 Good afternoon, and thank you for joining this event on building peace from the inside out, a conversation about Sierra Leone's fumble talk program and the transformative power of locally led solutions. I want to extend a special thank you to minister Al-Ghali and to all of our panelists for joining us in person today. My name is Karine Graf, and I'm a senior advisor for conflict prevention and fragility at the United States Institute of Peace, which was established by the U.S. Congress in 1984 as a nonpartisan public institution dedicated to helping prevent, mitigate, and resolve violent conflicts. We are delighted to co-host today's event with the Foundation Catalyst for Peace to discuss a timely new book by its founder and president Libby Hoffman, who is here with us today. In a moment, Libby will share with us her journey as a peace builder, author, and as co-founder of the community reconciliation program, Fumble Talk, which is at the center of her new book. The book's release is very timely, in part because it coincides with an ongoing debate here in Washington and in other capitals around the world about the role of aid localization. That is, how to improve aid programs by forging closer partnerships between donors and national and local actors, including the communities most directly impacted by aid. To be clear, the debate on this issue is not about principle or whether working more directly with local leaders is the right thing to do. There is broad agreement on this. The benefits of increased localization include improved trust, access on the ground, speed of response, responsiveness to community needs, and the sustainability of programs. It may also be more cost effective to work directly with local actors. A recent study by the Share Trust estimates that delivering aid and peace programs through local organizations could be 32 percent more cost efficient than working through international for-profit implementing organizations. And so organizations like US Agency for International Development are raising their ambition and commitment to localization. USAID recently committed to redirect the development funding that it provides directly to local partners. Raising the share of aid, it will provide to those partners to 25 percent of its total budget by 2025. But what is still very much under debate, particularly in international aid agencies, is the question of how to deepen partnerships with local actors and what localization actually means and looks like in practice. Some of the questions that are percolating here in Washington and policy circles include what do successful partnerships between international actors, national leaders, and local governments and communities look like on the ground, what are the tools and mechanisms needed to put local communities in the lead to design and implement programs, and where and how are donors in position to better support local actors in responding to local challenges. I can't think of a better group of panelists that is better positioned to help us explore these questions than the individuals who are here with us today. Their engagement with Fumble Talk and Sierra Leone's One Fumble national framework, a participatory policy planning process that is rooted in communities, offers us a unique opportunity to learn from a concrete example of localization that has been brought to scale nationally. So with us, in addition to Libby Hoffman, we have minister of state in the office of the vice president of the Republic of Sierra Leone, Francis Algali, John Kalker, who's executive director of Fumble Talk, and Dr. Sani Joseph, vice president of the Africa Center here at USIP. Welcome. For those tuning in online, you can take part in today's discussion by asking a question using the chat box function located on the USIP event page, and we'll do our best to address as many of your questions as possible. So with that, Libby, I'd like to start with you. You've just released your book. The answers are there, Building Peace from the Inside Out. Could you tell us what the book is about, and could you share with us a little bit about your journey and how you came to work on local peace building in Sierra Leone? Sure. Thank you, Karen. First of all, thank you to you and to USIP for hosting us in this conversation. I think this is absolutely the perfect time to magnify this story and this conversation, and we're really thrilled to be a part of it, so I appreciate that. So the book is about the last 15 years of my work in Sierra Leone, alongside John Kalker, and in the last several years, alongside the government of Sierra Leone also, building a program that puts the people in community of Sierra Leone at the center and in charge, first of their own post-war reconciliation and then adapting that into a people's lead planning and development process. So it tells those stories while it weaves in the framework behind that, the different components of the system of the way we had to work to accomplish that, and then it also weaves in my own journey as a person, as a leader in what I had to learn in order to work that way, and the nature, what this partnership and this work required of me in order to be a part of and to support it. So it weaves all of those things together, and it springs from, in my own experience, I had been a political science professor at a college, and while I loved that work, I was always more oriented towards activism than just research. And so I left academia because I really wanted just to do the work of conflict resolution and peace building. And not long after I had a windfall and actually came into $20 million through my father having taken his company public. And so now all of a sudden this work that I wanted, that I was on the grantee side of, I now had an opportunity to be a grantor and to use those resources to create the work that I wanted to see. And what I really wanted to do, I had seen so much locally led peace building that was incredibly powerful and effective all around the world, but it was isolated and episodic. And I was really interested in what are the systems, the structures that support local ownership and leadership at the systemic scale, and how do we live into that? How can the people and communities most impacted by war in particular be the ones that get to lead? What are the systems that support that? And decided to use our resources to live into that. I thought the only way we can actually learn that is in practice. And so we decided to do a sort of unique approach to funding, spending down the endowment over roughly 20 years, and focus on granting to fewer places and going deeper and longer term. And five years into that process I met John Cawker and the synchronicity in our visions was incredible. And he had this vision for a reconciliation process in his country after the special court, after the TRC, one that was really drawing on their culture and their community and that was based at the local level, centered around bringing communities together in a restorative justice process of truth telling, apology and forgiveness. And so when we came together to work on that, it began this partnership that led to living out these ideas in process and learning as we went. And so that's the story that I'm telling in the book and that's a little bit about my motivation and what got me into it. Well, thank you. So to get to the core of your book and the title, you talk about an inside out approach. So I imagine most of our viewers are familiar with what a bottom up approach, but what do you mean by an inside out approach? What's the distinction between that and bottom up? Well, one of the things as we have lived into this work, so our vision was not only to do a community centered reconciliation process where the communities were running their own reconciliation process, but we wanted to do it at the national scale. So how do you simultaneously create a process where communities are leading, but you're actually organizing in a way that helps that to roll out nationwide. And as we did that, a couple key concepts emerged. And if I can, I think this might be a time actually to show it visually, if that's all right. Absolutely. So the, and we'll hear more of the stories, I think as we go. And I know John will speak to that. But if I can just sort of set the framework for it, because I think it's foundational. If you look at in whether it's peace building and or development or whatever the humanitarian work is, the community that has a challenge is like a cup or a bowl. And so in this case, the issue was a need for reconciliation after the war, but it could have been lack of access to education or healthcare or whatever the issues is. In a traditional aid system, the aid coming into help is like water in a bottle. And so typically