 Okay, good afternoon everyone or good morning or good evening wherever you are in the world. A very warm welcome to today's event on urban social protection and lessons from the pandemic, we're really thrilled to have you all here with us. So now please let me hand over to Anna Walnicki, who is our moderator today and a principal researcher at IID. Anna, over to you please. Thanks Juliet. And hi everyone. Yeah, as Judith mentioned, I'm a principal researcher in the Human Settlements Group at IID. And I'm here with our partners from the Indian Institute for Human Settlements and Dialogue on Shelter, which is an NGO also affiliated with Shack and Slums, as well as International in Harare. Hello, colleague of the Institute, Ian McCollum from Genesis Analytics. So yeah, thank you all for joining us today. So I guess this debate reflects a series of ongoing discussions that we've been having at the Institute and with our partners for many years now and that's around what effective social protection looks like in cities, particularly cities in the majority of the world that are characterised by high degrees of informality, or plenty of informal settlements. And I guess we came back to some of this thinking during the pandemic when we were unable to travel to many of the cities that we've been working in and partners that we've been working with for a while. But we were in regular contact around the impact of the pandemic, particularly in informal settlements. And collaboratively we managed to secure some funding from FCDO through the COVID collective which is hosted by IDS. And this gave us the opportunity, I guess, in the initial years to reflect on the impact of the pandemic. And we, I guess, with time to reflect on the effectiveness of formal and informal relief mechanisms, specifically for those people living in low informal settlements in cities in the majority world. So in the most recent bit of research that we've been doing, which is summarised in an archive that we've just launched today on the IID website and there's a link to that in the chat. So we were looking at the role that formal and informal relief mechanisms were playing for different groups, how different institutions interacted during the pandemic and deliver different types of relief and social protection cities for different groups. The implication that this had for the recognition of marginalised groups, the distribution of resources and also specific procedural and policy arrangements during the pandemic and subsequently. And I guess we've also been pondering and continued to think about which of these relief measures should be retained or scaled up or transformed for people living in low income settlements or for informal workers and how that might enhance resilience of cities, not only for future pandemics but also for the impacts of issues such as climate change. And so as I said, today we're using this event to draw attention to an archive, an action-orientated archive that has lots of written and media-orientated outputs from our partners. And I'm going to turn to Gautam to provide a few reflections on what came out of that research before getting to the debate today. Thanks Gautam. So, so welcome everyone. It's a pleasure to be here. My name is Gautam Han and I'm with the Engineering Institute for Human Settlements in Bangalore. So, you know, along with the dialogue for Shelton Zimbabwe, two of the core empirical sites of the archive are across India and Zimbabwe, and I'm hoping the archive will grow over time to pick up from many other sites as well. I think that for us the opportunity is really to sort of push ourselves to be a little more specific about what and I call this act of retention. Right. So, when we think about learning from the pandemic, it's a phrase that a lot of people are using. But I think that it's very important that we start thinking about precisely what it is that can be learned, because the thing about pandemics or the thing about events that feel like ruptures from the norm is that it's very easy to kind of separate learnings and say, well, that happens in an extreme situation. It happens in an emergency. And there is this distinction between this idea of the crisis and the idea of the everyday. And I think one of the goals of the archive and the debate today as well, is to sort of unsettle this distinction. A lot of people writing about, particularly from cities in the global south, actually argue that for many people, the pandemic was more familiar than strange. Because everyday life in the absence of social protection in the absence of core basic capabilities is always full of crisis. Right. So while the distinction of the crisis may be a difference in degree, it is not a difference in kind. And that should give us pause. In India, particularly many scholars have been arguing that a lot of the inequalities that are now attributed to the pandemic actually existed before the pandemic. So politically, the pandemic also becomes a way to say it's not that the economy is not inclusive in generating work and giving basic dignity to residents, it's the pandemic. So there are many wrestling legacies on what the story of the pandemic will be. What is it that we will choose to remember and what it is that we will choose to forget. So to me, the archive and this project is particularly precisely invested in what archives are about is to say we've got to tell the right stories, we've got to remember the right lessons. And this specific lesson is one that is about the operationalization of social protection and I think this is very important. It is not a question of saying, there was a large need and great distress during the pandemic so relief had to be done. This word relief is what we're trying to push against. I'm simply saying that relief is a diagnostic. It is a kind of archive in itself because when states and non-state actors, the subject of today's debate had to suddenly mobilize under extraordinary constraints, lockdowns, pandemics, virus geographies, resource constraints, uncertainty. States began to innovate and work in new ways to get to people under different circumstances. And it almost reminds you actually that when there is that kind of political will then states are capable of these kind of innovations, but then the question becomes why don't we see them without crisis. And if the bar for states to innovate on operationalizing social protection becomes crisis, then we really kind of miss the fundamental idea of a safety net. A safety net is meant to be built when you don't need it. That's precisely why it works because it allows you to know it's there and take risk accordingly. It is not meant to be built precisely while you're falling. So the pandemic is actually akin to building a safety net while you're falling. And in all our work, we kept seeing that system state cities which had strong social protection before the crisis actually had to do the least amount of relief work because the structure of the net before determined the quality of relief itself. So the point of the archive is to say, now that we have a sense of what can happen vis-a-vis epidemics crisis. Now that we remember that