 So, we can get started now. So thank you everyone for joining us today. And the COVID-19 pandemic has been raging on for the better part of a year now. And while recent announcements point to a vaccine coming out soon, there isn't really a clear end in sight yet. And pretty much every part of our society has been impacted by the pandemic from a day to day lives to all of our political processes. These changes have come under a lot of scrutiny over the past couple months, but a subject that hasn't really been explored as significantly is the effect of the pandemic on peace building. And given the importance of peace building initiatives, not completely understanding the effect the pandemic is having on them can have pretty dramatic consequences. So here to speak on the effects of COVID-19 on peace building in Nigeria, allies is grateful and honored to host allies alumni Miss Britt Sloan, an independent consultant on conflict resolution and peace building, and her former colleague, Miss Sharon Obogu, a program officer with the Marine Corps. So either of you would like to get started. Thank you so much for that lovely introduction and I'm so pleased to be here and rejoin the allies family and IGL family. I thoroughly enjoyed my experience and hope all of you despite the distance are still finding ways to build those bridges and transcend those borders so thank you so much for for having us. And as Nitya mentioned, I am a former program manager with with Mercy Corps in northeast Nigeria. I'm currently an independent peace building and conflict management consultant based in Erbil so it is very much evening here. I'd like to give Sharon the floor to introduce herself for her just a moment as well before we turn to the slides. Alright, hi everyone. My name is Sharon Obogu. I am the program officer for the Northeast conflict management and stabilization I work for Mercy Corps, and focusing in the north eastern states of Nigeria precisely bonus days. So I'm excited to be here to speak on the topic peace building in a pandemic. Excellent. Thanks so much and we can flip to the first slide. Um, so as Nitya so rightly said over the past year, the coven 19 pandemic has affected nearly every country and territory on the globe. And while the virus may not be able to distinguish between people of different nationalities, ethnicities, ages, genders, political stripes, the way that the pandemic interacts with different societies is indeed different. And that relationship is particularly fraught in context that are affected by violence and instability due to some of the underlying root causes of that fragility. And so my former colleagues at Mercy Corps Lisa inks and Adam Lichen held developed this model that you see here to map out some of those relationships demonstrating not only how coven affects peace, but also how violence and instability affect coven. And when we're talking about coven 19 we mean not just the virus, but also some of the containment and mitigation measures that government states around the world put into place can actually reinforce violence and instability. And so I'll just briefly present the five different pathways that we see here and then we'll explore them a little bit more in depth within the specific case study of Northeast Nigeria. So my colleagues Lisa and Adam had posited that coven 19 and those containment measures can have a negative effect on proliferation of dis and misinformation, increasing scarcity and economic competition fraying social cohesion and enabling armed groups to fill the void. One that we're going to focus on in particular today is the deteriorating how coven can contribute to deteriorating state society relations, and in particular, limited the limited legitimacy of government and limited capacity of government to fulfill their duties, and the exclusion and marginalization of in particular minority groups within a society and the weak civic engagement of the many of those same groups in a participatory governance process. And so, while there is an impulse among some donors and policy communities to shift funding towards public health interventions. This comes at the expense of peace building and governance. In the complex world, these seemingly distinct sectors are intrinsically linked. And so social divisions and broken social comp contracts actually indeed the effective implementation of public health responses. Just as the pandemic and botched mitigation measures and responses to the pandemic can actually undermine long term efforts for peace, and good governance and stability. And so there's really an imperative here to continue seeing those linkages, understand the complexities and that holistic analysis of the problem, as well as to recognize the opportunities to strengthen the resilience of fragile societies in these contexts. So we can move now to the next slide. So, as some of you may be aware, Northeast Nigeria has been at the epicenter of a brutal conflict since 2009. And the two groups have a one group, mostly known as Boko Haram but formally formally known as Jamah, Ahal, Asuna, Lidawa, and Jihad came and rose up and started a violent uprising and then subsequently there was a splinter group as well the Islamic State West African province. That split in 2016, these groups and a number of smaller splinter groups have affected the entire late Chad Basin region, including not just Nigeria but also its neighboring countries of Niger, Chad, and Cameroon. But the epicenter remains Borno State in Northeast Nigeria. And in the past decade, we've witnessed that 36,000 people have been killed, 1.1 million people have been displaced, and 1.2 million have remained cut off from humanitarian assistance. And it is important to note that obviously while this violence is horrific, these groups collectively known as Boko Haram did prey on real grievances that were pre-existing. And there have been in Borno since before 2009, longstanding governance grievances around