Education

Girls’ education is one of the most effective development investments. Yet 130 million girls remain out of school, and each year, twelve million girls are married before their eighteenth birthday. To commemorate the International Day of the Girl Child, Dr. Kakenya Ntaiya and Sarah Craven discuss new models to further girls’ empowerment and education and advance U.S. foreign policy objectives, such as global health, prosperity, and stability.   VOGELSTEIN: Good afternoon, everyone. Good afternoon, everyone. Good afternoon. Welcome to the Council on Foreign Relations. My name is Rachel Vogelstein. I lead the Women and Foreign Policy Program here at CFR, which analyzes how elevating the status of women and girls advances U.S. foreign policy objectives. Today we will explore an issue in honor and recognition of the International Day of the Girl that is really at the center of the strategic case for the advancement of women and girls, and that is education. As you know, improvement in girls’ education globally at the primary level is one of the major development achievements of the past two decades. But despite this progress, persistent gaps in girls’ education remain, particularly at the secondary level. You all know the statistics well: thirty-four million girls remain out of secondary school, with significant gender gaps in sub-Saharan Africa and in South Asia. The gender gap at the secondary level leaves girls at risk of practices like child marriage, early pregnancy. And in addition, at a time when secondary education really serves as the passport, in many respects, to formal-sector employment, this education gap also limits broader economic growth and potential. We know many of the reasons for the gender gap in education at the secondary level: son preference, harmful traditional practices like female genital mutilation and child marriage, threats of violence, and social and cultural norms that confine opportunities for women and girls. Today we are here to talk about not simply why these barriers exist, but rather how to surmount these obstacles. What are the most effective ways to get and to keep adolescent girls in school? How can leaders on the ground break through the social norms that constrain girls’ schooling? How can we ensure that girls who are educated at the secondary level are able to transition successfully to higher education or to the workplace? And how can we bring innovative models to scale? Perhaps no one is better-equipped to answer these questions than our experts today. First, we are very pleased to welcome Kakenya Ntaiya, a pioneering Kenyan leader who has dedicated her life to this cause. She is the founder and president of the Kakenya Center for Excellence, which uses education to empower and motivate young girls to become agents of change in their families, communities, and nations. Previously, she was the first youth advisor to the United Nations Population Fund, through which she traveled the world as an advocate for girls’ education. She has been widely recognized for her work and has been the subject of a BBC documentary that I commend to all of you. And, Kakenya, thank you for joining us. We’re fortunate to host you today. NTAIYA: Thank you. VOGELSTEIN: Second, we are delighted to be joined by Sarah Craven, who is a leading official at the United Nations Population Fund as the director of its Washington office. She previously held positions at the State Department and in the Senate, particularly for Senator Tim Wirth, and was a policy advisor to the Center for Development and Population Activities during the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo and the 1995 Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing. Welcome back to the Council, Sarah. So, Kakenya, I’d like to start with you. You’ve spoken in the past about your personal story and the challenges you faced as a young child. You were engaged at the age of five, underwent FGM in preparation for marriage, and yet you managed to negotiate a return to school and do what no other girl in your community had ever done, which was to leave your village to obtain higher education abroad. How did you accomplish this? And, importantly, what advice do you give to the young girls with similar dreams who face similar challenges in your community today? NTAIYA: Thank you so much, Rachel, for hosting us here, and everyone for coming. It’s nice to see good—lots of good friends and all friends. And I’m really honored to be here with my mentor and good friend, Sarah Craven, my very first boss. (Laughter.) We’ve come a long way. We’ll talk about the BBC. (Laughs.) We were on that journey together. So I’m very thankful for this opportunity to be here. I think, you know, I don’t want to go into my story, and I know everybody here knows about Kakenya, who negotiated with the father to get—you know, to go through FGM and go to school. What I want to say, that I think one thing that I’m reminded as I work with girls on a daily—on a daily day is that there are girls throughout the world who every single day being courageous, looking for an alternative to the life that has already been set for them. I talk about my girl Faith, who heard about our work and she’s been hearing about our schools and all we’ve done. And when the day for enrollment came—we do this enrollment once a year and, like, every girl wants to be there. And one of the requirements we have is that a girl comes with a family member. So Faith went to her dad and told her that, dad, can you take me to enroll at Kakenya Center? The dad said no. She went to the mother and the mother said she had to go do something else. And she didn’t give up. What she did is she went inside the house, took an egg, and walked to the market, sold the egg, bought a pencil, and came to school. She wanted to enroll in my school. So it reminds me that even though I negotiated, I fought, there are girls on a daily—day in, day out who want a different life, who don’t want to be married when they’re children, who want to see a different life. And for Faith, what she was running from is her father was very abusive. He just drinks a lot and he has, you know, three wives, and her mother was the youngest. She’s seen her sisters getting married. She was running away from that life. I was running from the life, that of my mother. My mother was abused by my dad. You know, the life that, when you see something different, you want to look for that. So I want to say that there are so many girls out there that need a helping hand, and we’ve been fortunate as Kakenya’s Dream where we have really worked on these girls. We’ve created a safe space for them to be able to walk in, to be able to say I want to go and enroll, I am going to take my chance and I’m going to walk without a father, without a mother. I’m just going to go to school. And that is—I think that’s, like, it’s not my story is not just one story; it’s the story of many, many, many more girls, and those who are not in school, those who are being mutilated, you know, each year. And what I have learned is that—as people who work in this field is that we need to create many, many more spaces, many more places for girls to come in to be empowered. What I tell girls and I tell anybody is that every child in the world has a dream, and it’s our—it’s us to create those dreams to become a reality. And go for it. I mean, if you want something, you go for it. Be Faith. You know, get up and go. And I think that’s the biggest thing, that anybody in the world should just go for what they want. VOGELSTEIN: So let’s talk more about the steps you’ve taken to help those dreams become reality: the Kakenya Center for Excellence, which started over a decade ago in a shack under a tree, and now today has a full campus with art and science facilities, and safe dormitories, and a library. And importantly, a hundred percent of your graduates stayed in school throughout, and then went on to higher education. So talk to us a little bit about the model. How did you achieve those remarkable results? NTAIYA: The good thing about—we’ve really grown with our girls. (Laughs.) I think, you know, for me, it was—I was a student at the University of Pittsburgh, working on my Ph.D., and you know, I had women who, you know, wanted to help me—you know, I kept saying I want to build this school—and really came together to support me to start that dream. And so I had gone home for—actually, for the holiday, over December, and when I went there one of the girls got married and I couldn’t help her. What happens is that when you get married, the next day of course is the honeymoon. And this girl, you know, she wasn’t ready. She was twelve. She also had gotten married to a young man. And I could see pain. I could see—there was no place for her to run to. And worse was that, you know, the elders had to come to help the man help, you know, perform whatever he wanted to do, and they had to use a horn to—you know, to open up the girl, a cow horn. And this girl stayed crying, and everybody in the village knew what had happened to her. And I was helpless. So I come to Pittsburgh, and you can’t go to class and, like, not think about that girl; and you can’t just get up every day and forget, that she doesn’t exist. At that time in my community, when you are in the rural—I mean, rural communities need our help. We talk about NGOs. We talk about work that people have done. But no one wants to go to the place that the road ends. There were no rescue centers. There were—you know, the government is there, but they don’t—like, there’s no place to take her. So I couldn’t even take her to a rescue home. So I went home and I said—you know, I tell Sarah and the team—(laughs)—we’re going to start a school. And, you know, my head is just like—I just wanted to grab those girls and I just wanted to put them in a little place. And I just said, you know, I just want ten girls. I just—I just want to help ten girls. And at that time, you know, I had been talking about it, but getting there in a hundred girls—(inaudible)—enrollment, and I wasn’t ready for that. I mean, I was like, oh—(laughter)—I guess—because I had to, like—I needed to go through a criteria. I needed to find the most needy or find the extremely needy. I mean, I grew up in a community where everybody’s needy, but there’s those other level of neediness. So I thought that, you know, I had a panel of people to do all these things, and every single story that day I wanted to take every of those girls in. So we started with thirty girls, and it was—for me, what has—like, I’ve really grown with the girls. At first we didn’t have a boarding school, so we just took them, put them in a landing place, and then you realize that the walk from school to home was a long distance. The girls were having tea in the morning. They come to school. A cup of tea, and then you walk three, four, five miles. By the time it’s 10:00, the girls are sleepy. You’re thinking, what’s going on? Apparently, they needed food. And, you know, I learned that, oh, food is important. (Laughter.) So before we even thought about a boarding facility, we started with food, feeding them. And all of a sudden you see transformation like their hair color, their faces, their—you know, food. They needed food. And from there, we knew that, of course, the studies—numerous studies talk about how girls, when they are home, they are cleaning, they are cooking, they are doing everything else other than to read. And furthermore, there is no lights at night because it’s rural communities, so at night: dark, go to sleep. You wake up, morning, you start (fire ?). So there is always work for girls. So the next thing we did was to have a boarding school. And literally, when you say under the shade of tree, that’s where the teachers were sitting down marking the exams. From there we went to uniform and the pride that comes to that, a bed. I mean, I had a room like this full of sixty girls—(laughs)—and people were like, why are you—you know, people would come and visit and they’re like, they’re so crowded. I’m like, no, they’re dying to be here. I mean, they are happy to be there. And from that I will tell you that every single girl that has gone through our school, I mean, our greatest happiness now is to see the first ones in college, walking the step that I walked, some going to Australia. And it’s just like, oh my gosh, we are finally getting there. But we’ve learned over time it’s not just the school. You need to bring the parents along. Fathers who never thought that girls need to be good in school, we had to use a pretense of saying come look at the grade to start look—developing a relationship between the father and their daughter because it didn’t exist. We worked from that and empowered the teachers. We’ve gone out to the community now. We work with about ninety schools, working with the boys, bringing the boys into the picture. It’s really been, for us, a growing learning with our girls. And there is no—I mean, I love—when we create programs, I think we normally create this thing up there with like a classroom, but it’s not really just a classroom. It’s every single part of the society is part of a girl’s life. It’s the mothers. It’s the fathers. It’s the brothers. It’s everybody. She needs—you need to empower the whole community to be able to empower the girl, and that’s what we’ve learned. That’s why we see our girls continuing with school, because everybody is part of that equation. VOGELSTEIN: So a holistic, community-based, community-driven model. NTAIYA: Exactly. Yes. Yes. VOGELSTEIN: I want to talk about one of the challenges that you mentioned, which is scale. You know, I remember we were talking last year and you told me that the Center had forty spots available and over two hundred and fifty girls applied, which must be heartbreaking to have to turn away so many. So my question is, what will it take to actually address the need that you see in that one community? Or scale up to the whole country: What do you need to scale a program like the one that you’ve created? And if you got the resources that you need, what are the challenges that you would face, do you think, in bringing your program to scale? NTAIYA: So what I have learned over time is you need to be patient. It’s a constant reminder every day that, you know, educating a girl—and I say it all year—it’s not about being in a classroom; it’s about empowering the whole community and it’s about everybody being part of that. And what we would love to see now, and we are just in the process of an organization where we are looking at what has made us most successful. How can—how can we share that with the world? And we are in the process of asking ourselves, one, is the model actually a government partnership, where the school is registered as a government school, we are the sponsors? And what that creates is that we have an opportunity to work with other schools, we have an opportunity to work with other teachers, we have an opportunity to impact other local schools. So that’s one of our really greatest things. The other thing that we’ve learned over time is that our girls are going to high school, but their high school education is not preparing them for the next—for the—for the world that we are in now. We are no longer about just teaching to pass exams. It’s about what skills are you coming out of—I mean, we had our girls finish high school last year, and I was shocked. I mean, you don’t think about this, but none of them had had computers. So, in reality’s sense, they had to apply for college using a computer and they have never had a computer. And I’m sitting there like, so, in high school, we should be giving the girls access to computers. We should be able to learn this skill. So I’ve learned about that. And then the other thing about career development—and, you know, we talk about in a rural setting where the only thing that a girl knows is her teacher and us, and that’s still limited. So one thing I came to realize: if you ask the girls in my school, each one of them wants to be a doctor. So I finally figured out, why did they want to be a doctor? (Laughter.) Apparently because I’m called Dr. Kakenya. (Laughter.) So—(laughs)— VOGELSTEIN: That is wonderful. NTAIYA: So the whole time I’m thinking they want to be—you know, they think I’m actually a doctor because they have never seen—I mean, I’m the first woman in the whole community to have a Ph.D., and they’re like—their minds doesn’t even—so you have to really bring in that kind of setting, like, you know, creating those spaces. So I think for us, one is really we want to be the—(inaudible). We want to be the Center of Excellence where people come and learn from us. We are building a second school now. We are really thinking about being sustainable. Working in a rural community, we are talking about waste management, something that we wouldn’t think about in the city. We are talking about using local resource(s), because for us to build our first school we had to get everything from outside into the village. Now we are thinking about how do we make our own bricks, how do we, you know—you know, we talk about the solar system. How do we tap into the solar system within our own community? How do we become sustainable in terms of farming the right—like, we don’t need to buy food; we can make our own food. So we are really looking at that, solving that problem, because I think the biggest thing that’s scarce, people who are well-wishers and who wants to make a difference in the world, is when that road ends where do I get water? Water is very—it’s life. So when you know that you’re not going to have a shower, you’re like, really? (Laughter.) You start thinking about those things. So we want to show the world and we want to show that if you invest in girls in rural communities they are at the center of everything. So you are investing on that girl. That