what happens is the aid just comes into the community and pours in, but it goes right through because the cup itself is broken. Now the cup, the community is invisible in the international system is what we have found. And so the response, though, out of a desire people want to help is to pour more water in, right? And that just, oftentimes it actually widens the cracks in the cup and it depletes the resources. And it's a flow of resources one way. And you could say that that's from the top down, or you could say it's from the outside in. But in any case, the cup is invisible. FumbleTalk's work wasn't about pouring water and it was about repairing the cup. And what we found was that when you repaired the cup, the community itself obviously could then hold the resources, but it actually became more than that. It became like a well that tapped into the reserves of groundwater in the community. When they were working together, what they could accomplish on their own without even needing additional outside aid was phenomenal. And so that sets the stage for an inside out. So if you have the local community, FumbleTalk organized and supported that by gathering communities together in sections and then aggregated that to the chieftain, which is the next structure, kind of like a county in the United States, and then supported that at the chieftain level. In the second iteration that's focused on people's lead planning with the national framework, that culminates in a chieftain people's plan, where the people are deciding for themselves what they want in their own development and how they want to go about it. That's then aggregated and supported at the district level. And FumbleTalk first supported reconciliation and led it through building a network of volunteers who led it at the district level. And now the people's planning process with the local government, bringing them together in inclusive ways till they lead it. And then that supported at the national level. And first by FumbleTalk as a national civil society and now also with the government and then supported internationally. Now each one of these is its own bowl, its own container and the work of holding and repairing the container that's holding it. So this was the image of our work. This was the vision of the structure, the framework, the architecture of the piece and the organization that we were looking at. And if you look at this, there is no top or bottom. I mean you could be in the international arena up here or down here. The flow and how we would define a current traditional's aid system is it works from the outside in. There's a one directional flow of resources. But because we see the communities that are facing the challenges as actually having abundant resources. The answers are there within the communities. The role of outsiders isn't to solve those problems or fix, you know, bring in their expertise. It's actually to honor the resources that are there, the expertise and magnify it out and share it out at these other levels and to build the community's capacity to work together to do it. So in this model, the flow from the inside out, it rejects. If you think of the system as top down, the alternative is bottom up, but that still preserves a hierarchy. There are distinct roles at every level, national government, international, whether they're private foundations or governments, national governments, national civil society, local government, community leaders, community participants, all of those are distinct roles. There's not a hierarchy in them. They're just distinct in their levels of closeness to the issue being addressed or further away. And so when you think about that, it gives you a more holistic framework that allows you to envision resources actually is flowing both ways. And even though in the early part of our relationship, I was the major funder also catalyst for peace was of the fumble talk work. Everything we structured, I received as much as I gave, right? And I think we've all had those experiences, but we structured that in where the flow is inside out as much as outside in. So that's the summary of the framework that really emerged from our work, the articulation that emerged from our work. Thank you so much. And I'm really glad you brought the nesting bulls because it really captures what you're doing in such a vivid way. I have a lot of follow up questions, but I want to move on to John and ask John for those who don't know fumble talk, could you tell us a little bit about its origins, the origins of the program and the circumstances that led you as a human rights activist to establish the community based program? Thank you very much. Well, first, as a human rights advocate, I'll normally say activist, you know, someone who monitored the conflict and linked with several other international organizations. I was concerned, you know, by then that the way the conflict was brought to an end, you know, the decision making was more from the outside. We had a peace agreement, we had a truth commission, we had experts who came in to lead the process. We had a special court letter. The consultants who led the truth commission, you know, were all from outside, very good people, but by then I was really concerned that look, we don't need to copycat the South Africa model. We don't need to copycat the Chilean model, the Guatemalan model, you know, the Zimbabwean Catholic memorial model. I said, look, as a country, as a nation, we went through a unique conflict. We went through a conflict that was difficult to describe and I trust the process. Let's find ways to find solutions, you know, to sort of allow us to move on. Now, I remember when the governments, we are negotiating in Togo, Lome, I spoke to the then presidential affairs minister. I know, I appeal to him and to the general then say, please, please, please, don't resort to the quick fix. That is, the war is over, blankets amnesty, let's move on. So they assured me that there will be no quick fix. By the end of the day, that was what we got. I say, nation, there was sort of, okay, the war is over, let's move on. Power sharing, you know, the rebel leader was given the position of equivalent to vice president, and okay, you are fighting for all these minerals, you are in charge of the minerals now. So as a immigrant advocate, we said, no, this will not work well. But we were also tired of the conflict. We wanted to move on as a nation. So my colleagues, you know, we got one as I said, look, what can we do? Some suggested let's challenge the peace agreement in the courts because this will not go down well for us as a nation. And I said, no, I think, you know, when the agreement was signed, people of Sierra Leone don't know what was in the agreement, but we all just rejoiced. The war is over, let's move on. So okay, I said, let's study the agreement and see how can we use the provisions in this agreement to further address the issue of impunity. So we organize ourselves into what is the TRC working group, the truth and reconciliation working group, which I was the national chairman for a coalition of over 100 civil society groups across the country. So we tried to influence, you know, the establishment of the truth commission. We worked very hard. But at the end of the day, you know, it was more back and forth, it was almost the same like South Africa, because that's what they know. You know, so as an advocate back and forth, I said, okay, I will not continue this struggle. Let's wait at the end of the truth commission. We have all the time to continue with discussion. So I suggested to the consultant, let's work at the community level. Let's have a unique process where we have community truth processes that will feed into the official truth commission. And I said, no, it has never worked. It will not work, etc. I said, okay, fine. So then the report was handed over, the special court, you know, I was so frustrated. And as someone who helped negotiate the agreement with the amputees and were wounded, and I was stuck because I promised the amputees and were wounded that let them cooperate because there will be a reparations program. So with all of that, I was in that sort of conundrum where, you know, what do we do next? Even the special fund for war victims was not forthcoming by then. So I decided to take time off, you know, to come out. I had a fellowship at Columbia. So then I met with Libby, you know, I described my vision. I said, look, I believe we have a way to address our problem. You know, what has been done is more of the surface, you know, the special court, about 500 million to try about 10 people, 500 million dollars. The truth commission, about four to five million for the whole country. There was little or nothing for the special fund for war