 Hello and welcome back to the second day of the very first annual symposium of the Water and Development Partnership Program. We had a great start yesterday with the powerful speakers and engaging discussions along with our fair share of technical issues. We thank all our participants, panelists and speakers for their patience. We still have some people joining in but in the meantime we can do a little recap from yesterday. We began yesterday with discussing advocacy for impact where we heard passionate presentations about science communication. Our speakers discussed how us as water professionals can extend the findings of our research to wider audiences by collaborating across sectors and creatively using communication tools and how this can impact policy and what are the challenges faced in this process. The second half of the day was about technology for impact. Speakers shared the struggles of moving away from top-down technological solutions to water issues toward collaborating efforts of adapting technologies to the needs of local, especially marginalized communities. How can scientists and academics demystify technology and ensure that community perspectives are included in the inception of projects when problems are identified and formulated. Today we have another two very insightful sessions planned for you with the total of six presentations. The first half of the day will see discussions on diversity and inclusion, the varied interpretations of these terms, and the multiple ways of putting them in practice. And the second half of the day will reflect on struggles of sustaining projects and their impacts beyond project timelines. Once again we hope to share stories not only of success but also of failures, of uncertainties and of what we don't yet know. If you have not yet received the symposium program please download it at the link that my colleague Debora will share in the chat. And before we begin I have a few points of housekeeping. We encourage you to use the chat freely and interact with each other through the presentations. But if you have a question for the speakers please put it in the question and answer section which you will find in the zoom toolbar at the bottom of your screen. When you pose your question please make sure that you indicate who your question is posed to. At the end of all the three presentations there will be space for a discussion and reflections. During this time you can raise your hand and we will give permission to speak. If you have questions in French please feel free to ask them as well. We will translate these for the panelists. With this I will begin introducing our first moderator for the day Moitri Mukhopadhyay. Moitri Mukhopadhyay is a social anthropologist and feminist. She's among the very first generation of gender trainers, researchers and advocates. Based at the KIT Royal Tropical Institute in Amsterdam she led the KIT gender research advisory work and teaching and training for 21 years. I'm personally very happy that Moitri Mukhopadhyay has agreed to join us today and I'm so excited to hear how she moderates this session. Moitri. Thank you. Thank you for having me and welcome everybody. Our topic is diversity and inclusion for impact. I just would like to pick up a few points about the title itself. We have three projects that will be discussed and each of them has in the intention to include a diverse diversity. So I will address make two points about diversity. As you see in the title it's diversity and inclusion for impact and in a certain way it looks it's a bit off because it seems like a justification yet another category like all other categories of international development that we coin and we mobilize in order to justify that our projects are worth it. It sounds instrumentally. So there is a justification to incorporate this. Diversity and inclusion as consideration and impact as if that is the main goal impact is the main goal. So if diversity and inclusion work for that then well and good. But diversity is also used in other ways and I'm talking about social diversity here. Diversity and inclusion is also and has an intrinsic value. Diversity is ubiquitous in real life. It's the stuff which our societies are woven but because the dominant class is in a given society hold the power to set the norms the world gets organized around their needs and interests and the voices of the less powerful remain submerged and be invisible. Now the literature on diversity that I've drawn on primarily comes from organization behavior and management studies and educational studies would show a positive correlation between diversity and performance. However, public programs to include historically marginalized groups for example in higher education race in the US and caste in India are undertaken because it has intrinsic value. These programs not only benefit minority students who gain expanded access to elite institutions through affirmative action rather diversity also benefits students from the dominant race or caste who grow through encounters with minority students. It contributes to social and intellectual life on campus and it serves society at large by aiding the development of citizens equipped for citizenship in an increasingly diverse world and country. In social research our task is to visualize the needs and interests of those groups in social society for whom the development internship is critical but who are generally invisible to the mainstream. The question is how the research design or the project design incorporates voices less likely to be heard but most affected by the program. The projects to be discussed today have all mentioned as I said diversity and inclusion as intention. The three projects are farming in times of crises, experiences, responses and in needs of small holder farmers during the COVID-19 pandemic in Morocco, Algeria and India Maharashtra. This is the only completed project in the three. Water-based livelihoods is the second one, urban development and climate change in two port cities of Colombia and this has project has just begun and finally sustainable water pans and Tanzania and this project has also just begun. There'll be a question and answer session as Ein has pointed out. We'll give priority to clarification at first to clarification questions not addressed in the presentation but not only that's just in between we can allow a few clarification questions but we want to focus really on how is diversity and inclusion addressed in the projects. How is it intrinsic to project design not only instrumental but intrinsic to project design but the politics of diversity and inclusion including who is considered marginalized in which ways they prefer to be included etc. And how is paying attention to diverse marginalized perspectives shaping goals in all three projects and outcomes of their project for at least one project which has been completed. Now with that I would like to call the ask the presenter for farming in times of price times of prices to please give us a