girl is invested in her family. She touches—it’s a ripple effect, and it really starts with the girl. So that’s what we are trying to do. We want to create a model that people can just jump into the most difficult places to make a difference, because if we leave those girls—I mean, in Africa, eighty percent of the populations are in rural places. So how can we get to them if we don’t jump into that line? So, yeah, so that’s what we are trying to create. And it’s not—it’s not necessarily—and I’m looking for—this is where, you know, I’m looking not just for financial support, but I’m looking for people who want to think beyond just, you know, skills, you know. Everybody has skills. And I think—I look at it like my team and, I mean, from interns that we’ve had who are amazing people who want to make a difference, I look at this as a lab. What can you bring in to create something that we can share with the world? So that’s what we are—we are doing. VOGELSTEIN: So let’s move now from the local, from this rural community in Kenya, to the global. And, Sarah, I’d love to ask you to talk about the State of the World Population Report. We actually have the most recent report, which is hot off the presses, for 2018, but I’d actually like to start by asking you about the one that came out before, in 2016, that focused on the ten-year-old girl and stated that the world’s future will be determined by the fate of its ten-year-old girls. Tell us, from a development perspective and from a global perspective, why it’s so important to focus on girls, and specifically how this focus manifests programmatically at UNFPA. CRAVEN: Is it on? VOGELSTEIN: It’s on. (Laughs.) CRAVEN: That’s a huge—that’s a huge question, Rachel. I’ll do my best. First, I just want to start by just letting people know that I’m here wearing several hats. So I am assuming three hats that I want people to be aware. I work for UNFPA, the U.N. Population Fund, so in that role I’m here as an advocate. I’m also on the board of Kakenya’s Dream, which is another hat I’m wearing. But I think the most important hat that I’m wearing is I am one of the backup singers to this rock star. (Laughter.) There are many people in this room who could be sitting in my chair as one of those rock star backup singers. So I have the honor of being here today, but when we open it up to dialogue I feel really humbled by everyone here who’s been part of this journey. So, with that in mind, I’m also happy to talk about UNFPA’s report from two years ago, which was on the—which was on the ten-year-old girl. And from my perspective and from UNFPA’s perspective, the most important person in the world was the ten-year-old girl. And for those of you who can go back and remember when you were a ten-year-old girl, or when you were a ten-year-old boy and knew ten-year-old girls, it’s a time in your life where the world is still full of possibility. You are in school. The world is your vision. You are dreaming of becoming a doctor or a lawyer or a teacher or whatever role it is. But for many girls in the developing world, that world can suddenly change dramatically when they’re twelve and they hit puberty; and suddenly those options, those opportunities, the choices they had suddenly become much more diminished. And in the case of Kakenya, you know, she had to make this dramatic choice of undergoing female genital mutilation, this cultural practice that was preparing her for being a mother and for being a wife, and for no longer having those options. So girls no longer are able to stay in school. They are put into situations where they are being married before they’re physically ready, emotionally ready to be in that situation. They’re taken out of school. And that impacts, of course, the life of that girl. It also impacts the family, the immediate family, and it impacts the larger community, and then the nation. So it’s that ripple effect. And so at UNFPA we really want to drill down and focus on that ten-year-old girl. What investments can we make to ensure that that ten-year-old girl can grow up to be Kakenya, to have that opportunity that she can stay in school, that she can decide who she wants to marry, she can make that decision on what she wants to do, when she wants to have children, how many children she wants to have. And that involves a very large enabling environment. So it involves situations like having a school like Kakenya’s where she can go to school and be there safely and get herself there. It also means an enabling environment, a legal environment which is supportive of her rights and her ability to be in school and to be able to maximize her health and potential. And it means having someone believe in her. So Kakenya believes in all of those girls in her community and has become a real advocate for them. So if you go on our website today, we do have a new report—(laughs)—that builds on that. But what I really would say, unfortunately, it doesn’t have any of Kakenya’s girls, but we have a very beautiful visual on today that’s looking at the girls that we focused on two years ago and where they are now. And, happily, many of those girls are—they represent a global picture. Many of them are still on a very good chart moving forward. Next year is going to be the fiftieth anniversary of my organization, the U.N. Population Fund. And what we’re going to focus on next year—and unfortunately, I’m happy to say, I do not qualify—but it will be looking at sixty-year-old women and ask, looking back from when they were a ten-year-old girl, how has the world evolved in those fifty years, and then looking at a new cohort of ten-year-old girls and what their vision is for the next fifty years. So I’m hoping one of your girls, Kakenya, and maybe one of your sixty-year-old mamas back in the village, can be profiled in that. NTAIYA: Yeah, that would be good. VOGELSTEIN: Sarah, you’ve talked about the support UNFPA gave to Kakenya in developing her leadership role in her community, and now of course there’s this whole new generation of Kakenyas that has resulted. And clearly, Kakenya’s leadership made the difference there. What other programs that UNFPA has supported have been successful? And what are the elements of that success? And what would you like to see the United Nations do—not just your agency, but across the organization—to better support the programs, the best practices that you see working well? CRAVEN: Well, first of all, Kakenya is our—you know, one of our shining stars. I’ll tell you, the way I first met Kakenya was we were doing a panel on child marriage, and Kakenya had just been featured in The Washington Post. And so my colleague gave me the job that I had to take her out to dinner to vet her, to make sure she wouldn’t embarrass the U.N. (Laughter.) And so I met her and I thought, oh, I think—I think she’s going to do a pretty good job. (Laughter.) So the next day she spoke with our at the time executive director, Thoraya Obaid, and Thoraya’s story had been similar to Kakenya’s. Thoraya was from Saudi Arabia, and she was the first Saudi woman to come to the United States on a government scholarship. And I had told Thoraya—I said, oh, you’re going to really like Kakenya; she’s just like you. And Thoraya was like, what do you mean she’s just like me? And then, after Kakenya spoke, Thoraya got up and she said, this girl is just like me. (Laughter.) And so, after that, Thoraya said—I said, well, you know, she needs a job. And Thoraya said, well, we’re going to hire her. And I will give UNFPA great credit for that. We give more than lip service to engaging young voices in our work. Kakenya was a youth fellow, where she worked at headquarters. She was a little bit unique in that she came to us through Washington, D.C., but usually we identify young professionals in their home countries. They’ll work in the country office and then come and do a stint at headquarters. Our colors at UNFPA are orange, and so we have what we call the Tangerines, which are our younger staff. So whenever we have any kind of global meeting or programmatic work, we actually have our younger members of our team as full participants in terms of they’re not just the ones setting up the nametags, but they’re there leading with their ideas and leading. And so I see for the whole U.N. system I think we have done some good work, but we need to do a lot more in terms of engaging young people’s participation—that it’s not just, oh, the youth are having their own separate meeting, and here’s their list of wishes or demands; instead, that they are part of that dialogue and conversation, and that youth perspective is as valid and as important. Because right now we are entering a moment in the world where we have the largest cohort of young people in the world. We have over a billion young people entering their reproductive years. And so not just the U.N., but member states all have to be focusing on ensuring that young people’s potential is fulfilled. VOGELSTEIN: You talked a little bit about the importance of an enabling environment for girls, and I wanted to ask about the environment for UNFPA. It’s now been a year since your current executive director assumed her role as the head of the agency. Can you talk to us briefly about what some of her main priorities are and some of the biggest challenges that you face? CRAVEN: Sure. Well, I’m hoping you all can get to meet her if you haven’t already. Her name is Dr. Natalia Kanem. She has been at UNFPA just about a year. She’s has very interesting story herself. She is a(n) Afro-Caribbean from Panama, and came to the United States when she was a young girl. I think she didn’t have the same family support structure that would support her, but she got here. She ended up graduating from Harvard and getting her medical degree from Columbia, and spent most of her career in sub-Saharan Africa working on these issues. So we’re really delighted to have her leadership. Under her leadership we have a new strategic plan at UNFPA. So our goal is to go out of business, and our goal is to get to what we call the three zeroes. So that is by—under the Sustainable Development Agenda, we’re focusing on three pieces: one is zero unmet need for contraception or family planning; zero preventable maternal deaths; and zero tolerance for gender-based violence, with a particular focus on harmful practices such as female genital mutilation and child marriage. So we have a very ambitious agenda. Today’s report, if you go on our website and find it, is like a kickoff to next year, where we’re really focusing on these three big goals and focusing on next year, where we have the twenty-fifth anniversary of the conference that happened in Cairo, Egypt, which has created this blueprint of action for us. And I just want to say Anju Malhotra—butchering your name, Anju—my colleague from UNICEF, is here, who has been a key partner to UNFPA, where together we do work on ending child marriage and ending female genital mutilation. So a lot of that joint work has been very critical to the issues that Kakenya works on every day. VOGELSTEIN: Well, we have a lot of experts around the table, so I’d love to open the discussion now to questions. Please raise your placard and state your name and affiliation, and we’ll get to as many as we can. Why don’t we start over here, and then over to Anju? Q: Hi. I’m Tami Hultman from AllAfrica. Kakenya, on your website you have a conversation between two interns, Canadian from—students from—college students, I guess, from British Columbia, and it’s about their time there. And in contrast to so many organizations which have international volunteers who come to teach, to help, the whole tone of their conversation is that they were there to learn, and how much they learned from you and the girls and the school and the way things were done, almost as thought they really were interns there to absorb expertise and come back to Canada and share it. How do you—how do you get interns like that? Do you—do you say to people you’re not coming here to tell us what to do—(laughs)—you’re coming here to be part of us as we move forward and to learn? NTAIYA: I think my organization has always worked with young people from our beginning chalet. (Laughs.) And I don’t necessarily go out there and say we need intern. I think what we have been very successful is we’ve been able to find people who want to go, who want to help. And I think that curiosity is something that so many young people are now learning in college, and that—just curiosity of a heart that wants to help and wants to learn. And I’ve been very fortunate for George and Rachel, who spent three months. That’s the other thing: you cannot just come for one month—(laughs)—you have to come for at least three months and above. I think the first month is like, where am I? And then the second year is really about learning about the place. And by the time you’re leaving, you really feel that you know the place, you know the people. The interns stay with families, so you are embedded within the family. You have to do what the family does, and it’s really about the living experience. And I think the thing I’ve learned is that to truly change the world we have to listen to the young people. And I think Sarah shared about the work that UNFPA does bringing young people from developing world, from—in their rural villages to giving them an experience to learn how to shape the world. I look at young people as these are the—this is the future. And when I see how my country—my country is, the issues of corruption we are fighting, the issues of, you know, gender-based violence, all the things that you look and see that is not good in the world, if we can work with young people—both my girls, the boys that we work with—and connecting them generally, they are going to be creating laws. They are going to be implementing. This is the future. So we—they have to be part of that, solving that problem. And I think for young people from the—you know, from the developed world or from the place that they have never entered into that, what it means to be in a poor place, what does it mean to go through FTM, to live in a community that practices that it changes who you become in the future. Q: And would you take interns from other parts of Africa? NTAIYA: Yes. We have interns even within Kenya. Yeah, it’s—we don’t have a boundary saying that this is the only people. (Laughs.) We work with young people across the world because I think that is—that’s the way to go. You can’t just say this, this, so you have to put them all together, create relationships that will change the world. VOGELSTEIN: A lot of possibilities there. Anju, please. Q: Thank you very much, Sarah, for the collaboration message. And certainly, I think that the U.N. is for the first time in a space where the generation that we are facing currently is both a promise and a challenge that we have to really realize. So at UNGA this time Generation Unlimited was launched, and UNICEF’s new executive director is also very much with Natalia in moving that agenda forward. My comment and question is a little bit convoluted and is for Kakenya, but I hope you’ll have patience to sort of appreciate what I’m trying to ask her. You know, over the last six years while I have been at the U.N., part of the reason I went to the U.N. is because I wanted the girl agenda to go to scale. And so the issue of scale has been the one that has been absorbing me the most, and we are working on a large—a global child marriage program, a large FGM program, but also at UNICEF I’m working on girls’ education programs, nutrition programs, water and sanitation programs, and I’m very much active in the gender and adolescent community. And it makes me wonder when I look at people like you—and I think you’re absolutely right in saying there are so many shining lights like you. There are so many courageous girls and women who have taken action, and either must managed to save their own lives but also become models for so many others, and taken courageous steps. Malala comes to mind and you come to mind. And when I talk to Malala, she says there are so many Malalas out there that we don’t talk to. And I think the question is, are we putting too much of a burden on you by putting all our ducks or all our whatevers, investment options, in you? Because the issue is not just for you to shine, but for you guys to become a Milky Way. That’s really, really powerful. And what are we doing? Where is it that we’re building the infrastructure to make sure that there is a road and there is no end to the road, right? Where are we building the capacity for those schools to actually have the teachers? I mean, it’s one of the most interesting things I recently have been doing with our education colleagues when I—when they say, yeah, of course we are working for girls’ education, what else do you want us to do? I’m saying, well, let’s do a pipeline analysis. First of all, it’s not just convincing. It’s not just norm change. We can change the norms. We can—most parents actually really do want their girls to go to school. (Laughs.) But there aren’t schools. There isn’t a road. There isn’t transportation. There isn’t safety once they’re there. There isn’t food to eat to make them, as you say. So even when we will build toilets and school(s), they are not—there’s water—(laughs)—for them to function, nobody’s taking care of them. How do we build infrastructure that actually really supports girls and is maintained? Where is the capacity we’re building so that those schools actually have teachers who teach, and teach the skills that you’re talking about? So it’s not just an issue of giving computers, but having people who can teach the girls—(laughs)—how to use the computers and not lock them up in a cabinet because they’re so precious, right? So I guess my question to you really is, what do you ask of us, those of us who are not just giving