 Hello, everyone. We're delighted to welcome you to this event entitled, Paths to Recovery in Yemen, Prospects and Priorities for Reconciliation, Reconstruction, and Sustainable Development. My name is Mike Yaffe, and I am the Vice President of the Middle East North Africa Center at the United States Institute of Peace. We are honored to co-host this event today with the United Nations Development Program in Yemen, which recently released a report assessing the impact of the war in Yemen and the pathways for recovery. In this event, we will discuss how this timely UNDP report can serve as a guide for Yemen and the international community as they work to bring an end to the conflict and create sustainable development strategies in Yemen. I want to give a very warm welcome to U.S. Special Envoy to Yemen, Timothy Letter King, to UN Assistant Secretary-General and UNDP Assistant Administrator, Dr. Khalida Buzzar, and to the rest of our distinguished speakers. For those of you who are not familiar with USIP, the Institute was founded in 1984 by an act of Congress on the premise that peace is practical, peace is possible, and peace is vital to U.S. national security interests. Here at USIP, we work to prevent, mitigate, and resolve violent conflict in regions around the world, from the Sahel to the Horn of Africa to the Middle East and Latin America. One of USIP's key functions is to inform policy through convening events and conversations such as this one today involving government officials, lawmakers, practitioners, and the international community. In Yemen, USIP has supported capacity building of civil society organizations and local initiatives for resolving conflicts and building peace. We have and continue to emphasize the crucial role women play in peace building and the importance of dealing with issues that are most relevant to women and girls. After nearly seven years, violent conflict in Yemen continues, resulting in great human cost and suffering. The conflict has killed tens of thousands and displaced millions and significantly damaged the country's infrastructure. Negotiated ceasefires have failed repeatedly and sustainable recovery remains elusive. The UNDP report projects that should the conflict continue through the year 2030, 1.3 million people will die as a result. Yemen's future hangs in the balance. The conflict in Yemen is complex and multifaceted, and in order to stop human suffering, Yemen and the international community must tackle each facet to create lasting solutions. We need to continue building on the work that the Yemeni people and the international community have done so far and reconsider how to bring all parties to the table. All of society must be included to create real and lasting change. To be successful, the process should include not just military and political leaders, but also women, youth, tribal leaders, and civil society. Once a peace deal is achieved, Yemen and the international community must work together to create sustainable developmental strategies. UNDP's report found that an integrated approach that empowers women, makes investment in agriculture, and leverages the private sector could end extreme poverty in Yemen within a single generation. I look forward very much to the thoughtful remarks of those others in the Department's Near Eastern Affairs Bureau. Prior to that, he was Deputy Chief of Mission at the U.S. Embassy and Deputy Chief of Mission at the U.S. Embassy in Riyadh from 2013 to 2016. He is a career member of the Senior Foreign Service. Dr. Khalida Bazar has 35 years of international and corporate leadership experience, including 25 years in the UN system. Thank you very much, Mike. It's a pleasure to be with you. Thank you, USIP and UNDP, for hosting for the excellent report that has come out. It's a pleasure to serve with Dr. Khalida as well on this panel and other distinguished, yet with a trip to the Gulf to urge the parties to de-escalate and protect all civilians, support a UN-led, more inclusive peace process, and do more to address the humanitarian and economic crises. In terms of U.S. assistance, the United States has provided the people of Yemen over $400 billion since the crisis began more than seven years ago. Nearly $214 million for COVID-19, pandemic response for refugees, vulnerable migrants, internally displaced persons, and host communities. More than 300,000 vaccine doses delivered through COVAX since December 2021. The United States remains concerned with the UN's estimated $3.9 billion funding gap in 2022, and we continue to urge donors to fulfill their pledges to the people of Yemen and step up to give generously as they have in the past. In terms of U.S. economic support, we continue to advocate with other partners to provide economic support to advance critical reforms to address the issues of salary payments, infrastructure, and to address the fuel crisis. Currently, we're in a state of escalatory military action, and let me restate, there is no military solution to the conflict in Yemen. The United States, along with the international community, continues to urge the parties to de-escalate, and we cannot stress enough the responsibility of the parties to abide by their obligations under international humanitarian law, including those related to the protection of all civilians. Let me be clear, when we speak of protection of civilians in the region, we also include the tens of thousands of U.S. citizens living in the Gulf, whose safety is the top U.S. national security priority, and our detained, locally employed Yemeni staff in Sana'a, whose safe release we remain committed to. When we look at the Houthis offensive in Marib, including repeated attacks on civilian areas in that city, and attacks against internally displaced persons camps, we can see that the Houthis Marib offensive over the last year has been the primary obstacle to peace efforts. Houthi recent losses in Yemen should indicate to them and all the parties, again, there is no military solution. The United States is deeply concerned with the increasing number of civilian casualties in Yemen, and we continue to raise this issue on an urgent basis with the parties. Now, over the past year, U.S. diplomatic efforts have translated into two important building blocks to pave the way for peace in Yemen. First, we have growing international consensus on the need for a ceasefire and a political solution. Second, we have momentum around a more inclusive peace process that takes into account diverse views across Yemen and seeks to amplify the voices of the vast majority of Yemenis who are calling for an end to the fighting. I've been personally engaged with a range of Yemeni groups, including women, youth, persons with disabilities, and civil society leaders to promote a more inclusive peace process and amplify their calls for peace, justice, and accountability, as has UN Special Envoy Greenberg. We are listening to these diverse Yemeni perspectives to inform this process and to amplify the voices of Yemenis. It should be clear to everyone that the Houthi offensive in Marab will only bring more suffering given that there is no military solution and the only pathway forward is dialogue. The United States feels strongly that that dialogue must be Yemen-led and that the role of the international community is to create the space for Yemenis to come to the table. This is at heart a Yemeni-Yemeni conflict and a durable Yemeni-led solution is needed to end the conflict and reverse the humanitarian crisis. I can assure you and the Yemeni people that the United States will be there to support as we have been. I remain hopeful that these two building blocks in place paving the way for peace in Yemen, one, a growing international consensus for a ceasefire and a political solution and two, momentum around a more inclusive peace process that with will from the conflict parties and the international community's joint efforts, peace in Yemen remains possible. 2022 brings new opportunities and the United States is committed to this mission. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you. Special Envoy Letter King. Dr. Khalida, over to you. Thank you very much. Allow me to start by thanking the United States Institute for Peace for hosting this very important event. I'm honored to speak alongside you, Mr. Lennon King. It's a pleasure and honor and as UNDP, we are very grateful for all the support that the United States is providing to Yemen and beyond. As you mentioned, the situation is really devastating across the country and is going from worse to worse. The recent spark in violence is worsening the very serious humanitarian situation. As we speak, almost 21 million people are in need of some form of humanitarian assistance or protection. Currency devaluation and hyperinflation are making food affordable, pushing more Yemenis into extreme poverty and food insecurity. As a matter of fact, food prices have nearly doubled in two years since 2019 and unfortunately women and children are suffering the most. More than half of the Yemeni population, about 16 million, are facing acute hunger and only 50 percent of Yemen health facilities are functioning. The ongoing pandemic has placed additional pressure on the country already fragile. The health system and the rate of vaccination is quite low, if not the lowest in the region. Daily critical work happens across Yemen to help Yemenis to make a living and cope with the crisis in UNDP. Our programs with other sister agencies and through very successful partnership with the World Bank, the European Union and other key donors help Yemeni to preserve dignity, maintain the functionality of national institutions and create a solid foundation critical to effective recovery when peace return and I hope it will return soon. Our work complements