the sector which they think are problematic, you know, and to sort of shed even more light, you know, so words like beneficiary will crop up, you know, capacity building will be described as sort of like a bottomless pit that is never filled, it's just ongoing. Or the field, what is the field, you know, I'm working on the ground, what's the ground, are we not sitting on the ground or standing on the ground, that type of thing. So you're able to start seeing that these are things that communicators in the sector are already actually thinking about and especially after, you know, the Black Lives movement went global in 2020. These are things that, you know, that they're already thinking about and it seems like for some of them, it was even just about the timing when they could start talking about these issues. They needed an outlet and some organizations were not ready to provide that space for them. And right now, you know, there's a sense from some of the communicators that there is a space that's sort of opening up for them to talk about it, but not necessarily to change how the machinery of the communication is actually being done. And I say that that space is yet to be expanded because my colleague Jennifer held the September Connect where she basically told the communicators that in this session we're inviting rage to the table. So we're looking at the things that we want to destroy or we want to eradicate in the sector and we don't want to see it again. And some of the comments, I just pulled out like three different comments from the communicators. It's very telling. So one of them said that one of the things they want to eradicate is stories and communications which are positioning donors and funders as heroes or centered specifically on them. You know, so there again, you see that the whole narrative of the donor having a magic wand and coming in and the donor sort of being glorified is still very rife. Another input went donor messaging that says how grateful a person is for our programs and it's usually a little child and that they will be compassionate, they'll be grateful for your compassionate support. And the person actually said that it literally makes them physically ill. And then another one is rereading the report released by the UK Parliament saying that there is definitely racism in the UK development sector. A bit surprised that yes, so finally the government's technology, but you know, the fact that despite the recommendations haven't been made, the government still has not made an actual concrete plan to address the racism that in the sector. And then the last one is, you know, recognition that the sector is racist and DI trainings are happening in different organizations, but it's mostly to tick a box, but the work of shifting the power is yet to happen. So just looking at the comments about things that people would like to completely destroy in the sector. And this is just September last year and it was one of the sessions, and not last year, but like this year, just last month, it's just very telling of where we stand as a sector and the amount of work that we still need to do. And that, you know, it's so much about recognizing that we need to sort of find a pace to slow down and to see, as my friend, Deepa Ranganathan, she's a communicator as well. She says that white supremacy is not the shock, it's the water. It's the water that we are swimming in and we have to recognize that so that we can actually move towards change. Yeah. And I'm going to stop there for now. Thank you so much, Joan, for sharing with us those very sobering reflections from where the sector is. It's great to see that there is a space where communicators can come together and that we are building that shared understanding of the challenges because that's the first step towards working on solutions and really keen to follow how this evolves and what we can all learn from your conversations. Let me call on you, Maria Elena, now and perhaps move a little bit sideways onto the world of international organizations, where change takes place in a different way, let's say. Could you tell us a little bit about your role and maybe what you are beginning to find in terms of this agenda at UN Women? Thank you so much, Gabriella. It's a real pleasure to be here this morning, a privilege, this morning, this afternoon for you and Natalie, particularly to you, thank you for inviting me. Yes, indeed, change occurs in a very, very different way at the UN. It is not exactly an agile, quick-moving structure because you have 193 governments to agree to anything significant and obviously they are not going to agree mostly to things that are not in their interest so you see where that will create a lot of bottlenecks in spite of the majority of the countries at the UN wanting to do certain things. There is also the power structures that we're talking about that affects that deeply. It should also be said that the UN came to being in the middle of the colonial era and its structures reflect and maintain that colonial structure that includes the 2030 development agenda. I believe many people here will be familiar with that in terms of calling it the SDGs, the Sustainable Development Goals. We had a last report by an independent expert. In fact, her name is Special Rapporteur on Contemporary Forms of Racism. It's a longer title. It's very, very scathing and she serves the function to counterbalance that conflict of interest of states who will be trying to maintain their position. That is to me a very good form of checks and bounds. You have these very dedicated activists or activists, academics who really get into the part that the UN can't necessarily get into and report on it to the UN. Her report talks about the SDGs and she specifically says that it preserves colonial injustices and perpetrates the domination of powerful nations over peoples and territories that was subject to historical colonial extraction and preserves structural racial discrimination within nations. We have it pretty clearly stated in the UN at one level that this is the state of affairs. In spite of, I don't want to skip over some of the extremely positive racial justice work that the UN has been a part of and that the member states have pushed and the agency's funds and programs like UN Women although UN Women is a newcomer but historically agencies funds and programs have played