these crisis happen on an everyday level for many people anyways, how do we build the net better and not wait for the next crisis that's fundamentally the learning aspect of the project for us. In many ways, one of the strong reflections was that particularly on these two conditions of large scale economic and spatial informality that marks many cities of the south workers without databases that you can't reach even if you try housing that is not recognized legally. The Indian government tried to give a rent waiver, for example, that in the US was very effective, but in the Indian housing markets didn't work at all because 88% of our rentals are not based on written contracts. There are no ways to find renters. So one of the specific reflections was to say, what is it about economic and spatial informality that hinders the delivery of social protection? Is it the absence of data? Is it the conditions of vulnerability? Is it a bit of both? And when that data was not available to the state during COVID, it innovated. We document in some of the work in the archive how the state scrambled to create new registration systems in order to give food relief and vaccination. How the state created multiple new forms of both technological and non technological ways to recognize and find citizens. How a new political language got created where claims that before COVID were not being heard, claims of migrant workers, for example, suddenly found audiences. So there are many ways in which people say that a good crisis is a terrible thing to waste. This is a political window of opportunity. But the thing is the window of opportunity is not obvious and it's not self evident. We will have to work to keep that window open. And I think in each of our contexts, the desire to return to normalcy has seen us watch the window begin to close. As there is an almost desperate human need to say, let's go back to where we were. But I'll remind all of us of graffiti that originally started ostensibly in Hong Kong that traveled all over during COVID that said we will not to return to normal. Because normal was the problem in the first place. But if you don't want to return to a pre-COVID normal, we have to be specific about what changes we want. And one of those is saying there are better ways to do this. There are better reasons to do it. And so therefore the fact that COVID and the pandemic need our vulnerability apparent is not enough. How we address that vulnerability. How we take all the innovations and relief measures and experiments that marked the pandemic and say which of these can be hold on to. How do we take them and put them into everyday social protection? How do we start building the net now instead of waiting for the next pandemic? That's specificity matters. And I think today's debate is an example of precisely one specific learning. Can non-state actors, for example, play a larger infrastructure delivery role working with the state? What are the risks and opportunities here? I think these are debates that are quintessentially important for us to have. The debates that make the learnings of the pandemic specific that push us not only towards diagnosis and analysis. I don't think we need more evidence of widespread inequality. I think we know. But actually we need more evidence of experiments to engage and take on inequality of operational details of institutional experiments of registration databases of new forms of partnerships of unlikely alliances. If a pandemic made us experiment, then we must tell the stories of those experiments well. That is what archives do to us. They don't just remember. They are past. They allow us to think about the present and they allow us to imagine the future. So my hope is that today's debate is one of the first series of such future imaginations that refuses to let COVID be something that happened without telling the right stories from it. It's not a singular story, not a best practice, not a silver bullet solution, but complicated messy incremental experiments in places that have been very difficult to work in for a long time. But there are some new stories that we should be telling from here. And I hope that you'll enjoy hearing them today. And I'll pass back to Anna from that. Thanks so much. And so these stories are not going to be presented to you in a traditional panel form. Instead, we've invited a series of people to argue for and against two specific debate topics really. I need to really underscore here that some people have drawn the short end of the stick and are arguing for something that they absolutely don't believe in. So the first, I guess the first subject that we're going to debate is the idea of whether or not so should CSOs be recognised as infrastructure for social protection in cities that go beyond final mild delivery. And we're going to invite Aditya first and then Rashi to provide some arguments for and against that statement. But before we do that, we thought it might be quite fun to take the temperature in the room and to see what everyone in the audience thinks about that statement. So we're going to pop a quick poll up. And we'd like you all to answer this question. And then after Aditya and Rashi have spoken, we'll also take the same poll again to see if they've managed to change anyone's opinion. All right, so only one no. Aditya, at least there's plenty of people there that you can work on. And we've got six unsure. Okay. So, as each of you got five minutes. Thank you very much. Hi everyone. My name is Aditya Bahadur. I'm a principal researcher at the International Institute for Environment and Development and Lead the Institute's work on urban resilience. I'm one of the people who got the short end of the stick has been asked to defend a position that I may not necessarily believe in. But I'm going to give it my best shot. I want to play the devil's advocate, because from this conflict hopefully arise pearls of insight that all of us can use this. All right, so let me begin. I think the motion that CSOs should be recognized as infrastructure for social protection and cities that goes beyond final mind delivery is laughable and as furious from the get go. I'm going to give you five reasons in five minutes, why I believe this. Because CSOs accountable to no one. They cannot be voted in, they cannot be voted out if they don't deliver the services that they are expected to, and no one can really pull them up. The incentives therefore for them to do something well, aren't there. We're talking about something that's not critical but we talk about social protection, which is the thread that separates life from death from some of us most vulnerable citizens. We cannot outsource this effectively to an unaccountable group of organizations, you know where the citizenry has no control over. In contrast, governments can be held to account in most countries across the world. There are well determined redressal mechanisms, you can complain to ombudsman, there are transparency mechanisms in place such as India has the right to information, which you can use to question why certain services aren't being delivered. Therefore, let's not ask an unaccountable entity to