small amounts to NGOs but are part of government and multilateral systems that are spending billions of dollars? Where should they be going? NTAIYA: Thank you so much, Anju, for your wonderful explanations and your continual work. I thank UNICEF and UNFPA. I mean, they are everything in Kenya, and we really appreciate the work that you are doing to support the girls. I think you really hit the nail on the head—(laughs)—as they say, because I think for a very long time, you know, we come with these policies—free primary education—and it’s really good. But what we realize, yes, girls are going to school, but there is no teacher, there is no toilets, there’s no—like, there are all those things that are not there. And I think us and Sarah and my couple of teammates here and my—we are really trying to show the world what does it really mean to empower a girl? What do you really need? So somebody will say uniforms. Somebody will say toilets. Somebody will say a classroom. Somebody will—I mean, there is school fees. And you realize you are paying school fees, the girl is going to school, and in that school she’s being abused. So you really have to look at a holistic—a holistic model, a holistic approach. And that’s what we’ve learned. The reason why we are building a second school is because we want to build a high school, because for a long time we are sending our girls to different places and we realize we are lacking. The school system is not ready to empower that girl, so we are losing. So how do we—how do we create that thing when—Anju asked: What do I need to empower a girl? I will hand you something that says, you know, you need a good teacher because teachers—it’s not just about the teachers who come to the classroom. Are they passionate? Are they willing to educate a girl? Or are they there to abuse the girl? So you need to sensitize that. You need to be able to say, a boarding school, yeah, why are we doing a boarding school? Because we know that when the girls are home—but then they go home. So in their homes, are they being used as workers? Are they—are they being children? So these are really—it’s a complicated issue. It’s challenging. But I think the biggest thing that you would need to do is I think the approach need to change to just—it’s great to invest in governments, but I think the funds that you put into those local NGOs, those local people who are doing the things in the most extreme, the funds that you put there are more—there is more to show than what you are—you know, you do with especially our government, which is just another talk for a different day. But I think—I think your question is that you need a lot of Malalas, and they are there. It’s about identifying them, creating the space for them to thrive, linking them so that they know that somebody else is doing something somewhere else, and really creating that road that you already started. There is no end. It means that we are coming. And trust me, the young people who are coming from behind, they’re just going to push us all out and they’re going to change the world. And that’s what we need to do. When I look at my girls, I mean, they are passionate. They are passionate. They are saying no. They are saying no to FGM. They are saying—I mean, it’s—for the very first time my community has these girls who are going to college who have never been cut. And I’m like, uh. And then, like, this is a wave because the biggest thing we’ve done for—especially for our girls, it’s a network. They know that I cannot do alone; I need you as a team. And I think you just—you answered your own question, actually. You just said what you needed to do. And I think we need all of us to start changing our minds, changing the way we do things, and just let—empower the young people. Let them run the world. VOGELSTEIN: Sarah, anything you want to add on this question of supporting individual leaders versus building infrastructure to create that enabling environment you were talking about earlier? NTAIYA: Oh, you need all of them, though. You can’t just choose one and leave the other. VOGELSTEIN: So both and. NTAIYA: Yes. CRAVEN: I have—we should, like, sit for hours because there’s so much—(laughter)—to unpack in what you just talked about. I mean, one thing I want to say, that I just really want to emphasize was so amazing when I’m wearing my hat as Kakenya friend/board member, is, imagine, she was the first girl in her community to go to college, right? And now how many girls did you just send off to college? NTAIYA: Twenty-four. CRAVEN: Twenty-four, right? So that’s in ten years we’ve had a big change right there. It’s sort of amazing. This past spring four girls came for the model U.N., and they came with their teachers. And what was amazing about this was their teachers had never left the village or the community. So first they all had to get to Nairobi, and then they all had to get here. And then guess what happened? It snowed. (Laughter.) And so there was this quick, like, oh my gosh, everyone give you mittens and your gloves and your jackets. And so these four—it’s a little bit an anecdote, and then I’m going to get back to maybe knowing how to answer Anju’s question. But the—we met with these young women. They were the four years that don’t want to be doctors. Three wanted to be pilots and one wanted to be an accountant, I think, to add up all the money that the pilots were going to make. (Laughter.) But when we asked these girls what was the thing that, like, struck them the most about—one said snow. I’m trying to remember what the—one said snow. One said Times Square. I forgot what the third one said. And the fourth one said the Martin Luther King Memorial, because of what your country has done for civil rights. How old is that girl, ten? NTAIYA: She’s thirteen. CRAVEN: Thirteen. Can you imagine? I mean it was unbelievable. So I just want to say if the U.N. could somehow figure out how to get more funding into the hands of the Malalas and the Kakenyas—and Linette (sp), who just went off to university in Australia, who was educated in Kakenya’s school—I think some of this ripple effect could happen. I think for me, listening not as the U.N. but listening to Kakenya as her friend, she sometimes tells me the most harrowing things that are going on that we talk about at this level, and then she talks about the reality. For example, if I’m telling this story right, in Kenya, FGM is illegal. NTAIYA: Yeah, mmm hmm. CRAVEN: Is illegal. And so some—it was cutting season and some girls were being cut, and so they came through and they arrested all of the perpetrators, which included these girls’ parents. So then Kakenya had the situation of girls who were bleeding, who were injured, who didn’t have any of the—and these weren’t students at your school, but who didn’t have any of the support structure and parents who were there to help take care of them. So we don’t think about all that, right? Like, we just think, like, oh, we did a great thing because— NTAIYA: We stopped them. (Laughs.) CRAVEN: We stopped this— NTAIYA: The law is there. CRAVEN: The law is there. So these are the things that I think that Kakenya can help us in our lofty seats realize how important it is. It’s important that we outlaw FGM, but we also have to know what that means in terms of the reality on the ground. So I’m just mumbling in terms of response. It’s hard. But I think how we can create more Milky Ways is very important, and I think that is getting resources in the hands of local communities. VOGELSTEIN: Of our leaders. Let’s come over here to Daniela (sp) and then we’ll move to the other side. Q: Thanks. So much to think about. Wow. So glad I’m here. Thanks for all you’re doing. My question was a little bit related to what Anju was raising. And I guess it’s something we’ve been struggling with. You know, we’re a public-private partnership that works with UNFPA, UNICEF, et cetera, but really trying to change this kind of mindset of doing things in a multisectoral way at a national level. But every time I hear about these shining stars, what we like to call sometimes these boutique projects where you—where you see someone who, in a small community or in a district or in a—at a small scale has been able to do that, it really raises for me whether—I agree it’s an and/or. It’s a both, like, from national level—so kind of a top down and a bottom up. But I think there’s more to do at that bottom level. And I’m wondering whether you have thoughts about, for example, is it just about finding a single NGO—because that’s what we tend to do—and then putting money there? Or are there opportunities to try to bring together at a district level, at a village level multiple actors—I know you don’t want to talk about government, but that’s an important piece, you know—(laughter)—and other players to perhaps start doing more at that local level to see what can change? And so I’m wondering whether you’ve had some experiences with that and whether it’s just kind of a lost cause in your case. But have you seen anything that’s been able to work in a multisectoral way at a smaller level that perhaps could teach us about where to make those investments? NTAIYA: Daniela (sp), that’s what exactly we do. So we do work with the governments. Even, you know, I have this love/hate relationship with the government. (Laughs.) I want to give you an example of a program that we run that’s called—we call it Health and Leadership because we are hiding too many things under the health, because we want to talk about FGM but we actually want to talk about teen pregnancy, we want to talk about rape, and we want to talk about, you know, hygiene, we want to talk about sanitary part. So we pack it all together so when you come we’re actually talking about health, but we talk to (many ?) about other things. Within that program, the leadership component is really about raising their hand and overcoming some of the cultural things that are—a girl should not look at somebody’s eyes, so you should always look down. When you are walking on the road and there are boys, there are men, or there are people who are passing there right behind you, you step on the side and then they go. And what we are trying to teach the girls is that you matter. So when you are in class you raise your hand. You know, girls—and this is common, actually—women, we want to be right before we answer, we poke up the hand. So we have that. But the most exciting part with that is we have a self-defense component. I think we talk about gender-based violence from, you know, women and when it comes to children, finding nine-year-olds, eight-year-olds, you know, who are being raped by relatives at their homes. That changes how you approach things, because it’s one thing to—and I’ve learned a lot. I mean, I used to just come and give information, and now you realize somebody writes a question and said this is happening to me at home; what do I do? So that changed our approach to where we actually bring the children’s office, which is part of the government’s body, into our meetings. We bring in the police, because we have this relationship, we don’t like police at all. So we want to create a relationship between the police, the gender desk, and the community so that the girls can know if something happen(s) to me, if I go to that police station, I know so-and-so. We bring in the doctors and the nurses, because the biggest challenge is that a girl would report a case; between the reporting and the time they go and do the doctor’s report, something happen(s). I mean, all the doctor needs to do is just write no penetration, the case is out. So between those two, there is corruption and all the things that happen between that. So we realize that. We will bring information, but we need to bring in the whole team so that there’s a relationship between all those offices, all those stakeholders. The chief needs to be there. Like, when we are implementing our no-FGM policy, the chief is the one who is actually implementing it. He’s the one who is telling the parents you’re signing, your girl is not going to be cut. And it’s really—it’s a small scale, but if you think about, you know, the over three hundred girls that we have touched over the last few years, remember that their generation, none of them is going to be cut. That means their children will not be cut. And that’s really a ripple effect. And I think we need to start changing our narrative about scale. When we think about scale, we just think about up there and, like, all the things, all of a sudden the country’s changing. But it’s really about the networks. It’s about my work. It’s about so many other young people. And there’s so many of us. I mean, so many amazing people that are coming up doing amazing things. It’s about: How do we amplify that as a whole? How do we share experiences? How do we—how do we create that network? And that’s really what you want to lift up. It’s that network of people, of organizations, of individuals across the world who are doing good. And that’s—really, truly, for me it’s the scale. It’s not about the whole community. I don’t know how, but it’s about those networks of people. That is scale to me. VOGELSTEIN: Thank you. Let’s come over here. Janet. Q: Thank you so much. It’s really—in these dark times, it’s really wonderful to hear what you’re doing, and to hear what you’ve learned, and to hear your perspective on how to move forward. And I’d love to draw you out a little bit about—with some advice for us in this moment in Washington and around the world, particularly in the areas of sexual and reproductive health, family planning. Sometimes this administration will say that people on the ground in the countries where we have programs don’t want family planning or they—you know, it’s culturally inappropriate for the U.S. to be pushing or even providing a range of methods on a voluntary basis because of all of these perceived barriers that people who tend to not be proponents of these services are advocating. So I guess what I’d love to hear from you is how would you frame the issue of sexual and reproductive health and rights for adolescent girls? And what’s your message to the U.S. government about how to move that forward? VOGELSTEIN: Small question, Kakenya. Jump right in. (Laughter.) NTAIYA: Oh my goodness. I think one thing—I am not even trying to address the U.S. government right now, but I think for people in this room my advice or my little knowledge is that, you know, for a very long time we keep saying, you know, we need to be culturally appropriate, we need to be—you know, we don’t need to step over—this is how they do it; we shouldn’t bring our ideas. I don’t know, what, and what, and what, and what. At the end of the day, you know, when somebody tells me, oh, it’s cultural, we just cut the girls, I mean, it’s mutilation. It shouldn’t happen, you know? It’s like giving them permission to keep doing that to girls. So we should never apologize for supporting human rights, never apologize for rescuing girls, never apologize for taking girls and making sure that they don’t go through FGM. That just culturally, religion, whatever you call it, stop. It’s wrong. I mean, we all know that. We shouldn’t try to make it look pretty. I think I always say—you know, I put myself—and I have this weird because I live in I don’t know how many different worlds where I’ll go to the village and I would see a girl getting married, and somebody will tell me it’s culturally OK for a thirteen-year-old, fourteen-year-old to be married. And then you find her a few months/years later, she’s pregnant, she has another baby, and she has another baby, and she’s living in poverty. If you talk to that lady, she would tell you, where is family planning? (Laughs.) I need to space. I need—I need—I need—I need—I need—I need to be able to manage. Because food—at the end of the day, you can have children and they don’t have food. It comes to the basics of that. So I think—and I’m rambling through too many things—but the bottom line is that never apologize for human rights abuse. Never apologize for it. Just don’t apologize. Just do what is right. Yeah. VOGELSTEIN: Sarah, I don’t know if you have anything to add on the— CRAVEN: A lot. (Laughter.) VOGELSTEIN: —challenging moments that UNFPA faces with respect to the— CRAVEN: I’m not going to talk about the U.S. government. (Laughter.) VOGELSTEIN: —the current administration. CRAVEN: I’m not going to—I’m not going to talk about the U.S. government. (Laughter.) But I guess I think it’s just important whenever we can get real voices to policymakers. Kakenya certainly has gone and spoken up on the Hill in one of the most moving moments—well, I’ve had many moving moments with Kakenya, but it was when she testified in the U.S. Senate before Senator Marco Rubio and Senator Tim Kaine and really raised these issues and lifted them up. So I think there are U.S. policymakers who understand, and the more we can use those opportunities to talk about Kakenya’s story and what the reality on the ground is, I agree, we shouldn’t—what’s the word—we shouldn’t dilute the reality of what it is because it makes people feel uncomfortable. I’ve been in too many situations. I’ve had a Democratic female senator who shall go nameless who said she was not going to talk about menstruation or sanitary napkins because it made her feel uncomfortable, and I don’t think—that was a decade ago. I don’t think we would say that now. So I think we just have to be very honest and also talk about why investments in sexual and reproductive health have had great benefits and is something the U.S. should be proud of, which is something you do all—do so well and all of us around this room do so well. VOGELSTEIN: Let’s come over here, please. Q: Hi. Hi. My name’s Samantha (sp). I’m a second-year student studying international studies and global economics at American University, right, two