 Welcome, and thank you for joining us today. My name is Tabitha Thompson, and I serve as the Acting Director for USIP's Program on Nonviolent Action. We focus on research and capacity building to better understand and support movements around the world as they seek to advance human rights, justice, and sustainable peace through nonviolent means. As you may know, today is International Anti-Corruption Day, a day committed to spreading awareness about the ways we can combat corruption damaging social, political, and economic effects. A growing body of research has identified linkages between corruption and violent conflict, making it a key threat to sustainable peace and one of the greatest challenges to achieving the sustainable development goals. Rooting out corruption is important for building and maintaining democratic institutions, strengthening rule of law, and ultimately creating more just and peaceful societies. This year's theme is United Against Corruption, which very much aligns with the topic of our event today. How movements are fighting corruption and demanding transparency and the accountability for their national and local governments. This event also marks the end of a multi-year research project studying the effects of external support to movements focused on transparency, accountability, and good governance. And we are grateful to our partners at USAID and DRL for supporting this work. As part of this initiative, a series of interviews, focus group discussions, and workshops were conducted in six countries, Burma, Guatemala, Zimbabwe, Ukraine, Nigeria, and Kenya. With the goal of learning how citizens and movements are using nonviolent action to fight corruption, as well as the best ways for international actors, such as ourselves, to support them. The findings and reports for each of these countries are available on the USIP website, and you'll be hearing from three of those report authors today. They'll share what they learned as well as provide more recent insights on citizen-led efforts against corruption in light of COVID-19, which has heightened the risk of corruption in many states around the world. So without further ado, I'd like to introduce our panel. Gladys Hletwayo is the Secretary of International Relations for Zimbabwe's MDC Alliance. She has 15 years of experience in Zimbabwe's democracy movement, in which she has worked as an activist, member of a coalition, and for a donor organization. She was previously a British chevening scholar and a Hubert Humphrey Fellow at the University of Minnesota. Elena Trigo is the Secretary General of NACO, the Independent Defense Anti-Corruption Committee, which is an international oversight body created by Transparency International. She has more than 15 years of experience in policy analysis, design, and reform implementation, with a special focus on corruption prevention in economic and security sectors in Ukraine. Walter Flores is the Principal Advisor for the Center for Studies for Equity and Governance in Health Systems in Guatemala. He is a social scientist and a human rights advocate whose work has been carried out all over the world, and his expertise is in health equity, right to health, democratic governance, social accountability, and community participation in public policies. Brian Sims is a Senior Manager of Peacebuilding at Humanity United, where he leads the organization's Peacebuilding and Conflict Transformation Initiative in Zimbabwe. Brian has over 10 years of experience in the fields of human rights, democracy, and governance, including research, advocacy, and the establishment of an internationally-based NGO. And finally, we are grateful that our former USIP Research Advisor, Shasko Bayer Ali, will moderate this conversation. Shasko now serves as a Senior Fellow at the Terrorism, Transnational Crime, and Corruption Center at George Mason University. She's a researcher, writer, and educator in nonviolent action, focusing on anti-corruption and accountability, and she's the author of Curtelling Corruption. Thank you all for taking the time to be here today to share more about your work and research. And a special thanks to my colleague, Miranda Rivers, for all the work that went into bringing us all together. Shasko? Thank you, Tabitha. If anyone cannot hear me, please let me know. Raise your hand to send a message to the chat room. We are really excited to have this session today because, as Tabitha mentioned, it is the culmination of extraordinary research that has been conducted in a number of countries around the world. And we are so fortunate to have three of the leading authors here with us today who are also civil society actors in their own right. I'd just like to give you a brief overview of how this session is going to run so that you have a sense that we have designed something as interactive as possible through Zoom and also to mention what will be the format for sending in questions and comments to the panelists. So the format will consist of two short sessions of presentations. So in our first session, our panelists will give a three to five minute overviews of the country research and the conclusions of their special report. Then we will have our first round of questions and comments from all of you out there. Then we'll turn again to the panelists and they're going to have another three to five minutes each to talk about the takeaways for civil society and international actors. I should mention that we're also very thrilled that Dr. Brian Sims from Humanity United is here with us and he is going to be discussing in the first round how Humanity United has constructively supported social movements. Without further ado, I'd like to turn the floor over to Gladys. Thank you so much, Shaska. Firstly, just to appreciate USIP for giving me this opportunity to share my thoughts on this very important day. Anti-corruption day. And also to contribute to this very, to the research that we're able to do in Zimbabwe. So the title of the paper was challenges for social movements in the post-Mugabe era. Firstly, one of the key things that we're able to find out from the research was that the majority of the research respondents were of the view that there is, we have not seen a transition in Zimbabwe. We have seen a change of leadership, but that change of leadership was not concomitant with the change of the governance culture in the country. So the 2017 November coup has not led to a transition despite the optimism that we saw that was characterized by the immediate post-coup period. And also the rhetoric that came out of the current administration under President Mnangagwa, especially around the promise for comprehensive reforms and a transformation to a democratic Zimbabwe. What we have seen instead is more of authoritarian consolidation characterized by militarization, characterized by closure of democratic space, closure of civic space. We saw what happened on the first of August just after the elections when six citizens were actually killed in broad daylight in the streets of Harare for demonstrating to demand election results. We also saw what happened in January 2019 when citizens were demonstrating demanding, they were demonstrating against the increase of few prizes, the hiking that had happened. We saw how 17 citizens were also killed related to January 2019. We also saw just recently July 31, 2020 when citizens were also demonstrating against corruption. And