corruption, poor service provision by the government, regionalism, both in terms of how resources are allocated from Abuja, the capital of Nigeria to Borno, and also within Borno from the state capital of my degree to different local government areas in how the north central and south parts of Borno have been prioritized for political power. And this also extends to a sense of political protectionism within the way that that government is set up. There are pre-existing sociocultural conflicts and divisions, including inter-ethnic divisions between the majority Kenori tribe and other minority tribes throughout the state, including Shua, Margi, smaller tribes throughout the state intergenerational conflict that we often see between traditional elders and youth in their society, some inter-religious conflict between Christians and Muslims, although it is important to note that the root of the conflict isn't really a just one in the same way that we see it in other parts of Nigeria, as well as quite severe marginalization of women in all public spaces. So those all those set of conditions pre-existed were pre-existing, but since the violence started, you've now seen a new set of dynamics that have both reinforced those pre-existing dynamics and introduced new effects. So we've seen quite a severe militarization of the response at the expense of other interventions that really address these root causes of the crisis, an interest in using military as the primary tool to address the crisis and not really looking at these other governance grievances and social sociocultural conflicts and really looking at the institutional reform that's often in some ways much more difficult than a pure military response. We've also seen since 2015 in particular, the introduction of the international humanitarian aid, it's important to note that there were a network, there was a network of local organizations that were providing humanitarian assistance before then, but you saw a huge investment after 2015 until now for the international humanitarian organizations coming in and providing emergency life-saving assistance to people. However, there's been quite a severe politicization of that aid, both in terms of the government trying to at times co-opt that aid and use it for their own purposes, and as well as quite a tense relationship with the humanitarian community, and also understanding how these humanitarian assistance modalities can sometimes actually undermine those interventions to invest in those longer-term reform processes that the government itself is responsible for. And then you have these dynamics of displacement. As we said, you have 1.8 million people displaced which has not only eroded people's livelihoods, people's ability to get education, their ability to access systems of government, and basic services, but it's also only in further deepened their trauma that they might have experienced as a result of the initial violence and eroded these traditional conflict management mechanisms that were in place as you have IDP internally displaced persons now settling in host communities that haven't historically interacted. So we can go to the next slide now. So now I want to talk about some of those different pathways that you saw on that first slide, but looking specifically at the case study of Northeast Nigeria. So starting with these state-society relationships and really looking at the collapse of the social contract, in Northeast Nigeria we see, as we said, quite a significant lack of legitimacy of the government. On the first day that it was announced that COVID had reached Nigeria, I remember being in the car with a taxi driver, and asking if he believed that COVID was indeed in Nigeria. I remember the first case was in Lagos and he said, absolutely not. I don't believe that it's here. I believe that it's just the government creating this story so that they can get more humanitarian assistance from the international community and just take that money for themselves. There's an inherent lack of trust in the government and suspicion that any good things that come from outside are just co-opted by the government. There's also this sense of a double standard. In the first month of the lockdown in Borno in April, we saw that the lockdown was being applied as people liked as the government saw fit for themselves. You had a crackdown on religious leaders who were trying to carry out Friday prayers, but government officials were allowed to move around the city as they liked. That further erodes the credibility of both the government as well as the mitigation measures around COVID. As mentioned, you have poor access of citizens to the levers of government. Since the insecurity started in 2009, we've seen a huge flight of local government officials from local communities to the capital of my degree. This is in some cases because traditional leaders in particular and government officials were the primary ones being targeted by Boko Haram and armed opposition groups. They were very fearful to return, but that has left this very physical gap between communities at the grassroots and the individuals that are supposed to represent them, both the state and local government officials as well as traditional authorities in some cases. So that makes it incredibly difficult for citizens to understand why these measures are lockdown measures, containment measures are being put into place, and to also voice their concerns, their needs, give government an understanding of how these measures are affecting them. Also very tangibly, we've seen that the, we've seen an effect on local government as well. We had initially, there were initially local government elections that were planned for June of this year, which would have been the first since the crisis started. Until now you've had local government officials that have been appointed rather than elected, which again means that that sense of real representation is missing at the