minutes up north in D.C. And you had discussed about wanting to push forward the model of community and relationship building and sustainable education within not only rural communities, but just all over the world. And my question for you was, what thoughts have you had or what ideas have you had for streamlining? Just because, at least coming from a college perspective and especially someone who’s participated in model United Nations, model G-20 summit initiatives, the one question or the one idea that has always been brought up here—and it’s almost the default that every student, whether it’s on the collegiate or high-school level—is social media campaigns. And that’s always been the default people go to, is use social media campaigns. Yet, there is obviously some areas that don’t have access to that. So my question is—for you is, what ideas have you thought about in order to push this model forward, especially within rural communities? NTAIYA: Hi, Samantha (sp). I think, yeah, I did international relations—(laughter)—and I tried economics. I left halfway. (Laughter.) I did model U.N., so you are—you’re just ready to go. (Laughs.) I think, you know—I think we shouldn’t underestimate social media. I mean, Facebook is everywhere. (Laughs.) It’s amazing. When I came to the U.S. to go to college, I couldn’t call my home. It took me six months to get a letter there. And now I have to call my mom into the room, it’s like a different two worlds. So I don’t think you should underestimate the power of social media. It has helped us a lot, especially Facebook. People will find—we do—we don’t put ourself as rescue people, but occasionally we will be called on to rescue girls who are being abducted for marriage, and people will literally put it on Facebook that this is happening, and it has helped some girls a lot on that. So I think the question goes back, again, to where we were with Anju. It’s really about where do you start and where do you—where do you go from there, and what do you need in the—along the way to get it there. I think it’s a question that Kakenya would not be able to answer alone. I think it’s going to really take a lot of people to come together and to shift the mindset of doing things the way we normally do, and really focus how do we—how do we change that narrative. Thank you. VOGELSTEIN: Why don’t we come over here to one final question. CRAVEN: Can I add on to that real quick? VOGELSTEIN: Please, Sarah. CRAVEN: Just to say also on the social media, I’m going to do a little plug for Kakenya. There’s a new video out called Keeping Up with Kakenya, which is going to come out every month, every two weeks. Every month? NTAIYA: Every month. CRAVEN: Every month. So— NTAIYA: India (sp) is like—(laughs). CRAVEN: So India (sp) here is part of that, telling the story. So certainly we have to use social media to do cultural/social change at the rural level, but whatever anyone in this room can do to help tell this story, because all of Kakenya’s efforts are done based on individual contributions, a few—a few foundations. So get that story out. So there’s another great one that we like called A Mighty Girl, and we’ve never met the mighty girls. We don’t know who they are. And then suddenly one day there will be a post talking about Kakenya, and then within, you know, twenty-four hours, like, seven thousand people have contacted Kakenya. So it’s really when you can tell this story, social media helps broaden it and gets Kakenya the support she needs to then be able to support it on the ground. VOGELSTEIN: Great potential. One final question. Q: Hi. Thank you very much. My name is Anne Griffin. I’m a new member of the board of Kakenya’s Dream, and my background is with international foundations over the last twenty years in Africa with a focus on education. And I wanted to just ask more kind of a point of clarification and also just a way for you to talk about how things work and how they work so miraculously for Kakenya’s Dream, and in particular this notion of centers of excellence and the holistic approach that you’ve touched on here and there, but haven’t really gone into. And I just thought, one, I’m just curious more and more about how it is working; and, two, this different approach that I would imagine you have when compared to just, you know, a regular boarding school, and how important it is, of course, to differentiate yourself and to explain why it is working so well. And it relates to what Daniela (sp) was saying, too, about the—you know, the ripple effect, and what is happening on the ground, and what kind of networks are taking place. So I was hoping that if—and as part of that explanation you could touch on your experience with schools. And you were saying you’re working with a number of schools now outside of your own, and how that is working, and what lessons you’ve learned, and some of those experiences that I think would help us to get a sense of how magical it is and, you know, how we can look to be supportive in the future for this approach. NTAIYA: Thank you, Anne Marie (sp). That’s a setup question today. (Laughter.) Thank you so much for asking. And, Sarah, I would love for you to help me on the way—along the way. And I have a different team. All of them can speak. I think, for us, the center is really the place. I talked earlier about we started as a day school and then we moved into a boarding school. And we take—we took thirty girls the first time, and after that it kept going up because each year we receive about two hundred and fifty girls applying to come to our school. We are not just a school that is just placed in a place; it’s a school that is really changing the perception of how girls are viewed in the community. The boarding school is essential. It’s a place where it’s residential, so they live there. And most people are telling me, how would you take a ten-year-old away from their parents? But you realize that at that age, when they are nine, ten, it’s when the society’s starting to tell the girl that now you’re a big girl, behave well, stop playing, and they just start changing their mindset. So we come in and we change their mindset. And the greatest exercise I like doing with the girls is that when they walk in, I tell them to draw their future. And literally, most of them are—they are drawing buildings. Some are drawing orphanages. Some are drawing being a lawyer. Some want to be doctors. And each one of them, the reason why they are choosing that is because of a relationship that has to be with something. So an orphan will always write—will draw an orphanage because she wants to be protected when she—when orphans are left at home, they become the workers at their home. So they are—they are really exploited. So when we come to the school, we put those girls, we have good teachers. Our teachers, we vet them. In high school is where I’m having challenges of getting more teachers, but the primary school we have a lot of teachers from different parts of the country. They are not just from my home village. There are actually maybe two or three, but most of them are from outside. We train our—we retrain our teachers to know that they need to respect the girls. Our classroom is not a regular classroom where there are desks facing forward; it’s mostly tables to create collaborations with the girls and to also let the teacher know that it’s not about hierarchy of you up and the girls down. So we have different blackboards or whiteboards in different locations. So there is that shift, that it’s not just a normal classroom. We ensure that the girls go through a training where I talked earlier about on leadership and health. We talk about, you know, you need to know your rights. So we are not just teaching math and English and all the other amazing subjects, but we are really creating that voice to be out so that the girls can be able to advocate for themself. The new additions that we did in this year in the school is we’ve had—we have a library, the very first one in the community. That is not just helping our girls, but it’s also helping schools from (within ?). So, you know, that—you know, in these communities in America there are, like, libraries everywhere? I was really shocked when—my very first time is to go to a library and I was like, wow, you mean I can check them out for free and I can bring them back? There’s nothing like that in the community. So we do that. We do field trips. Field trips are—you know, when we talk about field trips, maybe here it’s a concept that everybody knows, but we realized one thing is that all these kids are coming from their local villages. They have never been out, like out of anywhere. They’ve always been in the village. So one of the trips we do is to—(inaudible)—is like the lake and where there’s fishing for the very first time. The girls are like, oh, you mean you can eat fish? (Inaudible)—we don’t eat fish. So we’re really exposing them. We (field ?) them to go and see the national—you know, the Maasai Mara is one of the biggest—Maasai Mara, people don’t go there, you know? So we take our girls there and then learn from there. We take them to Nairobi. We take them to the parliament, where they meet women MPs. We really expose them, because at the end of the day it’s not just about learning in the classroom. It’s really learning from the outside. And there are so many other things to do. Can you, Sarah, help me continue the chapter? (Laughter.) We do so much. It’s really not just a school. It’s really, I don’t know, a center where you get to be exposed to so much, because that’s the only way you can really open up the minds of the people. I think the Masasais say—and I think it’s a saying that everybody say—the eye that has gone out knows more, so that’s kind of what we do. VOGELSTEIN: Sarah, a final word? CRAVEN: I guess final word is that, I mean, Kakenya is quite known in the area not just for her school, but the schools around it. When it’s not term time, the health and leadership camps that you talked about actually brings students from other areas in the—in the community who can come and then have some of that experience that they might not be getting in their own schools, which is incredibly important. We as a board, and certainly Kakenya, have learned a lot along the way because the first school is a hybrid with the government, and so there’s been a lot of learning—slow learning back and forth, and how much, you know—for example, the head teacher is someone who’s come through the Kenyan government, and she may have a very unique perspective. And so when this young Dr. Kakenya shows up with a lot of different ideas it was like, oh. So there’s been that kind of learning along the process. I think there’s been great validation. There’s a Catholic school that’s been quite supportive of you that has come and—who has a headmaster who really sees what Kakenya’s doing and then amplifies it, and has given you a lot of support. And I think, too, that when Kakenya gets a lot of global attention or when she’s seen, that trickles back to the village, too, and that gives her a lot more power in the sense that, for example, she as a woman can meet with the chief and bring up issues in a way that a woman probably couldn’t before. But there’s also, like, the challenge of that in that that can be threatening to the system as well. And so sometimes—or there’s beliefs sometimes within the community that Kakenya has—you know, she’s a millionaire or that she is magic. NTAIYA: (Laughs.) CRAVEN: You know, things like that that Kakenya has to balance. Q: She’s not a millionaire? NTAIYA: Um— CRAVEN: I don’t think so. (Laughter.) VOGELSTEIN: Let’s see. Q: She is a rock star. CRAVEN: She is a rock star, which are usually millionaires in the same time, so. (Laughter.) VOGELSTEIN: Not a millionaire, but a rock star. That’s a perfect place to conclude. Well, there is— NTAIYA: Could I—can I say one thing before I— VOGELSTEIN: Yes. Kakenya, one final word. NTAIYA: Sorry. VOGELSTEIN: Please. NTAIYA: I think, you know, I am on the light, kind of people saying Kakenya doing all this magic. But trust me, I have an amazing team from my matron to the cook to the team that just works with me, India (sp) as well. I mean, I have all of them. And it’s really not about—I think what I keep telling people, it’s just people willing to support a dream and believe in me, and willing to bring their ideas out. So I don’t have answers all the time, you know. I’m always like, what can you bring on the table? So if you know you’re really good at something that can help my girls, please talk to me and let’s work together. It’s going to take all of us. It’s going to take all of us to create a different—a better future for our children and our grandkids and all of the above. VOGELSTEIN: Well, there is no doubt that a lot of work lies ahead, but also that the conversation today has really illuminated the path forward. So please join me in thanking Kakenya and Sarah for spending time with us today. (Applause.) (END) This is an uncorrected transcript.

As technology transforms the world of work, a generation of girls is in danger of being left behind. Globally, girls are underrepresented in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education. In celebration of the International Day of the Girl Child, Roya Mahboob and Fatemah Qaderyan discussed their experiences breaking barriers in STEM and what needs to be done to reduce the education gender gap.   STONE: So we’re going to get started. Is everyone feeling good? This is the few, the proud, the breakfast crowd, CFR breakfast meeting. So I just wanted to welcome everyone. Good morning, my name is Meighan Stone, and I’m so honored to be a senior fellow here at the Council on Foreign Relations in our Women and Foreign Policy Program. Before I joined the team here at CFR, I worked with Malala Yousafzai, and I was the president of the Malala Fund, so—our youngest Nobel Peace Prize winner—so this is a particularly exciting day for me—International Day of the Girls, one of my favorite days on the calendar. And we’re really grateful that all of you made the time to join us today. Our mission here at the Women and Foreign Policy Program is to analyze how elevating the status of girls and women around the world furthers our U.S. policy objectives. So to that end, our conversation is actually on the record today; I know many conversations at CFR are not. This is a day where we want to encourage you to take your phone out and feel free to tweet. The hashtag is #CFRWomen—so #CFRWomen, and if you want to post a photo, or if you hear something today that’s particularly meaningful, that you want to expand the conversation beyond the Council and these walls, we want to encourage you to do that, and our team will engage with you on social. So we’re going to be having a presentation today to start. We’re going to mix it up. Today we’re going to have a bit of a TED Talk kind of 10-minute presentation from Fatemah. When I was your age there was no way I could have given that kind of talk—(laughter)—so I’m even more awed and honored by you, Fatemah. So she’s going to be presenting for about 10 minutes, and then we’re going to bring everyone up on stage to have a little bit of conversation. And then we’re going to open it up to Q&A as we always do at the Council. I want to especially encourage our younger attendees today—which means you are not an adult; you are a young woman or girl—to feel really bold about asking questions. We want to hear from you today. So today is really important because it is this International Day of the Girl. We’ve been celebrating this since 2011, and the goal of the day is really to celebrate girls’ extraordinary achievements and potential, and to take action to advance the rights and opportunities for girls everywhere. So having our guests today is right on point, all the more because they have a theme this year for International Day of the Girl, which is “A Skilled Workforce (sic; GirlForce).” So when we think about STEM, and tech, and digital—all the more relevant, and why not champion and celebrate girls and women doing this work in Afghanistan. We know we’ve had a lot of progress globally on girls and women in tech, but currently women hold only five percent of leadership positions in the tech industry, and only about three percent of ICT graduates globally are women. So we have a lot of ground to take. In Afghanistan specifically, we know that labor force participation rates with young women are particularly low, and we know that progress in education there can also sometimes be threatened by the security situation. And we even saw that secondary education for girls over the last few years in Afghanistan went from thirty-seven percent to thirty-five (percent.) So we want to see improvement. We’ve seen incredible efforts by the government of Afghanistan to continue to support those numbers. We’ve also seen cause for hope when we look at the parliament in Afghanistan, what are women doing when they graduate, when they’ve learned, when they’ve gotten their degrees. We see women holding 27.7 percent of seats in parliament in Afghanistan, and that number was only four percent in 1990—so cause for celebration and cause for more hard work together. I think all these statistics are why Roya’s work is so important in Afghanistan. We’re really excited to have you share with us today. My favorite fun fact about Roya is that she started her foundation operations trading bitcoin—(laughter)—to find resources to support her work, so her creativity and commitment are unparalleled. So today we just want to have this conversation on the International Day of the Girl to explore how we can expand learning opportunities and prepare girls to join this workforce of the future. So we’re thrilled and honored to have our guests here today, Roya Mahboob and Fatemah Qaderyan, and then also Kawsar Roshan has joined us as