victims. So I said, look, let's go back to the people, let's consult with them, and let's find ways to get their own input. And I believe they have the answers. So that's how we started. I said, okay, Libby asked me for a concept note. I said, look, it's difficult to even come up with a concept note. What I know is I can describe the process. Let's just go in and consult. Let's have first, I wanted to suggest chiefdom consultations, but we'll take more time. I said, okay, let's have district consultations. As soon as we had the first consultation, you know, asking people, do you want to forgive? How do you want to go about that? No one has asked us this question before. No one has come to us to talk about what we want to do. I said, okay, so I called Libby. I said, look, I think the people are ready to engage. Okay, but let's continue with this consultation. First, second, third, the same thing. You know, we asked them, who bears the greatest responsibility, told them is the person next door. It's not the leader of the rebels who they don't know. It's not the commander who they don't know. It's the person next door, you know, who burned down their house, who killed their loved one. So basically, you know, I have this baggage of being a human rights advocate, and now I'm trying to see how I can lead a peace process, you know, getting people to talk about finding their own solutions. So the first decision was, I think it would be difficult to continue with the human rights baggage, you know, as someone who has been always, you know, raising issues with the government, press release. I want to start from a new page. So that's how we decide to form FAMBUTALK. FAMBUTALK is cruel for family talk, because we believe we are a family. Before the world, we used to be one family. You know, you see your mother, you see an elderly person carrying water, heavy load. You stop. You don't need to be related to that person. You stop to help. You see a child going the wrong way. You don't need to be the biological father or mother of that child. You stop to find ways. You know, there is this added, it takes a village to raise the child. You know, I remember community will come together to contribute, to send the brightest child to go to university. What went wrong? I trusted the process that, look, something went wrong. Let's find a way to move on. So that's the genesis of FAMBUTALK. We decided to form this organization to say, okay, look, let's start from a new page. Let's see what we can do. So basically that's how FAMBUTALK was established. And our work was to facilitate this process. We believe, you know, we were guided by values. Value number one, we are not experts. The people are the experts. They know what they want. Number two, how do we work in a way that is non-political and non-partisan? You know, in a way that people will see it as their own program, their own needs. And also, how do you avoid bringing people to the big towns? You know, having a conversation within the security and safety of their communities, where they can speak freely. So that's, these are among other things that guided the process. And once we started, people were so willing, they were so engaged. And that's how we were able to organize over 250 ceremonies with hundreds of villages, you know, allowing people, victims, perpetrators, to tell their story, you know, about what happened during the conflict, you know, because the development process was a little bit challenged. You know, you come to a village where, you know, I live next door to the person that I, you know, I killed their child or loved one. And if they call us to a meeting because an NGO is coming in, you know, I wouldn't sit in that meeting because he or she is there. You know, I have something that is difficult. So anyway, so basically the process created that environment for us to talk about what happened. And then the next stage was where we are now. That is, the people are ready to move on into development processes. Once the healing has taken place at that level, they are ready now to step into that, into their next stage. Thank you very much for that, John. And especially for making the contrast between the outside in and the inside out approaches. I think that came out very clearly from your presentation. I want to turn to Minister Algali because the government of Sierra Leone has really latched onto this program and forged a really unique partnership around this program and is currently expanding it from what I understand to build a national process of participatory policy planning. So I want to ask you, Minister, if you could speak a little bit about what motivated the government of Sierra Leone to do this? And why more generally would governments want to work with these local level partnerships? Okay. Thank you very much. I never knew that the United States had an institute for peace. So this is really, really most welcome. I'm happy to be here. In 2018, I joined the government. I have a background of human rights and education. So when the government came to power, I was invited to become a minister of state in the office of the vice president after an election that was really peaceful. Although we had isolated incidences of violence during the elections and there was movement of people. So his excellence in the president called the vice president and asked him to see why there was this violence, isolated and sporadic violence, and to see whether something can be done to strengthen social cohesion. And the honorable vice president tried to interrogate some of the structures because a lot of investment was made in Sierra Leone after the war. We had security structures. We had district structures. We had provincial structures. So we decided to work with the UNDP then to look at the areas where there were isolated cases of violence to see what some of the issues were. And one of the organizations which we worked with to look at these issues was FAMBUL Talk because everybody in Sierra Leone used FAMBUL Talk and their work in conflict resolution. And when they sent the report, we noticed that in areas where there were no chiefdom structures at the chiefdom level, the community level, the tendency to violence was high. But in areas where there were chiefdom structures, they were able to solve the issues very quickly and the violence did not spread. So we noticed that during the peace building structures, it was stopped at the district level. It did not drill down to the chiefdom level and conflict always begins in communities. And the fact that FAMBUL Talk had a community-led program that starts with the little minute villages, we thought it would be a good idea for the ministry of local government to see whether they could adopt these structures. Let me take an example. In one of the areas, what came out was that there was a conflict between the speaker and the paramount chief. The speaker supported one political party. The paramount chief supported another political party. So the people were afraid. Nobody wanted to associate with the paramount chief. And when we interrogated, the people said, just make peace between the speaker and the paramount chief and everything is okay. We have no problem, because we don't want to fight each other. But if the two chiefs, the two heads are fighting, we have no choice but to fight. So simple issues like that. So we looked at it from a peace-building and social cohesion perspective, and we thought it was a good thing for us. The second thing, we also looked at it from a developmental perspective, because there was a case of one village where there was a high level of maternal mortality. And the ministry of health just looked at the statistics and said, we need to build a maternal health post here. There's need for a hospital in this village. And speaking to the people, the people were saying, no, we don't need a hospital. It's not a hospital. We need to just make the road for us. And there's a hospital three miles away. So why do you want to come and build a hospital for us? So it dawned on us that there was need to involve the people in terms of social cohesion and peace-building. And that there was already a process in Sierra Leone which we had not been using. And we thought that as a government, if we tried to expand and pilot this process to other villages, maybe we would have found an answer to strengthen our social cohesion, as well as strengthening our development. So the Honorable Vice President asked me to call a meeting between the Ministry of Planning and the Ministry of Local Government and Family Talk. And that was how the partnership started. We have been working together to see how we can pilot this program into more areas in Sierra Leone. But also it led the government to understand the richness of civil society