local level. And because of COVID we've now seen that the elections has have been postponed until we don't know when. Lastly, in terms of these these governance challenges and the interaction with COVID. We've seen this politicization and mismanagement of palliative support from the government. Often this support is insufficient in quantity it only makes its way to, to several families are several hundred families which is wildly insufficient. There have been reports of some of the stocks being infested with with weevils and insects being rotten. And then we have this issue again of politicization not only of the broader age sector, but even of the assistance that's being delivered by the government that they often give this assistance only to their own political party loyalists, rather than to, rather than on the basis of the And we can move to the next slide. And so we mentioned that in the context of the crisis we've seen this militarization of the response. And this is a bit challenging because I want to make clear that a lot of these dynamics were pre existing coded but again COVID has exacerbated some of them. So since the since COVID started you've seen that armed opposition group attacks haven't necessarily increased in number, but they have become increasingly predatory towards civilians. Since the military has been asked to not only manage the fight against armed opposition groups, but also manage interstate travel and the COVID 19 lockdowns, you've seen a vacuum of power. Again, this was part of the military strategy that they were removing people from forward operating pieces military personnel from forward operating pieces. Since about November of last year, but we've seen an escalation of that approach and an even further reallocation of resources of the military which has allowed these armed opposition groups to gain control over vehicle checkpoints etc. But you've also seen the military taking advantage of these lockdown measures during the interstate travel bands, even though in theory these lockdown measures were firm policies of the government, the military would often take bribes and hike their prices to enable citizens civilians to travel from state to state or from city to city. You've also seen a situation of increased sex sexual exploitation. You've seen an increase in gender based violence and domestic violence globally, but in this case we've seen it linked to access to assistance. So in this case, the military is sexually exploiting women to give them protection, safe passage access to assistance, and all of these abuses by the military have only deepened tension between military and civilians. And then you have this network of community based militia groups that are like vigilante groups in the community that that rose up in the wake of Gokul Haram. And in the with the rise of COVID again you saw that these groups started to exploit their power that they in the initial days of the lockdown they often very forcefully tried to enforce the lockdown. And in particular you saw them using this power against other youth. So these militia groups are primarily local male youth, and they've gained outsized influence because of their their work on behalf of the community to fight against these armed opposition groups, but they've also turned that increased status and influence against other youth in the community, and you've seen this being only further, further manifested during COVID. Next slide please. So the third dynamic that I want to discuss is a further erosion of social cohesion in terms of the relationship between COVID and fragility. There has been a huge strain on individual and collective resilience in in the society. One of the main concerns that we heard from community members was that, especially during the initial lockdown which came around Ramadan and northeast areas, predominantly Muslim, was that the lockdown was really undermining their ability to participate in cultural and social activities. They weren't able to go to prayers and male youth typically meet in in these large Lisa groups these informal groups that chat and talk. And these really provide a social safety net in these local communities. But if you have these lockdown measures in place, those very foundational elements of community cohesion and resilience are at risk of breaking down. As mentioned, the violence, the crisis has caused extreme rates of trauma in northeast Nigeria. And as we know, even in countries where we can comfortably sit in our own homes and have air conditioning and access to, you know, water and sanitation. There's been an increase in stress and trauma as a result of this. That's compounded even further. The existing trauma is compounded further when you're in IDP camps or in informal settlements across the state. Again, another dynamic that we see is this distrust of traditional leaders. I mentioned that already we've seen that traditional leaders often are in my degree and the capital of Orno State as opposed to in local communities. COVID has only exacerbated some of those tensions. We've seen examples of traditional leaders who if they are seen to be agreeing with the government in these lockdown measures, then they're seen as pandering to political ends rather than fighting on behalf of the local community. And we've also seen situations of traditional leaders who are basically gatekeepers to the aid, rather than actually facilitating the distribution of assistance to local communities. You've seen a situation of traditional leaders mandating who that assistance can go to, often their own family and friends, or co-opting that COVID aid keeping the PPE for themselves. Finally, you've seen a stigmatization of different social groups. We've seen cases of, again, youth, there was that pre-existing intergenerational conflict, but because of the aid, because of COVID and the way that aid has been distributed, many youth see that it's part of their own duty to fight against these