we saw quite a number of people being arrested, quite a number of people being detained, abductions. And extra judicial killings. We have also seen lethargy on reforms. In fact, as I'm talking to you right now, there are 27 amendments that are being proposed by the government in this 27 amendments to the constitution are not meant to feather the rights of citizens, but they actually meant to consolidate power for the current administration. We have also seen a little first state capture and corruption, escalation of human rights abuses. Since 2018, we have seen 50 extra judicial killings in more than 120 abductions being perpetrated by the government. And there's also been a lot of impunity because no one has been held to account for all of these human rights abuses. So largely President Munagaku has retained and perfected the predatory systems that sustained the previous president, President Mugabe, which bordered around party-state conflation, captured state institutions, talk of your media, the judiciary, military police, the electoral management body, all of these are under the firm grip of the executive. We have also seen militarization of state institutions, including the executive itself. I think for the first time in Zimbabwe, we now have former generals who are part of the executive and the current vice president is actually a former general in the army. Coming more specifically to issues of corruption since today we are talking about the anti-corruption day, President Munagaku promised to put an end to corruption and to bring paper traitors of corruption to book. I think this was one of his campaign messages in 2017, November, but also is the country prepared for the 2018 elections. Nevertheless, corruption and state capture have become so pervasive and have become one of the greatest failures of the current regime. They've absolutely failed to deal with this cancer in society. And in the majority of cases, corruption cases have been linked to individuals that are quite close to the president and the first family, including his own wife and his sons. There are also individuals such as Kudabwase T'Aguide. This individual is actually under restrictive measures of the US government. And he is... One minute, please. One minute left. Okay. I didn't realize I was already... Anyway, let me try to quickly finish. So all of these individuals are really close to the president and nothing has really been done to make sure that paper traitors of these corruption cases are actually brought to book. Between 2017 and 2018, USD $6 billion was actually lost to corruption under a program called Command Agriculture where the military was heavily involved. And these statistics are actually available in the Auditor General's report as well as the Parliamentary Public Accounts Committee. The Anti-Corruption Commission, which is supposed to be an independent commission to look into these issues is really captured. In fact, it is led by the wife of the current foreign affairs minister who is also a former general. So you can actually see that there is no political will to do with these issues. And we have seen a lot of catch and release where individuals are arrested, but nothing really comes out of those cases. And some of them are actually given bail without even the state contesting some of these issues. And lastly, I just wanted to say we have also seen the state going after whistleblowers in generalists who are actually exposing some of these corruption cases. I'm sure you might have followed the case of Hopo Chingono, who was arrested for an effing some of these corruption cases. Citizen protests against corruption have also been brutally crushed. I think I've already made reference to this issue. So corruption is really a big issue in Zimbabwe. And statistics are showing us that we are losing about a billion dollars, United States dollars as a result of corruption. I think I will end here. And maybe I can have more time to speak next time. Thank you Gladys. And I'm sorry we are keeping the presentations short because I know that there's so much to discuss about Zimbabwe. And there could be a whole entire session just on the situation and the report itself too. Thank you. I'd like to turn now to Dr. Walter Flores from Guatemala. And Walter, could you please take three to five minutes to present an overview of the country research and the special report? Great, thank you. During the last decade, we saw a search interest in looking at social movements confronting corruption and demanding transparency and accountability in different parts of the world. They are of spring Eastern Europe and Latin America and specifically my own country, Guatemala. In our report, we argued that in the case of Guatemala, the roots of social movements fighting corruption and impunity have a long history, centuries, particularly indigenous people movements fighting oppression in a post-colonial society. In our report, we focus on human rights movement of the last four decades, which includes indigenous and non-indigenous activists and how they influence the young and urban social movements that led the 2015 demands for the resignation of the president and vice president accused of corruption. The main findings in our report is that the success of the social movements of 2015 was based on several conditions that were achievements of long standing indigenous and human rights movements. For example, the access to information law of the year 2008, the creation of a National Ombudsman Office and the creation of a United Nations Pact Commission against impunity in the year 2006. Urban youth led social media. They use social media as the main tool for communication and organizing. However, the mobilization gradually expanded to include more and more of the long-established social movements and more traditional means and tools for communication. After several months of peaceful protests, the president and vice president resign. They are currently in prison facing trial. But despite the energy of mobilized citizens, it all came to a sudden stop once authorities resigned. Some organizations such as indigenous movement insisted in continuing the pressure to demand structural reforms and agree on unified social justice demands beyond corruption. However, this did not happen. Elections were near and there was a general impression that the new authorities would continue the anti-corruption agenda. The new government elected under an anti-corruption slogan did all the opposite. It allowed and facilitated the restructuring of a coalition of politicians, judges, bureaucrats and some members of the economic elite engaged in corruption and impunity. This coalition led a backlash against anti-corruption movement. Despite the backlash, an anti-corruption movement is still very much present in Guatemala and is still fighting against this very strong coalition inserted in the overall state apparatus. And, but very importantly, they are showing that they had been learning from the experience of the year 2015. Nowadays, we can see that the social movement fighting corruption, they are using different strategies, not only the street protests, but they are also fighting in the judiciary system and they're also created a new political party and they're trying to elect progressive politicians as well. So, very importantly, social movements do learn in this process. And now we stop here. Thank you. Thank