work and civil society partnership. So one of the innovations we also did was to establish a government and civil society dialogue platform, dialogue series, so that the civil society could organize themselves and invite government to dialogue on any issues that the believer issues that government need to know about or they can work with government to address. And the government can also call civil society to discuss certain issues which they think civil society can help to ensure that there's development and there's social cohesion. So this is how we stumbled into the program. But one of the things that we noticed as a government is very difficult for international organizations and NGOs and donors to support processes. This program was a process. It was a means to an end. It was not like oh we have the objectives, we need to build a school, we need to do infrastructure here, we need to set up this. It was supporting a process whereby people are engaged, people discuss and people come up with solutions and we accompany them. So it was difficult for us to see how we could engage the international community to engage donors to see how they can support processes because we noticed and we saw the value in this process. So as a government we allocated resources to it through the ministry of planning and development to pilot and see how we can expand it to different districts. And the results are there, the testimonies are there for people to see what can be achieved if you involve communities in this way and if you put people at the center of their own development. There's so much you can get out of it and development would be sustainable. We don't need to write a book about sustainable development. The people themselves can sustain their own development if we work in this way. So this is how the government came into it. Thank you. Thank you so much minister and you know I think one of the really unique aspects of this program and Fumble Talk is that it was scaled to the national level and I think that's really the lesson and the model that it shows for the rest of us. Susani I want to turn to you and I saw you taking a lot of notes so I want to invite you to react to what you just heard and maybe comment on why is this kind of community-based approach so important and unique. Thank you and thank you Libby. Thank you minister. Thank you John. I think I was taking notes because I'm so fortunate to work here at USIP because we we want to we create this type of platforms to allow this type of this kind of exchanges and every time we have this opportunity yes we learn with humility and this is a learning platform for us and hopefully for the audience as well and thank you for the book and thank you for documenting that experience because for me the book and the experiences are acts of generosity I think you you spend the time to document something unique the look the expertise of local serial unions and the sense of innovation the face of wicked problems and really thank you for that thank you for your testimonies I think some couple of things came to mind when I was listening first I was reminded one one author Hal Sanders he used to work for USIP at some time who told me Sani remember leaders sign peace treaties but only people make peace mm-hmm and that was for me as I was listening to you I was reminded of that that yes family is about people making peace yes the peace treaty was signed and then we had a quick fix but you wanted people you wanted to facilitate that peace making process between people and that's key it's key because they will own it that's how they build those relationships number two there is something a saying uh credited to one of chinese philosopher but I think it's an african wise man or woman who said it that if you want to work with the people go live with them love them learn from them start with what they know build on what they have and I think that's that's that's the demonstration of when you have the humility to learn from the people you pretend to help yeah when you love them it means respect and dignity and when you start with what they know meaning that they are at the center of the issue because they experience that issue firsthand because they can frame the issue in their own terms not in consultant terms or outsider terms so they will own the issue they will take the responsibility of the issue because they they can identify and relate to that issue and the way the issue is described and when you ground your intervention on the look on local resources they own it they can afford it they can sustain it they can scale it up you know that's what we are seeing here right so for me that's the approach right so and now as outsider is I will borrow I like I mean generally I grew up in the family where we tell stories so I always take stories so I will borrow from President Kennedy who said people need not handout by hand up and so your intervention when you recognize that that the people are the framers they own their issues you ground your intervention on local resources so now your intervention becomes a handout not a handout and so for me those are the last my initial reaction here as I'm listening and learning from these testimonies thank you Sani and I couldn't agree more it's an act of generosity that all of you have engaged in and I think it's also an act of courage to do things differently from each of your perspectives so really appreciate what you've done and you're sharing it with us I want to drill down a little bit into your experiences and the this case and I want to turn to John and ask you John to start with what were the conditions that made it possible for you to launch this inside out program and and to scale it what did you need from catalyst for peace to be able to do that and what did you need for your from your government to be able to to launch that kind of an initiative thank you very much um well first it's commitment commitment to engage in the process and I think from the start Libby and I agreed to be part of the journey I will take the co-creation because it's not like a project you know peace building is a process you know it's not something you can say okay I will build five schools in one year I will build three hospitals in six months so it's a process so it's that commitment commitment to accompany the process that's basically the guiding principle of our partnership you know for us to be in the middle of engaging communities something come up you know I'll have the courage to pick up the phone to call Libby right here and we agreed to work at chiefdom level because initially we agreed to work at the chiefdom level you know it's easy to say okay we're working um but then 161 chiefdom by then but then the people said no we want to have the conversation at the vintage level so if it was another donor he would say ah no the indicators we agreed on is at the chiefdom level so you cannot go back down you know so no we need to sit that back you know to have another meeting so and you know I was able to explain to her she said well if that's what the people want let's go through that process so it's an emergent design we'll respond to um the issues that come up so okay the people said we want to work at villages okay can we work at cluster level you know like the sectional level the smallest unit is about five to ten villages so that's how we started but now with the partnership with the government we've gone down to the village level to have structures each village to have their own um monthly meetings to agree on what they want to do to agree on how they want to go about it you know sometimes it's it's really unfortunate you go to a community what you see is in your lens it's poverty you don't look for values you don't look for what they have you know the success you know the resources they have you just say oh these are people are poor and that's the lens you come okay you go to a village um you see women working to the stream you say oh these people oh they are so poor they cannot even afford to have a borehole let me come and help them to build a borehole in the middle of the town that might be um problem for the women because maybe the work to the stream is their downtime that's when they talk about their kids that's when they talk about their husbands that's when they talk about development within the village so if you come in you think you're coming with a genuine um intention but because you did not consult with them you caused more problem so basically um it's important to have partnership co-creation you know to work this way and as Libby said that's was how we started you know for the first um say 10 to 12 years although the partnership have evolved you know now we are more program partners but it was really important to get to