well, so we have an additional member of the Afghan robotics team. We are so thrilled that all of you are here. Roya is the founder and CEO of Digital Citizen Fund, which is a nonprofit that is increasing women’s technological literacy and providing employment and educational opportunities to girls across Afghanistan. She is one of Afghanistan’s first women tech CEOs, and she was named one of Time’s most a hundred influential people in the world because of her innovative initiatives in Afghanistan and globally to expand computer education. So we’re thrilled to have you, Roya. MAHBOOB: Thank you. STONE: Fatemah is the captain and the spokesperson of Afghanistan’s all-female, high school robotics team. She is 16 years old. I think you’re our first young woman to have speak at the Council in quite a while, if not ever, so this is a good day. We’re so glad you are here. She is an eleventh-grade student, so she is off from school to spend time with us today. She goes to Mehri High School in Herat, Afghanistan, and she actually wrote her first book, My Afghanistan, at the age of thirteen. And she is currently working on her second book. So we really admire that at the Council because we like to write books here, and to think that you’ve already got one done and you are working on your second is really impressive. So with that I want to hand it over to Fatemah to share with us, and Roya, who is going to be translating during her presentation. So I want to welcome you both to come up, and Fatemah, do you want to share your presentation with us today? Why don’t we give her a round just to welcome her? (Applause.) QADERYAN: (Through interpreter.) Salaam. This is not a greeting only from me, but it’s from all the young females from Afghanistan to you. As a child, my world was filled with curiosity. I had abundant passion for understanding how the world works. I watched documentaries about technology as favorite pastime. I sleep with a book under my pillow every night. I walk around with so many books in my backpack that my mom would often ask me whether I have filled it with stones. (Laughter.) I was six years old when I first saw the cartoon called I Robots (sp), and it was so interesting to me that how the robots could talk, and they could walk like humans. I became so curious about the technology works, and this was the first time that no one could answer my questions. After a time, my imagination grew and became a dream. I wanted to go to the school to learn as much as I could so I could one day build robots of my own. But I wasn’t aware of the danger of dreaming in my country. In my country, girls are not supposed to be curious, and instead they should be—(inaudible)—and shy. My mother told me stories about the dark area of the Taliban who would force women to stay inside of their homes so they would be easier to control. The Taliban insisted that the mullahs’ roles to be accepted as the truth. And they destroyed the power of the knowledge and imagination and left no room for innovation. They keep everyone in dark in the name of Islam and Sharia law. Even taught everywhere in Quran, curiosity and scholarship are encouraged. Today Afghanistan is a place where Rokhsana was stoned, where Farkhunda was (burned ?), and where women are murdered, but here are still sign of the hope. But due to the economic priority, teacher shortage, lack of opportunity, and the Taliban continued presence in the part of the country, many of the girls and children are still denied access to education. And even when the girls have the opportunity, cultural barriers and prejudices stand in their way. My team and I faced these challenges when we started our robotic team. The Afghan Dreamers started through a program run by Digital Citizen Fund, and our teacher was Alerazami Harimon (ph). Many of my relatives didn’t understand and support my interest in science and technology, especially because mechanic is such a male-dominated field. My father was the only one who supported, and encouraged me, and helped me to go every way. When we got the opportunity to go to the competition, we were so excited, but many girls couldn’t participate because their families were very conservative. One of our challenges was that our visa was denied, but finally, with intervention from president of United States, President Trump, we could finally get the visa. We broke our silence and spoke out, and our story reached millions of the people through the TVs and social media, and fifty-three congressmen signed a petition to us. And finally we could win and we could come back with the medal of silvers to our country. This medal sent a message to everyone who doubted us. We proved that if you giving a chance to the young girls we will be able to reach our full potential and will hold the Afghan flag with our pride. A week after our return to Afghanistan, ISIS took my father from me. I always believe that there is always a hero in the life of a child. And my father was my hero. A year has passed, but still I can’t believe that he is gone. It seems to me that good people die before their time. Everything is in a child that start with imagination. After a while, imagination grew and become a dream. Once they had a dream, they want to achieve in their reality. Children of conflict only knows the blackness of the blood and the redness of the blood. But they know that the condition in their country has forced them to only have access to two color from the whole pattern, no more. Many people in older generation continues to hold the prejudices told to them by the Taliban, but my generation is different. Children or young adults make up over fifty percent of our society population. Leadership must be in the hands of the young, the generation, and consider technology as weapon of the peace, but not the generation that consider Afghan (foes as brothers ?). We are the children of the war, but we have proven that hope still exists. Hope is what builds my today and your tomorrow. My friend and I were the ones who plant the first seed of the science, technology, engineering, art, and maths, and today we are harvesting the result. We had a chance to meet with president of Afghanistan, Ashraf Ghani, and sharing our plan to build the first school of science, technology, engineering, art, and maths in Afghanistan, and we are still surprised that he has not only accept one, but he wants to build five in five zone of Afghanistan. We are today—are the people who started a revolution of the technology in our country, and we still know that there are lots of the problem exists in our way, but we are trying to stand in front of all of those. And we have proven that sometimes a small opportunity can change the story in (a country ?). And we are happy that—to proving the importance of the STEAM education for not only our leaders, but also for our communities, and we are trying to—building the schools. And we were proving that today the pencils is on the hands of the young generation, and we are going to change the world. A thousand years ago, Afghanistan produced scholars like Abul Alecena (ph) and al-Biruni, who is scholars in math, and science, and philosophy, but influence and highly regarded around the world. Now it’s our turn to write the pages of our story through knowledge and technology. The children in my country no longer want to hear the sounds of the gun and bullets. We do not want to be bystanders. We wants to become the actors. We do not want to live in the fear of the distribution of international imports or relationship. We want to produce and be exports. This is why we have started technology revolution in our country. And I want to change your image of our country. My teammate and I know the danger under the water and, yes, we know that there are sharks that want to make us their prey. But we also know that there are shiny pearls in the depths of the ocean. We will go to them by swimming in the deepest water and we will harvest those pearls. And then I wanted to say that I wholeheartedly believe that we cannot see the future, but we can build ourselves so that the future we want becomes a reality. Thank you. (Applause.) STONE: Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you for sharing that. I still can’t believe you’re sixteen and just gave that speech. I can’t speak like that now and I’m way older. So we’re going to have our team bring up some chairs so we can sit and have a conversation together. So, Fatemah, if you want to—if you want to come back here, they’re going to bring all this up. We’re going to welcome Kawsar and Roya actually to come up and start our conversation. And so this is a good time to start thinking about your questions as well because we’re going to open that up in just a moment. So I want to start with Roya actually and just talk about what Fatemah just shared about wanting to change the image that many people have of Afghanistan, of your nation. And I’m wondering if you can share with us about this vision that you have to build the first high school that is STEM-focused for girls in Afghanistan. And what caused you to develop that vision? And why do you think this project is so important? MAHBOOB: Sure, and thank you. I think that I have to a little bit give you the background about myself and why we came up with this idea. I’m a tech entrepreneur from Afghanistan and I also ran a foundation called Digital Citizen Fund, that we are trying to empower women through digital literacy and providing education and financial literacy. We have helped thirteen thousand local girls to come through our program. We have different programs, from coding, building applications, games, and financial literacy to help them to start their own startups. But two years ago when we started a robotic team, things have changed. I mean, many of our projects had important impacts in our society, but I think that this one was a bit different. It was just was, like, a spark in the darkness and it has changed. After they come to the United States and they come back to their countries, they have been changed the view of so many people in the community, in the leadership, and in the politicians, and economics. So that was for us a hope to continue, to not let this light to be turned off. So we went to do so many competitions and they win some of the medals and they meet with lots of the leaders. And it has changed the view of the Afghan people, especially men, on the women’s ability in science and technology. And we have forty-one percent of our population lives under the age of eighteen—under the age of fifteen. And in order to compete in twenty-first century, we have to—the countries must have access to groundbreaking technologies. And unfortunately, inequality to access this education still exists and especially in the area of a third-world country, and Afghanistan is one of those countries that they don’t have that access. And what we want today is to build the first school of science, technology, engineering, art, and math in Afghanistan to build the next generation of the young leaders in science and technology. And we’re three years along to building the MIT-style university focusing on high tech and hopefully to see Afghanistan within the next ten years as a country with sources of high tech for their country. STONE: That is a great goal. I love that you talk about how you’re changing the perceptions of men in Afghanistan about what girls and women are capable of. And you’re just showing by doing, you’re leading by taking action. And I wanted just to ask about, you know, allies as we call them here in the states, so, you know, men that support, boys and men that support your work. I know, you know, Fatemah, when you shared so powerfully about your dad and about losing your dad and how he loved you so much and how he always supported you and celebrated how curious and inquisitive and intelligent you are and that he’s still in your heart today, you know, helping guide you. You know, I’m wondering if you can share about men that—you know, what is that interaction like with men around this or men who have been supportive? You know, I think about Malala’s father always saying that all he did was not clip his daughter’s wings and just let her fly. And, you know, I think there’s some real wisdom in there. I don’t know if you want to translate, Roya, the question for them. QADERYAN: (Speaks in Farsi.) MAHBOOB: She says that Afghanistan is very male dominated and very conservative. And if you don’t have the family support as a first thing, it’s not possible that you can continue your education or your growth. So for her, it was her father who supported her and that’s why she did succeed. And she said that at the beginning, the men in Afghanistan doubted their abilities, but today many of the families have changed views, especially men in their families on the women’s ability in science and technology and they supportive of this cause. And I have to also mention that lots of—we couldn’t be here today if the men didn’t help us and support us in this progress. And I guess it started from, first, from their coach that was a man, and then lots of others. Ambassador Mohib, he was very supportive of us. STONE: The ambassador of Afghanistan to the United States, who’s now the national security adviser to President Ghani, has been a big champion. MAHBOOB: Yes, he was a very big champion and he is still very supportive of us. And there are lots of other men in Afghanistan on the ground helping us to build these schools and building on our ability. And actually, they lobby for us. So also, I think that it’s very important to say that’s an important role of men in our success and especially for the future if you wanted to bring the change, because I think that this is a collaboration, it’s not, like, one, we only as women can go. We can go, but if we have the support of the men, we can do it faster. STONE: I think that’s such an important message and especially as people think about Afghanistan. I don’t know if you’ve heard, here in this country we’re still working on that issue as well, so we’re joined in that. I want to ask a question to Kawsar before we open it up to our guests. And so I don’t know if Kawsar wants to share about her own experience about what barriers she overcame in her life to be able to become part of the team. And I have to say I want one of the uniforms because they’re amazing. (Laughter.) They’re phenomenal. But what did—what did Kawsar overcome in her own experience to become part of the team? ROSHAN: (Speaks in Farsi.) MAHBOOB: She also mentioned that Afghanistan is a—is a country of male dominated and very conservative. And the women—we have very few women in the leadership of technology, so that’s also very challenging because they don’t have enough role models to look at. And for her, it’s just she lost her father when she was three years old. And her mom and her sister were supportive of her that she could come and joining to this team. And she was very interested in technology and science when she was a child because she likes the complex problems, to solve it. STONE: Well, we’re—if you can share with them we’re just really humbled by both of your strength and bravery and courage and commitment, especially losing family and still pressing on and achieving their dreams is really incredible. And we’re proud of you and we’re grateful you’re here. QADERYAN: (In English.) Family, yes. (Laughter.) STONE: All right. So we’re going to open it up to questions. What we do at the Council is, if you have a question, go ahead and put your placard up and we will call on you. So feel free to put up—I see a young woman putting her placard up first, Sophia. So are you ready to ask your question? Q: Yes, I actually have three of them. STONE: You have three? Well, this is a great educational moment. Your dad is training you here. (Laughter.) So we have a rule here against speeches and multiple questions. (Laughter.) If there was anyone to break it, it would be you. How old are you? What grade are you in? Q: I’m eleven and I’m in sixth grade. STONE: You’re eleven and in sixth grade. I really want to bend the rules for you, but why don’t we—why don’t we see how you do with your first question and if we run out of questions we’ll come back to you. Is it a deal? Q: OK. Uh-huh. STONE: All right. Sophia, we’re ready for you. Q: How have your achievements affected women’s position in your society and community? STONE: Awesome, that’s a good question. MAHBOOB: That’s a good question. QADERYAN: (Speaks in Farsi.) MAHBOOB: She said that we receive a lot of the awards and the medals. We received the congratulations. We’ve been in Estonia. And all of these awards actually are giving a message to the very conservative men in Afghanistan, if they give a chance to women to go on in the competition, they can make the—they come back very proud and they make the flag of Afghanistan show to the world the abilities of women in this field. So that has changed the view of the men in the country. Q: Can I go on with my second? STONE: We’ll give you a follow up. We’ll give you one follow up, Sophia. What’s your—what’s your follow-up question? You can have one follow up. Q: So how have your achievements affected— STONE: No one tell Richard Haass, all right? (Laughter.) Tell us? Q: How have your achievements affected schooling in your community? MAHBOOB: School in the community? ROSHAN: (Speaks in Farsi.) MAHBOOB: So they say that when we—we are—we are part of different schools with a different number of students, like, for example, between five (thousand) to six thousand students because they are part of public schools, government schools. So when they come back, they’re providing the training and workshops for the students inside of the schools. But in general, they created—as Fatemah says, that we become a role model for the girls. And right now, competition is getting very tight