a very positive role in spite of this scathing recognition of how it actually works in practice. I wish I could go a bit more into that but it would really take too long so I just want to say that since the murder of George Floyd as it seems like most of us were able to take action that we weren't able to take before. So at that point the majority of the UN funds and programs that includes UN Women, UNDP, I just referred to the New York based ones so UN Women, UNDP, UNICEF, everyone knows UNFPA which is the population and few others. With the exception of the Human Rights Organization we were not able to have an in-depth focus on racism until or have an intent to have an in-depth focus on racism until 2020. It's not that we don't work with racialized groups around the world, we do, we acknowledge and we interrogate racism when we work with these groups and that is in the concept of leaving no one behind which is one of the principles of the sustainable development goals and some of our offices can even go a bit deeper such as in UN Women with Roma women with Indigenous women or migration colleagues have just done a really strong piece that goes really deep but in the majority of cases when we're working with these groups we are focusing on alleviating the immediate and urgent manifestations of racial injustice as opposed to tackling the root causes of racism itself but now we have this opportunity and I would say the opportunity is to lean in hard and do two things one break the silos of which UN Women organizations tend to operate in and the mandate of race was quite owned by design of the UN but to break that in the way that gender equality over time over the years has actually been mainstreamed in a pretty significant way into all of the UN and if I can brag a little bit on my organization in the last 10 years 12 years we played a big role in that so one is breaking the silos two is breaking the silence that dominates so much of our anti-racism narrative or our overall narrative and to go deeper and get to the root causes of racism it's still some ways off I think we can admit and then to shift our programming to respond to that so it began with really the internal conversations that driven by rank-and-file staff of the UN in some cases certainly in the case of UN women also by the executive leadership but it was really staff driven clamoring for change clamoring to talk about the pain that they experienced within the UN as people from the global south people of color um those conversations primarily concentrated on the workplace and addressing racism in the workplace and we have about two years of working on through a senior advisor on diversity equity and shared leadership and she has made incredible strides in the last two years on this we also had the establishment of the UN women black caucus a very active staff organization that plays a very strong advocacy role with HR in particular right now as we're looking at the internal policies and programs that will alleviate some of these very structural issues in how people from the global north are able to get into the UN and to advance there and without those opportunities for people of the so-called global south but now we are we are building on that with the establishment of the post that I'm encumbering it's building on that and it's out with facing looking at the programic work and the ultimate goal is um the many many parts to it but that's sort of big big picture in the same way that UN women can tell people like we know and and many people know in the system what it means to apply a real intention of a gender justice lens a gender equality lens what does it mean we can tell people and we know what it looks like and we can actually deliver it in a real way what does it look like to do the same thing for an intersectional racial justice lens what would that look like and and how could we get there so I'm maybe five months into this so it's it's a very new process but when I found the report that Natalie co-authored on Twitter that was a real eureka moment because of course I was very familiar with the concepts of white gays of saviorism of neutrality exclusion color blindness but those were and those were part of the staff-led discussions that we were having but I hadn't considered our storytelling which also includes our narrative I mean our storytelling or narrative which includes what we don't say it's an important point that I I that really came out in that work I didn't consider it as a really important conceptual as well as practical tool in this journey to figure out what is a racial justice approach and what is our roadmap as we take that journey and I think the clearest example or the quickest example that I came across in this nexus of all of these these features coming together in our discourse was a the almost absolute narrative of most of the UN except by the human rights organization which is mandated to speak in those terms but the almost apart from that absolute narrative of official reference to repertory justice for enslavement and colonization and and you know today how does one have a incredible conversation about where do we go with this without talking about reparations so of course we were all we were yelling about this in our staff discussion but otherwise it was a silence without any necessarily written rule about it there was just silence and it's only very recently I'm not sure exactly when but in in this period of racial reckoning that our secretary general and and told the secretary general of the united nations Antonio Guterres he spoke openly and decisively and said that reparations are critical must be for the egregious wrongs of slavery and colonialism and I am hoping that that will help us deepen how we talk about the the depth with which we we look at how do we go about really breaking the back of this monster actually I also go back a little bit in history and I think about when um colonial powers assassinated and otherwise ensure that local leadership could not emerge and in particular Lumumba and Mobutu the rape of the Belgian Congo the rape of Zaire the rape of women in numbers that astound in the instability of the DRC in recent times and how the history and the history of how the present came to be how how how did that happen how how is is is the democratic republic of Congo so deeply mired in all of this how did it come to be