lead on providing this critical life saving service in times of upheaval. The second argument is our effectiveness. I mean, yes, there are fantastic CSOs and NGOs out there, many of the people working for those are represented in our attendees today. But let's be honest, there are also a lot of ineffective CSOs and NGOs out there and when we are planning something like this, we have to plan for reality. Most CSOs and NGOs lurch from program to program, they lack continuity, there are sometimes long breaks and discontinuities between the services that they deliver, and this just does not work for social protection. The social protection requires the gradual and continual development of local infrastructure to deliver social infrastructure over time. As Gautam mentioned, for instance, the critical importance of maintaining databases and rosters and you need to develop these and maintain these dynamic rosters of those who might be in need of social protection support. That's absolutely crucial to delivering social protection effectively. This cannot be done by institutions that suddenly appear and disappear with a rise and fall in funding. It has to be done by a permanent institutional entity, i.e. the government. And this is particularly complex in urban areas because urban areas are much more dynamic than non-urban areas. Now, the other thing that we have to acknowledge that NGOs are called NGOs because they're necessarily run and staffed by people who are not from within government. And I would argue that for delivering an absolutely critical service to vulnerable people such as social protection, you really need to understand the nuances of how governments function. You can't just ask people who've come from outside the system to take over such a critical function. I mean, for instance, if one doesn't understand the nuances around why certain people have access to government ID cards and some people don't, you will not make progress. And that kind of nuanced understanding only comes from experience within the system. Therefore, again, I argue that CSOs can never be as effective as state led institutions in delivering social protection. The third thing is around equity. I mean, of course, as again, I say there are lots of good NGOs out there, but there are lots of NGO out there that are doubled badly, that serve particularly narrow interests that are handmade in particular political agendas. And therefore, let's not only talk about the shiny outlier examples of fantastically run NGOs to which all of you belong, but let's think about the majority of NGOs out there that aren't governed as well as they should be. Do we really want to outsource a critical service such as social protection for these NGOs so that large numbers of people might be excluded from support that can be provided? I don't think so. I think we need to make sure, and I said earlier that social protection is delivered by accountable entities. The fourth point is, yes, okay, even if I was to suddenly change my mind and concede that CSOs should be recognized as an infrastructure, we can only recognize that they exist, right? And the research that you're going to hear about today is only based on a couple of cities, which are pretty well governed, have a high level of economic development, and therefore there is a critical mass of CSOs and NGOs out there that might in these outlier examples serve as infrastructure. But when you look at second and third tier cities in developing countries across the world, that critical mass of CSOs and NGOs is not there to serve as critical infrastructure. So the argument from the get go is furious. The final point that I would like to make is anyone arguing against the motion, I would argue is a nefarious agent for neoliberal forces. Essentially what they're arguing is, yes, let's argue, let's outsource a critical responsibility that the state is expected to discharge to some non-governmental entities. Yes, let's let the state retract and retrench from an area in which it's supposed to play an important role. And yes, they might argue that they're not arguing for a retraction, but they're arguing for partnerships. How are you going to regulate these partnerships? How are you going to catalyze these partnerships? It's in the first place you're arguing that the governments are so weak that you need NGOs. So with these five arguments around accountability, effectiveness, equity, and the fact that we don't have the right amount and the right kind of CSOs in the right kind of places, and the fact that this is essentially a neoliberal agenda, I would argue vociferously that CSOs cannot and should not be recognized as infrastructure for social protection in cities that goes beyond the final mile delivery. Anna, back to you. I'm not sure I believe that you don't believe any of those points at each year. Thank you very much for that, that was very entertaining. Rishi, I'm going to hand it over to you now. Yes, thank you. My name is Rashi. I'm from the Indian Institute for Human Settlements and I'm very happy being here and I must say that Aditya, you have really, really tried to make some amazing points here. So I'd like to first begin by saying that when we talk about non-state actors as being social infrastructures, we're not talking about outsourcing all forms of governance and all forms of welfare to them. What we are saying is that there is locally held knowledges, deep sort of inroads and deep roots that non-state actors have within communities that have been inaccessible to forms of governance. So where governments have been weak, this is where the non-state actors have been able to sort of pull their weight, use that knowledge and long term work on multiple issues to come together. Say during of course during the crisis like COVID but also otherwise in the everyday emergencies that exist in cities like New Delhi where I'm speaking to you from. I also want to say that when the migrant crisis happened in 2020, in a Supreme Court hearing of an Indian Supreme Court, the Supreme Court said that non-state actors deserve all appreciation for the kind of work that they did. I remember being part of the Delhi government's relief network where we were called in, got the most part of a committee on hunger relief and the government literally said, but where are these people walking from? We don't know where they've started walking on the roads from. Can you tell us where these geographies exist, these geographies of vulnerability? Now even in a very well governed place like New Delhi, the government had no idea where the informal settlements were, where the resettlement colonies were, where the unauthorized colonies were, where these vulnerable migrants were that could not pay the rent and were going to begin and had begun walking on the highways. So to discard, you know, it's that kind of deep knowledge that is not built just in crisis but has been strengthened over many, many years of work would not, it would not have been possible for India to be able to sort of reach and stand up to that kind of, you know, to be able to really come and be able to deliver social protection at that moment. And I would say in our