presentation. Hi good afternoon so I will can you hear me yes yes um great so I will share my screen for the slides is it working can you see it you can see it right yes okay perfect then I can start Irina we see your screen but it's not a full screen yeah it's not a full screen what do you mean it's not a full screen it says your screen sharing yes but we see the presenter view we don't see it a full screen that's uh okay wait stop share let me see oh I can do this because I'm we share your screen and select the full screen first sound no okay I have only one option select the window or or yes when you're selecting the window select the first window which is screen and then in your powerpoint presentation when you go to slide show it should show us the full screen is it correct now yes yeah okay perfect then I'll start so yeah my name is Irana Leonhardelli and I completed in May a PhD at IHG DELT and yeah during the years of my PhD one of the project I was involved in I coordinated was this farming in times of prices experiences responses and needs of smaller farmers during the COVID-19 pandemic and it's a project that was active from June 2020 to December 2021 so first of all I would like to give you some background information about the project by telling you why this project was developed so in March 2020 I was conducting fieldwork for my PhD research in Maharashtra in India and I was studying small older farmers living in a drought from rural area mostly focusing on their ways of managing water and mostly focusing on women farmers practices and experiences with water then suddenly the COVID-19 spread around the world and lockdown measures started to be implemented everywhere and I had to fly back to Europe with some colleagues were also doing research on rural agrarian transformations and working with small older farmers in different countries of the world in India in Morocco and Algeria we were holding regular online meetings to share insights about the COVID situation in our research areas and to stay connected because we were all working remotely from home so although the COVID-19 pandemic was affecting each country in different ways we were sharing similar concerns about the challenges that different small older farmers were facing during these times because the markets were closed and many couldn't sell their produce anymore they had to leave the the harvest to to rot on the fields or agricultural laborers couldn't travel to their workplaces to the farms so we were wondering and worrying about how different small older farmers were dealing with the situation how they were inventing their everyday organization how they were reinventing their livelihoods in these troubled times and if they had access to government programs that were there to support them and above all we wanted to understand if there was something we could do if there were some strategies some programs we could develop to support them and so we got founded by the UPC-2 for to develop this smaller project and the main objective was that of ensuring that the voices of marginalized small older farmers in Morocco, Algeria and India were considered in policy and aid interventions during the COVID-19 crisis and its aftermath so the partners involved in the project you can see in the table it's this NGO in Morocco another research agency in Algeria and an NGO in India and then IHEDALT coordinating the project in the Netherlands the diversity of the partners so involving both research agencies, research institutions and the civil society was very important to to implement the project and to and to have their outcomes we had but I will talk about this later on in the presentation so just to specify where exactly the project was implemented there is a map with the areas so in Morocco we focused on the Dravalet the science plane and the Garplane in Algeria we worked in the Masab Valley and in India as mentioned in the Maharashtra state different villages in Maharashtra so the activities we were able to implement in the context in the context of the project included so first of all research so we collected data on COVID-19 related experiences and impacts across cases so we did about 15 depth telephonic interviews with different farmers in each country because at the beginning also the local partners couldn't travel to the field so we had to conduct remote field work through phone interviews and then when it was possible to move around different countries the local partners conducted some field visits to monitor the situation and conduct some more in-depth interviews with the people that we had already talked to through the phone and then in India we also conducted a survey together with the local partner which works with a network of women leaders women farmer leaders and yeah we were able to conduct a survey involving about 1000 single rural women and then we disseminated the data we collected and we analyzed through academic articles and blog posts and podcasts and we developed some strategies to to support more older farmers to build COVID-19 resilient strategies and also policy advocacy was part of the of the activities implemented in the context of the project now I would like to say something more about these activities focusing on the team of the session which is impact for diversity discussing the importance but also the challenges related to two specific aspects of diversity that were important in the in the in this project so first of all the diversity of smaller farmers involved and particularly our decision to focus on those most marginalized and then the diversity of the partners involved so of course the category of small older farmers is is broad and it means something different in different countries in different contexts but what we wanted to do was to remain sensitive to our experiences and responses to the COVID-19 pandemic differ among different smaller farmers and we wanted to be particularly sensitive to our existing patterns of inequality shape these different experiences and responses this is also because we wanted to to develop support strategies that could particularly help the most marginalized those farmers that were suffering the most the effects of the pandemic so in all three countries in in in the Amoraco and Algeria patriarchal social structures interweave with class and the caste system to constitute institutional and social dynamic dynamics in which single women farmers and agricultural laborers from scattered castes are often the most marginalized and discriminated in fact our data suggested that women and particularly women from disadvantaged castes and classes were particularly affected by the by the pandemic because they found it very difficult to find paid agricultural work and to reach the farm during the lockdown and also they struggled to access government supports to support schemes on top of this there was a clear increase in care work in caring tasks that they had to take that they had to take on as children for instance weren't going to school during