that is completely absent from our storytelling around poverty turmoil conflict it it erases the narrative of resistance which would have destroyed the white gays I think um thank you so yeah I was about to say I think I'm going to run out of time so I will stop here and see if Natalie um or in the q&a um they can it can be addressed a little further if if time allows thank you very much Marilena for that incredibly powerful reflection about the impact of not talking about some some crucial aspects of why we got to where we are and in a way the the genesis of our sector and the reasons why we what we need to work on what we work for and um I also thought it was quite interesting like Ebony in the chat this this this idea of breaking silos and breaking silence incredibly powerful but also talking to us about the you know what remains ahead and and as ever is this issue of going deeper into the root causes and into the into the power dynamics and it seems to me that there's a bit of a recurring theme with our speakers today in that we've done quite a lot of work of reflection and recognition but maybe now we need to go deeper into those root causes and I see some reactions along those lines on the chat today um so fantastic to to to be together today and also this this notion of um of perhaps drawing some lessons from from gender equality and of the way in which it's been mainstream and and and how we can potentially apply some of those to to to our um to our efforts on anti-racism um I'd like to invite now Sheila Patel um to come and share with us some some reflections Sheila is not a communicator but is someone who's been working incredibly incredibly hard and successfully in the development space and and just going back perhaps to to a reason for being as a as a sector and to the day that we mark today the day for the eradication of poverty. Sheila tell us from where you sit do do narratives matter when it comes to the eradication of poverty when it comes to the fight for social justice what we communicate what we put out how does that help or hinder that objective. So I don't think anybody so first of all thank you for having me here my journey with iid and the whole work body of work which Natalie spoke about uh has been a sort of a refresher of acknowledging and naming and uh surfacing what I have intuitively been doing for the last 40 years but you know whenever you know many years ago there was a group of people who said naming the moment is important and that's what we're doing right now that we are using these stimulus of black lives matter to go deep into our own work our own sense of self uh our commitment to various causes and then it's like an x-ray of what we do how we do it and how we communicate about it so first of all I would say that if you are in development you are a communicator willing so my journey is and my sense of what I believe in and what I think is very deeply rooted in a lot of very very intuitive choices that I made many of which emerged from the conversations I had with very poor women who were migrants in sit in Mumbai now quickly tell you that journey for several reasons the first one being that storytelling has been at the heart of all the communications that poor people do and especially poor women and so their own emancipation of being able to articulate their experiences without fear without believe without fear of being mocked at or fear of uh being you know thought of negatively but uh but to be able to sense that this is a space which is trustworthy where they can talk about their things their their feelings their history their experiences and their intimate uh exposure to violence and injustice and I think that my entire education in this field has come out of those conversations which began when I first worked in a community center that did projects that delivered services to poor people in general and to poor women by default uh where everything made them consumers beneficiaries supplicants to everybody else's imageries of what they needed how they should do it and what they should do and uh and my intuitive rebellion about feeling what would I do if I was in their place I tell them to piss off why can't these women tell them to piss off when we started these conversations their imageries of themselves their imageries of how they felt others were perceiving them and the collective intergenerational imageries of being in poverty were so strong that it was like just peeling layers and layers to come to a point where you could just say what you wanted and learn to assess you know that's the power that we talk about that you don't allow judgments of others to be the basis of how you respond to your communication but you assess the ability of the others to engage with you in the challenges that you faced and you judge their trustworthiness and if you don't trust them you have the guts to reject their presence that is the power that women taught me in this process what I also learned and that's what I'm going on the storytelling thing rather than other things the other thing is for all people who are disenfranchised aggregation is power individual voices of poor people get lost in transition in translation in the noise of development delivery syndrome as I call it you know so the rebellion that I intuitively felt to do what an international aid agency wanted me to do that was good for women we turned it around to say I'll give you a very interesting example in the 80s a lot of money came to the south through people who sponsored the child in the north if you remember you know you give 10 pounds a month and you think it's going to transform a poor child's life we talked to the women about all this I said this is what they say we have to do I was talking not to one or two women I was talking to 5,000 women and I said in the and we were all in they were in about 25 groups and the unanimous thing was if you give me food do you think I'm going to give it to one child it's going to be distributed so allow us to make a choice of what we do it so my response to the agency was do you want me to lie cheat and steal and tell you what's good for you and let women do what they want or do you want to truly know what women have done with that money that has worked for them and not worked for them so do you want the truth or you want a fairytale we can give you both now that was our emancipation that you are