everyday crisis that exists, the three things that we really found and I'm speaking to you from the research that my colleagues and I have done, counting the first wave of COVID in India in 2020 and then the one that this archive looks at which is 2021. We saw that the non state actors were able to look at really just when we say not just last mile delivery and why we call them social infrastructures is because they were able to identify much quicker than the government. Many times on where the where the gaps in social protection work. They were able to deliver in really challenging circumstances where the government waited for you to have an identity card be a part of a database. The non state actors really just looked at really just looked at negative lists saying if you're not part of the government list, then you're part of our list and we are going to reach out to you. And that was a really big number of people so if you see that in Delhi government did actually do really like a lot of work in trying to combat, you know, the crisis of hunger the crisis of food that was beginning in the, you know, very quickly within a few days within the city. It was just the policy of having a cap in India we have a gap gap in the urban centers you know even though we have one of the largest food security systems in the world policies around that. There is a cap of 40% in urban centers. And what COVID showed us was that people about 70% is what you know was being other is the population that was being left out so you had people who were food vulnerable, or who were just at the line and if work would have stopped then they would fall back in. So, you know, to sort of look at that and work together, the Delhi government did come up with, you know, e Russian cards and sort of coupons to sort of get Russian kids. And the other thing that we were able to do was to be able to take like this is work that I've done myself where boats were taken across the Yamuna in Delhi, so that you could read certain communities where food had to be delivered. When we talk about, you know, as I said very nicely and I do agree you know neoliberal agendas and NGOs and there is a deep sort of conversation there but within the daily coordinated relief network there were unions many many worker unions that had come together and we asked them for the archive. Why did you do the kind of work that you did and they said because there is deeper accountability. We've got 10,000 members, and if you're not going to help them now in their hour of crisis, the union work will fall apart the work that we do regularly. So the work that enter my colleague is done, which is with the domestic workers union in Rajasthan where the government said we want to give a cash transfer but where are the domestic workers because they're not part of any database they don't have official contracts. We don't know where they exist, and the union took 2000 names account details and gave it to the government and said here this is where you find people and this is how you do it. So it to sort of say that there isn't accountability, you know if you're going to work daily in a community and then be absent at a time like this, and I'm a community mobilizer started my work like that. You will not be allowed to come back in so there are these social contracts that exist, and that are in many ways at least we saw in Delhi through the daily coordinated relief and the work of the union in Rajasthan was that these contracts really were fulfilled by these organizations to the extent the Supreme Court, all sort of, you know, look and say that this is something that we have to do that we have to acknowledge. And lastly, I'd like to say that the amount of adaptation, the quick adaptation so you see that there is the first wave and exactly a year later we have the second wave in New Delhi. And the government had dismantled a lot of infrastructure that they created because thinking oh that's not going to happen again. But what the non state actors did was they knew that because they know that there is a daily crisis in the city. Those infrastructures only got stronger those social infrastructure so we got together, you know above 40 civil society organizations community based organizations unions and delivered more than 76,000 Russian kids and for the archive. We have mapped exactly to lack long where those Russian kids went where was the food delivered. And what we have given to the government now is a map of food vulnerability in the city. And that kind of local knowledge that kind of, you know, activism that sort of moves really runs the city when the state is absent has to be acknowledged. And of course, there are issues where we say there must be regulations and of course there should be and no union says or no NGO says that they shouldn't be. But as we have those regulations it's like throwing the baby out of the bathwater we have this and we must sort of work together. And India has a deep history of this you know we have a history of cooperatives in say milk production or in crafts. You know we've done this very successfully as a nation before. And I think it's time to sort of rethink and look back in some of the ways in which we identify beneficiaries how we make these lists how do we collect this data in how we sort of define what entitlements are you know like for us. I can tell you that when we were doing food relief work in New Delhi, people started started saying that we want the NGO kits we don't want the government kits because the NGO kits also had things like sanitary pads. They have hand sanitizer so these are things that they were, you know that NGOs with people when you work daily you know what the need is, you know and where the shortages might come. So, so with that I'd say that, you know civil society organizations unions, they have a long history in India around the world. And it's time that we sort of look at them as strong infrastructures, so that social protection reaches not just last mile delivery, but also is transformative because they can tell you what is exactly needed so that you're not just keeping people barely above the poverty line but allowing them to really flourish and really sort of be true citizens in a sense. So yeah, that's my two bits. Thank you. Thanks so much Rashi. Okay. Should we do the poll one more time Juliet. See I to see if each has managed to make any inroads. I'll flag that there is, there is a question in the Q&A that does look a little bit like it's someone who's trying to pose a more critical stance this. Well, so maybe it's each Rashi you can have a quick look at that. But in the meantime, if everyone could just have a quick go at the poll before we go on to the second motion. Wow. But still, a resounding support for the idea that civil society organizations should be recognized as infrastructure for social protection and disease. Great. Thank you all very much. Thank you both for your contributions and for everyone's participation. We're going to move on to the, I just, I mean we've got a few minutes actually would anyone like to provide any kind of anyone that was in the know, or the maybe and then that that that shifted