 Thank you for having me. Thank you, David, for inviting. A few disclaimers. Before I start, I think David mentioned it in his introduction, but I think in the program I still appear as UN verification mission in Colombia. I don't work there anymore, but I've been working for about five years there. Another disclaimer is that this is going to be a practitioner perspective. There's other academic here on the panel. I won't play this role. And it's also a collective perspective. As you can see, there are a few names on this first slide. And it's actually I'm going to present a shared experience. An experience I've been working on with two former colleagues at the UNVMC, the UN verification mission in Colombia, with whom I've been working for the five years over there. And so together right now we're trying to put together actually a piece on what this shared experience has been. And that's why I'm here today. That's why it's also a work in progress. And I'm really looking forward to your feedback, especially on how we could best frame what we've been doing on the ground, either from the literature or the policy research side, we would be really willing to hear your feedback on that. So before I start, I'll just say a few words about the UN mission in Colombia, because I don't know how familiar you are with it. So the UN mission in Colombia started actually back in 2016 to accompany the first part of the peace process, which had to do with the ceasefire, the secession of hostilities, and the laying down of arms by former FARC combatants. As such, we were part of a monitoring mechanism made of three parties, the government, the FARC, and the UN. That lasted for about a year. And after that, as of September 2017, our mandate got expended to verify two main aspects of the peace process. First, the socioeconomic and political re-incorporation of former FARC combatants into civilian life. Second, the security guarantees for them, their families, and the communities most affected by conflict were actually hosting the process. And later on in 2021, the mandate was further expended, but I won't really go into that to deal with and verify transitional justice sanctions. A few features of the mission that I think are important to mention to start with is that, first, it's a special political mission. It's not a peacekeeping operation. That means that it's mainly a civilian mission. The particularities, we also had some kind of international policy and military observers, but exclusively in civilian roles, not armed, not uniformed. The second characteristic, which I think is quite interesting when we look at what we can do at the local level, was the very strong field presence of the mission, especially for a special political mission. So on top of its headquarters in Bogota, the mission also has about six regional offices and 20 sub-regional and local offices really spread throughout the country. And I think that's quite interesting regarding some of the other things I'm going to mention today. And finally, it also has a strong level of in-country acceptance. Basically the UN mission arrived at the moment to accompany a peace process and was kind of a sign of hope. I'm saying that because I think it's also quite of a particularity compared to other settings. And that also helped build trust with a lot of local actors. So that's really just an introduction on the UN mission. So what were the challenges we faced? So I'm going to focus on three of them on this rather simplistic slide. But first I will refer to political challenges, the politics side of things. So the main parties to the peace agreement, that is the government and the FARC leadership, strongly disagreed on the way forward regarding the model of integration for former FARC combatants. On one side you would have the main presidential agency, the RN, who was actually promoting some kind of individual model of our incorporation based on 20 years of experience that they had with previous armed groups. And on the other side you had FARC who actually argued that they were not demobilizing, but they were remobilizing at a collective level on the social, economic and political fronts through the creation of a political party and through the creation of some kind of co-operativism model at the social, economical scale. And the truth is on the ground what we were saying is that none of those were actually working. And in the first stages of the process what we saw was actually ex-combatant spread out through the country with no contact whatsoever either with the main national authorities or with their own leadership at the national level. And these political challenges especially showed up after the first part of the peace agreement was finalized. Remember the previous slide I mentioned that the UN mission actually went through a transition, first accompanying the laying down of arms of FARC combatants in contentment sites like really like physical spaces in 26 different parts of the country. But when that was over when the arms were laid down we would see actually former FARC combatants spreading out through different regions of the country. And so that's what I refer to when I talk about transition challenge. And that's not something that either the government nor the FARC, not even the UN mission were really prepared to face with and we were kind of slow to adapt to this new geography of their integration in the country. Finally the last challenge has to be a territorial one. Reintegration took place in actually mostly in rural zones heavily affected by organized crime, illicit economies and also with little presence of the national state. This was the case of the region we were working on, the Catatumba region. It was on a little map on the first slide which is a border region with Venezuela. And I'm actually going to focus on some efforts that we led in one municipality called El Tara where we first got reports of over 100 ex combatants actually relocating to this municipality as of late 2017. And this is a region characterized by the highest level of illicit crops in the country, the presence of many different armed groups that are not part of the peace process and very little state presence. And we have to remember that it's also a border region