this stage you know using that approach now for the government I really feel I am so privileged I am so fortunate to lead a program that starts from the community you know I remember my first encounter with my president was in Paris you know where I was for like 30 minutes and he was he was connecting with the president oh yes I'm yes we went to that village yes I saw it so it's more of the commitment for the government it's not just the commitment from the leadership it's the ministerial commitment you know the way we work you know is how do you avoid working in silos how do you get the ministries to collaborate you know so you know like we through the office of vice president we have a steering committee you know we have three ministers who actually um take who make decisions but the technical committee these are the directors you know that brainstorm and forward the recommendation so mostly it's commitment that is really what is needed to work this way and also I would say patience you know working on peace building on innovative processes it's difficult to give a timeframe so we have to trust the process you know of course the sorties are very much important and the government have demonstrated their commitment by you know allocating those small but it's the symbolic allocation with all the problems all the challenges they said this is really important it's in the national budget this is the way to go for us as a nation let's find ways to respond to the to the needs of the communities in october we had a big event in corner district we are you know the leadership the vice president and a couple of ministers we are there for three days listening to ordinary people in the same room from the village to the council leaders to the traditional leaders to the ministers all in the same room I think you know and before then we also went to the communities to see what they are doing have that conversation I think the courage to engage at that level it's really what is important to work this way and of course there are challenges you know how do you keep the program uh non-political you know we are we are approaching elections you know how do you make sure that you know this is not seen as party a's program or party this program it's seen as working for the people of Sierra Leone it's an approach that will help alleviate you know the people into a position that they decide on what they want and how they want to go about it it's a unique privilege I really don't take it for granted thank you for sharing that um Libby could I turn to you and ask um from the perspective of catalyst for peace what is it that you had to do to support this kind of inside-out growth and the drivers coming from the inside out versus development is often driven from the outside or at least that's the perception yeah um so what did your foundation need to do to support that how did it need to adjust and yeah one of the thank you it's I think it's a great question and even that question includes within it and part of the assumption of my answer which is I had to do something right like I was a part of the system so it wasn't about just as being a funder giving to people local people who were leading right and I'm outside of and disconnected from but actually a part of creating a whole system and so how do I work within that whole system in ways that are constructive and that are actually supporting and strengthening local leadership and there's a couple things I would say one is an orientation I had to come in first and foremost not as an expert but as a learner and what that means is if I really believe that the answers are there um how do I go in and create the space to help identify ask for invite learn um from those answers that are there and then share them out like that so there's just an orientation as a learner now um and I had to continually work to let go of I've been you know all my training was about you get more success in this work the more of an expert you are like it was all building towards a certain notion of expertise and it's not that you're not cultivating that but I had to put that aside um and continually reinforce that engagement I am I am really here as I'm bringing my expertise and a lot of it is process expertise and kind of a nerdy program programmatic language what it required to actually support local leadership was what we call nested circles of learning at every level when you're using um when you're really putting local people and communities in charge you you don't know exactly you have a program outline but you you don't know exactly what they're gonna if you ask them what they want to do what they're gonna you know and how you're gonna how it's gonna emerge and so we had to create um what we called a learning and immersion design platform um where it is you're creating learning spaces to gather that that learning to look at what's like an action reflection loop um to reflect on the action that's happening what are we learning what's working what's not working how do we need to adapt how do we need to to build so we used immersion design and we used uh learning an immersion design platform that was building these spaces so for example the first after the first six months of the program we brought John and the senior staff outside of that context for a spacious week together to reflect and to think about what we had learned from that and how we were going to do revise the program as a as a result and we instituted a regular cycle of those kinds of things process things learning and reflection spaces and again none of my training either academically or professional culture was ever really talked about the importance of learning spaces but to actually do the work on the ground I think that was one of the most valuable things and we invested a lot of our resources in these learning spaces in country and outside and then within that the staff had their own version of that they got together every month for staff meetings where they shared what was happening in the different districts um and it was those meetings that became both a source of the the staff supporting each other doing difficult work but it was learning exchanges were really facilitated it was like this major um it just sped up the learning incredibly so that you're sharing what's working here and what's working here and that just magnified it and also raised the challenges and they were the resources as a staff that decided how they wanted to address the challenges so you're creating the spaces that allow the resource and the expertise that's there to come forward now that was three days a month plus the expenses of getting there and gathering for the staff to do it and as we faced budget cuts I would always say no you can cut other things but don't cut that that is the heartbeat of this work is that's how you learn that's how you magnify the the growth so those learning spaces and that one other thing that I would say is an expansive definition of time one of the things that we said um that that we've learned is that you have to go slow to go fast go slow create the space for people to make their own decisions build the infrastructure of community based decision making um and then structures at each level including organizationally and when you take the time to do that then the growth actually happens exponentially after that but you have to go slow at first and I had to learn how to counter all of my okay but you know this doesn't seem like it's work this doesn't seem like it's you know moving this forward like all of my desire to move things forward I had to really learn how to see the process itself the tending to relationship the tending to community building the reflection space the learning space this was actually the engine of not only growth but sustainable so you had to be willing to take a risk in the beginning when you weren't huge risk huge risk which you can do when there's relationships of trust thank you for that um I also just a quick follow-up question for you um to what extent did you work with international donors and can you share positive experiences that you had or examples of working with international donors um over the decade and a half that you've done this work in Sierra Leone do you you talk about how international donors work in your book yeah and there's some you know not so positive examples um but I'm wondering if you can share some positive examples sure and actually John you probably have some examples of that of that too and I can sense that you might but the from my experience first of all I would say the field and and I'm coming as a private philanthropist philanthropist and so that's completely different than an inner governmental um arena I have seen in the field of private philanthropy I have