ongoing and vital humanitarian work while supporting necessary building blocks such as livelihood, public services and small businesses for prosperous future. Just to give you an example, we have improved access to key services for more than 5 million Yemenis. More than half a million Yemenis have access to energy through our solar project and we have facilitated the clearance of 3.1 million square meters of land of explosive hazards. All this is very good and we are very proud of our work and we are very committed, nevertheless, what the Yemenis need today is a peaceful settlement of this devastating conflict for their suffering to end. In the third report that will be discussed today in our series of impact of war studies, we show how with an end to the war, a brighter future is possible and some of the devastating consequences can even of the war, sorry, can even be reversed. The report projects that if the war stops in 22, meaning this year, it's possible to eradicate extreme poverty in one generation if we embark on holistic and integrated recovery process. By 2050, it's possible for Yemen to be a prosperous middle income country that offers a dignified future for all Yemeni. And the report confirms that if the war continues, the impact on people's lives will be even more disastrous. The recovery costs will be enormous and risk for the occurrence of the crisis in a short-term increase. If the conflict continues until 2030, you mentioned it, Mr. Yaffe, 1.3 million deaths by 2030, but 75% of them will be directly related to the secondary impact of war and why one child under five will die every five minutes. So brokering inclusive pieces is crucial to reverse these trends, start saving lives of hundreds of thousands, but also improve livelihoods. The economic gain of peace is enormous. However, peace alone is not enough. So it needs to be accompanied by a holistic and people-centered recovery approach, cutting across a humanitarian development spectrum and also ensure national ownership and leadership of the Yemeni people and also commitment of the international community, as was just mentioned. The prospect of such an approach offers hope for the people of Yemen and hope for us as well. So if the war stops now by 2030, we project 85 billion incriminative economic gains in dollars. And more importantly, we will be able to save 440,000 lives. Our reports find that women are indispensable and a key multiplier for successful recovery. 50% of the Yemeni are women, so there is no surprise that the active political and socio-economic participation is central for sustainable human development. Let me tell you as a woman and a woman from the region that too often we pay lip services to the critical role women play in development and peace processes without truly empowering them. So we need to put women at the center of development and recovery in Yemen and beyond. The world cannot longer stand in Dubai as Yemeni suffer from a lack of access to the most basic services like healthcare, education and food. We cannot leave Yemen behind and to enable the Yemeni, the future they deserve for the generation to come, we must work together on ending the war and on ending the war now. Ending the war is a gateway for a productive and sustainable future and I know that Mr. Lennon Kin and as a special envoy is working tirelessly on the political front to reach the end of the war. You can count on our support as a UN family. We will be there and I hope that together we can bring more than hope to the Yemeni people. We can bring them peace but also development. Thank you very much. Thank you Dr. Yafi, special envoy Lenderking and Dr. Bozar for your thoughtful remarks. Good morning, good afternoon, depending on where you are. My name is Sarin Hamasahid and director of Middle East programs at the US Institute of Peace. It's an honor for me to introduce Dr. Jonathan Moyer who will talk about the report and moderate the following discussion with our distinguished panelists. Dr. Moyer is assistant professor at the Joseph Corbell School of International Studies and director of the Frederick S. Pardee Center for International Futures at the University of Denver and the institute is home to international futures integrated assessment platform upon which this report of UNDP has been developed. As director Jonathan leads the Pardee Center's research team which uses long-term integrated policy analysis and forecasting methods to inform the strategic planning efforts of governments, international organizations and corporations around the world. I truly appreciate the research and report that Dr. Moyer and his colleagues produced and enabled by UNDP. We often hear about the value of integrator approaches to recovery, development and other matters at conceptual levels but the research and report that they produced goes further beyond by providing numbers and scenarios that illustrates effectively in my view critical aspects of the coordinated and integrated recovery path that Yemen needs. So without further ado over to you Dr. Moyer. Thank you so much Sarhan for that very kind introduction and thank you to USIP for hosting this event to Special Envoy Lenderking to Dr. Buzar and then to my colleagues in UNDP Yemen. Thank you so much for your support. I hope you can see my PowerPoint. Is it coming through? Okay, thank you. I'll be presenting for about 15 minutes to give you an overview of the report, the background methodology. This report is part of a three report series that we produced in collaboration with UNDP Yemen. I'd like to highlight my other co-authors who are not with me on this panel today but Taylor Hannah is the lead author of this third report and has been a part of all three reports and David Boll has been a part of all three reports as well. Other authors include Brendan Mapes and Mickey Rafa across time. These three reports focused on using a new methodology that uses an integrated model to analyze the cost of conflict on development in Yemen across time. The first report was produced in 2019 and it estimated the cost of conflict between the years 2015 through 2019 and then made projections through the year 2030. That report highlighted for the first time a multi-dimensional results framework that demonstrated that the cost of conflict in Yemen was indeed dire. At that point, a child under five died as an indirect or direct result of the conflict every 12 minutes. The second report explored how likely Yemen was to make progress towards achieving sustainable development goals and furthered our understanding of questions related to gender inclusion, inequality, and other development issues. The report explored whether humanitarian assistance could be sufficient for improving the development trajectory of Yemen across time concluding that humanitarian assistance alone would be very insufficient to change the development trajectory of Yemen during conflict and the only viable path forward was to end the conflict. This third report updates our findings through 2022 through 2021 and then extends our forecast again through 2030 but importantly what we do is we paint a path forward to think about different recovery pathways in Yemen and how those recovery pathways with different characteristics will impact long-term development outcomes. The purpose of this presentation, first we want to raise awareness of the ongoing cost of conflict in Yemen and the cost as you've heard from the speakers who've introduced this presentation is extremely high. Second, we want to reinforce the idea that this research shows that ending the conflict is the only viable pathway forward to change the development trajectory of the country. Finally, in the post-conflict recovery space, we're interested in making an argument that the international community should be focused on providing Yemen with enough assistance so that it can achieve the development trajectory that it would have been on in the absence of conflict. Finally, we argue that an integrated recovery is essential and by integrated recovery we mean across two dimensions, first across different international regional and local actors and second across issue areas instead of investing in recovery in silos we should invest in recovery thinking about the effect that different investments have on development outcomes across different systems. The total deaths, you've heard some of these numbers from previous speakers. The total deaths through 2021 stand at 377,000. Of those, 60% are indirect deaths. So these are deaths that are the result of lack of access to food, water, sanitation, health systems, and other basic inputs into human existence. So as the conflict continues, the share of indirect deaths grows across time. In 2021, our new estimates of the cost of conflict show that a child under five dies every nine minutes. That extremely high burden of child mortality is almost entirely the result of indirect mortality. These are not deaths that you'd see on the battlefield or even often in news media coverage. Many of these are hidden. As the conflict grows, this burden grows as well. The economic cost of the conflict has been enormously large, both in terms of the overall loss in GDP. As you can see, 15 million of 126 billion rather through 2021, but also in the distribution, more than 15 million people pushed into poverty. As the conflict grows, that cost grows as well. The same is true for people suffering from malnutrition and other outcomes. The cost of conflict is enormously high on the most vulnerable people in society. Methodology. I'll spend a bit of time on this and happy to take further questions in the Q&A. We use a system called International Futures, which is an integrated simulation of development, both within and across a large number of systems, governance, economics, demographics, agriculture, energy. We're