that time so we aim to listen and document particularly the voices of of women in our academic articles in the blogs in the podcasts we produced and to support their needs to advocacy work and also provision of agricultural inputs it was easier for the to collect data to collect rich data in in Maharashtra and in Morocco because the local partners there had already a wide a broad network of contacts with with women farmers they were working with women farmers before the COVID-19 pandemic so also contacting women farmers through phony interviews was was relatively easy because we had many contacts there it was more difficult in Algeria because the partner organization there before the COVID-19 pandemic was conducting research on rural agrarian transformation but without a specific focus on gender issues without really applying an intersectional approach so for them it was more difficult to reach out to to women also during the field visits so if if contacts with women farmers were already established and it was easy to contact them and to understand the challenges they were facing but if contacts were not there it was more difficult to go to the villages and admit them because of all the restrictions that were that were there so this was one of the challenges I wanted to talk about and then I wanted to focus more on on the importance of involving different partners so it what we not we but the local partner the local NGO in Maharashtra India was able to to develop the actual programs to support women farmers because they had this broad network of they were in contact they were already working with this network of women farmers leaders and activists and they were conducting advocacy work for for many many many many years so the activities they were able to develop included promoting chemical free kitchen gardens so around 200 single women farmers were provided with agricultural inputs including small land seeds irrigation tools to build their kitchen garden and to start cultivating household crops for their own consumption this helped them to be a bit less dependent on commercial crops something that was particularly important as markets were closed also Saapakum the NGO in Maharashtra was able to organize capacity building workshops to grassroot organizations and women leaders activists to increase women farmers access to a government scheme that aimed to provide work to women also before covid but this was especially important during covid times so workshops served to create awareness about the scheme and to explain how to get the cards the right documentation to access to access the scheme also the partner NGO Saapakum was able to organize several meetings with government officials and politicians to conduct advocacy work to explain to spread also the data we collected through the project to explain why women farmers especially single women and women from disadvantaged caste classes were were facing specific challenges in these times and how they could be they could be helped and because the partners in Morocco and Nigeria were more focusing on research and advocacy work they weren't they didn't develop programs like this like these free kitchen gardens or capacity building workshops their activities focused more on conducting advocacy work writing policy briefs writing articles in local newspapers to make the voices of smaller farmers and particularly women farmers yes so to conclude I think yeah the what we learned through this project was definitely the the relevance the potential of the collaboration between research institutions and local practitioners and activists as as we have learned especially in Maharashtra in India the fact that the local partner already had broad network of contacts with women farmers leaders and activists was fundamental to to support more smaller farmers to reach out to more smaller farmers in different areas of the region and to implement actual programs actual small projects to to support them and and of course because I for instance couldn't travel to to the field like I was doing before before covid and I could conduct only only for the interviews it was extremely relevant to have an important to have local partners that could travel to the field as soon as it was possible and actually meet the people and see how the situation was on the ground because of course you can get money for information through phone interviews but it's not the same as going there and actually meeting the people talking to them see what they need and and support them yeah for instance we know that two years after the implementation of this project many women farmers are who participated in the kitchen gardens programs are still cultivating the gardens of course not all of them some stopped after one year or so but others are still using that support and and also started to rethink a bit cropping patterns to cultivate more household crops and yeah and we kept working with the same partners sorry to interrupt you but you are of four minutes over time okay I finished I'm done thank you okay thank you Rina are there any questions for clarification before we switch to the next panelist if so please put your hands up only clarification okay there's one in the question and answer which I think Rina could type answer it's what are the success stories yeah you would like to share to us at the learning lessons it's from core from South Sudan yeah so I think I I I mentioned some success stories by by mentioning some of the of the activities that South Pekom did this La Calangio was able to implement in these in these times and these these activities were were developed because we collected in depth rich data on the situation of different smaller farmers applying an intersectional approach so really making sure that um yeah trying to understand who was most affected no looking at looking at social existing patterns of inequalities so focusing on gender on class on caste on age and then the programs were developed accordingly and and I think some of them were were really successful as I as I mentioned the 200 women okay yeah can we um yeah call it there then we move on to the next person as time progresses thank you very much Irine we're moving on now the next week please hello how are you um I am uh Parisa Rinaldi presenting on behalf of the water-based livelihoods group from Colombia my presentation is focusing on our framework for thinking about transdisciplinary research through this idea of diversity as not only an add-on and a thing to to kind of include in our projects but as a unifying method and understanding of the need for unity in diversity to reach truth to establish research questions and to develop cycles of action and reflection with those involved so the title is unity and diversity as transdisciplinary method building a framework for the amphibious water-based livelihoods project and um just to begin I'd like to um introduce the project we call it the amphibious project endearingly because the father of participatory research action in