and less of the girls want to be participants in robotics and this field. STONE: Great follow up. We see you in the White House press corps in the near future. Why don’t we go to Holly, we’ll go around the table? Q: Don’t you want to ask us—(inaudible)—ask my question? Q: I have a question. Q: She has her own question. STONE: OK. Well, we’ll go to Maeve Brogan— Q: But I’ll cede my— STONE: —after Holly, how about that? We’ll start with Holly and then go to Maeve. Q: Oh, OK. So Fatemah and Kawsar, in ten years from today, where are you going to be and what are you going to be doing? QADERYAN: (Speaks in Farsi.) ROSHAN: (Speaks in Farsi.) MAHBOOB: She wants to say in general and then also she wants to say the personal. Q: Perfect. MAHBOOB: So she says that Afghanistan within the next ten years is a country of innovation and technology. And she says that we want to go to this field to learn about STEAM and also becoming—she wants to grow to be a specialist in AI and come back to the country. And because they have all these schools, they want to teach students there and give back to their communities and helping to be a country to working on innovation, bringing new products and new ideas. And she thinks that in the next ten years, Afghanistan has a lot of awards not only in the country, but also in the region in terms of innovation in AI and robotics. STONE: We’ll go to Maeve. Do you have a question? Q: All right, yeah. If not everyone wants to be involved in robotics and not all the girls know they can be involved in robotics and technology, what are some ways you would want to inspire them and bring these opportunities to them? STONE: Great question. QADERYAN: (Speaks in Farsi.) MAHBOOB: So she says that the STEAM education is very male dominated and more than eighty percent are right now in the hands of men. And she thinks that it’s very important that the girls get involved because it’s such a—such a field to create more creativity and you can be more creative and you can also solve complex problems, that it will help you to not only build your personal life, but also it helps you to build your future. QADERYAN: (Speaks in Farsi.) MAHBOOB: And the future is about STEAM. And if the girls are not getting involved, they are going to lose opportunities in the future because, first of all, in the next ten or twenty years, the jobs in the industry will be double and then lots of high salary would be another thing, an option that the woman could have. QADERYAN: (Speaks in Farsi.) MAHBOOB: And if they get involved, they can also increase their income and also help support their families and also grow the economy of their country, they can be part of the growth of the economy. QADERYAN: (Speaks in Farsi.) MAHBOOB: Like, for example, we should look at the cybersecurity which is a very important thing for the security of the country. And many of the sites we see that it was hacking, and especially in Afghanistan we don’t have that expertise. But by 2020, we need a lot of the jobs in cybersecurity and we need to have women to be represented in this field as well. STONE: I love that we have a sixteen-year-old girl giving cybersecurity job coaching this morning. (Laughter.) So I have to imagine that you, Roya, and all of the students on the team are great role models in this. You know, it’s like we always say, you can’t be what you don’t see. And, you know, being able to be visible and see makes a big difference. I want to go around the table and come to Emily for your question. Q: Hi. So my question is, like, how do you hope that international, like, organizations get involved and, like, help you further your goals? Because there’s been such a big focus on, like, improving women’s access to education and, like, including women in, like, the technology field? STONE: Roya, if you want to, you can start with that one, too, after you translate maybe as well, yeah. ROSHAN: (Speaks in Farsi.) QADERYAN: (Speaks in Farsi.) MAHBOOB: So she says that investing in STEAM education for young girls if very important because they are living in society and also they know lots of the problems inside of the families and the environment and the community. And if they get involved with this education, they can bring better productivity in the country. But I think also that, as Fatemah says, investing. And also, what we need is funding and we need resources. And if the organization wants to join forces, we would welcome them. And right now, we’re going to build not one school, five schools in five zones and we’re going to build a university. So I think that the main part of that is we need funding. And we would to be partners with organizations who are interested in this, that want to be part of this revolution in Afghanistan. We would welcome them to join us. STONE: That’s good. I think our hope in having these conversations is being able to be an earnest broker for people that are caring about specific issues to come together and find ways to take action outside this room. So be sure to talk to Roya after if you want to be part of not just being inspired this morning, but actually doing something. I’m sure she would love to have that conversation. I’m going to go to Samantha for our next question. Q: Hi. Your work has truly sparked a fire internationally on trying to integrate women into the global workforce, especially within male-dominated fields. So my question for you is, how do you think your work will impact not only the newer, younger generations, but the older generations as well who have their own already preconceived perception of women and where they should be in the workforce? MAHBOOB: I will respond to this question. I think that we already—we are not only going to meet with the younger generation, but also we had a chance to meet with lots of the leaders in politics and religion and economics in Afghanistan. And it’s interesting that we saw that the changes happened in them as well and they understand the importance of the knowledge and especially technology as a tool to improve the economy of the country and security and the future of Afghanistan. And we’re not only going to change that view in Afghanistan, but the good thing is that we go to other countries, we meet with lots of the leaders there. And recently, a month ago, we were in Mexico and met with the minister of development there. And interestingly, we discussed about technology and what we have to plan for Afghanistan and they got so interested. And they asked the team to lead their force in Mexico and help them to build their own first STEAM education, first STEAM schools in Mexico. So right now we are working with them as well. So I think that it’s not only for the younger generation, but also for the older generation. And it’s good that they understand that this is very important. STONE: Yeah, that’s so important. I mean, a statistic that really resonated with me when we were preparing for this discussion is that in the next decade six hundred million adolescent girls will enter the workforce—six hundred million over the next decade—so we need to get this right for that generation and for generations that are also figuring out how to come to terms with the digital evolving workforce and economy. So we’ll go back around the table, so I want to go to my colleague here. Can I read one of your questions? (Laughter.) Did you work out a deal—you’re now—you’re now reading her third question? This is a natural diplomat right here. Q: Well, OK. What is your favorite problem or what has been your favorite project or robot that you’ve worked on? STONE: Maybe give that to Kawsar so we can hear from her as well. ROSHAN: (Speaks in Farsi.) MAHBOOB: So one of my favorite projects was the robots that we prototyped for the farmers. We did an interview with lots of the farmers, the small farmers in Herat to see what’s your problem. And then we designed a robot to helping to cut and package and process the wheat. And this is a prototype that they have done. And it’s reduced the time and it’s increased their productivity and also it’s very—it’s good for the small farmers to use these small machines for their work. So that’s one of the favorite projects and they are working on that. STONE: Great. We’ll keep going around I think to—does your father have a question as well? Q: So the answer to that actually answered the question that I had, which was solving problems in Afghanistan, not just the competitions. And so, because they answered my question, I put my card down. (Laughter.) STONE: OK. Well done. All right. I see you—yeah. Q: What other girl teams have you met? MAHBOOB: What? Q: What other girl teams have you met? STONE: What other girl teams have you met? Have you run into a lot of all-girls robotics teams on the high-stakes robotics team circuit? Have you—have you run into many other all-women teams? MAHBOOB: I think so because they are going to compete—going to different competitions, so they meet with lots of the teams that are working on robotics. Like, for example, they were almost four months in Canada for the first competition and they met with lots of the teams that are girls and they build robots. So they had the chance to working with the students as well. Q: Were there any all-girls teams from a non-Western country? QADERYAN: (Speaks in Farsi.) ROSHAN: (Speaks in Farsi.) MAHBOOB: So they forgot, there was one of the African countries that they met in Mexico that they were all girls. And then also, the coach was a female, so that was also another team that they met. Q: Thank you. STONE: So one question from me about just the high school—the high school—the five high schools, right, that you’re looking to start in Afghanistan. What kind of curriculum, what kind of skills are you looking to teach in those schools as you’re talking to partners and donors and friends who want to support this program? What kind of educational opportunities do you foresee girls being able to access in those high schools? MAHBOOB: So this is a program that we are working with our different partners. More focus would be on AI and robotics, but it would—it would be based on the standard or the curriculum that the United States and Canada, they’re teaching in their STEAM schools. So we will take that, but we will a little bit adopt it with Afghan society needs. But then our focus more will be, again, on AI and robotics. And we are right now working with our partners on developing a good curriculum for this. And the idea is that from ninth grade we take an exam from the students on logic and mathematics. And once they take this exam, the best students can go and enter into this—to this—for the high school for ten, eleven, and twelfth grade. And then the training would be—everything would be in English. So we’re going to have the professor, we think that they will come and they’ll do lectures in Afghanistan. And we’re going to have also online training for them, virtual training for the students in some subjects. But also, we already find lots of the Afghans who got their master’s from AI or from different computer science or engineering from the United States and Europe, so we’re going to have also resources there from inside of Afghanistan for that, for the program. STONE: I think it’s so powerful because it really flips the script on what people think about girls and women in Afghanistan, girls and women, you know, writ large in terms of tech and AI. I see one last question here from Christopher Brogan. Q: One of the—one thing that’s evolving is not just STEM, but adding the A for arts as we move forward. And clearly, Fatemah has got her second book in the works. So I’m curious as to how—do they have artistic pursuits that help feed that creativity as it relates back to technology? MAHBOOB: Well, I—well, we have science, technology, engineering, art, and math, so it’s STEAM, so have included art, which is very important, in our curriculum. STONE: Do you—do either of the students, do either of you pursue anything in the realm of arts? Of course, Afghanistan has a rich artistic history as well. It’s pretty extraordinary. QADERYAN: (Speaks in Farsi.) MAHBOOB: She does painting. STONE: Painting, that’s wonderful. How about Kawsar, anything? ROSHAN: (Speaks in Farsi.) MAHBOOB: She is more interested in the mechanical field. (Laughter.) STONE: Yes, I love it. Well, the last question I want to close with is just to—because this is International Day of the Girl and it is meant to celebrate the achievement of girls and girls who also become women one day. And I wonder if we could just go down and each of you can just share with us something that you’re most proud about in this work, because you’ve overcome a lot. You know, when I think about last year with everything around the visa process, your visas getting rejected, and then there was—it was pretty extraordinary for someone that cares about girls and women in the region to see the whole world really get engaged for a couple of news cycles about would you get the visa or not was really wonderful and extraordinary to see the outpouring of support. And, you know, you’ve had so many achievements and successes since and I know many things that you overcame to even get to this point. So perhaps each of you could share something that you’re proud about that we could join you in being celebratory about today. And we’ll bring it to a close after that. So do you want to share the question, Roya, and then you can kick us off? QADERYAN: (Speaks in Farsi.) MAHBOOB: I would say very small that imagination is powerful, dream big because that’s what we did. QADERYAN: (Speaks in Farsi.) MAHBOOB: So whatever you believe, stand on your belief, even if there was no one standing with you. And always fight for what you believe. And also, persistence is one of the things that you can get it and don’t give up on the things that you believe on that. ROSHAN: (Speaks in Farsi.) MAHBOOB: Always imagine what and who you want to be. And I always dreamed to be one day a mechanical engineer and today now I have that opportunity to become. STONE: That’s so powerful. Well, we’re so honored that you came all the way from Herat, Afghanistan to be with us today. You know, what a wonderful moment we even had before we started today about how the Council, we’re all connected in ways we don’t even expect. One of our member’s—Jeffrey’s daughter Eleanor is actually a robotics team high school student here in the area and was actually part of the petition process to bring you to the states and I know sent a gift this morning. So young women are connected in ways we didn’t even realize. So let’s give our speakers a round of applause. Thank you so much for joining us. (Applause.) If not the first time that we had a young woman under the age of eighteen speak at the Council, certainly the first time we’ve had at least fifty percent of a discussion be young women, so this is a historic moment for CFR. (Laughter.) Thank you so much. And I think if we wanted—if anybody wants a photo with you maybe, would you be willing to agree? If anyone wants to come up and have a photo after, I would be happy to take a couple of photos before their next engagement. So thank you so much. (END)

In the shadow of this year’s World Refugee Day, 39 million girls living in countries impacted by conflict or natural disaster still do not have access to education. A lifeline in times of turmoil, access to quality education provides girls with safety, dignity, and the opportunity to thrive. Yet, education is often one of the first services to be disrupted and the last to be restored. In humanitarian contexts adolescent girls are acutely vulnerable – girls are two-and-a-half times more likely to be out of school than their male peers. Current negotiations on the Global Compacts on Refugees and Migration present a powerful opportunity to prioritize girls’ education in international policy, data analysis, and funding. Experts Yasmine Sherif and Matthew Reynolds discuss how international organizations and policymakers can work together to advance stability and prosperity by ensuring all displaced girls have access to the twelve years of quality education promised in the Sustainable Development Goals.      