locked in this system you have to fight it but you don't fight it by yes and no you fight it in the gray space of saying make a choice you make a choice and what we had was an amazing transformation of people who were interacting with us who then used our narratives to transform their internal and external communication and that has been a very important point of challenging people who tell stories about us who write case studies about us who involve us in research or on whose board I often get invited because I'm a black woman from the south who's ahead of the organization I get into that space very often because of who I am rather of the characteristics of mine rather than what I contribute as a person and then very soon they realize that I can piss people off very quickly but I think that that aggregation model has also developed what we call the federation process where intimate small groups aggregate into networks and they develop a communication pathways that even during covid we adopted zoom and where 50, 80, 100 women like we are now 150 people listen to some reacted to the others and talks to many more and created relationships we have a very interesting symbol of not accepting something so one of the early analysis that women did is that you professionals can out talk us all the time you can just go on talking so the deal was that when one professional sat in a meeting there would be at least 25 women there and if the 25 women felt that whatever we were talking was rubbish to just make a lot of noise and drown us out because that was a sort of protest that was visible that was collected and that was done in a safe space initially and we use these techniques later with other groups and other people who did this so that's one whole thing I think what is also important and what we have to worry about is that many times those of us who are here in this meeting by somehow being representative of those voices that we are so carefully nurturing and we forget that we have to come to a place where they share the platforms with us and I feel that modern digital communication is very disincentivizing for women most of the women that we speak to have don't have the smartphones for instance the husbands have the smartphones the women have the old phones so their ability to use digitalization to use digital communication is that much behind than what we all are celebrating right now so the kind of bandwidth I need to look at your face to look at questions and look at this and that is not available to them so I feel that being able to challenge for on behalf of somebody has to move to people challenging themselves this is one of the practices we do for instance when we have difficult researchers and donors we just make them sit in the middle of a conversation with communities and we challenge them for saying don't be patronizing and say no they don't understand it means you haven't been able to explain so how do we facilitate these things the other thing is that storytelling has been over stylized by what I call selling Coca-Cola and biscuits you know I see northern NGOs spending $150,000 for a two minute video where they send five people from different parts of the country with equipment they don't even share their original good quality documentation with the local groups just take it all back they produce the ad-like beautiful you know like you were saying earlier and some of the others were saying earlier is that you you sort of glamorize poverty you make everybody very sympathetic to a dirty looking hungry child with little flies on their faces those extreme things have gone but the subtle ones are still there the subtle stylizing and everything is there and to counter that we in STI have started a campaign called rough and very advocacy you're saying if I'm saying something let my editing of it that I put on WhatsApp be what you listen to not the cleaned up noise removal there is so much noise in my background I have to shout on screen at it you listen to that so that you understand the noise in which I live so in the communication space also there's a lot of transformation that's needed and I think all of us who are doing these very sophisticated seminars and webinars have to now look at how we learn as a larger community to do that with community women when we don't have the opportunity to go and have them come to a seminar or a webinar and there also become one or two they're deeply intimidated by the whole sophisticated setup that everybody has so how can we sit where they are as a group and talk to you and feel comfortable in giving feedback in giving suggestions in being prepared because the equity and quality issue is still not in place in whatever we do in development and we and with research organizations there's this scandal of how little money is given for what I call vacuum vacuuming of data you know just suck everything off take it somewhere hybridize it till the person who answered the question doesn't even have the right to say what did my answer tell you that I should know and in the climate space this is very important because in the adaptation space choices that individuals and communities make and women especially in the sector I work with in urban slums are the real invisible managers of their neighborhoods and they have no rights they have no information and they have no choice so how do you get there is what I want to end with thank you Sheila thank you so much for that we are running out of time um but this is what happens when you get such a fantastic line up of panels I'm just completely mesmerized listening to all of you unable to cut you but I but I would like to take at least two questions from our list very quickly um first from um Vienna from Mexico she's asking about whether there is a trend and new narratives around this issue of questioning this power dimension and and also there's a question from Megan Andrews about about this this idea that racial injustice is sit beneath other inequalities I'd like to invite Natalie and Joanne to perhaps give us a 30 second roundup of of your immediate reaction to that and and then if Maria Elena and Sheila also want to give us another 30 seconds I think we could make it thank you very much I'm going to just to come in on Diana's question very quickly you know this discussion about narratives and the need to deconstruct them around race you power is at the