Colombia Orlando Falls Borda studied the communities in the Atlantic region of Colombia and gave them this um this name of of being amphibious because they could easily work and live um fluidly with a fluid relationship with both land and water and so the communities that we are working with in this project are communities mainly fishing communities in these two port cities Barranquilla and Buenaventura Barranquilla and the Atlantic coast and Buenaventura and the Pacific coast these two cities are the major port cities that export are nodes of the fossil fuel economy so they export all sorts of products but mainly oil from the country and the development of the ports has really affected the ecosystems around the port and the base of livelihood for the fishing communities that are historically present in these areas and and are also racialized communities so in dupc 2 as the previous presentation mentioned a lot of those projects were done during the pandemic my team also had a project in these two cities um addressing water access uh gender and also um the the impact of water access on dengue and mosquito borne diseases in these two cities and they also had to kind of adapt to the pandemic and um the pandemic forced them to actually enter into more participatory methods such as um doing uh auto ethnographies so they they sent they trained groups of women in these two cities they sent them cell phones and the women kind of um researched their own everyday lives and and were able to speak about how their access to water um was uh had had these differences by gender so this kind of precedent um allowed the research team to think about now that we are working in the same cities thinking about the impacts of climate change sea level rise climate relocation development policies um and wanting to really focus on the resilience of these communities how can we move from just a participatory you know research method of um uh data collection to really having a uh a project that serves the the needs of the community so this is how we have entered into the amphibious project um with the aim to highlight the adaptability and resilience of these coastal communities whose livelihoods depend on on both land and water and how do we understand diversity in and its role in this project um we we see the need for um diversity to to really be intrinsic and to be driving our path forward um so we really hold on to this concept of praxis and climate justice um and praxis as being kind of encouraging cycles of action and reflection as well as research but in an unfinished collective way that um kind of breaks down dichotomies breaks down binaries um and intertwines both fury and practice and both community needs and uh investigation and um community question based questions um and these are some of the ideas that also arise in terms of climate justice from this praxis lens we do not just see um sea level rise as a problem right it is interconnected with these other issues of pollution ecosystem degradation the port development in these two cities the livelihoods of the fishing communities um tourism projects that are coming in and displacing communities urbanization um and also all of this connected to um communities economic development so we were able to just very recently in october launch this project with this uh with a kickoff training um gathering and um also development collective development of the research questions with uh 15 members of each of fishing communities from each city and we chose um our partner fundaic which is the foundation for the application and teaching of the sciences which has over 50 years of experience in colombia as well as across the world in developing rural education um programs um and have really developed a framework for understanding capacity building based on an understanding of uh development as both material and spiritual um fundaic has developed a um training on reconceptualizing leadership um that draws on moral leadership and an understanding of historical consciousness that now we're in a in a different um time when all of us need to be moral leaders and uh in in every aspect of our lives and professions and community uh relationships so we partnered with fundaic and uh asked them to give this training to us and we were all participants in this training both um the research team the academic research team members and um community members and students that we've involved in this project all participated and one of the main um kind of learnings from this training was understanding um the need for all voices to be heard so as each one of us thinks about facilitating as moral leaders facilitating learning in our communities whether they be in these cities or in the uh in academia how can we really serve uh and not impose our will on others and allow uh the voices of all to be to be considered and um consulted on to determine um our paths forward so we used this kind of method of consultation with the steps that fundaic offered to determine our research questions at the end of this training we were able to do this in this beautiful space uh the house of worship the bahai house of worship in um cauca colombia which is a space that is open to all walks of life um so people had the opportunity to reflect and meditate in between um in between these training sessions um you have two more minutes yes mm-hmm so this is a just an image of the the training our uh collaborator from fundaic presenting um we were able to as i already mentioned talk a lot about this concept of unity and diversity um through the exercises in the training and also develop this concept of praxis as cycles of consultation action reflection so here on the last day um we you know came together shared all of our questions and we organized them across these four main research themes um that the project has so which is everyday resistance and resilience spatial and temporal transformations ecosystem degradation water quality and discursive strategies so for each theme we had a paper where we put out we kind of decided where each question that was arising could fit and people signed up to you know form research teams around these questions so just to give a sense of one of them for resistance and resilience some of these questions came out the need to document the life stories of leaders and community associations um in these communities to answer the question of specific cases of internally displaced communities how have these communities sustained their fishing livelihoods and also discursive strategies of um uh laws that have been implemented that consider biodiversity but also prohibit the fishing of um certain species that are part of the ancestral diet um and so just to conclude the training was pivotal to starting this project it really brought us all together and and sparked many other ideas and collaborations that are um associated with this project and I'm sure that we will be very successful moving forward with our next steps will be having a methods workshop we're also