traditional leaders, and there have been instances of youth actually stealing the aid off trucks. And that's caused an increase in intention in the community. You also have IDPs internally displaced persons who are viewed as possible carriers of COVID, that they're dirty, they're in close quarters, and just in general that they are the primary recipients of aid. There's a perception among the host community already that IDPs get most of the aid, which is inaccurate, in fact, the majority of aid goes to host communities. But there's still this perception that under COVID, IDPs are even further getting the lion's share. There's another case of this being extended to different ethnic groups as well in one of the communities where Mercy Corps works. The Fulani tribe, who are primarily nomadic herders, are seen to be bringing COVID into the sedentary local community. Next slide. Oh, I forgot that little bubble there. If you can go back, I forgot that that, yes, humanitarian assistance. So we often see humanitarian assistance as a really positive thing, an important contribution, a life-saving emergency support to local communities. And I want to touch on the fact that in the case of, it can actually exacerbate conflicts. Again, I mentioned how this relates to IDPs, that IDPs are being seen to monopolize that aid. Again, it's causing tensions and further fractures between traditional leaders and their communities. So I just wanted to put that button on it, that humanitarian assistance can sometimes actually, we talk about conflict-sensitive humanitarian assistance. And I think in the case of COVID, it's vitally important to be thinking in those terms because humanitarian assistance can often work at cross purposes to social cohesion and resilience. All right, next slide. The last dynamic that I'll talk about is the fueling of rumors and misinformation. In Northeast Nigeria, we had, there was a statistic from one of our partner organizations that consistently sticks in my head that even though they were doing sensitization around COVID, trying to provide factual information about COVID to the community via radio, and 96% of their audiences had heard this information, only 45% of their audience actually believed that COVID-19 was real and deadly. So this is obviously a huge gap. And when we think about why is this, how can this possibly be that people are getting this information, but they're not believing in it, one of the big reasons for that is again going back to this inherent mistrust of the messengers themselves. In much of the sensitization work that's being done in Northeast Nigeria, the government and international non-governmental organizations, NGOs, are serving as the primary messengers. And so if there's already a mistrust in government, as we talked about, there's already this politicization of NGOs, then those being the primary messengers actually serves to undermine the message itself. There's also much more trust in social media than other forms of media. So when you're using newspaper, even radio, you're seeing that those modalities, those vehicles are not in fact the most trusted. So you see this widespread, as a result, you see this widespread proliferation of myths around COVID-19, and in the US, I mean, we're not so, we're familiar with some of them, but in Northeast Nigeria, there is this continued feeling that until we see it, we can't believe it. So if we don't have concrete evidence that COVID is real, it must just be this government plot to continue to undermine local communities. So it continues to fuel these pre-existing beliefs and conspiracies around the mal intent of the government. I'm always careful to bring up this topic, but some of those rumors can serve to fuel extremist narratives as well. Back in April, you saw the head of JAS make an hour-long audio statement about how COVID was just a plague against these secular democratic governments. It was God's way of responding to their evil secular democratic approaches to governance. Because again, you had the initial lockdown in Borno be right around the time of Ramadan, that seemed to fuel this narrative that the government itself was perpetuating this war on Islam. Now, while we haven't seen any uptick in recruitment of these groups since COVID started, and again, that's important to emphasize because a lot of CT, CVE people like to make this strong linkage, there is still some risk that's there. So now I'll turn it over to Sharon to talk about in response to these dynamics that we're seeing, what are just a couple of examples of what Mercy Corps has done in response. All right. Thank you so much, Brits, for that extensive information. So firstly, I'd like to say that peace building is an integral and vital in the pandemic period. And similarly to what Brits has just said, I'll be taking us through on three major highlights, areas of Mercy Corps peace building programming as it relates to the pandemic. I'll also be sharing examples and workable solutions, which were also achieved during this period. So on the first slide, the first program highlights is the area of participatory COVID planning. So Mercy Corps has continually engaged community structures, the Good Governance Committee and the Bruno State Tax Force in workshops in order to bridge the communication gaps between the government and the community. So for example, for example, there is, there is this hoax. There's been complaints from people around COVID-19 being a hoax and the government using it as a way of enriching themselves. Also people not getting tested adequately. And then we have the same stigmatization of patients by frontline workers. And so to address this, Mercy Corps is working to establish a grievance redress and complaints mechanism for ongoing communication. The next slide, please. Here. So the second program highlight is the management of conflicts through community-led dialogues. The community structure responsible for this is the conflict