you, Walter. You're pointing to something to many important lessons and how the movement is learning and adapting and also starting to shift strategies and tactics and to actually combine institutional and extra-institutional tactics together. So I think that we definitely will stay tuned on what is happening in Guatemala. And sometimes there are some steps forward and then some steps back and then some steps forward again, which leads me to our next speaker, Olena Tregub, who in fact used that expression as the title for the special report on Ukraine. Olena, could you please take three to five minutes to present an overview of the country research and the special report? Yes, sure. Indeed, corruption struggle in Ukraine can be described as some ongoing struggle and Ukraine, according to many rankings, according to the Corruption Perception Index of Transparency International is the most corrupt country in Europe. And of course, this struggle has started, I would say, since day one of Ukrainian independence, but my report specifically speaks about what happened after so-called Euromaidan Revolution in 2014, we had a big national uprising to basically demand pro-Western democratization and reform in Ukraine. And our pro-Russian president fled to Russia and a new president was elected the pro-Western president, Poroshenko. And since then, of course, anti-corruption reform became number one priority because if you ask an average Ukrainian in sociological polls, you see that they say that two biggest problems of Ukraine are corruption and war with the Russia. So did we really have anti-corruption movement in Ukraine? This is what I'm trying to answer among other things in my report. And the answer is, unfortunately, no. We had a very serious anti-corruption agenda supported by international actors, by professionalized civil society actors who are called in Ukrainian society, anti-corruption years. There is even like a name, this profession, I would say, but it's a professional thing. All these people, they work for institutionalized NGOs. And they were very influential at the time of post-revolutionary reform and they were able to gather with international partners to push for a certain agenda. And that agenda was establishment of, no, I'm sorry, that's my dog, sorry, sorry. And that agenda was establishment of independent anti-corruption institutions, the infrastructure of those institutions, which included the National Corruption Prevention Agency. It included the National Anti-Corruption Bureau, Anti-Corruption Prosecutor Office and Anti-Corruption Court of Ukraine. And as of, and my report describes how these institutions were set up and how difficult it was, it also describes other achievements of Ukrainian anti-corruption struggles, such as establishment of transparent system of electronic asset declarations of government officials, transparent procurement, which is probably one of the most successful anti-corruption reforms after my revolution. Yet, my report that concludes that corruption remains persistent. And also my report concludes that it's very hard in Ukraine to mobilize society for some social movement on the anti-corruption agenda. I actually even make a comparison with the social movement that we had after the war with Russia started. People really united on all levels of society, not people who only do it professionally, but also like common people who were given away their time, their money in order to help Ukraine fight Russia in the East. And this was a real movement. And these people even entered Ukrainian Ministry of Defense because they said that not only they now are replacing the function of the state because they understand that the state is weak and they are just citizens are replacing this national security function. But they also said, let us reform this state, let us enter MUD as advisors and let us just draft a new legislation in order to reform defense procurement, housing, food, all the kind of necessities in the war. And this was a real movement, but anti-corruption remained our high priority. Everybody worries about it yet. Of course, the result is not yet the one that we would like to see and our international partners would like to see. Thank you, Alina. I appreciate that you're giving such a concise summary of such an in-depth report. It's not easy to do that. And you're pointing to the, in a way, the balance, the difficult balance that civil society actors have in the anti-corruption realm between on the one hand being a strong resource and source of policy analysis and recommendations that have a bite that can be listened to and adopted. And on the other hand staying connected to citizens and continuing to sustain citizen involvement and mobilization in the anti-corruption struggle. Absolutely. We have very strong civil society in Ukraine, very vibrant, but it is strong exactly in the area of giving policy recommendation and formulating policies. Yet it's not strong in mobilizing citizens for something because these are two separate worlds a little bit and these worlds unite only when we have some massive uprising like we had in 2014. Thank you. Last but not least, I'd like to turn to Brian Sims from Humanity United. And Brian, you haven't written a special report for USIP yet, but maybe you will one day. But in the meantime, I think all of us would really benefit from hearing from you about how Humanity United, which is an international actor has constructively supported social movements. Sure, first I just wanna say it's a real privilege to be here and to be in conversation with everyone. So thanks for having me. And for perhaps those of you who aren't familiar with HU were a foundation that was founded in 2008 and our peace building approach is really centered around supporting locally led peace building initiatives as well as networks, practices, policies, all to elevate the voices of local peace builders. And so over the past few years, we've learned a lot about how to be and how not to be a donor within this really fluid, often very intense but really rewarding space. And so there are four lessons that we've learned from supporting social movements that really account for how we show up now. And so the first is that donors really need to understand the movement ecosystem. And I think this was something that both Gladys and Charles pointed out in their report for Zimbabwe. And so that includes understanding power dynamics as they're perceived by our movement partners, by allies and by the opposition, so to speak, all in an effort to facilitate strategic relationships where sort of the knowledge and the agency of those who are doing the work is respected. And this also means encouraging and supporting safe spaces where we go beyond connecting the usual suspects and we either create or we reinforce those unlikely networks among activists, among people that'll work within NGOs, sympathetic civil servants, musicians, creatives and technologists, but really in order to expand and to improve their knowledge of civil resistance but also to find ways to make sure that knowledge is available, that it's understandable and that it really becomes attractive to their own communities. Second, there's always a need to focus on capacity and strategy. And one of the gaps that we're seeing and experts like Maria Stefan and yourself Shostka have made a really compelling case about this is that as authoritarians become more