seen when we first started this idea of local ownership was just like we were one of the only voices us and maybe peace direct and that the the field of locally owned and led peace building from a private philanthropy has really grown and take off and we just came from meetings yesterday with like the Siegel Foundation and Madre and Rockefeller Brothers Fund and and others Radical Flexibility Fund and they're all like there's this burgeoning of of not only new organizations but new programs within organizations that recognize okay we have to transform the way we work so that experience as a field is really growing in incredibly gratifying ways um and within within our work I mean we did one of the um of our um um so we've had great experiences I would say most recently um one of the things as we've been working with the government and to adapt this community mobilization process to a um a national policy framework you know anytime you're working with the national government it's complex it takes a long time um and we have and this is at the time where Catalyst for Peace was pulling back our funding and no longer able to fund but we needed more funding to carry over the process as you reach this increasing complexity and we've had three grants from Humanity United to support the work as it's been emergent um recognizing that the process of developing government ownership and capacity takes time right so this last year was the first year that the One Fumble Framework was incorporated in the national budget but we started those conversations four or five years ago um and Humanity United has given us we just got our third grant from them for the framework basically immersion emergence process um and I think they understand that in real life process takes time change takes time and um and they believe in the learning process of doing it and so that's an example um of a kind of funding partnership that's been supportive yeah very helpful thank you um minister Algali I want to come back to you um and ask you in terms of political commitment or other resources what did it take for your government to be able to continue to engage with this partnership as I know it has over time to sustain it and if you can share any hurdles that you've experienced um in terms of the government being able to adopt and embrace the One Fumble Framework and incorporate it into the national budget you know what were the what were the challenges thank you very much for the question in the first place the agenda of the government is human capital development so in terms of political commitment we do not lack it as far as this process is concerned and we were lucky for the fact that the local government act was being reviewed during the other point in time and it was a good opportunity for us to institutionalize the the the process so that even if they're subsequent governments unless they review the act or they change the act that is the official government policy if you want to do development and service delivery at the local level processes that you have to go by it's using the people's planning process and the One Fumble Framework so that was really a positive thing and the government was committed to that so once it became part of the policy it was easy to allocate resources to it it's part of the government program it's not just a project that you would have to seek uh additional funding or extra budget re reallocation to to for it one of the challenges now is you know that some of our programs uh don't know funded like to get big institutions like the World Bank to to see this as part of government agenda and to try to see how that can be incorporated into the country's strategy but it's work in progress we are working on it and uh I believe there are positive signs from both the World Bank I think the the the vision that there has been a change there has been a slight shift in the perception of the the international community about doing development there has been a a slight shift there's now a talk about local ownership about contextualizing development and all of that so it's it's uh positive for initiatives like this to get additional support to enable the government to to roll it out however there is the need for technical support and technical expertise for example uh the government now has a fumble talk who are it's their baby it's their program they are the the the owners of the concept more or less we have adopted it as a government but we do not have the technical expertise to roll it out without the support of fumble talk there is need for for training there's need for capacity building at the ministerial level both within the ministry of local government and the ministry of planning and development to take this forward how we do that is another hurdle that we we we need to climb and we need to to to set that out but we have the national steering committee and we have the technical committee we hope that within those spaces we will try to develop the the necessary framework but as both John and Libby have said it's a process it's it's not a project we are talking about having a five-year plan a five-year plan maybe a three-year cycle of of of implementation after that we evaluate and then go another three-year cycle so it's not something that can be done today but there's a commitment there's a political will i hope i continue to be in the office of the vice president to see to see to see this this through but uh i believe as a government realizing the potential and realizing the value of doing development in this way and building social cohesion in this way i think it's a very big step and i would want other governments to emulate this kind of thing because it would really minimize some of the conflict situation and some of the underdevelopment that we see at the rural level thank you so i want to we we've been going for about an hour now so i want to look forward a little bit before we go to the q and a and i want to ask you all what your aspirations are for this model in Sierra Leone going forward and beyond to what extent do you think that this model can be replicated in other places so with that particular question i think i'll start with with sunny what are your thoughts on given all the conversations that are going on in capitals about aid localization and elsewhere you know to what extent can we expect to see this model replicated are there places or sectors where you think conditions are ripe for this where we're more likely this is more likely to work than others if i'll turn to you for that sunny to kick us off thank you i don't think it's about sectors i think it's about context it's really the context and i'm listening to the minister i think and libya and john i think that there are a couple of things that need to happen or take place be present you have one commitment you need that local commitment the political the political will right and so you need that number one so i call the first c so to speak number two she mentions it you need capacity you need the local capacity to either be able to adapt or absorb a new process so you need that technical capacity to allow the scaling up or the replication that the second c the third c i my view you need a demonstration of contribution like for example the government is putting down payment making a down payment and then now so that's a contribution they have the technical steering committee etc so that's the third c and the fourth c i think you need the willingness so an attitude of co-learning so so you want a space that facilitates learning and co-learning inviting orders right so and then all those forces call for a paradigm shift paradigm shift from the donor community and also from our partners in the south so those are i think as i said the context it's really those forces for me are critical and call for that paradigm shift i will stop thank you so maybe i'll open this up this question up to the three of you as to what are your aspirations for the one fumble framework for fumble talk going forward it's difficult to open question it just summarized it all i'll just add one word respect it's important for the donor community to engage in a respectful way you know i think what i'm trying to say is not to go in with um an outside agenda but to be able to go in respectfully you know to listen to um what the people want and respond to their needs through the central government so more or less i think they should be willing to sit together i'll say we should be willing but i mean i'm still a civil society person but we should be willing to sit together to have that conversation you know we are in the government the donor community community representatives through the local government i know the traditional leaders you know they are able to sit