trying to simulate how development occurs broadly from an integrated framework. We've applied this tool, which is often used to look at longer-term development trends to the ongoing conflict in Yemen. The tool is really quite helpful because as this kind of Gestalt systems map suggests, the world is made up of a series of interconnected systems. When a conflict's ongoing, we have data points that we can use to identify certain development trends within that conflict, but those need to be triangulated and there's a lot of missing data. A tool like this can help us fill those gaps. What this system produces is a series of scenarios. The scenarios we analyze here look at different historical and future trajectories of Yemen based on assumptions. The first two scenarios we compare. First, we start with a conflict scenario that looks at the effect of conflict from 2015 through 2030. Next, we look at a no-conflict counterfactual. How would Yemen have developed in the absence of conflict? That scenario doesn't paint a very optimistic picture, but it does paint a realistic trajectory for development based on how development works in other countries across time. We then compare these conflict-no-conflict scenarios with a recovery. In that second report I mentioned, the big finding was that you need to end conflict to adjust the development trajectory. What if that conflict ends and the peace settlement is tenuous? Most peace settlements, you know, countries have a high likelihood of falling back into conflict. So what if we frame the scenario that was not a very optimistic path forward, but where peace was achieved? That's the fragmented recovery. We can do better than a fragmented recovery. On top of that scenario, we build building blocks of recovery that look at different issue areas. What if we invest in including women in society and the economy, or we invest more in agricultural systems? How does that affect development? And then the final scenario is looking at an integrated recovery. So what happens if we do all these pieces together? What is a plausible best case scenario for recovery in Yemen? And when can we achieve that development trajectory that Yemen was on prior to conflict escalation? We're still in the methodology section, or I'll show you how we think about the scenario comparisons here. Many of the numbers you heard from previous speakers refer to the conflict attributable difference. So a child dies every nine minutes. What that means is that the conflict attributable portion of child mortality is that a child dies every nine minutes. It doesn't talk about the total burden of child mortality in Yemen. We're only trying to identify what the conflict is causing vis-a-vis development. To do this, we compare conflict and no conflict scenarios. This graph shows the total deaths in Yemen across time from 2014 through 2021 across these scenarios, and that's how we capture this conflict attributable portion. To the findings, the graph on the left is showing you what I was showing you just previously. The total number of deaths extended through 2030 for the conflict scenario. On the right, we're looking at total GDP, and I'm going to show you a few different scenarios to give you a sense of how we think about the conflict burden on development. First, let's look at the fragmented recovery. Here, you can see if conflict ends and not much else happens. This is a really fractured, not a really cohesive recovery path. We save a lot of lives. The difference between the conflict scenario and the fragmented recovery scenario is about 440,000 lives. So achieving peace can pay big dividends. You can see the effect on GDP on the right. However, the shadow burden of conflict persists. If you compare the purple line with the blue line, the purple line is showing you a no-conflict scenario. There are still a huge number of indirect deaths that would result of developmental deficiencies in the fragmented recovery scenario relative to the no-conflict scenario. So while we would save 440,000 lives relative to a world with conflict, the shadow mortality is greater than that. It's over 500,000 lives. This speaks to the urgency with which we should pursue a more aggressive recovery strategy in a post-conflict situation. On top of the fragmented recovery scenario, we look at different building blocks of successful recovery. These focus on governance quality, improving things like corruption and effectiveness, investing in human capabilities, so improving access to electricity, safe water education, empowering women, looking at including women in the economy in terms of formal labor participation, proving access to education and access to family planning and health services as well. Agriculture investments. Right now, Yemen is reliant on food imports for a very large share of the food that's consumed in the country, creating very large vulnerabilities vis-à-vis food security. It's one of the main reasons that this conflict has been so pernicious in terms of its developmental effects and then economic development. What if we focused more on investments, remittances, foreign aid, et cetera. The report goes into much more detail than I can hear, but each of these investments has a different effect on outcome indicators. Here I'm focused again on mortality. So we're looking at the cumulative lives saved on top of this fragmented recovery, so we achieve peace. What if we achieve peace and we get agricultural investments right? Well, agricultural investments has a large effect at reducing the conflict burden through 2030, saving an additional 100,000 lives, for example. While agricultural investments have a big effect, the single most significant intervention on top of a fragmented recovery is the empowered women's scenario. The lack of inclusion of women in decision making and the economy in Yemen is a significant hindrance on long-term Yemeni development, and this intervention frees that potential. But what if we did all these things together? What is possible for Yemeni development? And what can we do from a strategic planning perspective to think about putting our resources in the right place in order to achieve those outcomes? In an integrated recovery, and what we're simulating here is integration of policies across different levels. So international organizations working together to coordinate and think strategically about how investing in one sector affects other sectors and making sure that we're going about recovery together, but also working all the way down through local actors to make sure that the policies and the foreign assistance that are being provided are appropriately allocated. This has significant effects at reducing the number of people in poverty, malnutrition, mortality, and improving economic outcomes. But what does this do for the broader questions of lives saved relative to a fragmented recovery scenario? This integrated recovery scenario saves well over 700,000 lives through 2050 and does much more than any of the individual interventions, which makes sense. So the broader question, what development trajectory does this put Yemen on? This graph shows you GDP per capita, but an okay measure of some aspects of human development. Then it shows it for scenarios that doesn't include the conflict scenario. These are the building block scenarios, the no conflict scenario, and then this integrated recovery space. So the blue line shows you the development trajectory Yemen would have been on in the absence of conflict. This black line shows you this integrated recovery trajectory. What we see is that Yemen is able to get back on the development trajectory that it would have been on in the absence of conflict. Now this happens by mid-century, so it's not immediate, of course. But I think there's a strong argument to be made that we have an ethical obligation to pursue these development strategies so that future generations of Yemenis do not have to live with the developmental repercussions of the conflict or at least have fewer developmental repercussions inflicted upon them. This is my last slide. Recommendations. I believe that all of us have an advocacy responsibility. The cost of conflict is terribly high. When we think about political trade-offs, when we think about regional politics and dynamics, we should also be thinking about how many children are lost due to the conflict in indirect ways. No fault of their own, of course. We need to prioritize a sustainable and lasting peace deal. This is true from previous research we've done. This is reinforced with this research. Without that, there's no real hope for improving long-term development in the country. We need to promote an integrated recovery plan for Yemen. This should be a coordinated plan across different actors, going from the top to the bottom and then across different issue areas. And finally, I think we have an obligation to invest in the future of Yemeni development for future generations of Yemenis. And we should be promoting the idea that we can do a lot to erase the scars of conflict, even though some of those deep scars will, of course, process. Thank you very much for your time, and I appreciate all of you coming and listening to this presentation. Thank you, Dr. Moyer, for sharing your presentation. You have certainly given us a lot to think about and discuss. We will now turn to our panel discussion. We invite our audience to take part in this event by asking questions through the questions and answers box under the live stream on the USIP event page and or the live stream on Facebook. You can also engage with us and each other on Twitter with the hashtag pathways for recovery. My colleagues will collect and send your questions to me, and I will do my best to get to as many of them as possible. For our discussion, we