sophisticated in monitoring or repressing activists and human rights defenders and as more people use social media to connect and to mobilize, movement effectiveness is decreasing. And so we're committing to supporting an array of trainings and workshops that talk about power that teach people of good old-fashioned organizing skills. We're supporting dialogue and mediation approaches that really try to identify local grievances and solutions in ways that bring communities, especially those that are at loggerheads with one another that bring them together to identify and strive for that common goal view. And I also think it's really important to keep in mind that partners and donors can have multiple strategies at the same time. You can increase resistance while laying the foundation for dialogue and sustainable peace. Third is as a donor that is not accountable to government strategy or to a taxpayer, we can assume some risk. And that's important because not only does shared risk really increase the initial trust, but there are times when key activities, especially when it comes to seeking accurate information on grand corruption or state capture, they may be too dangerous for people living in a country to undertake or to investigate. And so I think we have a duty to make sure that people on the ground who are doing the work have the access to the most accurate information possible as they plan and as they seek to leverage their influence. And finally, we've recognized sort of a need to be really, you know, to be able to move quickly, to support partners that find themselves in a moment of crisis or there's an unexpected window of opportunity, as well as commit to partners for longer periods of time and accompany them to achieve their goals. So all the while, you know, we want to be really cognizant of the fact that movements at peaks and valleys and they require different types of support. And so just sort of to bring this home, these lessons and others have led us to make sure that as a donor, we can either respond in ways or encourage our partners to respond in ways that capitalize on both the designing and implementing strategies that are really sort of the nexus of those contentious extra institutional methods that can intensify conflict. So civil disobedience and self-organizing with the more conventional mitigation methods, right? So those multi-track approaches, focusing on activities that support dialogue and facilitation and mediation, that when you bring them together, we really try to create paths for inclusive political and peace processes that try to avoid agreements that only address the really narrow preferences of elites and often further entrenching of inequality and poverty and really the root causes of violence. Thank you, Brian, for summarizing so much wisdom about effective donor support in such a short time. You've hit on so many key points and I think it will give our other panelists a lot to comment on in terms of their own experiences and perhaps even people who are participating virtually in our session. So I'd like to encourage everyone who is listening in right now to please send in questions. Please send in any comments or experiences that you may be having in a country either with international actors or within your institution or civil society organization or movement. We'd like to hear from you now. So I'd like to, and just mention again because it's really important to please, in order to submit your questions and comments, please use the chat box function that's located just below the video player on USIP's event page. So all of you who have connected via USIP's event page please look on there now and submit your comments and questions just below in the chat box function just below the video player. While you're doing that, perhaps I can just turn to all of you because we're operating in a different world now from when the field research was done and the reports were written. And of course that world that we all share now is the COVID-19 pandemic world. And so perhaps it would be great if each of you could take a couple of minutes to just share with us some comments about, I mean just some comments about how are transparency, accountability, good governance, anti-corruption, movements and civic initiatives in your country pivoting towards or dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic or how is the pandemic affecting the anti-corruption, transparency, accountability, good governance, movements and civic initiatives in your country. Olena, would you like to just start first this time around and I'll go in reverse order? Sure, well, definitely COVID-19 is a big factor. Well, and before COVID-19, of course I'd like to mention that the fact that we have an ongoing military conflict in Ukraine also affects very much anti-corruption struggle because first of all it distracts attention from corruption struggle if the national sovereignty is at stake, national security, of course, everybody feels it's a priority. It's essentially Russian aggression is scarier than corruption to people. So it is very similar with COVID, I would say. If COVID is a threat, then of course corruption is less of a threat when we need to deal with COVID. And society generally cares less about different stories that keep happening not in COVID related expenses, but in other areas, other sectors, energy, defense, our customs, they remain as corrupt as before even more but people pay less attention and this story, some occasional story or some corruption scandal generates less of a response from people than before, I would say. And when it comes to COVID itself, of course, like any country, we established the COVID fund and we allocated national resources to this fund and resources of the international donors and there was a lot of scrutiny to how this fund was spent because a lot of organizations, they did their projects around monitoring this fund and yet, even though there was this oversight, the fund wasn't spent properly and like more than half of the money was spent on constructing roads, for example, instead of medical expenses related to COVID and nobody could do anything about it. And right now, the international monetary fund who is our key international partner is auditing the expenses of the Ukrainian COVID fund and trying to understand why we spent all of our money on roads instead of fighting COVID. But the answer is, of course, again, corruption during construction of roads. Well, I wonder if there's a different dynamic in Guatemala or Zimbabwe, perhaps where the linkage between corruption and COVID responses and public services to deal with the pandemic is being made if those linkages are being made and if citizens are involved in that. So Walter, let me turn to you and just ask you for just a brief response about the impact or the interplay of COVID with citizen mobilization. Yes, so because of the lockdown, of course, this affected possibilities of the collective action, which is the heart, the center of social movements, but using this same lockdown and using the national emergency as justification, we have seen that the corruption has exacerbated the country. We also see a lack of capacity in authorities to lead the response to the pandemic, a lot of lying and not being transparent with the citizens about what's happening with the pandemic. So we have seen that citizens have lost trust on authorities, but very importantly, throughout