management committee. During the conflict analysis workshop, they mapped out conflict issues, which include the traditional leaders, the conflict between the traditional leaders and the community. And then they see that the traditional leaders were perceived to hold COVID palliatives rather than uneven distribution in the community. Particularly this happened in Goza LG of Borneo State, the northeast, eastern Nigeria. In the traditional leaders community dialogue, participants agreed to establish a distribution committee with representation from different stakeholders to avoid gatekeeping by traditional leaders. So to have some sort of equal distribution whenever palliatives or other distribution items coming to the not necessarily COVID palliatives or the distribution items come into the community, there will be equal presentation and people who will be able to have these items. So another example, which was seen was conflict between market vendors and the community. So these market vendors had increased the price of old stocks, which even escalated into physical violence. So the prices of these old stock commodities were increased just to make profits or just to make high profits. So in the market vendor community dialogue in Dambua area, vendors are great to reduce prices of their stocks when more goods became available. So this very stock of old, the price of old stocks were reduced when more goods became available, sorry. So another example again of a successful dialogue is the IDP hosts community dialogue, which is the internally displaced persons and the host community dialogue in Goza area of Borneo States. Where the IDPs were faced with stigmatization by the host communities over getting more palliative items. And to resolve this, the communities agreed to join sensitization and distribution of personal protective equipment to the opposite communities. Can you just go back? Yeah, thanks. So this is the third highlight of our programming, which is the use of digitalized Mitaka tool to address more conflict. So the use of traditional religious leaders who are credible local actors were used actually to pre record messages about COVID facts, because the community. There's this mistrust or mistrust with the messengers or with the government and other stakeholders. But you find out that the community have more trust or build more trust to their religious leaders. So how do we get this very, the right messages to the people. So Mexico in the program and use this religious leaders to pass this message messages across about COVID facts prevention and response to counter meets. For example, one of the recurring meets in communities is that COVID-19 is not a real disease. So it is a way for politicians. It is a way of politicians to make money. If someone in the committee submit this meets to the hotline, they will receive an automated, automated message in response to explaining that COVID-19 is an infectious disease caused by virus. So, and also, what are the main symptoms. This very digitalized system also actually gives gives you the response of the right messages as to to answering questions concerning this, and then, and that there is no evidence that this virus is being spread intentionally for political or religious reasons. Rather, it is happening naturally and the spread can be prevented. This is the sort of messages to actually define or give the definition that COVID it's real. So in conclusion, I'd like to say that peace building cannot be overemphasized in this times of of COVID as it also has to do with behavior change, changing perceptions and attitudes of people. Thank you very much. I'll hang around for questions. So I'll hand over to Brits to continue with the next presentation. So it's just our last slide. Thanks so much Sharon for that really great overview. And so just some key takeaways before we turn over to your questions. I'm just emphasizing again that public health governance peace building responses. I'd like to see them as separate sectors. They are really intrinsically linked. COVID and weak state society relations conflict are threat multipliers for the public health response as a rather sorry, weak state society relations and conflict are threat multipliers in terms of COVID, just as much as COVID is a threat multiplier for good governance and peace or rather conflict and weak governance. Number two, rather than reducing funding for governance and peace building programming, these sorts of programs should be short up. And they should actually be mainstreaming governance and peace building conflict management programs into public health interventions, which is something we've been advocating for programming must be participatory. This is my, my favorite kind of anthem as a peace builder is around participatory programming. This has to be from beginning to end, starting with community led analysis as Sharon mentioned as a part of our community dialogue and the design of the programming itself to all really capture the nuances and intersectoral nature of the problem as well as relevant and locally viable solutions. And then finally programming must consistently embed these spaces for exchange and feedback. And as we saw in two, actually all three of the examples that Sharon gave these spaces are vital to continually build trust which helps with good governance and peace building these spaces help to monitor changes in the dynamics themselves and help other programmers like Mercy Corps to refine their approaches. So, we will take any questions that you guys have in these last 15 minutes. Thank you so much. So, we're not going to go into an audience Q&A. So if everyone can use the Q&A function on zoom to ask your questions. If people type in their questions I'd like to ask, given the general distrust between the state government and the local communities. Do you think that people will be receptive to new proposed efforts for increased government citizen communication. Sharon, do