have four excellent speakers. I will introduce them in the order that I will ask, I will direct questions to. So first, we have Ms. Jihan Abu-Ghafar, who is a senior advisor to the executive director representing countries in the Middle East and North Africa and South Asia regions at the World Bank Group. Jihan is an international development expert who has devoted more than 20 years working on global, regional and national issues related to poverty reduction, conflict resolution, small states, gender and human development. Today, she is joining us in her personal capacity and her views do not represent the World Bank Group, but I'm glad that we have her expertise as part of the panel and also being a Yemeni voice. Then Mr. Adir Rahman Al-Iriani, who is an economic development specialist from Yemen, he has undertaken various development-related positions at Yemen's Ministry of Foreign Affairs and has served as the principal economic officer at the Embassy of Yemen in Washington, D.C. Throughout his roles, Al-Iriani focused on development assistance and economic reform programs with bilateral organizations, international NGOs and multi-lateral organizations. And then we have also Ambassador Barbara Baudin, who is a distinguished professor in the practice of diplomacy and the director of the Institute for the Study of Diplomacy at Georgetown University. She's also a distinguished diplomat with over 30-year careers as a Foreign Service Officer, who's focused primarily on the states of the Arabian Peninsula, Iraq, Yemen, and including, so she also served as Deputy Chief of Mission and Baghdad during the Iran-Iraq War. So imagine the depth of knowledge that she brings to this conversation and the different actors. She also served as the Deputy Chief of Mission in Kuwait during the Iraq invasion and throughout the occupation. She also served as Ambassador to Yemen for nearly four years. She knows Yemen, she knows the region, the different countries and the different actors and we are, she's extremely knowledgeable and we are delighted to have her. And then we have Mr. Alke Lutzma, who's the resident representative in Yemen for UNDP since February 2019. He started in Yemen as country director in August 2016. His career with UNDP began in 1994. In the recent past, he was country director in Rwanda, senior recovery advisor in Ukraine, deputy country director in Sudan, and deputy resident representative in Uganda. Again, rich depth about conflict about Yemen and recovery and development. We'll dive in with questions to Jihana and Adler Rahman first to talk about the issues from the perspectives of the Yemenis and then go to Ambassador Baudin and Alke to expand to the international angle of these issues that we will discuss. So first, to you, Jihana, a key prerequisite for recovery and sustainable development is ending the violent conflict. How do the Yemenis assess the prospects of ending that conflict? Thank you, Sir Hang. And I would like also to join others to thank USIP for hosting this event on Yemen and of course UNDP and Dr. Mayer and his team for producing these excellent reports. I'm honored to be here today with this distinguished panelist. As for your question regarding the prospects of the conflict, I definitely believe that the war will be over one day. I really hope it will be today rather than tomorrow. But as we all know that at the end of the day, there is no winner for this war. The Yemeni people are the ones who are paying the biggest losers in this war. But there are a lot of uncertainties that poses a lot of questions. For example, these are things that I'm always struggling with. When will this war actually be over? And what will it take for it to be over? What will be the cause of this war? If this war did not stop any time soon, that goes beyond basically the numbers, especially that the second worst thing that happened in my opinion of this war is, of course, the first one is the loss of lives. But it's actually the second one for me is the damage that this war caused to the social fabric. We never experienced such a thing in the past. For me personally, I think building infrastructure is the easy part of the recovery process. But rebuilding social cohesion is much more complicated. And then when the war is finally over, how will Yemen look like at that point? And how to avoid the relapse and end of this vicious cycle of conflict? As I said, unfortunately, I don't have answers to these questions. But I hope really that the war will be over very soon. Back to you, Serhan. So when you talk to the Yemenis in country or those who are displaced, is there, do they see a path where this conflict would end? I know I appreciate your comments and also special envoy Lenderkin's coming that there's no military solution. But how do the Yemenis feel? Can you tell us about their views? Who they hold responsible for this violent not ending? Well, I think at this point, everybody who's involved in this war is held responsible. And as Mr. Lenderkin said, that there is really no military solution. At this point, the only way forward is to have a dialogue towards peace, a very serious dialogue that will include also in all most of the Yemenis, women use civil society in the other. It needs to be an inclusive one. It needs to reflect the aspiration of the people too. So at the end of the day, it's only through dialogue that this war will end. And if I may ask you one more question before I move to Adler Rahman, that from your experience and follow up of developments in Yemen as an expert, what stands out to you in the UNDP report, whether in terms of the barriers or the enablers to recovery? Well, the report touches upon critical issues that will support the recovery process. I think for me, it provides a glimpse of hope and send a message of the importance of staying engaged and not wait until the war is over to support the recovery process. I think it also provides answers for the what, what is needed for an integrated recovery scenario. I personally believe that Yemen's wealth is in its people. So investing in human capital, empowering women and youth, supporting the private sector and SMEs, strengthening key economic productive sectors, enhancing the resilience of local institutions and investing in, especially the energy sector, will put Yemen in the right path to recovery. So I think the report is spot on in many of these things. For me, the questions that needs more deep diving is the questions that are related to the how. So how to ensure that there is a sustainable level of support for Yemen? How to have a mutual accountability arrangement in place to ensure that both donors and government made their commitments? How to have a shared economic vision that prioritizes inclusive growth and balance humanitarian with development needs? How to ensure that the recovery efforts are owned by the Yemenis for the Yemenis? And how to take into account the new reality in Yemen and build the recovery process on indigenous drivers that allows people, communities, and national institutions to establish their priorities for recovery and build on local initiatives, especially that the war created new realities in Yemen. We have a new decentralization impact realities in which governorates, especially oil-rich governors, are more in charge of their affairs now. We also have the issue of internally displaced people where we didn't have that mass before. So there are new realities on the ground and how we're going to be able to capture all of this in the new Yemen. Thank you. Thank you, Jiham. Excellent and great points. So Abdel Rahman, the same question to you. How do, from what you're tracking, how do the Yemenis assess the prospects of ending the conflict? Hello. Thank you, Sir Hang. It's such a pleasure really to be invited to USIP and so I'd like to be included in this wonderful panel. Let me begin by congratulating UNDP and the University of Denver for this remarkable work. I mean, these three reports are incredible addition to the body of literature on development in conflict settings. And when I approach these reports, especially on Yemen, we approach it in two ways. We approach it either for information and these three reports contain a remarkable amount of data, analysis, figures and charts that articulate pretty well the devastating effects of wars in general and especially on Yemen. Yemen's war is not a new war. I mean, this has been going for over seven years and we can trace back the instability since the Arab Spring. So it's an old war. And the second way we approach these reports is to understand. And this is, in my point of view, sometimes kind of difficult to understand reports and what are they trying to convey. And in my opinion, through what I've understood through these three reports, that wars can destroy decades of achieved development in a matter of months or a couple years of a war, let alone seven years of an ongoing war. And it has produced devastating effects. What I think needs to be clearly understood about the situation in Yemen is that Yemenis are suffering, but the fragility now is there's some externalities of this war where the fragility now is contaminating the entire region. And it's not only about Yemenis. There is a strong urgency to at least end the worst aspects of this war, the greater war. And there are ways and as this report articulated pretty well, there are turnaround points. But what this report, from my opinion, is trying to convey is that as we delay this cessation of this greater hostility, the turnarounds are becoming extremely and more expensive. Now, we should not, I mean, Yemenis in general, they don't need to read reports to understand what are they going through. I mean, they're experiencing it in their daily lives. But still, there are sometimes compounded ignorance. And