this process civil protest by social movement did not stop. It's only that they adapted to the new reality. For instance, we have seen an increased use of digital spaces for protests, such as Facebook, Twitter, and others, a lot of using local radio and audiovisual campaigns. And more recently, civil protest has returned to the streets, but they have adopted protecting measures such as everybody using masks, a facial mask, maintaining physical distance, use of gloves or hand washing. And in the past few weeks, a large civic protest which included street mobilization in different parts of the country were successful in forcing parliament to back up in the approval of a budget for next year that was very much prone to corruption and with insufficient support for people worse affected by the pandemic. These mobilizations still continue because they are putting pressure in the resignation of the authorities that push for this very corrupt budget. But more importantly, the message is that people is aware that the pandemic will stay a lot longer, it's not going to disappear soon. So they are rapidly adapting to the new reality and continue with the street protest, but also using more alternative communication, as I mentioned. Thank you, Walter. There's a lot happening in Guatemala and you're illustrating how quickly, sometimes adaptation can happen and that creativity enters into tactical repertoire, into the selection and development of tactics to put pressure on those who are not listening. Gladys, let me turn to you and ask you for a brief report from Zimbabwe in a few minutes, about three or four minutes about how, what is the interplay between COVID and social movement activity around corruption, transparency, accountability, and governance? The situation has really been difficult for social movements in Zimbabwe in the COVID-19 era. We have seen largely what has been termed an authoritarian pandemic where the government has been using the lockdown in COVID-19 to sort of curtail the freedoms of citizens. And citizens have really been trying to mobilize, come together to demand accountability around how the COVID-19 funds are being handled to demand accountability even in terms of the inability of government to provide social safety to citizens. Zimbabwe is a highly informalized economy so the majority of citizens do not have formal jobs and as a result because of the lockdown they've not been able to go to their jobs and there was an expectation that the government was therefore supposed to provide social safety to the citizens and that has not happened. So the government is really taking advantage of the COVID-19 pandemic to further loot resources at the expense of the citizens but also using the COVID-19 pandemic to sort of curtail the freedoms of citizens. As I'm talking to you right now elections were actually suspended because and to be quite honest we don't have apart from the fact that we are not testing enough we really don't have huge numbers in terms of the cases but the government is really seeing it as an opportunity to curtail the freedoms of citizens and also even to go after political opponents. They have used the lockdown to go after the MDC Alliance using the courts, using the military to seize the headquarters of the opposition they're doing a lot of things under the guise of COVID-19. So it's really an opportunity for them to further their political agendas in terms of destroying the authentic opposition in Zimbabwe. So I would say those have been the experiences in Zimbabwe's more of an authoritarian pandemic that we are seeing. Thank you, Gladys. I mean, the experiences in Zimbabwe echo what's happening in other parts of the world too. And for example, you and both you and Olina have talked about how resources and funding that's supposed to go towards COVID pandemic is actually being looted. And it just listening to you just makes me think that they're one of the things perhaps that international actors could do and are doing and maybe Brian will tell us about this is bringing together virtually people of activists and civic leaders from different countries who are trying to operate within the pandemic to learn from each other. So just listening to the three of you, I can just see how fruitful it would be if for example, the three of you and some others from other parts of the countries just got together virtually and started talking about how are you doing it? What are you doing? And things like that, something that's very simple but could be so profound. So that was not meant to be a segue to Brian, but Brian, it would be great to hear your input as a private foundation. How is the pandemic affecting your priorities and interactions with social movements? And I'll mention that once you share with us some thoughts, I'm going to direct a question to you from one of the participants. Sure, and this sounds good. So one of the things I want to do is also just maybe take a step back and sort of acknowledge that as a donor we need to be really aware of what the environmental costs are of doing this work. So this means being aware of burnout and exhaustion, being aware of mental and physical health that is either threatened by repression and violence, as well as the stressors that are a result of this pandemic. And so we try to accommodate this in a few ways. And the first is we try to provide general operating support grants to organizations that provide legal support and medical and psychosocial care in countries where we've committed to accompanying movement partners over a bit more medium and longer term. And we also make sure that essentially immediate family members of those people that we do support also have access to those services. And in situations where we can't give out those types of grants, we try to connect our partners to organizations like Freedom House to other regional human rights defenders networks to sort of help them seek additional support in emergencies. And we try to sort of help them problem solve as best we can as we go along. But also during the pandemic, what we did is we actually reached out to every partner that we had to basically ask them what it was that they needed. So this included things like making sure that they had money available to pay staff salaries and to cover staff benefits. This meant providing extra equipment, whether it was laptops or sort of dongles and cell phones that people could connect. Making sure that people had not only access to internet but good access if it was available. And it also meant things like changing timelines and readjusting goals as needed and just being, try to be more flexible than what we could also, what we normally are. And then the other thing I sort of just going back to some of the conversations that the other participants were mentioning, I think one of the things to also keep in mind and it's trying to maybe find a little bit of light in what is a really sort of hectic situation around the world right now is that I think there is also an opportunity recognizing that sort of COVID and corruption could potentially offer sort of a convergence a convergence point, if you will. I think there are these issues could bridge the interests of certain people within government, certain folks within movements in civil society to help them organize around healthcare but also sort of lay the groundwork for some of the more radical and sort of systemic change that