heart of that these power differentials are um that they're made up of power differences in their own right but actually they are power differentials that have been racialized and so you you have this issue um of power on one side of a coin and maybe races and the other or you could put gender on the other or you could put class on the other so I think having a conversation to drive this narrative change that really ties power really closely to issues of racial justice gender justice having gender justice to be broad enough to consider issues of sexuality and gender identity and to think about power in those terms I think is going to be really important part of how we come up with new and alternative narratives that talk about uh uh important working development in ways that um move this agenda forward thanks Natalie John you're 30 seconds okay I'm going to I'm going to try and answer Megan Andrews question which is about recognizing racial injustices that sit beneath inequalities and advice for NGOs how to bring it into storytelling and acknowledge colonialism so I think one of the things is to have a discussion as a team whereby you recognize even when we use words such as aid what what are the implications what are we really trying to say are we not recognizing that we are basically um we're basically saying that you know the majority world are sort of the passive recipients and they're in need of this aid and the minority world are the only ones who can provide them so recognizing this white gaze that we're using in the language and also in the images I think that is the first thing to do and then finding alternative words um so instead of saying that it's the aid sector why can't we call it um global solidarity or global reparations or you know equalization fund so such that we're speaking to power you know the sort of injustice that has underpinned the sector and we're trying to take that away and when it comes to photography and images I think what is important is to get as specific as possible so when we're using images of people that we actually have their consent first of all and then secondly we're also writing we're in conversation with the people so that they know my picture is going to be used by this particular NGO and my name is going to be featured there and are they actually okay you know with those kind of things so just being as specific as possible and when you involve the actual community members I think it also helps the team to be accountable because then the community members are able to hold you accountable yeah thank you so much Joanne I'd like to invite Maria Elena and Sheila to perhaps give us 30 seconds bearing in mind that we are on the hour and somebody's going to pull the plug on us every second any second now thank you very much Maria Elena thank you Gabriella I actually I'm not sure if you're asking me to answer that but I'd like to pick up something just just a final comment please yeah a final comment um I would want to say that in terms of um how did UN women go about getting you know how did the UN get gender inequality such a major aspect of of its work I there are a number of things but the main one I want to say is the um the activism of civil society they formed an an organization that was meant to form UN women and they they did not stop until UN women was formed but as a result we have a very strong relationship with civil society it's in our mandate unlike other agencies to work with civil society so I would like to leave that thought that um there is a way to enter into the UN and make change as an activist in in your organization fantastic that's a great that's a great thought to leave us with Sheila I'd like to give a final word to you uh because I know you you lift us up before you go I think most importantly I think it's important to interrogate how we are taught history you know because uh that you know that that that racism that casteism that color that colonization is not just the last few 300 years it's a millennium old story and you see that repeated you know the previous speaker was talking about all the terrible victimization rapes and other things in the Congo and in the DRC in other places but this is a historical happening again and again and again situation which was there in history but we don't recognize it we don't talk about it we we are not allowed to interpret it and talking about this whole reinterpretation and rearticulation of history one very interesting young economist in a finance webinar basically said that everything that Africa needs is basically a repatriation of all the plunder that northern and powerful nations have done which they are now converting into a sort of a a rivulet of aid this were his words and I think you know articulation of an alternative imagery like you know this whole thing of women chanting the same thing for years and years that got the UN to change I think these are the narratives that have to be mainstreamed and they have to be large amounts of people making lots of noise on things and not allowing you know we have to be careful that while many of the things we started to do now were because of that terrible killing but there has been a silent and long standing movement of people articulating the truth for a very long time that has been subdued so how do you how do you aggregate all that and how do you make that into a powerful and exciting journey that is transformative for people because it's going to take time UN women being recognized as not transformed for women's lives but it's a victory so how do we celebrate more and more of that and let's have more of these conversations thank you so much Sheila thank you so much for for for sort of sending us off to go out there and undo those those power structures that keep us down and that keep us from fulfilling our mission thank you so much to our panelists I think we can all agree that they've been absolutely wonderful a special shout out to Rebecca and Nikki our wonderful BSL interpreters particularly for staying this extra five minutes and and to all of you for your brilliant questions and comments on the chat I kind of feel like there's an appetite for continuing these discussions and I hope that this will be the first of many recordings and materials we share with you in round of applause virtual real etc to our brilliant panelists and let's keep up the fight everybody goodbye