you want to, do you want to answer that your thoughts on how welcoming people are of opportunities for for governance work. So the in our government community dialogues that we do are, to what extent our community is actually receptive to those sorts of activities if I understood the question correctly. Okay. Okay, please can you, can you go about the prison so I can understand Lynn. So the extent to which local community people are receptive to activities around governance if they are so suspicious of government to begin with. Actually, yes, there is an existing distrust already with the community members and the government. So, I don't know if this answers your question, if the information from this government, if the community members are actually receptive like accepting this very information. So I don't know if that's the question. So I guess just to build on what Sharon saying, I think that people, it's a complicated question I remember one of my last interactions with local community members. One of our other activities that we were doing before COVID hit was bringing these local government officials down to the community level, and having them, them interact and having dialogue on different issues around governance. And I spoke with one of these good governance committees. Just before I left and they were appreciative. And they felt a desire to continue fighting and to continue accessing these government officials, but felt very suspicious that anything would change. And we're quite disheartened at the state of affairs. So I guess it's mixed. I think there is a lot of space to continue doing that sort of programming and you have to start somewhere in order to build trust. But as fast as it, you know, you have to recognize that you're overcoming generations worth of mistrust between government and local communities. So I think you, I think it's what communities were saying was that it wasn't important mechanism. But that they were, you know, until they see real change. They, they were, they were reticent to fully invest. Thank you. And this next question is from the Q&A section. So if you've been, so I think you've been hinting this throughout the entire presentation but how splintered is the response to COVID-19 in Nigeria, who's spearheading the effort and enforcing things like lockdowns. Is it local communities, the military or outside groups? Yeah. I mean, I think I remember seeing photos from the first weekend of the lockdown in Borno in the center of town showing like no cars in the roundabouts and only set times for people to go to market. That quickly deteriorated. So you're not really seeing very strong enforcement of lockdown and containment measures. And even while the measures were being put in place to some extent in the capital of my degree, again, you have this issue of lack of it, you know, that last mile problem. And in the case of Borno, it's many miles. You don't have those, you don't have those systems of government at the local community level. And so you see a total corruption of government officials pressure traditional leaders not to abide by the containment measures and lockdowns. Military officials who will take bribes to let you, you know, go against the interstate travel ban. So I think these measures very quickly deteriorated. I haven't been in Nigeria for several months, Sharon. I don't know what your thoughts are. If there's any semblance of lockdown left in Borno at this state. In terms of lockdown, there is no, there is no lockdown in Borno State at the moment. So I think it was just when the first case was recorded in Borno State, we just had like three weeks lockdown. That was it. At the moment, there is no sort of lockdown in Borno State. Yes. And just to, I was looking at kind of the nuances of the question in the, in the Q&A. And I think that INGOs have been the most active in trying to get communities to recognize the seriousness of the situation. But you haven't really had that enforcement coming from, from, you know, authorities in the country. Thank you. And for our next question, what does accountability look like for funds donated to fight COVID-19? So does the lack of accountability discourage donors from continuing to support both initiatives that are supposed to fight COVID and those dedicated to peace building? So I think a lot of donors were caught off guard when COVID first struck. I know that our programming that donors kind of took two different approaches, or even three different approaches to managing those funds. One was to kind of halt any non-essential programming altogether. So one of the programs that we had running was completely stopped for a period of a couple months as they kind of figured out what was what was happening with COVID and how peace building programming could be best implemented in this new context. Some donors took the approach of kind of trying these middle measures of getting organizations to reshape their proposals, still have these interventions that were maybe peace building governance or whatever the sector was, but just integrate some COVID mitigation measures into their existing programming. And then the third approach of donors was really to release new funds around COVID, which had to be, you know, stood up very, very quickly to again do this very strict public health response. So the accountability around all of these different modalities around rather the second two was a bit complex because the shift was quite fast. So I think it was challenging. The second part of the question, does lack of accountability discourage donors? I don't think that there, I think there's a recognition that COVID is serious enough to continue investing and at this point donors have been able to make that shift significantly enough and understand the interplay of everything that we were talking about around the context and the way that COVID manifests in these societies. So I think that most donors and policy communities