needs to happen. Thanks, Brian. Thanks for these really valuable and astute observations. The, as mentioned, I have a question for you. The question is, I will read it out. It is, I have a very operational or process question. What does implementing these principles look like in terms of staffing and tools provided by your organization? That's a great question. So I think a couple of things. One is that a lot of this, we really try to focus on relationships. So what it does mean is that operationally, we commit to investing the time with organizations and with people to really try to understand as best we can what their situation is and what it is that they want from us and how we can provide that for them. So that might sort of mean having a looking internally to figure out what types of skills and things that we can offer beyond just funding. And in situations where maybe we don't have those capacities looking to other sort of other organizations who we have relationships or organizations and people who have those skills and making sure that we can connect them. So that might mean we put together a contract for an organization that is really skilled at developing sort of PR campaigns. If an organization or movement doesn't have that capacity and sort of connecting them that way, we sort of try to make those connections and build up those networks so that the partners that we do have are building the skills that they need to have to feel confident both in their ideas and their ability to take it forward. And sort of build their own networks without each you having to be the person constantly driving that forward. Yeah, I think a lot of it really focuses on that. So it's good relationships and then sort of making sure that people on networks and have the ability to sort of build their skills as they see fit. I mean, you raise really important points that when we talk about international support for social movements, oftentimes the immediate thought is funding, but in reality, there are so many non-financial avenues of support that are so important to movements and that are often very simple and don't require a lot of funding to make happen. For example, what you mentioned, which is putting movement actors in touch with organizations and groups who themselves have skills or capacities that they could share with movement actors. And I mean, and we, you know, I'm sure all of you in our panel would have examples from your countries about that where you wish it would have happened or it happened and it was really helpful. The next question is directed to Walter. And the question is, given the recent less peaceful protest tactics employed in Guatemala to demand reform, do you think a return to the peaceful mass mobilization style of 2015 is required to be effective? Yes, I think that this less peaceful action that was mentioned, which included a status on fire in parliament and also a public transport, these are the exception stills. This were probably some people that were very much upset with the situation, but it still is not the main trend. The process are still peaceful and I'm very confident that they will remain peaceful. Of course, there is no, in this kind of very large civic action, there is no control of every single person involved in the actions. But what is very important, I think, is that immediately the large social movement realized that as soon as the movement is stopped being nonviolent, then they lose the legitimacy that they have for their demands. And this is very clear. There was a widespread information that that's our legitimacy, we should maintain that. So I'm pretty confident that it will remain peaceful because it's very much aware that that's where the strength comes from. Thank you, Walter. Another question has come in and I will read it out and ask whomever from the panelists would like to respond to please raise your hand. The question is throughout these USIP reports, there seems to be less success in accountability initiatives than transparency initiatives. What can we do to bridge this gap? Elena, please. Yeah, I would like to say a few words on this because it's exactly the Ukrainian case. Ukraine is super transparent. One of the most transparent countries, you can find anything about anybody online, the court decisions, declarations, people's addresses, anything. Yet no accountability. And of course, we came to our conclusion is that we need to reform judiciary. Anti-corruption court was not enough. It existed now for one year, but only six people were sent to jail and those people, they committed like small scale corruption comparing to what we have here. And yes, judiciary is a very important pillar of society. And if there is no fair judiciary in the country, there will never be any accountability. That's very simple. Thank you, Elena. Gladys, we'd love to hear from you. Thanks. I just wanted to say, I think for Zimbabwe, it's a different ballgame altogether because we actually don't have transparency. We also don't have accountability. And it is largely because of the captured institutions that we have. We have some kind of a facade democracy where the institutions that are supposed to provide oversight are there on paper. But in terms of how those institutions are working, it's another story altogether. So we have an anti-corruption commission that is supposed to be dealing with these issues of corruption, but again, like I indicated, it's a captured institution and it's failing to discharge its constitutional duties. We have the judiciary is the same case. The judiciary is actually used to persecute political opponents and tag actors and civil society actors. So I think for Zimbabwe, in some of these corruption cases, it's actually money that is being siphoned, for instance, directly from treasure. So you actually see that there is no transparency to talk about and even the oversight role of parliament is currently being decimated because the opposition parliamentarians are being plugged out of parliament as we speak. So just recently, our own vice president, Tendai Niti, who chairs the parliamentary public accounts committee, which is very key in terms of oversight role of parliament on the executive was actually arrested on very flimsy charges. But you can see that they were going after him because of the role that he's playing in terms of providing oversight. So for Zimbabwe, no transparency, no accountability. Thank you, Gladys. Walter, did you want to comment? Yes, transparency is an important factor to achieve accountability, but by itself is not sufficient. And I think that's one of the major weakness of many organizations working in the area of good governance and transparency and accountability that they assume that by supporting transparency action, that's sufficient or automatically lead to accountability. I think organization must be aware, especially external donors, that tackling corruption and lack of accountability is actually tackling the abuse of power by powerful actors and authorities. So this is not a matter of having a set of rules, it's a matter of long-term engagement and pushing and pulling with this very powerful actors. So it's very difficult to have achievements or success in accountability if donors work in a frame of mind or one or two year cycles instead of seeing that this is a long-term process and also instead of adapting to how the solution is evolving. It is easier for donors