I am a victim of it. Sometimes I say I know as a Yemeni, but there are things that I don't know. Wars produce a Pandora box. There are effects of wars that you do not fully understand and realize only later, maybe decades later, after you see and you look back, oh, that's because this is what the result of the war is, especially as Jihan mentioned is about the social cohesion. However, I am optimistic because we have to count our blessings. There are some things that did not, things that have not occurred as badly as we think in Yemen, like for example, the destruction of complete cities that we've seen in Iraq and Syria. The fallout of our economy, that did not happen. We've seen some kind of an amazing resiliency in many aspects of Yemen's economy and society. And I think as a remark here that I believe that the international development organizations should lean on Yemen's rich social capsule. And as Jihan mentioned, we have a very rich heritage, a youth civil society organizations, and even local quasi governmental organizations that are capable of implementing development projects and to stabilize some aspects of Yemeni's difficulties that they're facing during this very costly war. And let me see if you have any further questions and I'll stop here. Thank you, Abdelhaman. You kind of answered my follow-up question, which was going to be from your experience and follow-up on the development in Yemen and what stood out to you in the UNDP report in terms of barriers and in terms of enablers for the recovery. You touched on a good set of issues there, but let me give you a chance if there's any additional thing you want to add. We have to, Yemen doesn't live in an island. I mean, we are in a globalized world and we see the devastation effects of wars in neighboring countries. And it's important to see and to take notes on what happened in Afghanistan. Ashab Rani, I've known him before, him becoming president. He's an expert when it comes to nation-building and when it comes to these various work when it comes to stabilizing a country in conflict. And yet we've seen what happened and this is nothing to do with his performance. But putting countries together and stabilizing countries is quite difficult. I came across a quote by Dr. Fraynman and he's a very well-known physicist and he's a late physicist. He said that physics is the horizon of our ignorance and he means that in his subject, it's quite difficult to understand physics, let alone us understanding and modeling social behavior, especially when we're trying to come up with models and so on. But what I'm saying is we need to end the worst aspects of this war in order for us to make meaningful, sustainable development projects. We cannot really initiate development projects without having some form of at least a degree of stability on the ground. And I think, okay, and my colleagues from the UNDP could elaborate the difficulties that they're facing on the ground really. Thank you. I want to remind our viewers that a good set of questions have already come in. You can also ask questions, putting them under the live stream on the USIP webpage, streaming the event and also on Facebook and also sharing via Twitter using the hashtag paths for recovery. So if we switch gears to a regional and international view, a year ago, Ambassador Bonin, I'm coming to you, a year ago, the appointment of special envoy Lendricking, removing the terrorist designation of Ansarullah and other developments like the Iran-Saudi talks in Iraq and prospects of reviving the JCPOA triggered hope that new and dedicated US diplomatic energy and less regional tensions will positively affect Yemen. One year later, we see more fighting in Yemen and high-profile attacks on UAE. So what's your take on why the turn of events have been going in the direction of more violence instead of calm? Is this due to internal actors, regional actors, international community not doing enough, or what? It's a nice simple question. First, I'd like to thank USIP for putting together this event, and I am very pleased and humbled to be listening to people who work on Yemen and two very good Yemeni scholar practitioners and their views. And I want to very much thank Jonathan and UNDP, Jonathan and his team, for not just a series of reports, which I think should become required reading for anybody who's trying to work on Yemen, but particularly this last one, which it does lay out a credible way forward, not an easy one and not a cheap one, but a credible one. Unlike so much of what we see in here, it's both data-driven and people-centered, and it's strategic. It understands the importance of local lead. It understands the importance of building core institutions. It understands the importance of human capacity and sustainability, and I'm sure it was not intentional, but basically the report is a counterpoint to everything we did wrong. We, the international community, did wrong in Afghanistan, and I know the report started well before Afghanistan collapsed, but this is the alternative. This is the antidote to the lessons that we should have learned. I hope we learned from Afghanistan. I hope it is read by a lot of policymakers. It also points out, I think, an important lesson, and this does get to what you've asked, is that if the international community does not engage early, significantly, and in a coordinated manner in the recovery of Yemen, then we will see Yemen fall back or not even fully get out of the violence and the destruction and the cycling down that, again, the UNDP reports have so well documented. We can either try to do it right or we can do it wrong and do it again and again and again, and to borrow from Jihon, the people who will, no one will win and the Yemeni people will continue to lose. Why did we go from such tremendous hope a year ago to a situation which actually seems to be far worse? I think part of it reflects the players within Yemen, but also the regional players. This is not just a simple, if there is such a thing, a simple civil war. May have started as that, but it was regionalized very quickly. By regionalizing, it changed the lethality, the intensity, and probably the longevity of the war. It's also an imbalance, an asymmetrical war, but not in the way my military friends would use the term. Particularly the Saudi and the Emirati military have been, to be perfectly blunt, have been propping up a government which is technically the legitimate government and the internationally recognized government, but has very little legitimacy and very little capacity within the country, and in fact has been marked by corruption at a rather remarkable scale. Whereas the Houthi are more of an indigenous player and they have benefited from the support from Iran, absolutely. But they are not as dependent on the Iranians as the Houthi government and the STCR on the Saudis and the Emirati, so you have a great imbalance. Why it has kicked up, I believe, is in large part because the Houthi did believe that they could win militarily. They had, they control most of the north, they control most of the population, and they saw that the weakness of the anti-Houthi forces, because they are not consolidated, made Marib possible. And at least something to attempt. And by doing that, it had, it did change the calculation. I think there is also very good evidence that the Iranians have been providing the equipment to be able to go as far as Riyadh and Abu Dhabi. Lobbying missiles across the water in the early days was fairly simple. This is a different level of technology. What exactly the Iranians hope to achieve by providing this weaponry? I can speculate, I'm a diplomat, I can speculate on anything. I have no idea. I do not know. I do not know what is in the mind of Tehran. It has shifted some of the responsibility on how we bring this to an end. I think for a very long time, many external observers thought that if we could get the Saudis to pull back, to reduce their military support, that the Yemenis would be able to come together and have a Yemeni led negotiation and outcome. I think at this point, it's shifted to both Riyadh and Tehran far more than a year ago. What the international community more broadly can do is I honestly don't think that we have a large role. I do hope that Mr. Lenderking and the UN Special Envoy are talking in Riyadh and Abu Dhabi and Muscat and just about any place else they can talk. But this is really going to be a regional and a local effort. Where the international community is critical is to come back to where I started, which is to commit to an integrated recovery strategy, as Dr. Moyer and his team in UNDP has laid out. Otherwise, if we simply get a peace agreement or a ceasefire, we are going to be back here in a year talking about this again in five years. So the international community's focus needs to be on the day after and not solely on the ending of the war. Thank you. Thank you, Ambassador Boudin. You actually answered a couple of follow-up questions that I had about your comments about the role of international community and why it's important for that to continue. So I have a follow-up question that I'll come back to you after I go to Alke and get some of the audience questions about. And I'll ask everyone and say, okay, what can be done as we're moving forward some of the ideas and policy recommendations? So with your permission, I'll move to Alke and say, okay, you work on the ground in Yemen. I know you're joining us today from Jordan, but you've been there recently. Yemen is your primary destination. And UNDP has been working in Yemen. I was surprised to know that 54, 55 years now. So you see the suffering of the people and also the potential for more hopeful outcome that the report demonstrates. So what would you like to add or emphasize from the