position would anyone like to provide any reflections in the chat as to why they were dissuaded or why they changed their minds or why they fell one side or the other. It'd be good to understand when you I'll leave the chat open for people to provide any explanations because it would be good to hear. In the meantime, I'm going to move on to the next statements. So, I'm going to invite input from Ian and two I. So the next, the next statement is cities should be prioritized deployment of innovative alternative forms of social protection. And I guess it's very much builds on the idea that social protection tends to be designed for rural areas and there are high degrees of informality that that needs to be taken into account. So I'm going to, I'm going to ask Ian to go first, because Ian has also drawn the short straw and has to argue against emotion that I think he believes in. And then we'll move on to two I but yeah five minutes for you Ian before we start we'll just do we'll do another poll just to see where everyone stands on this statement. And here are the results as the majority of people think they should quite a few people think they don't. Some people aren't sure and feel free as the chat unfolds to kind of to put into the chat while you voted the way that you did because it's I think it's good for us to understand what people are coming from. But in the meantime, I'll hand over to Ian and to introduce himself and also to argue against this motion. Thanks and hi everyone, my name is Ian McCorsthan I'm a partner in the human development practices of a consulting firm called Genesis analytics, which is a South African firm I'm based in India. And I am going to argue that cities should not be prioritized for innovative alternative forms of social protection. And in brief I'm going to argue this because I believe that prioritization does need to happen, but any form of just society should prioritize its resources and the attention of its brilliant people and organizations, not on the basis of whether you live in a society or whether you live in the countryside, but on the basis of need and your ability to cope and need and your ability to cope with challenges is not concentrated only in cities, but is everywhere. So, I want to start by discussing the idea that prioritization is important I think that's absolutely the case. We are at the moment very scarce resources available for the public provision of social protection other social services. Many countries are already heavily indebted will struggle to borrow more as interest rates are rising and global economic slowdown means that in many countries, the rate of growth with the economy barely outstrips the rate of growth of populations. It's very unlikely that significant additional resources financially will be available to scale up social protection systems, which, as you all know, at the moment have very limited coverage as a proportion of the population and as a proportion of households who are in need social protection on the basis of vulnerability and poverty. So, financial prioritization is needed. There are also, I think, scarcities in the availability of administrative systems, creativity and brilliant people working on social protection. So some prioritization has to happen unfortunately, fantastic innovative alternative forms of social protection can't be developed everywhere because there are limits to the capabilities of people and organizations to be able to put them into practice so prioritization is needed. I would argue that you don't want to prioritize on the basis of whether people live in an urban area or a rural area or somewhere else you want to prioritize social protection on the basis of whether people are vulnerable, whether they face risks that they can mitigate and cope with themselves, and whether those risks are changing, particularly for innovative and alternative forms of social protection, changing in ways that are difficult to predict and understand. So, when you look at the distribution of, for example, multi dimensional poverty so deprivation in key areas of human development. You can find that around four out of five people are in rural areas and not in cities there are of course, a very large number of people in informal settlements in urban areas who are extremely deprived but there is an even larger, much larger number of people in rural areas who are suffering from deprivations and if social protection is designed to protect people from poverty and vulnerability, this should be focused on the places in which those people live which is not just the urban areas but also the rural areas. The second point around need I think is the extent to which people are able to face shocks that they have adequate coping mechanisms for in urban and rural areas. As everyone has said the data on these shocks is very difficult to come by. But it feels to me that in rural areas there are significant shocks that are covariates so they affect everyone that are very difficult for people in rural areas to mitigate or cope with if they take place for example droughts. For example, technological change that reduces the number of people who can work on a on a farm. For example population growth that puts increasing pressure on resources and the combination of these three forces of change climate change technological change and population growth means that it is increasingly difficult for people to get sufficient resources from working in agriculture in rural areas to be able to cope with the shocks that they face and which affect everyone in communities and the coping mechanisms the informal social protection systems in rural areas are under severe strain. And the existing formal social protection systems that as Anna said are often designed for rural areas are not working. If existing formal social protection systems were working in rural areas, you would not see enormous famine in the Horn of Africa at the moment, you would not see very large numbers of people migrating to cities as a coping mechanism to find jobs. There is an urgent need for more creative more innovative alternative forms of social protection in rural areas. That of course is not to say that there are no significant covariate shocks in urban areas of course the pandemic was an enormous example of this. There are also shocks related to increases in prices technological changes also causing immense disruptions of people's livelihoods in urban areas, and there's obviously the threat of natural disasters in many cities, which urgently needs social protection as well, particularly for people living in informal settlements but they shouldn't receive all of the sort of consideration for social protection. The other thing I want to say is that urban areas and rural areas are connected. And so, of course, social protection mechanisms need to think about this it I would argue strongly against wanting to prioritize one area of the other, because as I've already said, moving from a rural area to an urban area is a form of coping. And similarly of course remittances from urban areas to rural areas is also a very important form of coping for rural populations so social protection