wanting to support this that they just want to support similar strategies or the same thing that they use elsewhere with a really paying attention to each individual context, what do they need and support more long-term engagement process. So until we start doing that, I think we will not see successful examples of tackling the issues of lack of accountability or for corruption. Thanks, you've hit on something very important that a lot of this discourse and concepts come from the international community and their applicability or relevance may not be the same in each context. Brian, I don't know if you would like to comment on this line of conversation, but if you want to take two minutes or so, please do so. Yeah, thanks. I mean, just to sort of belong to what Walter was saying, is I think it's also important to not sort of look at donors as all the same. So making sure that there are situations where you have donors with a lot of money who are often the USAIDs, the diffids, the cities of the world who can come in and sort of really, they have the capital to invest and really shift, but it's also making sure that organizations that you all run are able to also link up with foundations who have a little more flexibility and find ways to get them, find ways to program and do the work that you want to do and sort of use both of those different types of organizations for your own benefit. Thank you. That's really helpful, Brian. So we have now 15 minutes left to our session. Time has been flying by and questions are coming in. So what I'd like to do as the moderator is the following. There's one question that's come in for Gladys. I'd like to give Gladys the floor to answer that question and then basically take the remaining time for each of you to wrap up. And in the wrap up, if you would very succinctly just share a few takeaways for civil society and international actors from the USIP field research and the special reports you authored. So literally if you would be able to just say here are two, one, two, three takeaways for civil society and social movement actors, one, two, three takeaways for international actors. I think a lot of that has already been covered in the conversation, but I know that there are rich insights in the reports and it would be great for you just to highlight a few of those insights. So we've got now exactly 15 minutes and there are four of you. So that means less than four minutes per person and I have to be really strict. So I have to say three minutes per person because then we have to wrap up it because we're gonna get cut off. So I'm gonna set the timer for three minutes and then after three minutes I'm just gonna say like do this for each of you. So Gladys, the question for you is given the recent events in Zimbabwe, do you think Zimbabweans in general are fed up and ready to join social events for drastic change or have they given up hope? So if you could answer that question and then share a few takeaways, that would be phenomenal. I do not think that Zimbabweans have given up hope on the situation in Zimbabwe. Yes, we have a very difficult situation, especially around the capacity of citizens to mobilize given how militarized the society is, but I think Zimbabweans continue to demonstrate that they are ready to come together and to let the regime know that they are not happy with what is going on around corruption, human rights abuses, all of the issues that we are facing in Zimbabwe. And we saw that even after the first of August, 2018, after 2019, we saw citizens coming together again just recently around the July 31st movement. So the citizens have continuously tried their level best to mobilize. And I believe that someday Zimbabweans will, they will be successful in terms of getting what they are demanding from the government. Coming to the recommendations or the key takeaways from the research, I think number one, with specific reference to countries such as Zimbabwe, it is important for international actors to help, you know, tag actors in terms of putting diplomatic pressure, you know, for reforms, especially for Zimbabwe, it's really important. I mean, given how the society so militarized, how the civic space has, you know, shrunk, it's important to get that boost from international actors in terms of diplomatic pressure to make sure that there are reforms that are necessary to the resolution of the crisis. That's number one. Number two, you know, more resources are needed for democracy and governance actor in such environments so that they continuously, you know, push a back on authoritarian consolidation. It's unfortunate that, you know, given the context of COVID and everything, I mean, donor priorities are shifting and everything, but it's important to make sure that, you know, authoritarian regimes such as Zimbabwe, democracy and governance resources are built. And this funding should not just be available, you know, around elections because when these funds are also, you know, around available around elections, it feeds into the, you know, propaganda by regimes such as, you know, the one that we have in Zimbabwe that, you know, civil society organizations, are puppets of the West and they are there to push a regime change agenda. So it's important for civil society to remain visible in communities throughout the electro cycle. Number three, it's important to support, the support should be targeted at various levels. You know, the ecosystem, the full ecosystem of civil society organizations, including grassroots, you know, level organizations because these are the people that are really connected to the people. And so it's important to also focus on these organizations. And some of these organizations do not necessarily take the box, all the boxes in terms of, you know, criteria for funding and everything. And it's important to be flexible to allow these organizations to do the kind of work that is needed at a grassroots level. Also, you know, local ownership of, you know, the ideas that we'll be pushing. It's really important, especially in context such as Zimbabwe where there are sensitivities around the role of the West and, you know, all the propaganda that we get from the government. I would say for me, those are some of the recommendations to external actors. I'll stop here. Thank you, Gladys. That's really an important list of recommendations. And I know all the hard work that you and Charles Mangonguera did in Zimbabwe to gather this input and these insights. Thank you for that. Walter, I'd like to turn to you quickly, very, very fast. Please share with us a few takeaways. Yes, it may take away from our research, but also from my work in many different countries is that we have the support of external donors and supported like the organizations of Brian, but they are the minority. The majority of the support come from bilateral donors or large donors that use public funding and they are used very inadequate structure to provide support. They use the same framework that they use to support general development, which is very rigid, the logical frameworks and very in the principal value for money, which it doesn't really work for this kind of work or supporting organic social movements. My second comment is that there is a need to support the organic analysis, capacity building and learning within organizations. Still, many donors are parachuting external consultants into different countries that are