research and your observations working on the ground? And also, please feel free to respond to any particular comment that has been said so far. Yeah, thanks, Sarhang. Thanks for the question and thanks for having me on. It's really a pleasure and an honor for me as well. Maybe just for me, a couple of the takeaways from the report to start with that is, of course, first of all, that the consequences and the cost of the conflict itself on the Yemeni people is absolutely absolutely huge. And I think for us, both for the parties that are involved in the conflict, but also I think for the international community, we have a moral obligation to stop this war as soon as we can. I think that it's very clear from all the figures that come out. But what really also stands out to me are two main things. One is that this has become a generational conflict, but also we can fix it within a generation as well. And that is really important because that also gives hope to the Yemenis themselves. There is a way out here and we can go back to the former glory of Yemen, certainly if you go a while back in history. And what really stands out for me is also the role that women can play. I think Jonathan very effectively showed if you can really involve women in the process, what a huge contribution they can make, not only in terms of mortality or reducing the mortality of children and so on, but also in terms of contribution to the economic recovery of Yemen itself. And I think particularly in the context of Yemen, which is still a very conservative society, I think this is a very important message that we will continue to advocate for. Now, as Ambassador Bordin laid out, we are in a very difficult situation in Yemen at the moment. And in fact, the conflict has escalated and one could also argue that hopes for a quick settlement after the dash. But at the same time, I would also say there are a number of opportunities to do already some of this recovery and development work as the conflict is still going on. And I think over the last five, six years, the international community as such has really focused on humanitarian assistance in order to keep famine at bay and dealing with food insecurity in the country and so on and so forth, but has invested very little in dealing with some of the more sort of development of the recovery aspect of the same problem. And I will give you one example of what I actually mean, because otherwise it remains very abstract. So if you look at the situation of food security or food insecurity, if you like, in Yemen, is very much an issue of food affordability as opposed to food availability. So it's all about income or the lack thereof and really the high cost of commodities, in particularly food in the Yemeni market. Now, as Jonathan pointed out, Yemen is for 90% dependent on food imports. So really, the global supply chain, the inflation in the country, the macroeconomic stability, the lack of capacity to curb inflation, are all factors that are undermining any kind of comprehensive food insecurity or famine response in the country. So the country, the only focus on bringing more food to Yemen, actually is creating the opposite effect. So really, if you want to deal with famine and food insecurity in Yemen, we really need not only dealing with the weakest in society, but also in terms of food aid, but also looking how can we increase income amongst the ordinary Yemenis in their household so they can afford a minimum food basket, but also deal with, for example, the cost of bringing food to the market. And here, I want to give a very specific example. For any ship that goes to Yemen, war-risk insurance premiums are charged. And actually, we calculated that on an annual basis, shipping companies and therefore commercial imports of food, spending more than $250 million worth of insurance premiums simply to bring this food to Yemen. So this is not something we normally tackle within the humanitarian sort of work we put on the ground, but at the same time, this is a huge contribution if we can make sure that if we work with the insurance industry in London to abolish these war-risk insurance premiums through setting up various mechanisms and make a contribution that way. Now, this sounds a bit technical. The only point I want to make here is that if we want to make a difference in Yemen right now, we need to change our approach. Over the last five years, we really haven't been able to make a dent in the food security situation in the country despite the fact billions of dollars have been spent on food assistance to the country. And therefore, I think at least from the UN's perspective, we have realized that we really need to change tack, to change approach, and really do more with less. Because at the same time, while I'm talking about this, also the willingness, the preparedness, the capacity of particularly the international actors to contribute to the humanitarian response have also reduced significantly because there are so many other emergencies there. And we talked about Afghanistan already, and this is definitely also a country that Yemen is competing with in terms of being resourced for humanitarian action as well. So what I see in summary, Sarhan, is that when we talk about in popular terms, these humanitarian development and peace nexus, we really need to look at that and see how we can change our approach also in Yemen and already start dealing with some of these recovery and development aspects right now, even if the conflict is still continuing and whether, and the parties are still fighting it out, so to speak. So I think it's a really important message that I'm also taking away from the report as well. Thank you. Thank you so much. Okay, so we have a question from Nada addressed to Jihan, and I think it's a good opportunity for me to add another angle to it. So a question from Nada is what is the future of Yemen's women, youth and children in light of all the emotional trauma they go through growing up or living in a war zone? So that's a question directed to you, Jihan. And I would like to send a way of opening this after that and feel free to comment to my question as well, is that it's pretty striking and the report states that Yemen's female labor force participation rate of is 60%, which is pretty low. So women empowerment and inclusion is a key component for recovery, but the Yemeni women have not been afforded the education, the support, and the opportunity. So what are some of the key reasons and barriers and what could be done to address that? So first to you, Jihan, on the trauma aspect of this, and then I'll open it to the other panelists if they want to comment on the unemployment and inclusion aspect as well. Jihan. Well, this is an excellent question from Nada. Thank you for that. And let me maybe combine both of your questions and try to answer them both at the same time. I usually, when I try to answer a question about two women, I usually share a story. It's a story of an imaginary Yemeni woman. I always name her Amal, which means hope in Arabic, because I personally believe that hope for a better Yemen goes hand in hand with the empowerment of women. As the American author Harriet Stowe said, women are the real architects of society. Amal's story captured the life of many Yemeni women, but every story has a beginning and women's story starts when there are little girls. At the age of 10, Amal was fortunate to have a school in her village. She spent her time between school and helping her mother in fetching water and taking care of her young siblings. At the age of 12, the war started and Amal's school got destroyed. Now she needs to travel by foot for many miles to reach the nearby school, which is not considered the same thing to do. So education become a luxury that she cannot afford anymore. She drops out of school and joined the two million children that are out of school in Yemen. A year later, Amal's dad got sick and lost his job. Now the family joined the 15 million Yemeni that were pushed into poverty. At the age of 13, Amal became a child bride and joined the 32% of girls in Yemen that are married before the age of 18. For her family, marriage would result in one less person to feed and will offer Amal the safety of husband can provide. She then became one of the one million pregnant women that are at risk of acute malnutrition and her baby joined the 46% of stunted children in the country, one of the highest rates in the world. Amal's village was attacked and she and her family fled and joined the 3.6 million internally displaced person. The husband got injured and could not work. At the age of 18, she became the breadwinner with limited education and skills, adding to her responsibility as the primary caretaker. She came face to face with the new reality that contradicts the social norms, which glorify women's role at home and does not value her role in the public sphere. Now she's abused at home and facing the risk of being harassed in the street. But Amal's story, which is also the story of many Yemeni women, does not end here because her struggle is a reminder of all of us to all of us of what needs to change to build a better Yemen, as well as the important role that women are playing during war. If provided with the right skills and support, her income generating role could provide her with knowledge and skills that can be utilized during the peace building and recovery efforts and will have a positive return on poverty reduction and food security. The change of women's role in society is also a window of opportunity to normalize their role in the public sphere and support a culture shift towards gender equality. So, you know, as Dr. Buzar and Okeh said, Yemeni women are agents of change and drivers of social cohesion. There are many examples of Yemeni women