 My name is Makila James. I'm a senior advisor at the United States Institute of Peace Africa Center. We recently held our second African diplomat seminar for relatively newly arrived diplomats from 34 African countries, including Sub-Saharan Africa and North Africa. The goal of the program was to provide a platform, a forum for newly arrived diplomats to understand better how to navigate Washington and to learn who the key players, the key agencies, the key departments are that work on advancing U.S. Africa policy. The seminar was very successful in many ways, primarily because we focused on something that's really very important and that's the nexus between peace and development. To that extent, we brought in the private sector to talk about trade and investment on the continent. We brought in U.S. government agencies that talked about the tools and the approaches that they use in trying to promote development in Africa. And of course, we drew upon U.S.I. peace experts who focused on peace building in Africa. Overall, we think it was a very successful seminar. We're looking forward to building on our relationship as we have these events in the future. The interagency for me, how the agencies, different agencies work together has really been an eye opener for me and how important it is as diplomats to understand the importance of actually being at the heel most of the time and understanding how the heel operates and how it relates with the administration and other agencies that are working with the State Department and so forth and how these agencies would make our life easier as diplomats to promote our country's trade and investment and clarify certain policy positions that our governments take that perhaps are misunderstood in the U.S. For me, it's a brilliant program because being new in the U.S., I found it a bit intimidating, the size. Though I've served in many other countries, it took me time and it was really slow integrating but coming into the program for these few times have opened me up to a faster way of integrating into the system. It's actually been very helpful. Being a global strategic partner, the U.S. looks to hear the voice of Africa and see Africa placed on various tables in decision-making. All those issues that relates to peace, for us, is very important because also fitting within Africa, Africa we would like to have in the future where we are now looking at silence in the guns in the continent and we have USIP really having, you know, zooming this laser focus, as they say in the U.S., on issues relating to peace. And I think that through this institution, diplomats are able to even get into Congress, get assisted with linking up with members of Congress on issues that relates to conflict and so forth so that we can all of us work together towards making sure that there is peace on our continent of Africa and broadly throughout the world. In South Africa, we normally say that one of our biggest challenges, actually we call them the triple challenges in South Africa, that's unemployment, poverty and inequality. And that is the driving force of all South African diplomats abroad to say that we need to work hard and assist our government to make sure that we address these triple challenges. Now in the U.S., the multiple ways of doing that actually, from civil society, from think tanks to government to private sector, and it's such a big area that we need to zoom in and I think that my country tends to benefit a lot and is benefiting a lot from the bilateral relations with the United States. As a strategic partner, South Africa values these relations very much because it does assist, but it's a mutual benefit for both countries. The U.S. benefits from the relations, South Africa benefits from the relations and I think more investments into South Africa would assist our government in addressing the triple challenges that I just alluded to. Coming to this seminar has opened up my ideas as to how I can engage better with the diaspora community in the U.S. And in many ways, just use the platforms that the U.S. makes available to improve the lives of not just Nigerians in the U.S., but also Nigerians at home.