aiming to provide support to grassroots organizations or social movements that many of them do know what they need, what they want, what they need is the support of solidarity instead of the external consultant parachuted. And the final one, which is very important, I think is the most important is that we need support for grassroots organization. The heart of social movements are grassroots organization and by that, I mean voluntary organization, they are aiming to improve public policies and services that directly is affecting them. So this is opposed to many of us who work in professional NGOs. So donors, external actors need to have alternative arrangements to support grassroots movement because many of them ask grassroots organization to have financial and administrative system to receive grants, which they do not have, but some of the alternatives that we can have is NGOs, local NGOs, national NGOs that do have those structures, they can be intermediary organizations with external donors to provide support through training, capacity building to grassroots organizations. I'll stop there. Thank you, you did that in two minutes. I've got, I'm timing you. All in all, two minutes, please. I know that's not a lot of time, but please share with us some takeaways for the report. I'll try to be here as precise as Walter in terms of timing. Indeed, in my report, I had exactly the same recommendation about the grassroots movements about local communities because like I mentioned before, there is no national nationwide organic and corruption movement in Ukraine, but there are multiple organic movements that happen around different localities around the different corruption problems where corruption is affecting people themselves, but yet those people are not able to receive any funding. And my suggesting was that these big professional organizations in the capital can be used as a funding hub for those smaller organizations and capacity building facility. The second recommendation for international donors was to essentially try to leverage the power of Ukrainian civil society more when they are trying to push for reforms in Ukraine because I analyzed in my report that many of the reforms that were conditions of conditionalities of the international donors failed because civil society were not interested in them, they didn't know. And civil society is really powerful in Ukraine. They go on TV, they go in parliament, they shape opinions. So international donors should understand that they need to engage more with society to achieve this country ownership of a reform. Another recommendation was of course to set those conditionalities in a strict fashion. And if we see that corruption persists, donors can refrain from providing financial support because very often the support that the country receives is used to even increase corruption and to profit corrupt officials. This is of course a known fact. And my last point was that it's very important to pay attention to protection and support of anti-corruption activists because on the cover of my report, we chose to have a picture of anti-corruption activist Vitaliy Shabunin and at the time of my report, he was attacked during one of the street protests with some medical antiseptic liquid. But now, one year later, his house was set on fire. So that's the difference and the scale. And we had one of the anti-corruption activists, Katarina Gatzuk, not from Kiev, but actually she's a regional activist. And regional activists are much more in danger than Kiev activists. And they are just killed for their activity. So just we should always remember about this, especially on this day. Thank you. Thank you, Olana. You echo what, you were reinforcing what Gladys is saying that solidarity and protection is so important. People are challenging vested interests and they face repercussions for that. Brian, I'd like to give you two minutes. Apologies that I cannot stretch our time. I'm gonna put the timer on and then we'll just wrap up. We'll have like two minutes after that before we get cut off. Thank you. I'm gonna work at Shostak and I can speak fast. Sort of holding that really good question around process and operations, holding onto that for a moment. One of the things that all the reports mentioned was that tension felt between movements and activists and donors who have different priorities. And we were all pretty well aware of how donor dollars can create or exacerbate divisions within civil society that ultimately handicapped the ability to sustain a kind of mass non-violent action that builds social cohesion and fragments power of the ruling party or the government, which is really needed to get those key individuals to jump ship and help shift power. So our approach is to try to mitigate this in sort of like three different ways. And I hope there are other things that resonate both with folks who are donors and folks who are accepting donor money. And so the first is right off the bat at our first meeting with a potential partner. It's important that we are clear about what our interest is, what we're offering other than just funding, why we think collaboration is gonna help achieve mutual goals and what our red lines are. And so among those red lines is that we will only support movements that are committed to non-violence whose campaigns are consistent with international recognized human rights and movements that are not part of the portable party. And this framework was really adopted by thought leader in the field and the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict and I hope we can get that link in the chat. The other thing is we gotta really take on the work to find out not only where the gaps in funding are but to ask people what they're already planning on doing so that we avoid a situation whereby certain activities are getting triple funded because donors think they're attractive and the real needs aren't getting funded. And perhaps sort of what I was trying to talk about before is a unique role that we can play are those networks that we can bring in when they're relevant and that can help our partners fast track progress. And so some other things that we have done is that we try to have private and as frank as possible conversations with other donors about making sure that financial support is spread out and that we avoid came-making so to speak. And then we try to connect our partners like I said earlier to those who have a certain technical experience but we also try to make sure that those partners and those voices are connected to people that are on Capitol Hill or who are in the executive, people who set policy but who are designing RFPs. So that they better understand the impact that they're having in creating harmful competition or in an effort really to mitigate those predefined externally determined objectives and goals. And I'll leave it there. Thank you. My apologies for doing this. We're gonna be cut off in one minute. So I'd just like to thank all of you for your outstanding and insightful contributions. And thanks to all the participants for joining us today and thanks to the United States Institute of Peace and Miranda Rivers and our other colleagues for convening this meeting. If you want to stay in touch, please get in touch and we'd be happy to forward you resources on the special reports. Thank you very much. I think we're gonna get cut off in like five seconds. Thank you all.