incorporating a collaborator who will be doing a micro financing workshop to help the groups with with the project along with the research I think you've reached thank you very much not very service okay um can I um yes I'm looking at whether there are any questions for you immediately um there aren't any so I think thank you and we'll discuss some issues that you have raised in the question answer session along with the others shall we just move on to the next speaker please might you would you please introduce the next speaker yes can I yes um can I just introduce uh then third project sustainable water fans in the Tanzania and I believe is this Ellen yes okay Ellen please begin thank you very much well thank you very much let me briefly share my screen all right you can see my screen excellent thank you very much um Matri as you mentioned at the beginning our project has only just started so actually today we do not want to talk too much about the project itself um but the sustainable water fans project was started by a group of collaborators who have spent several years questioning the logic of empowerment and our way of working with marginalized communities so today we want to spend this opportunity to share some of that type of thinking that has shaped our project both from the perspective of a local grassroots CSO and of um a development professional namely myself speaking for the letter um I think many of us noticed that the increased demand for diversity and inclusiveness in our work is rather challenging um I know that especially being called privileged is one of these terms that has made a lot of professionals very defensive but actually if you know the debate the term privilege actually just means that we can live our lives without dealing with a specific problem that somebody else has to overcome now for me personally working with poor marginalized communities actually first and foremost meant to phase up to the full reality of what that term privilege means it means that in my projects to generate impact I have to make plans for realities that are completely outside my own experience the quote I put on that slide you are seeing is from a social mapping interview we conducted just last month for the sustainable waterpans project to appreciate the full reality of the context we are working with now in this example we have a young woman that is trapped and I catch 22 that most people I work with or from our culture cannot even begin to imagine but to create impact it means that when our project works in this community on capacity development or when we promote the formation of an inclusive waterpan committee impact actually means that our solution has to make a meaningful contribution to the reality of that young woman now what does that mean for us and how we approach our projects first of all I believe is that we have to understand that diversity does not create impact if it is limited to enforcing quotas in artificial spaces and project meetings trainings project contexts are almost always temporary and artificial therefore to me one of the key is to impact and diversity is to work with partners that are actually an integral part of the communities that we aim to work with because they are the only ones who can really reality check our suggestions and who can teach us lessons that we need to overcome our own blind spots now in my case and in the case of our project the maro women empowerment assistance is such a partner and so I would actually like to stop here already and hand over to my colleague mizamba chacha to share some thoughts and what it means to work with donor funded projects from his perspective thank you very much Ellen I'm representing where maro women empowerment assistance which is a local press root NGO rooted in the local community and this is providing microloans with a strong social focus over the last two decades where has positively influenced the lives of over 10,000 individuals through comprehensive initiatives including training programs at the focus efforts microloans and various forms of social support so drawing from this experience I would like to offer this of advice to the coming project when engaging with marginalized communities it's vital to know that within these communities there are people who are hungry for success but they are they live in a system once they are given something or they are training they are dropped back into this completely dysfunctional system where nobody is believing that change is happening and they are left there where do they go with their knowledge so in a specific community where we operate an investor with very good intentions so to assist a group of women in producing water filters to diminish charcoal and firewood consumption in boiling drinking water so like let it be from the outset the group was not adequately informed about accessing materials pricing and marketing strategies for the filters so tragically the investor passed away leaving the group struggling with production so despite having the necessary machines and the well-prepared side the project remains inactive it's not working so from from my experience a notable challenge is that many professionals initiating projects often fail to recognize the beneficiaries as individuals with human needs so instead they focus solely on metrics and statistics so in a discussion with about inclusivity our local field officers have suggested a simple yet profound change that when project interactive with individuals for the first time why not ask for their names this small gesture acknowledges the humanity of the beneficiaries you know just imagine for example if me as in Samba church a visit and knock your door and tell you what to do will you be able to accept without even building trust knowing anything about it so in our approach to work one of the key element not to to look who is in the room but at what are they doing so central to this one this concept of agency so agents means emphasizing that individuals should be in control of their own lives for example in a local consultation if someone rejects a suggestion that you have brought to them do project leaders have the flexibility and space to adapt change will you change your project or do you have space to change your project who is in control so I think it's essential to question who holds control in these scenarios and to ensure that the community members are active participants in the decisions that impact their lives thank you very much I would like to to stand back to Ellen for the continuation yeah and thank you Mersamba now reflecting on this local perspective but then also bringing it back to my own reactions to reality is that I've seen one of the most important lessons that I've learned from working with colleagues like Mersamba and the beneficiaries of my own project and the Veronica's or Manan Yandas of this world I think one of the key things is that we need to look at is the need to question the status quo that we find but together with people who are forced to