remain committed to managing both existing programs in different sectors and these new COVID dynamics. Thank you. And for our next question, at its height, there were less than 50 COVID-19 deaths in Nigeria. So how has Nigeria escaped the worst of the COVID-19 crisis? Poor documentation. Sorry, go ahead Sharon. Okay, I think Nigeria hasn't done anything differently from what the world is doing. So basically, when the first case was reported, we took on the preventive measures just like every other country would or every other country in the world would were enough face masks and social distancing and the rest of the preventive measures. So even up until now, we still have people who still keep to this very preventive measures around COVID-19. So I do not think there's something Nigeria particularly has done differently from the world in actually preventing COVID-19. And to build on what Sharon's saying, I think Nigeria's capacity regionally was actually quite strong. A lot of people cited the example of Ebola and how Nigeria, even though it had something like 15 cases of Ebola, it was able to manage that caseload and prevent it from spreading further within the country. So it actually has quite a strong epidemic response capacity that in fact other countries around the world didn't necessarily have. The public health system generally is not fantastic, especially in areas like Borno State and again we're talking about close quarters and IDP camps. My understanding from reports by WHO and UNICEF, I believe, is that there are two factors in particular that do result in a lower incidence rate in Nigeria and that is the huge youth population. Nigeria has one of the youngest populations in the world, so you may actually have a huge number of cases that again go undocumented because of the very low testing rates and regimens, but there are very few significant, very few severe cases. And just to build on that, a lot of people in Nigeria may not even recognize that it is a severe case because many of the symptoms are so similar to malaria, which people, Sharon's had malaria like 12 times since I've known her. People just get used to living with malaria and typhoid and I remember being consistently diagnosed with this very generic the flu, which it wasn't. And so people are very used to being sick. You might not report even severe cases as COVID or even recognize that COVID related deaths are in fact caused by the virus. The second factor that was mentioned was the heat. And we know that COVID can still exist in hot weather conditions, but when you have conditions that are, you know, 95 plus the majority of the year, at least the resilience of the virus on surfaces isn't quite as potent as in other places in the world. Thank you so much. And for our last question, how has COVID-19 affected education in Nigeria? And is there anything Mercy Corps is doing about this? Yeah, Sharon, do you want to speak to that, the closure and reopening of schools? Yeah, actually, Nigeria actually, the COVID actually affected the educational system in Nigeria. But along the line, the government resorted to online schooling for kids, especially for primary school. Children, through radio, through radio broadcasts. So there are times where the children should actually sit in for this very online classes. Majorly, that's what has happened during this very pandemic concerning, as relating to education. And again, one of, it actually impacted so much on the parents, you know, having kids around and not going to school. And some parents feel the disturbance and then some drawbacks in the education of the awards. And again, gradually school, the school has resumed and then children have gone back to school. But what the major challenge is kids now do not actually, there's this drawback, the kids are not even focused. And then they do not really understand the next step again, it's more like, okay, taking them back. I mean, so back like they've never been to school. So these are the things that the Nigerian government put in place just for education. But again, I think there was no much impact that has regressed the virtual learning. So but now the school has resumed just like two months ago. So I think there'll be a great change for the kids. Yeah. But I think you also have to recognize that that many students have been affected by the last 10 years. And one of the greatest calls, you know, advocacy points for youth has been to build new secondary schools or make those secondary schools available again as you have many of those schools that have actually been taken over by the military in these local government areas and which is a massive violation. And so I think many of these students unless they try, especially in these local areas unless they travel to places for school, they've been out of that, you know, they've, they haven't had opportunities for education for for nearly a decade now so as Karen mentioned, you know, radio is the primary modality. You know, for those of you who may have siblings or little cousins, you know that even when you do have great connectivity over the internet and can, you know, watch your peers and your teachers over zoom calls like this. So that's hard enough to get the attention of, of students so over radio, there's been a massive impact for for young people over the past year. But that again is just kind of exacerbating the problem that's been in place for at least students in in Borno and other crisis affected areas and in Nigeria for the past decade. Thank you so much. And to conclude the panel. I just like to say that we all really learned a lot and we'd like to thank you for taking the time of your day to speak with us today. Thank you so much. Yeah, absolutely our pleasure and if there are any other questions or points of interest that that you guys have, please feel free to to reach out we'd be more than pleased to continue to engage always a part of the IGL family. Thank you. Thank you.