STONE: Good afternoon, everyone. It feels like a family reunion in here. Warm crowd. Well, I just wanted to welcome all of you and to thank you so much for joining us today at the Council on Foreign Relations. My name is Meighan Stone, and I’m so honored to be a senior fellow here in our Women in Foreign Policy Program. Before I joined CFR, I served as president at the Malala Fund and worked with the U.N. World Food Programme. So I’m particularly grateful that all of you made time to come out today to have this discussion together. Our mission at the Women in Foreign Policy Program is to analyze how elevating the status of women and girls around the world advances U.S. foreign policy objectives. So we’re thankful to you for voting with your feet to come to this event so we can continue talking about these important issues here at the Council. So to that end, the conversation today is on the record. I know many events here are off the record. Today is on the record, and as part of that, I want to encourage everyone that has one of these with you to feel free to tweet—if you hear something that’s meaningful or engaging out of today’s discussion to continue to talk about these issues beyond the building. So you can use our Twitter handle at the Women in Foreign Policy Program, which is #CFR_WFP. So we’re going to have a conversation with our esteemed speakers today for the first thirty minutes and then we’re looking forward to opening it up to a really robust and vibrant discussion with all of you at 1:00. So we’re looking forward to your thoughts and feedback after we hear from our guests. So we all know it was World Refugee Day yesterday, and so talking about refugee education could not be more important or timely. We know that particularly vulnerable populations like adolescent girls really need to be served by policymakers and international organizations, and they need to work together because, ultimately, we’re advancing stability and prosperity and helping to ensure that all displaced girls have this fundamental right to twelve full years of education that’s enshrined in the sustainable development goals, which includes all girls including refugee and displaced girls, including girls impacted by conflict and disaster. So we know that the timing right now is particularly important. We know that wars, violence, and persecution have uprooted record numbers of men, women, and children worldwide. UNHCR, of course, released their Global Trends report this week and they found that 68.5 million people have been driven from their homes, globally, and we know that close to twenty million of those are refugees. So right now today, we have thirty-nine million girls actually that are living in countries impacted by conflict or natural disasters who do not have any access to education, and we know this intrinsically, right, in our own families and our own shared experience that education is what makes the difference. We know that it’s a lifeline out of poverty but especially in times of turmoil. We know that it gives safety, it gives dignity, and it gives the opportunity to thrive. We all have seen that in our own lives and our own families. So we also know, unfortunately, though, that education is often one of the first services to be disrupted in a humanitarian crisis and it’s often the last to be restored. In humanitarian contacts we know that adolescent girls are acutely vulnerable. They are two and a half times more likely to be out of school than their male peers, so a real need to be addressed by policy. So this makes these new solutions like Education Cannot Wait and the global deal on refugees being discussed currently more critical than ever. The current negotiations on the Global Compacts on Refugees and Migration present such a powerful and important opportunity to prioritize girls’ education international policy in our data analysis and in our funding. So I’m thrilled and honored to have such deeply-experienced expert speakers with us today—Yasmine Sherif and Matthew Reynolds. We’re privileged to welcome Yasmine, who serves as the director of Education Cannot Wait. She previously served as the president of international relations at the Global Center for Justice and Humanity and as the director of the International Humanitarian Law Resource Center. I think she’s worked in every agency of the U.N., at the end of the day, when I look at the list. UNHCR— SHERIF: Except World Food Programme I haven’t yet. STONE: Except for—we’re still waiting at WFP, but until then, UNHCR, UNDP, the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. She’s worked in Afghanistan, Cambodia, the Balkans, Sudan, the Middle East, and also at U.N. headquarters in New York and Geneva. So, Yasmine, we’re so thrilled to have you. We’re also joined by Matthew Reynolds, who is the regional representative for the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees for the U.S. and the Caribbean, based here in D.C. Before joining UNHCR, he served as the North America representative for UNWRA and as the U.S. assistant secretary of state for legislative affairs, and also as staff director of the House Rules Committee, a professional staff member in the Senate Foreign Relations and House Foreign Affairs Committees, and as a congressional chief of staff and legislative director. Matthew, we’re thrilled to have you with us today. We could not be more grateful to benefit from both your experiences and perspectives and so I want to dive right in with you, Yasmine, so I’d love to start a conversation talking about Education Cannot Wait. So I remember at the World Humanitarian Summit in 2016 when you launched in your first ever fund that’s expressly dedicated to education in emergencies. You’ve done so much to start this work in such a short time, and I think we all know from multilateral funds that’s easier said than done often when you’re starting out, and I just want to congratulate you on that and, say, for today, as you look across the landscape, what are the most urgent challenges and opportunities for you and your team at Education Cannot Wait? SHERIF: Thank you very much, first of all, and thanks, Meighan, for inviting me here and it’s wonderful to see so many beautiful faces around the table of whom some I have met. I just met somebody that used to work in Afghanistan with me in 1991. They’re over there. (Laughter.) I couldn’t believe this. What are you doing here? So that’s quite incredible. And, of course, Julie, she’s our—one of our strongest partners in Education Cannot Wait. And we—so happy to work with you, and everyone else that we haven’t met yet. We have some other colleagues here, as well, from the Global Coalition. There you are. There you are, my dear. OK. So it’s lovely to be here and it’s real exciting. Now, what are the big challenges and why was Education Cannot Wait created? And I speak from a perspective of what it looks like in a—in a conflict—armed conflict, natural disasters. When you come out in these armed conflict situations, there will be certain areas where everyone comes rushing in. You know, we are very good at coming in with the tents and the water and making sure that the logistics is there and try to provide as much as what we call lifesaving assistance, right, and try to make—help people to survive. What we have realized is that these kind of what we call emergencies they usually last more than a week. They actually end up lasting maybe seven, ten, fifteen years, and if you have children and young people who are sitting there and they are being provided with all that sort of logistical support but not being provided with education during the most formative years—that is, from primary to secondary—and you’re sitting there for ten, fifteen years, you can just imagine what happens to their minds during those years and where they might end up. For girls, what mostly likely will happen is they will get married by the age of eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve years old. A girl in South Sudan today is more likely to die of childbirth than to enter—to graduate from secondary school. That’s the reality. In Afghanistan, we have 3.5 million children—school-age children—of whom 75 percent are girls who have never gone to school. So they will end up in child marriage. They will be drawn into trafficking. We see this happening already in places like the—for the Rohingyas in the refugee camps. We see them in the Middle East in the camps in Lebanon, in Jordan—trafficking, prostitution, and, of course, abuse in all sorts of forms for the women and for the boys. A young man who is not going to school, who’s not being provided with life skills to be a constructive member of the society will most likely or be very—very likely to be drawn in to much more destructive ways of managing the trauma and managing his future. So they will be drawn in to extremist groups and they’ll pick up arms. There will be drugs and so forth. So we are going to create a whole generation of young people—if they are not provided with education as soon as they cross that border or as soon as that conflict breaks out, we are going to—we are creating generations without that backup. There’s another aspect that is equally important when we are—when we talk about education besides having the numerical or the literacy skills. It’s also about value systems. It’s about getting universal values, human rights, how to resolve conflict peacefully, how to, in general, being able to be a constructive member, maybe to become a lawyer or a doctor or an engineer, and if all of that is taken away from you. So, again, we are creating what eventually become a national security—(inaudible)—to every country, not only in the—in the neighboring regions—across the globe and we know what the world looks like today. So education is as important as any lifesaving assistance because it’s about investing in the human mind—investing in the mind of this new generation. Seventy-five million children and young people today do not have access to quality education or any education at all—75 million. Let’s multiply this. Where will it be ten years, fifteen, twenty years from now? So this is a very serious issue from many aspects besides—there’s also, of course, a humanitarian issue to that and the right to education is a fundamental human right. That’s the last thing you take away from a person because that’s the tool you have to build a new future. So Education Cannot Wait was created after that. Despite all the efforts that were being made by actors to deliver on education in this specific space of emergencies and armed conflict, no one was delivering adequately. So Education Cannot Wait was created. We are a global fund and our job is to attract resources, inspire political commitment to education, and to bring everyone to work together. We don’t—we are not UNICEF. We are not UNHCR. We don’t deliver education. But we are that sort of overarching facilitator to get the funding and get it out quickly and to make everyone work together. So this is how Education Cannot Wait was created, and if one were to summarize what we are about, I would say it’s about attracting the resources and delivering them and working with humanitarian speed for development depth. Education is a development sector. It’s not a humanitarian sector, per se, but you’ve got to work with speed. And often what happens when development actors go out in a conflict, they bring the development approach with them and then they sit with their systems and their plans and this, and we know whoever has been in the conflict, those plans are not going to work and the systems—and that Education Cannot Wait for all of that to be in place. We are working with very abnormal circumstances, and whatever is abnormal often requires external solutions. So we are about speed, depth, crisis-sensitive, move. Get everyone together. Get that education out as fast as possible to the 75 million. Make sure we save the generation and save the world—national security, stability, and our principles of humanity—and we are also hoping as we do this maybe we can also spur some U.N. reform as we go along. STONE: That’s a very ambitious agenda we support. Well, I would love to shift to Matthew then to talk about—you know, just picking up on the—having both speed and depth, you know, in response, you know, and I know we all dug into the Global Trends report. I saw so many people sharing its content and really putting a strong focus on it yesterday, you know, and it really just tees up the Global Compact process, right. So could you share with us, from the UNHCR perspective, the importance of education and humanitarian response, and with a special focus on girls and adolescent girls? And then what would you say is the state of play about how education is being discussed or addressed right now within the discussions around the Global Compacts? REYNOLDS: Sure. Thank you. Thank you very much. And thank you to the Council on Foreign Relations as well for hosting this today. Usually, in the past, I’ve often been one of the people sitting here, so now I’m intimidated. I’m on the front and I have to say something. And I’ll warn you in advance I’m a jack-of-all-trades and a master of none. So I don't have as much technical expertise on some of the technical things. But I hope to cover as much as I can. Look, I thought I’d, first, start off by answering that by referencing the trends that went out yesterday, which is our annual big (membership ?) of numbers. And I know no one likes to hear a lot of numbers so I try to make it an American gee-whiz fact so that you can understand the scope of what you're looking at when we’re talking about these things. As Meighan noted, we have now seen 68.5 million displaced in 2017—this is Texas and California combined—that 16.2 million of those were the addition of this year, which is the largest ever in the last five years, and that’s including new refugee—new displaced and repeated displaced. That’s 44,500 a day, or one person every two seconds is displaced. That’s the entire state of Pennsylvania and Oregon or, if you’re from the middle part, Illinois and Kentucky combined, fleeing, so—or being displaced. Now, two-thirds of this number—of the—of the overall 68.5 million are internally displaced persons and they’re staying within the borders. But sometimes the borders are quite large. You look at something like the Democratic Republic of Congo where most—where there’s a huge IDP population, but it’s also a huge country, or a place like Colombia. Now, of that large number, 25.5 million of them are refugees. These are individuals who’ve crossed the borders to escape persecution, war, and conflict. That’s—think of—that’s the—that the population of Texas, though—oh, this is on the record. I should be careful. Some people might like Texas to move. But—(laughter)—I’m from New England—but so that’s the population of Texas, and half of that group, though, are children and many are unaccompanied. So I just want you to remember that when you’re looking and thinking about all the work that’s being done on education because—and just think of that fact that 16.5 million of them are new so—or different. So because think about that when we’re looking at education. In some places where you have populations that have been stabilized, maybe in big camps like in Zaatari in Jordan or Kakuma in Kenya, you have a system already set up, but all of these new players in the field. And also consider the fact that 58 percent of refugees today are in urban areas. We all think of refugees in camps. That’s actually a pretty growingly smaller, smaller, smaller group of people. Most are in the urban centers. So access to education—it’s not just go into a camp and build a school. Now you’re having to go into neighborhoods both rural and urban to find and to help those individuals who are displaced and those who are refugees. And look at where this is happening or where they’re from. If you look at the top five, which is two-thirds—which is two-thirds of all refugees, what are the top five countries where they all come from? It’s Somalia, Myanmar—or Burma—South Sudan, Afghanistan, and Syria, and for those of us in the Western Hemisphere, Venezuela is looming around the corner. If you want to look at where they go, I would also point out one-quarter of the—one-fifth of those refugees are Palestine refugees, but those come under the mandate of UNWRA and not UNHCR. If you look at where they go, 85 percent of these refugees are in Turkey, Pakistan, Uganda, Lebanon, and Iran. If you look at sort of the education trends of what’s—of where it is, as has been referenced, more than half—this is for refugees that UNHCR is concerned about—more than half, or 3.5 million, of the 6.4 million school-age refugee children do not go to school. Refugees are five times more likely to be out of school than the normal average. Sixty-one percent of refugee children go to primary school, compared to 91 percent at the global level. This means that 1.5 million children—refugee children—are not in primary school. Twenty-three percent of refugee adolescents attend secondary school, compared to the global average of 84 percent, and 1 percent of refugees go to university, compared to the global average of 36 percent, and more than 50 percent out of those—of school refuge children are in seven countries. As you can imagine, they’re the poorest—Chad, Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, Kenya, Lebanon, Pakistan, and Turkey. So it’s—and it’s difficult for—as you can see, for all refugee children to access education and, as I said, they are more than five times likely to be out of school than their peers. If you want a lot of very good information on all of this, I just refer you to UNHCR. We put out a report in March of 2018 called Her Turn, because I’m going to reference specifically now girls’ education and this is the focus of Her Turn. Girls, as has been alluded to, have far more trouble accessing education than refugee boys, and the older the girl is the greater the gap. For example, in secondary schools, for every ten boys there are only seven girls, and in tertiary education, of the 1 percent of refugee students that are actually able to access it, only 41 percent are girls. Now, what are the barriers, because we have to deal with barriers in order to get the access. It’s a cost of schooling. It’s the social and cultural factors, as—such as community beliefs. We have sexual and gender-based violence at school and in the family or in the community. We have safety concerns on the way to school. We have a very inadequate learning environment, one that does not meet the specific needs of girls, that lack the right sanitary facilities, clean water, or private toilets, and there’s a lack of female teachers and role models. So we’re trying many ways to address these barriers the best we can and there are many activities that UNHCR engages with, particularly with partners, and partners play an important role. We have a—there’s a UNHCR youth education program to reinforce the links of education and training pathways. You want to make sure that girls feel welcome and safe in school. So, again, the infrastructure needs need to be met so that they can engage in a gender-sensitive learning environment. Supporting female role models that girls can look up to, such as female teachers, community leaders, and small business owners is very important if you want to break through. Another breakthrough, of course, is helping girls’ families overcome financial barriers that prevent them from accessing school, especially if they’re in a