live in the status quo of the situation and situations that we do not understand it is an easy reaction to just say that we need to respect the local culture or to advocate for something that we believe is positive like certain forms of equality or diversity but seeing the firmest cartoon on this slide I think at least in water circles it is quite famous there is a common first reaction that simply says that the women in this slide in this cartoon should be seated at the table where the decisions are made however if you really think about it making decisions at that table has created the system that marginalized the women in the first place so hopefully the debates of the last few years have clarified that also western societies are not half as inclusive and equal as we normally like to believe so if we simply asked to add women to the bench in this cartoon does it mean we are increasing diversity or in that local context does it mean that we are just adding yet another job to women's workload so as development professionals I believe we also have to face the fact that bringing resources into existing systems might stabilize hierarchies that marginalized locals would rather change or even break so this is something we have to ask how do we account for that when we measure impact now coming from the very philosophical to the very practical maybe just one thing that that I think all of us in our project believe in is equality diversity and inclusion in any context requires some rather uncomfortable conversations but mostly the increasing impacts through diversity starts with our own mindset the key is to look at our own proposals through the eyes of what we call beneficiaries now as Misamba suggested two minutes think about if you were one of those beneficiaries and you know somebody knocked on your door with your own attitude and your proposal and said here's what I want to bring you give you would you actually let that person in and do you want to be part of that project you're proposing Santasana thank you is that okay thank you Ellen this I don't see any questions that can immediately be answered in the short space there is one which you could please type an answer to or leave for later what are the modalities just have a look at the question that has aimed at you thank you anybody else all right so we could go on then hello yes we could go on then to some questions and answers and there aren't very many here but there's some are very specific to what Irene has each project and I would request that perhaps those be answered by the presenter themselves yes so but there's here's an interesting one from Khorchakor who asks Ellen what are the modalities your organization is able to use to identify marginalized women well in our case it's not just about women of course the beneficiaries are actually marginalized communities as a whole with all the beneficiaries so the the project itself deals with the way waterpans are designed built and operated because a lot of african rural communities depend on them so the the question here is how is the community as a whole treated for example by political decision makers which we do by trying to do the process so actually we start to try and build a waterpan as the community wants it so first of all finding out who in the community wants what so there we have rather complex processes to find that out at the same time doing research is to the better understand the local structures but then confronting actually the regulatory reality of saying okay here's what we want is it actually possible to give the community what they want or is current regulation and and also governance practice not even able to have a conversation about what the community wants so it's a it's a lot of you know a very experimental process a lot of participatory action research but I think I can't explain all of it here but maybe that helps understand it a little bit thank you um I think there's one for masamba which please kindly type an answer okay I there aren't very many questions and answers so I'm going to just raise some of the issues that have been already raised and please uh you feel free all of you not not just the presenter to actually engage with the issues one of the things that Irene said was that um that she also made us aware of while presenting was that diversity means um actually different groups in different contexts given that she was working in three different countries and three different very different situations uh although on agricultural workforce um the diversity of um the diversity she was referred to social inclusion that she was referring to um meant different things in who wants to be you know kind of uh included or what were how is in India as compared to Morocco as and um and Algeria so do you want to um Irene give one example because um um where for example in Algeria the other two places you actually had partners who were local on the ground and you were able to uh work with them um can you give an idea of inclusion that was not that I mean it's not even from your presentation for example from Algeria I thought that was a very interesting case of kind having read your article um yeah so over to Irene please yes I thank you um yeah as I said in Algeria it was more difficult to talk to women mostly because the local partner there uh had conducted research um on on irrigation practices on agricultural practices but mostly talking to male farmers because these are contexts that when you go to the to the field as other presenters also also mentioned um it is most often men that um speak up in the public space and that have important political roles so it is more difficult to to to talk to women one really has to go and to the houses of people and mention no I want to know what what women think about this what are women practices what are women's strategies around this issue because otherwise you get only the perspective of men which is of course very different because they have different roles different tasks in the everyday farming work or they don't even go to the farm and all the work is done by women but still it is men who decide about water management and who then tells you how things work um but yeah again in COVID times it was a bit more difficult to to go and uh knock at the door of uh of farmers and say hey I want to talk to to to your wife for instance because people were also a bit more protective no they were a bit more reluctant to talk to uh researchers to to people coming from outside because of the health risks mostly um so yeah we understood yeah how relevant it was to build a network yeah before before the before the pandemic started but um for instance in Algeria the the local partner that the researchers there focused on on migrants from sub-Saharan countries who were working as agricultural laborers in Algeria and they were also facing particular challenges because they are already living in a very vulnerable situation in very difficult conditions and of course the pandemic affected them particularly