with Venezuela so that's also an additional challenge. So faced with these challenges, what did we do? So we started by undertaking a series of exploratory missions to build a local network and working relationships with former combatants, local authorities and community-based organization. That would be like around late 2017, mid 2018. As kind of an analysis and evaluation phase to build up scenarios with local actors as to what could be done at the local level to surround this process. And in this process I would focus maybe on three major milestones. First, as you can see in this slide, we managed to build a key alliance with a civil society organization with a high level of presence in this territory which was called the SISCA. We first approached them through local public servants of the local administration who was also part of this social organization. And this organization actually put at this disposal of the process a farm and their staff to help train former combatants on cattle farming. About 20 to 30 ex-combatants actually were trained throughout a two-year process by this civil society organization. And this initiative was supported by two financial streams. First, extra-vegetary funding from the mission but also external funding by a U.S.-based NGO, Paso-Colombia that we managed to pull through the process. And so this alliance was also very important because in this context of spreading of former combatants in territories where they were not necessarily welcome, you didn't really have local authorities also prepared to receive them, it allowed us to have kind of a space, a physical space where people and actors who wanted to support the peace process could also meet and greet and actually meet with former combatants and get aware of their process. Another milestone that I would mention has to do with how we managed to get local administration on board. We talked a lot about this morning. And so these local administrations, as I said, were not really aware of the process happening in their own territory at the beginning as national efforts were very much focused on former combatants sites. And so they were not really aware of how many ex-combatants they would have in the territory and didn't really know much about the process. So there was also a lot of stigma involved and related to the process. And the UN mission at this point was one of the few actors proactively reaching out to the local administration to socialize what was happening in their own territory and to try to get them to support the peace process from early on. Through a lot of political influence, advocacy and negotiation, we managed to get them on board, especially through the integration of the reintegration process in the local development plan with unmarked funding. And you have to remember that these municipalities and these localities have very few resources at their disposal. So to be able to include that in the local development plan was quite important. And also through the creation, you can see that in the slide of a local office for peace and reintegration as part of the local administration actually led by a former ex-combatant. You can see him next to the mayor's actually on the inauguration of this office. And finally, I think that another key aspect of a work, and it was mentioned also this morning on how to link up local efforts with more national and international efforts was to link this up with national and international actors to leverage efforts and to not let them just unfold at the local level. We helped the local authority apply for a call of proposal from the French embassy which allowed to beef up support for the local peace office and give it some funding for its functioning. And I think here one key aspect was that the UN presence in this territory so heavily affected by security was quite key in building up trust to pull other actors. It was kind of like if you have the UN accompanying this territory, then we trust it. We also provided, we were not a peacekeeping operation, but I guess that we also provided some protection by presence. So it was kind of a trust and a security issue. And the fact that we were there actually allowed other actors to join on, to join on like the French or other UN agencies. So I know I'm running out of time, so maybe like just key lessons learned and there are many more. We discussed that this morning, the importance of local ownership and strategic partnerships. In this context we witnessed how some community and locally based initiative with the support of a rather flexible and light food UN presence actually managed to fill the gap at the time when the reintegration model was quite controversial at the national level and a source of political tension. So they kind of paved a way for a third way in the reintegration model, an alternative way in the context of great uncertainty. Another key lesson was the importance of having access to quick and flexible funding mechanism. And I have to say that here the extra budgetary funds that the mission dealt with actually managed to quickly fund some very small activities early on when we faced high risk. So there was a high risk that people will abandon the peace process and we were able with very small funds to actually start some processes. It's not much really from a development or economic development perspective because we're really talking about like $10,000. We're not talking about a lot of money, but it just that it was an excuse to actually bring people on board and start processes which was much more important that actually the economic dividends of peace. And finally, because I have to stop, I think that another lesson learned here is the need to further research and monitor these kind of local initiatives and how special political missions can also promote them. In Colombia I'm sure there are tons of examples like this and I have to say that within the UN mission, we are not necessarily aware of what colleagues are doing in other field offices. So I think there's a need for much more research on these issues and I hope we can contribute to this discussion and I'm really looking forward to hearing your feedback on some of the things I mentioned. That's it. I think I ran out of my ten minutes. Thank you.