together to see what can be done and not just to dismiss you know local concerns or local needs as if they don't know what they want so i'll respect across the board how do you integrate this program as i said into existing programs you know without thinking you know we have this program we've developed it you know or no we cannot change so it's that humility to respond that's all i can add but thank you very much thank you john for that um minister maybe if i can turn to you next yes um i would like to see this program become the how to do development in Sierra Leone it i would like to see this program really really take root as to how to do development in Sierra Leone we are in the process of developing a new national development plan uh in Sierra Leone and one of the commitments that the president and the honorable vice president have made is to use the model to see how that can inform the national development plan going forward i think in the near future we that is what we want to see and how that evolves and that would also give added value to how this program moves to the next level how we can use it to do the national development plan and how we can use it to implement the new national development plan the how so these are my aspirations for the program thank you livy i think i have a bigger laundry list i mean in addition to what to what you all are saying i want to see the work grow i want to see the government really build the cross ministerial collaborative space that i think is going to be necessary um for the actual implementation and for the its engagement as a government as a whole vis-a-vis the larger international donors um and that you're moving in that direction i want to continue to see that that grow and strengthen um i want to see um the work of community mobilization that fumble talk is really modeled spending the time to that i want to see that continue to be valued and all of the other whether it's local government um traditional leaders or national government cultivate the patience to really that it takes i think to to work in that way to build the processes for community mobilization and then i would say at a global level you know we've started to really dip our toes in um the global learning space um and just like as i was describing when you had fumble talk staff that were leading work in one district coming together with those that were leading it in another and sharing from from that space we've had a few different global learning events in Sierra Leone and whenever we've brought practitioners from other countries the first thing we hear is wow this gave me hope first of all there's something about seeing and experiencing an example of a program that's working and when you visit the communities in Sierra Leone and you see what they're able to do with the few resources that they've had and after the devastation of war and then Ebola and all of that that they are not defined by the problems that they faced but by what their visions for what they want to do and what they've been able to do and the agency that they hold as a community i mean to me it feels almost like this infinite resource and i want to bring other people in um to seem to be inspired by that and i the the thing that we've found a lot of great success with is creating experiences and and i want to see more of this i think that the people like john um in civil the civil society leaders leading other work the people like the staff and the community members in Sierra Leone the people like minister Al Gali the government ministers that are the visionary people who are working to forge this other funders who have this vision um when we can bring other people who are those kinds of visionary leaders from one context together with those practitioners in other contexts and create cross learning experiences they learn the most from each other um and so the the team that we had from Somalia for example um at a global learning event there the team that we had from Kenya the team that we had um you know from afghanistan right not only did they share their experiences of trying to do a large-scale community either community driven development or national community reconciliation process like the Zimbabwe um but they learned a ton and had the inspiration and so what i would love to see this is i i think there's so much untapped potential from creating spaces for practitioners not just to share head knowledge but to create real embodied immersive learning experiences and again you have to go slow to go fast they take more time um but they open up the kind of learning that is transformational and one part of that you mentioned the word risk and courage that it takes i mean i will say to anybody i think john is one of the most courageous people that i know and he has been consistently over his life minister alkali also the courage that it takes this work when you're forging something new it takes a level of courage and i think rather than making it courage against the odds we can actually create space that and courage courage right that we address the internal dimensions of leadership that we can create what if we could create spaces that recognize what it took and explicitly made that leadership development a part of um of the the program how do we develop the the courage because the courage is there also there are always visionary leaders in a context even the most i'd like to your definition of the wicked problems right even in the the sites of the most wicked conflicts there are courageous visionary leaders how can we support their courage it doesn't take much it just takes acknowledging that's another dimension of inside out we have to look at the inside of what it takes to work this way and create the spaces and kinds of learning communities that support our capacity to do that so that's just a little bit of what i'd like to see that's really helpful thank you liby and you kind of summarized a lot of what we've been talking about so i really appreciate that wrap up so i want to move in uh we have gotten a lot of interest from our viewers in the conversation and questions have been trickling in so i want to turn to some of them we're not going to have time to address all of them but um i want to turn to three questions and i'm just going to maybe start with sani and uh and feel free to respond um to any aspect of these questions so the first one is um how do you measure impact um so i think the question is specifically about development but it could be about peace as well um in the kind of work that you're doing so what are the how do you know what the results are this is a very washington question so it's fair to ask you this here um but how do you measure impact how how are you tracking that so that's the first question second one is um a comment and a question which is that peace building seems to really be on the cutting edge of localized approaches which i agree with that premise um how can we as peace builders help to transfer our knowledge about working locally to other sectors to other parts of the development sector so i think you touched on this already libby but if you have any other thoughts um so how do we you know bring that knowledge from the peace building sector into other sectors and then third um is a question about us programs and to the extent that you were familiar with pscore a question about whether you think the pscore works from the inside out um or maybe are there other us programs that work this way so uh with that uh feel free to to answer any part of those three questions and i will turn it over to sonny those are tough ones i think on the question of impact i think uh again we have all these log frames all these instruments i think we have to think even the measurement of impact differently from that model of uh who should define success who should define impact and who should define indicators right so and i think there is one conversation missing which is how do we work with the local expect to define the the measurement evaluation framework itself i think that's the that's i think that the new paradigm we should we cannot ignore uh locals local practitioners like john in that definition of the framework of impact so i will leave it there i think we are missing that in the current system of m&e's and learning m&e and learning i think we are missing that first key a step is how do we work together to co-clear those frameworks generally those frameworks are created in capitals or by donors without local involvement so and then not just involvement as talking is actually people saying because we have framed the problem because we have designed or co-designed the solutions we also we are well qualified to define what success is and how your nation's success i will i will take that question