so um part of the of the research there focused on this group of marginalized agricultural laborers um in in Morocco um the researchers focused on on young farmers uh particularly because also they found out that these young entrepreneurs um cultivating water melons were also facing specific challenges so I mostly focused on on women farmers in the presentation but there were other groups of marginalized people that we that we try to include in our in our study and these of course differed in the in the different context thank you so much that's great to hear so diversity in other words uh means different um different groups in different contexts talking to visualizing uh that's what I learned from Irene um Parisa I had a question I mean I wanted to from what you said I had I had a I would like to know more about uh something you said which is you talked about diversity as a unifying force and that all voices had to be heard um but first of all diversity as a unifying force can you explain to us what exactly you meant by that yes um so I just touched on it very briefly but it of course is a very complex idea I think that we're still um learning from in action but this understanding I think a lot of times people think of diversity just on the superficial level of as long as we have you know many diverse groups or um even perspectives voices present then then we've you know reached our goal but uh actually you know if we we talked a lot about how um you cannot uh do any kind of generation of knowledge without having diversity and diverse perspectives but also building something collectively together right so making a decision as a group taking that decision uh acting upon it and then reflecting on how on how that went so then diversity does become a unifying force through these processes of consultation um because we all realize that we all need each other and that we there's no way that we can even understand an issue without uh everyone's contribution um and so of course there's some principles there how to share perspectives and um identify what the commonalities for example uh of of perspectives how to share an opinion in a in a group consultation without being completely attached to that opinion being you know my will being imposed upon the group so there are many things kind of skills to practice in order to uh put the the concept of unity and diversity into practice but I believe it's it's an important thing to consider okay um with um Ellen thank you very much for also and you talked about diversity being challenging and I was wondering for when there is uh of course diversity is challenging there's a whole politics involved in in in the way in that diversity is manifested and what we do with it so um um then Denise also asked in your present you spoke about how we engage with communities can you define this a bit more so this is challenging for somebody is it challenging uh who's the we yes indeed so I was just typing the answer um in so in my presentation I was primarily speaking from the perspective of a development professional so people who earn their livelihoods from implementing you know raising funds from donor funded projects and earning the livelihoods with it um by supposedly generating impacts on beneficiaries that are will do not live in our street but somewhere else um now I think it is particularly um applicable to um a European academic perspective um but I have to say I also I have worked with a lot of African colleagues and who you know African professionals whose personal life experience is just as far removed from the life experience of a rural subsistence farmer as my own so also the idea that for example colleagues who happen to be born in an African country somehow automatically um have full insight into a particular rural community this is I think also something where Western professionals um make a lot of assumptions about the realities I mean African countries and and professional culture societies are extremely diverse as well so not to jump to conclusions because your passport has the same nationality I think is something that also needs much more understanding um than we currently practice thank you um but all three of you engaged with partners and then you also introduced a partner on the ground uh Parisa and and Irene also came to recognize to identify who they would work with because of the partners is that a way of actually trying to understand the social reality I understand what you're saying that somebody living in Nairobi or Dar es Salaam is not likely to uh know what the situation is for a woman farmer in who's widowed as you say at 21 um in a in a remote village but nevertheless doesn't make it any easier this to all three panelists um I would like to say that in in our case the organization that we um partnered with had just such a tremendous wealth of experience um and also in the materials that they had developed to be able to have these kinds of discussions um with all all kinds of you know uh communities mainly their experience has been in rural communities but this particular training had also been implemented with neighborhood associations um in urban areas as well and I think that um that was uh very very uh helpful in in our situation to be able to take the ideas that we had you know the framework that we were developing but then this organization had you know 50 plus years of experience actually um having these conversations in a structured way based on a material um and and also in creating the kind of atmosphere that allows diverse perspectives to uh to come out so I think that there are many different collaborations that can be done with these kinds of organizations Irene please yes I I agree I mean without the local partners uh yeah we wouldn't have been able to to conduct any of the activity I'm speaking more about the Maharashtrian context because it's the one that I know best because I conducted my PhD research there and in close collaboration with this with this NGO um yeah and I can say that they they work almost on a daily basis uh with women farmers in the villages really in the fields really uh uh work in listening um having conversations with with activists with uh um social movements organizations there so they they know um very much in depth what what are the struggles what are the daily challenges that uh that these more of their farmers face um yeah coming from outside and uh also not speaking the language working always with our translators of course very very limiting guy yeah it's possible to implement this type of project only because of their knowledge and because of the expertise of of local partners yeah thank you yes do you want to add to what you said already I would like to add one thing here I I think it's not about you know having local partners the point is what are you trying to achieve and who has something to contribute so I think my knowledge you know and 25 years of experience with certain things have contributed a lot of of insight to projects and initiatives that we