systems need to be thinking, not in terms of prioritizing cities, or prioritizing the countryside, but of how those interconnections are operating and how they can support those connections more creatively and more successfully. And the final thing I want to say, against this idea that cities should be prioritized is that, including in the persona of almost everyone on this call cities are absolutely full of dynamic brilliant people and organizations working on these challenging problems. The real difficulty is in those underserved marginalized rural areas, where there's a much lower density of organizations and people working on serious problems. And as countries get richer. The problems of urban areas, as you see from the decline in the proportion of city populations that are slums in countries like China and India and Brazil. They don't tend to resolve themselves anyway, whereas in rural areas will be left with enormous challenges of politically marginalized underserved populations facing tremendous risks that really need to be focused upon alongside their friends and relatives in informal settlements in cities. Thanks very much and I'll back to you. Thanks. Thanks so much Ian. Okay, I'm going to move on to Turei now, who's been leading the work that's come out of Harare linked to this specific archive. Turei. Hi. Hi, how are you? I'm fine. I'm going to hand it over, there you go. Thank you so much, Anna. Thank you so much, Ian. So, for me, I would like to argue that it is important, especially in our context in Zimbabwe, to prioritize deployment of innovative social protection in urban areas. You find that in Zimbabwe, the rural areas have so much support when it comes to resilient issues when it comes to disasters. I'll tell you that our rural areas in Zimbabwe, about 70% of the country, they are agro-based. So you find in terms of innovations in agriculture and assisting these areas, it's very high. And also, you'll find that most non-governmental organizations in Zimbabwe, they are operating and assisting in rural areas. Because the traditional belief is people who live in rural areas are the ones who are mainly in poverty. So you find that social protection and innovations are largely in rural areas. But unfortunately, COVID-19 gave us a different lesson, a different view on this. That's why I would want prioritization of urban areas in cities in Zimbabwe. And also, you find that populations in Zimbabwe, in cities specifically, they are increasing. And largely, these people are living in informal settlements. And this has increased poverty. And during COVID-19, you find that cities were hardly hit as compared to those people living in rural areas. People were asked to do social distance, which is nearly impossible in informal settlements. But those in rural areas, they have space they are not crowded to start with. And I think in terms of resources, the innovation that I'm talking about that we have worked with and that we have proved to be working in Harare is to start with the issue of community servants. You'll find that those people who live in informal settlements were organized in community servants groups. They used their servants that they have been serving for land, for health, for other issues and repurposed them to meet the disaster that had happened. So they took their servants, they bought their food, they would buy water. And you find that these servants were not prescribed per se, but they would buy whatever they needed at a certain point of time during this disaster. So you find that if the government really come and assist and support these innovations, it simply means that who addressed the issue of lack of resources discuss the resources. Because the community self is shipping in to the lack of resources and providing themselves with some cushion during disasters. And you find also that in Zimbabwe and also Harare, we have what we call city funds. You find these city funds really worked in assisting people living in informal settlements. Well, these people can get loans but they do not have collateral. Sometimes they are not even registered. They don't have the ideas, identification that is needed, it's microfinance. So you'll find that city funds all they have to do is assist. If you are saving at group level in your community, then you can get a loan and assistance from the city funds. And this really goes away in terms of livelihoods, income generation project, and also building resilient infrastructure. So you find that the reason why most people in urban areas if bounced back, especially those living informal settlements, is that they have access to these city funds. They really had to borrow some money at a reasonable rate from the city funds. They really tried to resuscitate their small businesses that they survived one. And I think this is what we say when we are talking about innovative alternative of social protection. Was a citizen Zimbabwe, our social protection is not really working that much in assisting people. And I would also want to quote the first speaker who said, we do not want to return to normal because the normal was the problem in the first place. I agree because now we do not want to go back where by city funds and savings were only for those small mobilized groups in the community. But we wanted to scale up how I think they introduced what they call solidarity groups. These are groups who may not join the movement or whatever, but they are mobilized, they are taught how to save. They save for a certain purpose for themselves and they are able to survive. So we have actually started to scale up all these innovative forms of social protection in Arari so that even in other cities in Zimbabwe, we saw that it works as an innovative alternative when it comes to disasters, when it comes to COVID-19. So you find that when it comes to innovation and social protection in the rural areas, like right now they have been provided with inputs for drought resistant crops. And now you find that in urban areas, they don't do much at the culture, even if you do a small plot, you won't get an input, you won't get anything. So I think that's why I'm asking that they need to prioritize now the deployment of innovative alternative forms of social protection for the urban areas to be resilient and also so that when another pandemic or another disaster comes, they are prepared. Thank you. Thank you, Terai. Okay, should we do another quick poll and then we'll open up to a broader conversation for some broader reflections. So if everyone could, yeah, reflect on what you just heard from the two speakers. Should cities be prioritized with the deployment of innovative alternative forms of social protection? Yes, no, I'm not sure. I'll leave it there for a few seconds. Oh, how can that? 38% I would, I would love to get some reflections from the participants as to why you voted that way. Would anyone like to share some thoughts or reflections in the chat, please do. I guess whilst that's unfolding, I wondered there is the only question that we've got standing from the chat is around the phrase social infrastructure and I wondered whether or not we might open up the conversation