because i think the rest i think my co-panelists are qualified sunny uh john could i turn to you i'll tell you the second question which is um how do we transfer peace building knowledge to other sectors i would i see peace building as the foundation for all other programs to travel you know take for example the health sector you know even the schools um in other schools to operate effectively the community should be whole you know um where do you build the school so the people feel that they own the school not just the structure but i mean are they comfortable to send their kids to school you know are they interested in what is happening in the schools are they supporting the teachers you know become like in some communities in Sierra Leone you know you have teachers who come from the big towns to work in the small towns how do you support them to stay so i see peace building as the foundation and by that i mean if the communities are able to decide on what they want they're able to own the process they're able to lead what they want all other things will fall into place easily things like agriculture you know we've seen where you supply fertilizers very late you know the planting season these give seeds very late because i mean what do people do you know you build um a market structure where the people don't want the market structure and so in the end they don't they don't use it so basically transfer of knowledge can be through having that conversation you know peace builders are part of the system so you don't just come in as a development practitioner but you engage with uh the stakeholders you know uh the community leaders uh peace builders in order to sort of as i say heal the communities heal the divisions within those communities and get them to be in a stronger position to decide on what they want and to lead the process moving forward i'll just take that one thank you john minister okay there was a question about impact how do you measure this how do you measure this i'll throw i will throw the the question back through a testimony there was a woman when we went to connor who stood up when the vice president was there connor is a place in free town and said um i like this one fumble framework these people's planning process before i wasn't even able to talk stand up and talk in a gathering but now through this one fumble framework where we have all been called together to talk about what we want and how we want to develop ourselves i am now able to talk what i want i am now able to discuss with my husband i can now go out and do things on my own so i feel empowered how do you measure that kind of impact of a program it's only through maybe testimonies only through maybe change from one state to another and what indicators would you use to measure that kind of change when you have women taking leadership before he that told they were not even talking so how do you measure impact i'm just to add to that it just fits very well into what sanny was saying how do you involve community people to define their own what is you know impact their own indicators exactly so you know it's all about having that conversion and involving the people don't do things from your office don't do things from the headquarters but involve people so at the end of the the impact is measured with the lens of either the people or from you as a don't know or you know your colleagues as practitioners yeah thank you both libby well who defines impact is what i hear you saying and i think that's sort of the key question who gets to define impact and i want to i don't feel like i have anything else to add to that particular conversation i think you said it really beautifully except i would say i think part of the conversation is actually for whom are we defining it are we defining it for an external person's validation or not or you know approval or not of a programming or are we defining it for internal learning purposes and how do we do that i think there's there are some really good tools for that and i think it's a mindset as much as everything how do we build in the the internal learning loops that allow us to adapt to harvest our own learning from my perspective because i've seen so much learning harvested from the communities from at that level i've seen so much learning harvested from the staff i've seen so much learning from harvested from the government certainly from our international perspective and how do we harvest more of that learning and channel it into the ongoing program development and adaptation and i think that's something um although we've developed a platform for it connected to this i think there's a lot more potential for using that lens so that you're building these these loops that feed explicitly back into to the community and along that lens i think there's a positive one of the things that we one of the roles that we felt we played as an outsider was an appreciative mirror to simply reflect back what you were seeing in positive ways and i know for myself whenever i experience that it helps me see things about myself and strengthen my sort of stance in those in ways that i don't um that help me and i see that happening in Sierra Leone all the time with john and the staff to the communities with our international partners to john and his staff like it's just when you when you build that in the appreciative mirror it serves as an explicit strengthening and magnification um so i think that's a question for us to take up and to to spend more time with also um i would just say about peace building one of the things i see peace building as an orientation um in a way of bringing together things that aren't often together and it can be people or it can be warring groups but it can also be um you know so um sectors peace building and development and when you're working in a local community these sectors aren't separate it's not like you have even education and health care peace building and development like they're all sort of woven together in the community experience and but so many of our problem solving systems split them apart so there's actually a need for i think a peace building orientation around reclaiming a more holistic um infrastructure supporting this the other thing that where i think there's more of a peace building lens needed is building the linkages the vertical linkages from village to section to chieftain to district to to national and to into international and creating the the space and this is one of the things that i think the one fumble national framework is really pioneering is how do we create the spaces at the national level where the people saying what they want like there is a channel for them to be heard and you described a practical example of that and then for that to feed back in and define development and i think there's it's not peace building as a separate task it's a peace building orientation built into how do we create the linkages between the levels um and so it's peace building informing program development um that i think um there's probably still a lot more to be explored and that could be a much more expansive under definition of the term than the questioner um meant and i don't um i you know i would leave it to you to define peace core and whether that i mean from my perspective i have felt like the peace core workers that i know that i'm people who have served in the peace core um because of the commitment to living in a place um and learning and accompanying um have a much more internalized understanding of this idea of the expansive notion of time that we've been talking about as as critical and of not coming in as an outside expert does you know coming to fix and to save but somebody who's walking alongside helping to identify and magnify and support um the resources that are there that's been my experience of it and that's from a point of remove um but it's at least the the part that i've observed i i think um in general it's a really good model um or for a lot yeah great well thank you so much uh we're coming to the end of our of our panel discussion um i want to thank our panelists uh i want to thank you for your leadership i want to thank you for your generosity as we've been discussing i want to thank you for your courage um and mostly i think i want to thank you for inspiring the rest of us through your example um and i have heard uh these programs talked about often enough that i know you're having an impact um and i know on a personal note you've inspired me and i plan to continue to follow what you're doing and to be inspired so thank you very much for everything that you do um i want to thank our viewers as well those who have joined us online for this conversation and hopefully there will be more to come thank you thank you thank you