have done but the thing is how do you combine who knows what and and then to create an impact so for example just to to mention one thing in a last project I did that was you know for capacity development in a rural area but that was about activating communities to aim to solve more problems by themselves now one of the things that we realized is that whenever a professional shows up and tries to train them in something communities just don't believe they can do it because they say well if I had a degree you know I might be able to but you know I'm not used so I can't do it so one of the solutions we had is that every single person standing in front of the community teaching is a role model from essentially the next village who has done something so they have proven that it's possible and one of the key things was that I never showed up in the communities because the presence of a white person would have completely distorted every single conversation that happened but nevertheless to develop the concept how to to turn a person who has a story to tell into somebody who can teach others you know or tell the story in a way that they are able to follow it that needed some very extensive work that also I think where I brought some expertise to the table so it's not about the local partner knows more is what kind of knowledge do you need to achieve something that doesn't exist right now and there is no simple answer to that this is where just asking lots and lots of questions starts to kind of you know create a picture that you then draw together okay thank you um I would like to just read out one which is for all presenters but it seems like something that is worrying at least one of the person who has asked a question it's dressed up it's written in a different way but the yeah it's but I don't want to take up all the time with this I just want your reactions to this question um so it says in a poor community as those you all are working on almost every person is suffering some kind of discrimination how do you select your target group for your intervention projects I'm asking this because sometimes you have to focus on non-discriminated group to achieve more diversity rather than only focus on marginalized groups it's kind of a philosophical well it reminds me of all the debates around affirmative action diversity that I've been going on for ages so um obviously this is a worry with many people um that if you if you seek to protect uh one group which is disadvantaged other groups suffer this is obviously some kind of uh anxiety and and it works in different ways in different societies so does um do any of the panelists want to um I think we're going to ask anybody in the audience want to um talk to this who wants to begin obviously this we're having a problem about who's going to begin um I'm going to ask Irina if you want to start and then go on in the order of panelists perhaps I mean I think these different projects target different types of people I don't I don't think that all projects in one area in one context in one situation uh aim to help the same few people who are recognized as the most marginalized so it really depends on the on the team on the collaborations that are built to implement a project what are the what are the objectives um I mean we for instance in the context of the project um we wear a network of researchers activists uh doing feminist research and really trying to focus on um on this group or women farmers and um yeah we of course on was on intersectional uh lands um because in water management in the countries where we work they are often silenced or marginalized so it was really something um grounding our research and action interests uh let's say but of course this is doesn't want to imply that other groups are are in need of other types of support that that we shouldn't be careful to include um I don't know other other marginalized groups as I as I mentioned before of course there are there are other factors that need to then need to be considered I I think it's very important to identify who are the people who suffer the most and uh and try to support to support them I don't yeah I don't think that we should focus on um on who remains excluded from this from this program so necessarily but yeah this is what I think thank you okay um Ellen I'd like to come back to you but actually I have five minutes so I'm going to actually ask you to take only one minute of those five minutes just and not to give a practical solution but to address the philosophical uh issue we have behind this questioning uh about this this anxiety about what diversity might mean well I think the answer to that is rather simple um the world we don't want a practical answer can you address the no a philosophical I think on a philosophical level it's in a way simpler than one things because the world does not suffer because too many people want to make it better so there are a lot of problems and none of us can solve them all so I think the only thing we can do as we can find a problem where we actually think it is a real problem and we know from local voices that it is a problem and do the best we can to help make that better now then you know millions of people do that for different problems then overall it will be good but nobody has to do it all but what is important is that we learn enough about oppression hierarchies exclusion to understand if what we are doing actually by accident enforces a hierarchy that excludes others and have that self-awareness and reflection that's more important to me thank you very much and with that I'm going to quickly wrap up and um call this session to an end thank you very much for everybody attending thanks for the panelists that you were great and um your presentations threw a lot of light on um on on diversity inclusion the politics of diversity the politics of including which groups how etc so um thank you and um the question still remains diversity does cause anxiety it causes anxiety especially if gender diversity if you want to include women because their voices are marginalized this is causes a lot of anxiety and so a lot of hypothetical situations will be presented as to why this is not necessary or that the other side suffers etc so um this is basically the politics of diversity but we have to hear the voices of those who are underprivileged and who do not have their voice represented when it matters okay thank you very much and bye-bye thank you and on that um rather unresolved note as questions and discussions on diversity and inclusion go we hope that uh you will continue these discussions amongst um your own project members with your partners amongst your friends your colleagues um and we thank you Moitri for moderating this session uh and to our speakers for enriching us with all your insights from the field uh we will now take a 10-minute break before starting the next session which is called Sustainability Month in the past uh we won't close the session so you can stay tuned and we start again in 10 minutes