who are leaders in their communities. Their needs cannot take a back seat during political negotiations and peace talks. The dismissive attitudes that claim that it's not the time for addressing women issues during war or peace negotiations need to be challenged. There is a need for a clear strategy that enable women to express their grievances, voice their demands, provide solutions and play an active part in shaping Yemeni's future. This is usually my story about Yemeni women. Yeah, thank you. Thank you, Ziyan. So, just a reminder to our panels that we have about 15 minutes remaining. So, I think I know we have a good set of great questions that I hope that we can get to. So, if possible, a little bit of short answers will help us to get as many of them as possible. So, let me come to the rest of the panel if you have any thoughts on the women angle, the question from Nada and the unemployment and barriers to women inclusion. I think Ziyan covered a lot of good grounds in that story about what are some of the barriers, but if you have any thoughts. I can add very quickly. I think, you know, I'm addressing the youth question and Ok mentioned something extremely important, which is, you know, the lack of purchasing power, which means, you know, people not getting paid and not receiving their salaries. So, you do have a large segment of our of Yemen's youth population that have not experienced a form of stability in their lives. Like if we meet someone now who's 18 years old, then, you know, since he was 10, he just didn't understand what, you know, stability is. And now when we combine the issue of salaries, what Ok had mentioned, you know, Yemen, Yemenis are intimate with their economy. We don't have financial markets, stock markets, you know, when a Yemeni receives his salary, they tend to receive it in cash form and they would bring it to home. They would look at the money, you know, this is usually on a Monday or on a Wednesday. And then this money quickly gets spent to people they know for many years, whether it's the landlord, the local grocery store. And so the suspension of salaries had had a devastating effect. This is not about the economy. We don't have a, you know, a jobless, what you call this here in the US, a jobless or unemployment checks, right? Salary suspends does not only affect the family, it affects the children in the family, it affects the community. And it has this unfortunate consequences on youth development. And so if you speak to today's youth, the incentives that you want to put forward in order to achieve peace, the economic incentive might not work with them because they got used to not receiving salaries for many months. They'd rather join, you know, a militia or, you know, they have now other kind of incentives that are unfortunate because of now normalized the conflict into their daily lives. And youth could become spoilers when we're trying to achieve peace. Some youth, not all of them, but a segment of them who have unfortunately engaged with militias and so on. So it is quite important for, in my point of view, for development organizations to reach out to universities, schools, try to put together programs, projects, especially livelihood projects, just to kind of, you know, unentangle this war economy that has unfortunately normalized war conditions. And women's role, especially in the agricultural sector, they've played an extremely important, and I don't want to take much time, but many people, especially foreigners who work in Yemen, see how women in Yemen have been playing an extremely important role in civil society organizations and in many aspects of our society. So I'll just end it here. Thank you, Abdulrahman. So let me go actually switch the questions, because I think it gives Ambassador Bodin an angle here, because there's a question to her from Alex, and she can comment on the women angle. So Alex is asking, could the national dialogue outcomes serve as a starting point for revitalizing negotiations in regard to inclusivity, especially for women as the report urges, or do we need to start elsewhere? That's a good question. I'm going to tell a much shorter story than Jihan on Yemeni women, who I deeply respect. I had a woman journalist come to Yemen, and after about five days, she came to see me, and she said, you know, when I was out around, I saw all these women in hijabs and abayas, and, you know, oh my god, they're, you know, and then she said, then I noticed that I was seeing all these women out and about in hijabs and abayas, and then she said, and this is my favorite line about Yemeni women, and they were not only out and about, but they were walking without apology, which I just thought was a wonderful phrase. The life of Yemeni women is extremely difficult. The life of a Yemeni man is extremely difficult as well. But Yemeni women, and I think they demonstrated this in their role in Change Square, where they were major voices, major leaders, and their role in the NDC, and actually the element of the NDC recommendations that gave women a quota, not just in the national legislature, but in the executive and the legislature, in the judicial branch and locally, aspirational absolutely, but they were able to get that voted on. There is a baseline to work from. Whether you dust off the NDC and, you know, try that again, there has been so much change in Yemen in the last seven years that you could not go back to the NDC and just restart it. But there was a dialogue there that may be a basis for conversation, and certainly the role that women, youth, and others were able to play, however imperfectly, is a baseline. It's a start. So I wouldn't throw it out. I would use it as a guide, but not a template. Thank you. So, okay, I have the next question comes from, obviously you're welcome to comment on the women's question, but also to get the question from Muhammad. He said, asking, do you expect the efforts made to end the conflict in Yemen are sufficient? How is UNDP working to rehabilitate Yemen now? Yes, thanks. Just quickly on the issue of gender, right? I just want to say, you know, one can look at this, you know, from a sort of negative point of view, but also from the positive point of view. And I think it's important also to give, you know, women opportunities to shine, right? And I just want to give the example of Iman. It's a lady that we supported one of our projects. She managed through a small support to build really, you know, a solar system within the village, providing electricity to the hill village. And then she tied up also sort of a microfinance as a grand scheme to it as well. And she became actually one of the hundred most influential women as per a BBC poll of last year, you know, and this is a woman who lived in Abz in northern Yemen, which is against all odds, if you know the situation in Yemen, right? So I think it is possible. And you really also have to highlight these positive, you know, examples where we can see and create these opportunities. It's really important, I think. Anyway, I just wanted to keep that short so I can also respond to the other question. And it kind of ties into what I've been saying before as well. Indeed, you know, even if the conflict is still ongoing, there are plenty of opportunities to rebuild Yemen as a matter of fact, that sounds contradictory in terms, but it's not necessarily so. I'll give you again one example. You know, at the moment as we speak in Yemen, you know, electricity is a very difficult issue, right? The grid is down, the power generation is at an all time low. And most households are coping simply through having a panel on their roof. And that's about it. It runs there, you know, it runs the fridge, it runs the TV, if they're lucky and charge their phone, but that's about it. Now, given where Yemen is geographically speaking, you know, a transition through to renewable energy, so provision is actually the way to go, you know, because all these old power generation and so on, there is no point in repairing it. And actually, if you look at it globally, we have plenty of instruments to finance it if you think about the green climate fund and so on and so forth. So why is an offshore windmill park unthinkable in Yemen? Why? You know, as a matter of fact, it's going to be probably the one investment that you can protect and de-risk very, very quickly, right? So for Yemen, the provision of electricity is a key ingredient because I don't know any country in the world that really can recover without electricity. You know, it is crucial for households, it's crucial for small businesses, it's crucial for big industries as well. So in my response to Mohammed, I just want to say, look, you know, there are tons of opportunities to already start rebuilding, as we speak, there are plenty of pockets of peace in Yemen, plenty of pockets of stability as well, however contradictory that sounds. But of course, you know, we need to also be creative about how we mobilize the funding and how we can de-risk it so that also we can leverage private sector investment with that, you know, as well. And this is really something that, you know, as UNDP here advocating and then also be going forward in terms of our way forward. Thank you. Thank you. Okay. So we are five minutes out from the end of our session. I think we'll be okay if we go a couple of minutes over. So just in the, I'd like to get back to each panelist. And for about a minute, we have a set of questions that we, I would like to put it out and please feel free to pick one to answer and any final thoughts. So the question, one question that I wanted to ask is that if there are any ideas or policy recommendations to the United States, United Nations or the international community for ending the conflict and or for the recovery and development, so if