around that. And if Rashi has any reflections on the use of social infrastructure, how we might define it and whether or not it's synonymous without sourcing. So I think that when we sort of in our research and IHS, when we use the word social infrastructure, we meant it in the forms of just how deeply embedded in communities and on people. The work of non state actors is so it is truly just looking at social infrastructures to us locally held knowledges, which are critical and which can help in bridging massive data gaps that the government has delivery gaps that we know that the government has, you know, identifying beneficiaries, etc. Just give you one of the examples from our work. We mapped in another sort of mapping exercise. We mapped the land area under bus these informal settlements in Delhi, because when we would have eviction cases we go and go in front of the courts and the courts would say that informal settlements have taken over the city. And we mapped the IHS researchers mapped each with housing rights activists map the land under land area under each informal settlement. And we found out that according to the government you've got an 11% sort of population that lives in informal settlements grows under estimation but still even if you were to stick with 11% for delis 33 million people. We found out that only 0.6% of delis land was under you know informal settlements. So you know it is it is to sort of say to somebody a housing rights activists and say, do you think that that much land and we are saying that there are that many informal settlements and say, is it true. And for them to be able to say to you that that's not that's not the case, and to be able to use this knowledge, present it in a way that is sort of, you know, more acceptable to the government. Sometimes is is a deeply valuable sort of resource. So for us, it's not an outsourcing but a really, and not even just a partnership. I mean, the government cannot possibly function without this kind of data, because in a country like India with 1.3 billion, you know the highest population in the world, exceptions even run into millions. So you need to be able to sort of tap into this sort of locally held knowledge these people who kind of do this, you know, do this kind of work to be able to bolster any kind of other physical infrastructure that might exist. So, so that is how we sort of look at it and not just as an outsourcing and not just a partnership. So, yeah. Thank you. And then I've got a few other questions unless anyone else would like to come in on last year's comment. I've got a few other questions that come up through the chat that I can put to our panelists be nice to hear your thoughts on them. So we've got a two pond question around CSOs and NGOs working on the work. So the question is CSOs and NGOs maybe working on different at different times or very specific initiatives they might need different sets of local knowledge and expertise. When we speak of operationalize more using the experience of CSOs or infrastructure through close collaboration with the state isn't the importance to define what the state is so I guess any any reflections on the role of the state and their relationship with CSOs. And then secondly, can state governments and central governments effectively realize an expert, the expertise and knowledge of CSOs working at the city level, or with developing an operational infrastructure with CSOs and safely collaborate with CSOs and would necessarily involve evolving state power and creating more robust local government. So, nice question there on the role of beefing up local governments. Would anyone like to come in on either of the problems with questions with Egypt. Yeah, I just want to come in on the first question. Take off my artificial hat and arguing against the role of CSOs. This is the secret source of making it work is identifying innovative ways in which state and non state actors can engage with each other can work in tandem. And I'll get to the point about defining all the stages in a minute but there are lots of really exciting examples to forward it where this happens. I'm sure many people here have worked in a familiar with Dharavi in Mumbai, in Mumbai, and you know, traditionally, there isn't a very good relationship between city governments and the residents in this informal settlement like any informal settlement to the country when COVID-19 happened, there was such a lot of panic around what's going to happen in Dharavi, which are the world's most densely packed settlement anywhere on the planet and Asia's largest now is that they actually form partnerships with people living in Dharavi in different ways. For example, teams of surveyors that were made up of people from the city government and people living in Dharavi were constructed and deployed to plan out across the settlement to map how badly affected the population was. So the only way in which the city government could navigate the terrain and penetrate the seemingly impenetrable massive informal settlement to gauge, you know, how much help was needed. And really that happened. The second way in which this happened was Dharavi has an existing network of quasi-professional, semi-trained medical practitioners that have been ignored by the formal system, overlooked by government health department, sidelined and shunned, but when COVID-19 happened, government actually forged a partnership with these existing unrecognized medical practitioners, groomed them into a network, gave them the knowledge and support and medication and equipment to deal with COVID-19 and embrace them and forge partnerships with them. They played a critical role in containing the outbreak in Dharavi. The third example was in Dharavi itself, which again has a network of informal sanitation workers. Again, these have been overlooked and ignored by the formal system. But during COVID-19, personal protective equipment was given to sanitation workers so they could continue to perform their duties, which resulted in very few sanitation workers actually contracting COVID-19. So I feel like the pandemic demonstrated the power of partnerships between state and non-state actors. And of course, I think the definition of what council state and non-state actor would vary from place to place. But I guess for the context of my debate here, I was talking about arms of the central subnational city level or local government, be it the municipal corporation or provincial governments or national governments. That definition might be wobbly in other contexts. Thanks, Aditya. With Ian or Thurai, I'd like to come in on either of these points. Any other reflections? I see that there's already another question for actually in the chat. But I'd like to give Ian and Thurai the floor to respond to anything that they'd like to respond to. Okay. Thank you. Thank you, Anna. I think I was also reading through the chat getting people's views. And what I got to understand that that context side a bit different here. There are others whereby the population is actually moving from the urban areas going to the rural areas. While it's in our context, all the younger people are moving