there's any idea what I put forward. And I want to acknowledge some questions that we received one from Noah, where he's asking what steps he's addressing the question to Ambassador Boudin. What questions, what steps are being taken to put pressure on the Saudi government to lift blockade that makes it difficult to get humanitarian aid to Yemen? How can we talk reconstruction without addressing that? And there is a question from from Matthew addressed to all, which is going forward. What are some of the practical steps that Gulf countries could take to improve Yemen's prospects of long-term success in Yemen? How might these future actions be evaluated to measure efficacy, to ensure efficacy, sorry. And then with a question from Raush, I hope I'm pronouncing it correctly. I apologize if I'm not. He's asking what are the consequences of the currency, the Yemeni versus US dollar divergence between the Houthi health and the non-Houthi zones for the prospects of a future integrated economy. Again, great questions, short time remaining. So a minute to each one of you. I'm coming to you in the order we started to Jihan first. So maybe let me pick up on the first question and maybe a little bit on some of the practical steps. One of the questions by the participants. So in the first question, I think what is important is for the whole international community actually to push to ensure that the economy as a part of any peace agreement. Trust building measures should really include issues that will decrease the suffering of Yemeni people. Issues like paying salaries, currency stabilization, resilience of local institutions, mobility of people and good, access to services, people need to feel that there is a peace dividend. Ahmad mentioned that young people did not really experience stability and that's true and the only way to have a long sustainable peace is to have a very clear vision of economic vision as part of any peace agreement. For the question about Yemen, for me, I see Yemen as part of its geography. It's where it is. Stability of Yemen is the stability of the region and it's very important. Unfortunately, in the past, the U.S. saw Yemen through the lens of security and counterterrorism and during the war, of course, that geopolitical lens has been added to the mix, but it's time to shift that and have an approach that focuses on Yemen and the positive impacts fill over of stability in Yemen in the region and globally. And I'm pleased to hear Mr. Linder King today mentioning that Yemen is now a top U.S. foreign policy. Thank you, Jihang. Mr. Brigid Abdelhan. Yes, very quickly. These are great questions. Just to answer first your question, there's no magical formula to end wars. As you know, we've seen conflicts around the world. They take some time to end. But we have to remove some of these catalysts that are kind of exacerbating the conflict. And in terms of development and what my advice to development organizations is to lean on Yemen's, as I said earlier, vibrant social capital on making sure that there's a platform, for instance, Yemeni businessmen can speak. There's a platform, an adequate platform provided for Yemeni women, an adequate platform provided for CSOs. And we don't want them to be discussing by themselves like on islands, the clusters. We want them to be speaking with each other because what's really important for development organizations in general, I think is just finding agents of reconstruction in the country, that ownership aspect, and that can only can be achieved through dialogue within Yemen. And so to answer Matthew's question about the Gulf, I think we live in a world of shared sovereignty. I mean Yemen, the Gulf countries, we need to kind of accept and realize that there are shared interests. And once this is accepted, then everyone knows that the conflict in Yemen is no one's interest really, especially in the Arabian Gulf. I just imagine at one point we were planning to build a bridge connecting Yemen to Djibouti. And this is not unpalatable. I mean, you see Chinese, they're building twice as long bridges. So can you imagine the kind of unlocked synergies between Yemen and its neighbors if we have these sorts of available infrastructure? As the question by Josh about the currency situation, yes, we fortunately, we only have one currency in Yemen, but we have two monetary policies, implemented by the international, by the central bank in Aden and you have a one that is implemented by the de facto central bank in Sana'a. But this is resolvable because we don't have necessarily a huge divergence between both currencies. Once there is some form of a general agreement and we can generally try to exclude these vital institutions from policies like central banks, we can find a turnaround. But there's a solution to the currency. We are not in a dangerous zone here, but it is important that we find that solution very time and it's done through dialogue and I'll end it here. And thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you, Ambassador Boudin. Sorry. Those are fabulous questions. I want to touch a couple of them very briefly. I totally agree that the United States went a little off track with Yemen when we started seeing Yemen through the prism of counterterrorism and security almost exclusively. And I think that that was a major mistake on our part and I think it is a contributing factor to current instability. And if I were asked my views to my current colleagues at the State Department and elsewhere, I would strongly say to deal with Yemen as Yemen, not as a derivative of counterterrorism, not as a derivative of the Gulf States. Yes, those issues are important, but we need to deal with Yemen as Yemen and the Yemenis as owners to underscore another point. That would be my very first recommendation to my own side. The Gulf role, I think, is important. It is unavoidable, as Albert Rakhman has said. The Gulf brings enormous resources, which will be important. But I think we also have to be very careful that a number of Gulf States also have agendas. And if we are going to have an integrated recovery that hits on all five P's, as they're called, I think there needs to be a partnership between those who can develop, devise, and in many ways implement these programs as developed by the Yemenis and a partnership with the Gulf States and their resources. So you're going to have to have Yemeni leadership, Yemeni ownership, international technical assistance and cooperation, and also funding. And then the Gulf contributing financially but not driving political agendas. And just briefly, I know that we are pressuring the Saudis on the blockade. I don't think the blockade will be lifted so long as the Houthi have access somehow to the weaponry that allows them to hit Abu Dhabi. I think that that probably set back blockade talks. Unfortunately, I agree in terms of Yemen and development on the humanitarian. But I have a feeling that that probably soured that conversation. Thank you, Ambassador William Elke. Thanks, Sassan. Let me just pick up a one point to keep it short. And this is on the position that Yemen is taking on the Arab Peninsula. I mean, Yemen is part of the peninsula, if you like it or not. It's not going to grow legs and walk somewhere else on the map of the world, right? So I think no matter what the outcome of the war will be in Yemen, good, maybe the less regional cooperation and support from the GCSE countries and involvement of the GCSE countries in Yemen will remain. So I think it is really important to underline what Ambassador Bodin was saying that really that energy, those finances are really also directed in a positive way so that really you can put back Yemen on this trajectory towards fixing their development deficits and become like a prosperous neighbor to the rest of the Gulf. And don't forget Yemen is one of the biggest nations actually in the region, but at the same time, also the poorest. With a 30 million people population, it is a big market at the same time. So I think it's important to keep that in mind also for the longer term and we really hope that the report will also contribute to that discussion. Thank you. Thank you. Okay. So we've come to the end of our time and I apologize to those who we did not have the time to get to their questions. I want to thank our distinguished speakers, our audience, our interpreters and special thanks to UNDP, especially UNDP-Yemen for partnering with us at the US Institute of Peace for the excellent work that you have been doing on the report and other areas of needs of Yemen and you continue to do so. And fortunately, violence and human suffering continue in Yemen. They need to end, obviously. I'm heartened that the Yemeni people have the support of the international community. I think the comments that Special Envoy Lendrking mentioned at the beginning of the world coming together to focus energy on ending the violent conflict is great to go for more inclusive processes in Yemen that's also great. And we clearly have to remain focused on ending the conflict and continuing assistance to Yemen to recover and focus on sustainable development as well because ending the violence is not the end. Also as Special Envoy Lendrking said at its heart, this is a Yemeni-Yemeni conflict but obviously we cannot underestimate the external factors that play a significant role. The decision makers in perpetuating the conflict should ask themselves the hard question. Do they want to be responsible for almost one million more deaths, 22.2 million people in extreme poverty and the loss of over 400 billion dollars? I hope the answer is no and they end the conflict and they choose the path of a prosperous future for the Yemenis. Thanks again for joining us and until the next time, wishing you all continued health and safety. Thank you.