to urban areas and middle age and the older doing agriculture in the rural areas. So I think this is on prioritize. Not like the rural and urban clear divide is starting now. It has been, there has been that divides in terms of social protection since then whereby the rural areas received most of the social protection in Zimbabwe. And you'll find that those in urban areas, the assumptions they are going to work, they can fend for themselves. But actually with the high unemployment and most of the people concentrated in informal settlements, there's really need to prioritize. I think another writer said that urban areas do not have much to offer when it comes to disaster recovery and everything. But I think in our context, you'll find that with the situation in urban areas right now, if there's an outbreak of cholera, for example, you find when those people move to the rural areas, they are the ones who spread the disease. They are the ones who actually spread the disaster because they carry it back to the rural areas. And if we make them both resilient, if we make them both like platforms for recovery when it comes to disaster, I think it will really help when it comes to innovation and social protection. Thanks to you. Anything else you'd like to add? Yeah, one thing. I mean, thanks. It's a really interesting debate and thank you for all of the comments in the chat, which are very interesting. I guess one of the things that I was thinking about whilst preparing for this and some of the work that I've done before is around the challenges that migrants have in accessing social services of all kinds, including social protection. And that, for me, feels like a very profitable area to focus innovation on because it's very difficult to provide social protection for mobile populations for all of the reasons that we've been discussing. And then I think Gautam laid out so nicely at the beginning. But equally, this is a group of people who are very vulnerable, often, and who represent these phenomenally important connections between different parts of the country for internal migrants, let's say. And as well for people who migrate internationally and incredibly important financial and informational links. And that for me seems like a very difficult but important thing to think about how can migration be made safer, how can migrants be protected and enabled to connect with the families and friends and networks that they have not migrated with. So that would be very interesting. I mean, it feels to me that so many of these issues have been around for such a long time, but have been put really into the spotlight by the horrendous upheaval of the pandemic. And so, yeah, if that was one of the outcomes of the crisis, that would be one way of not wasting it, as it went. And then we've got one specific question for Rashi. So the government perhaps choose not to generate or have certain kinds of data in this case these data relates to some franchisement of migrants and formal workers, unless we accept that the norm non say actors can't be the infrastructure to ensure social protection. So another provocation against the other and I think that you're making Rashi, would you like to come in on that? You know, the thing is that the government in India has come and many times and said that they like for example that they don't have the data of the number of people in Delhi that died because of lack of oxygen. Or the fact that, you know, they don't know how many migrants went back, walked back home, or how many died on the way. And, you know, this is both where we say that, you know, if you are going to let the government and governments data is lead the way and that's particularly the case where I'm from in India, then we will never sort of be able to push for any kind of change. I mean, these large data sets that have gaps that the government sometimes also, you know, uses in its for its own sort of convenience. But we know what the reality of it is and how citizens have sort of, especially in Delhi, sort of really negated that so I think that it is important to kind of create that kind of like I was saying create that kind of archive to look at what happened, so that we can really speak truth to power in many ways and hold the government accountable. So, until now, we cannot wait for the government to sort of, you know, say that they're going to be very transparent and in the current sort of way the world runs, especially around data. That's that's not how I mean there's a lot of literature on and a lot of lived experiences of people saying that that's that's that's not the reality of the situation so so you know that is that's where this kind of accountability comes in and you know I did I was saying, I was thinking about it, about how, you know, non state actors can be viewed as you know agents of neoliberalism but neoliberalism also encompasses the state now, you know the welfare state is receding in India around the world, you know, so really what was promised to us in the Constitution slowly receding because the state is advocating its responsibility. In many ways the last frontier of that fight is the non state actors that go and say, and citizens, of course, that say that you know it is the state's responsibility to be transparent to kind of say that, you know we are going to be you need to tell us what happened and you know that you also said talked about the right to information act in India, that is also currently being diluted by the current government so, so you know these these are hard fought, sort of, you know, rights in India. I feel that that that that the state is getting weaker and that they are advocating and they are stepping back from this. So I believe that if until and unless we sort of push back as citizens which is really the role of citizens you know, democratically elected governments come and go. So you know we have to be sort of careful there and sort of continue to push is what I feel at least. Thanks so much. And I think I'm going to just open the floor one last time to see if anyone's got any closing comments that they'd like to make but we are almost at time. And we've covered a lot of grounds. If you're going against some really nice comments in the chat. I would like to, if there isn't anything else, I would just like to thank all of our panellists also go out and say to the very end, everyone who's participated but really draw your attention to this archive. There's not in there. There is there is a podcast, there are policy briefings, there are videos, we've got there's an awful lot to unpack there but also it's it's kind of the beginning of a bit of a process for us as we try and kind of focus in a bit more sharply on on our work on urban urban social protection within the Institute but also with our partners. So yeah, thank you all for joining us. Do stay tuned and also reach out to us if you're particularly interested in the scene. We're kind of, we'd like to kind of gather a bit of a network of people that keen to kind of progress this work on urban social protection and consolidate a little bit. So yeah, thank you to everyone. And I hope see you all soon. Thank you so much.