single-parent family led—with a household led by their mother—by a woman—and that includes payment of school fees, exam fees, provision of uniforms and textbooks, and all these things. So there’s lots of practical things. We think of the big high issues, but there’s a lot of practical things that we can do as well to get that ball rolling. STONE: That’s so good. Thank you for sharing such a comprehensive landscape of the overarching issues around refugees, children, and then, particularly, girls and adolescent girls as well. You know, when we look at the Global Compact negotiations—you know, I’d love to open it up to a discussion amongst, you know, both of you—you know, the approach that the global community is taking to it. I don’t know, Matthew, you know, if you have anything to lend on that and then, you know, just in terms of the ethos or the values or what’s the framework that we’re taking to approach this. You know, Yasmine, I’ve heard you talk a lot about reaching the furthest behind first or sometimes I’ve heard you use this term of progressive universalism, which kind of reminds me of Partners in Health when they started advocating for ARV therapy and they kept talking about a preferential option for the poor. You know, people were, like, that’s impossible, and then, you know, things progressed, ultimately. So, you know, I hear you delivering some of the same messages, you know, about this is doable if there’s prioritization and there’s a sincere constant dedication effort, and we need to fight for that. So as you're taking that perspective, as these Global Compact negotiations are underway, what is both of your perspective about how girls’ education could be part of those conversations and we make sure that it’s enshrined in what’s going to be in the compacts, ultimately? REYNOLDS: Sure, I can—briefly, at the high level, mention the compact is moving—the Global Compact on Refugees, which is the one the UNHCR is involved—there are two compacts—there’s one on migration but that’s not within our jurisdiction—is moving quite along, quite—almost to completion now and we’re hoping—perhaps, in July. We’ve gone through many drafts and I know some of your organizations have been involved in that consultative process. But there’s a couple of real innovative and important angles that it’s taking. I think one of it is that it’s the idea of burden sharing but it’s also the idea of acceptance. And so what I’m referring to, really, is the community-based sort of responses and approaches, particularly when you look at countries that are having a high level of refugees, whether it’s Uganda or Lebanon or others. A lot of times in the past, people have focused directly on the refugee community. Groups come in, organizations come in, U.N. organizations come in and take care of the refugees exactly. A perfect example of this—because it’s an old model that’s only in one agency, which is UNWRA—it’s a whole self-directed creation of schools and clinics and so on for the one population, and that can breed a lot of challenges to the rest of the population. You know, you see refugees coming in. They’re getting something. You’re the poor community, because in many of these countries most refugees are in underdeveloped countries to begin with. We forget about that when we’re sitting here in the Global North that the burden is really shared by the—is really taken on by the Global South. So approach with the compact is, really, instead of targeting the refugee, it’s targeting where they are going. So in a place like Uganda, you’re looking at building all the infrastructure in the village in which they’re at so that the school—so that the local community, which is also hosting, which also—there may be trends of xenophobia in others—realize that the refugee community is not a burden but, in fact, can actually bring in development, bring in support, and bring in projects. This is extremely important, and I think is where it comes important with education because even in places like Lebanon where we have seen where the public school system is quite poor and quite—is not as developed—a lot of—most Lebanese go to private schools—it’s a cultural thing—but with the Syrian refugees coming in and going to Lebanese public schools, the international community has been able to beef up the Lebanese public school system for all to benefit. So the poor Lebanese student benefits just like the Syrian refugee, and that brings not only good will but it brings good practices as well. And as part the compact, it’s looking at a broader range of individuals. So, for example, UNHCR has now engaged in a very new relationship and partnership with the World Bank so that we’re able to access and look at how World Bank funds, which are quite tremendous and under IDA18 sub-window for refugees, there’s a lot of additional resources. But these are resources, again, that can go to a country to develop those systems and, again, it’s not just helping the refugee. When you're changing and reforming the local school system, you’re helping local girls as well. Not just refugee girls—the whole society, and that addresses beyond the refugee education problem. STONE: Thank you for sharing that. That’s really an effective methodology for doing this work. Yasmine, how does that touch on your work at Education Cannot Wait? SHERIF: Yeah. No, it touched very much. I mean, just to give the context of Education Cannot Wait, we are based in UNICEF but we cater to the entire system, and UNHCR is a key partner to us. REYNOLDS: We like them. (Laughter.) SHERIF: They are also a member our governance structure. REYNOLDS: I know. SHERIF: And we have some really good things coming out with UNHCR that actually goes back to the Global Compact and what they call the Comprehensive Refugee Response Framework. STONE: Yes. SHERIF: And the beauty of that—and that is also very much why ECW was created is that instead of having the development actors doing their little own thing over there and the humanitarians there is you bring them together and you make sure that there is multi-year—it’s predictability. So you invest three or four years at a time and, of course, for the Global Compact and the Comprehensive Refugee Response Framework, it’s multi-sectoral for the refugees in host communities. Our added value—so we’re coming in on the education side, and I think there—and I’m sure you will agree with me—is that Education Cannot Wait has probably—is becoming one of the pioneering sectors doing this with UNHCR and that’s a little bit also reforming the U.N. system or helping it reform—not UNHCR but the rest of the system, and you’re doing well already. But so in Uganda, for instance, we came out last year. There was 1.3 million refugees fleeing from South Sudan of whom half are refugee—are school-aged students and half of them girls—coming in from—across the border from South Sudan into Uganda and, of course, there is no one to be able to cater to them and create the multi-year investments in their education. So they are immediately the ones that are left out and furthest behind because they are sitting there and they can’t—they can’t do anything except being these aidless—the helpless recipients of aid. And that’s where we joined forces with UNHCR. It is one of those countries for Comprehensive Refugee Response Framework as a test pilot country, and we brought together, working with UNHCR together, a million dollars. I know that USAID is playing a key role on that and also DIFI came together and all the humanitarians and development actors. And we actually locked ourselves—just to see what it looks like—we locked ourselves up for one week in the UNHCR premises and developed a roadmap for coming up with a comprehensive response, multi-year, for education for refugees but a special emphasis on girls’ education, and that plan is now about to be—to be launched. There’s going to be a big, big launch and this is also one of the first experiments that we have together. But that is what it means with reaching the furthest behind. It’s not (good to do who ?) are easily accessible, with those who are already doing OK. It’s the ones that are completely forgotten. You go out in Afghanistan and you see these girls who’ve been wandering around at home for most of their life, and you have to bring them back to school and give them accelerated learning. They’re fourteen, fifteen years. They’ve never been to school. So those fourteen and fifteen years—young girls who have been sitting at home all their life, they are the furthest behind. Get them out of that and into school. But then you have to be very creative in how you do it because their parents may not send them to school if school is very far away. So you have build a school close to their home. That’s the first—the first step. Another way is—and that’s what we are supporting in Afghanistan—you invest, and 70 percent of the teacher education we are investing in are women teachers because then they’re more likely to send the girls to school if there are women teachers—if you have a protective environment, because you’re not going to change that attitude of mixing schools and, you know, the way our schools look. It is—it’s a process. But you need to get them back into school. So that’s—so that is what reaching furthest behind—it’s really to go to that—to the really downtrodden that no one pays attention to. And that another way of doing that is often what happens we do our planning. We love to see the agencies and the NGOs and the donors and maybe forget that there are refugees and displaced out there and, you know, they need to be part of this discussion as well. And when we had this discussion in Uganda, someone had set up a meeting for me with twenty refugees, separate from our consultations. So they were somewhere else in another room and I was going to go meet with them there so and then the consultations were happening elsewhere. And so I went over and spent time with them and said, listen, come, let’s go into this consult. So they all walk into this big consultation and everyone’s looking—refugees coming into our room. But it was—yeah, and it was not UNHCR because you always do this—but others who were not used to have refugees in the room. And I said come in, so they all walked in one by one by one and took place around the table, and you would think that they would sit there and feel very intimidated. Oh, they were tough. They said, you want us to do this—yes, we want quality education. Yes, we want all the things you are saying. But I need to tell you one thing: I cannot go and—go to your quality schools and quality education unless you either give us cash or you exempt us from school fees because we cannot afford—we don't have money to go into those schools, and I need to work because I have to pay for my siblings and my grandmother and my father and this—and my mother is handicapped and so and so—I work. So these are practical issues to make education available to refugees. So you come up with cash assistance. You come up with different forms. And they came with that thinking to us, because we assumed—we didn’t think that refugees had to work to support their family or the grandmother or their siblings. So it’s so important to have their voice there, and I remember—I have to tell you this story because it’s a little bit of a departure but it’s about women. I remember in—after the Taliban fell in Afghanistan in 2001 after what they call the Bonn Agreement and then—it was called UNIFEM back then, and I was with UNIFEM. That was one of those agencies I worked with. I was their advisor in Afghanistan because I used to work there before with Puneet Talwar. We were the early pioneers. Anyway, and so U.N. Women was going to organize this big roundtable for Afghan women who finally had been liberated from Taliban, and we brought them to Brussels and we were going to have this discussion. So I had this colleague of mine say, yes, and we’ll bring them in and we have to be careful how we talk with them and sit there in the circle and, you know, and I said, no, no, no, no—these are tough women—they used to run underground schools during Taliban—don't treat them like this because they’ll smash your face. (Laughter.) So, you know— STONE: Is that a policy term? SHERIF: Yeah, they—yeah, it’s a policy term, at least my—it’s a new policy term. (Laughter.) Anyway, so they’re not going to—they’re not going to be treated like this because they are tough. They are the furthest behind but they have—they have endured and they are survivors. So, rightly so, they came in and it started off with all sitting around in a circle and how are you, how do you feel, and they just took over, and they asked us all to sit down and just listen to them and then they described for us how they used to run the underground schools and how they want to move things and how they need to reclaim their rights and da—and tough, tough women. So being the furthest behind sometimes you’re very vulnerable but sometimes you bring in a lot of resilience. STONE: Yes. SHERIF: We just need to give them the platform and the space for their voice and they can teach us a lot—a lot. So it’s different ways of looking at the furthest behind. So that is—and the progressive universalism is very much about that is that they—all this—the marginalized and conflict-displaced families, the disabled, the girls who are at the—and the refugees who are on the margins, they cannot sit and wait for our systems to be in place, for our procurement processes and the government to work and whatever government, you know, we are—you know, whether it’s Afghanistan or elsewhere. Their education cannot wait, and progressive universalism is exactly about that—that they cannot wait until we are about to hit the deadline for our development goals in 2030. We have to go in immediately and try to bring them up to speed in their right to education so when we hit this agenda of 2030 where everyone should have universal education, they should have been up to speed, you know, in terms of numbers and access. STONE: Yeah. That’s so important. I remember talking to a group of refugee girls and saying, like, we win this fight for the SDGs by 2030. And they just kind of looked at us and they’re, like, why is it going to take you so long? Like, I will be out of school by then. And I was, like, we need—well, I appreciate you speaking to inclusion. I know my colleagues at CFR and myself and on the Women in Foreign Policy team have been talking about making sure that our future conversations will include refugee voices, you know, and I think that’s a challenge across the entire international development sector is, you know, not in your name without you and we have to shift these paradigms. So I appreciate everything you shared. We’re going to do a quick lightning-round question to you both but we want to open it up to questions. So this is your moment to get ready for your question. Just a reminder that, of course, at CFR we put our placards up if we want to ask. You know, just please, briefly, identify yourself and share a brief question so we can get to as many people as possible. Don’t “State of the Union” right now in here. Just give us your thoughts, and we’ll try to get around to as many people as we can. So just a quick question while people are getting ready to prepare their questions for you both. You know, it’s an important season, whether it’s the Global Compacts or appropriations here in the U.S. Of course, CFR is very focused on U.S. leadership. U.S. is the single largest humanitarian donor. I know that the U.S. gave, of course, to Education Cannot Wait—gave $20 million when you were launched, and there’s so many opportunities, whether it’s policy or funding right now, that are so important. You know, for each of your perspectives, what do you think are those key opportunities right now to keep this work moving forward? REYNOLDS: Well, from UNHCR’s perspective with the U.S., we couldn’t ask for a better partner. I mean, the U.S. is our number-one financial and political supporter and it’s on all levels, coming from the executive, if you will, with the State Department—the State Department funds UNHCR—to Congress, because we can’t forget they are Article I of the Constitution, not Article II, and they have the power of the purse—all the way down to the individual American donor and American taxpayer. So I have to just say thank you, thank you, thank you. And I think the U.S. has done its fair share and I think where the opportunities come—and this is where American leadership is very important, particularly for UNHCR—is to help remind the rest of the world that they can share some of that burden, not just financially but, you know, as much as there’s been a lot of debate about resettlement in the United States—and resettlement is a very important tool—it’s less than—less than one-half of 1 percent of any—of refugees will ever see third-country resettlement but it’s a very, very important option for the most vulnerable of refugees. But it’s an important signal about burden sharing, and the United States continues to be the number-one resettlement country. We want others to step up to the plate. So I think in terms of that sort of aid and support, we’ve got a great team player with the partner—with the U.S. We just encourage them to continue to use that international clout they have to help us help the refugees get more from others because there are a lot of others that can and should step up to the plate. STONE: Yasmine, for you? SHERIF: Well, I could say so much about it, besides the fact that we are extremely grateful for the—for the resources that we have received. But it’s also, I think, the inspiration of working together, and I worked a lot with the U.S. in many parts of the world and I remember when the Darfur conflict broke out and USAID was on the ground, and before you knew it we had created a whole new legal aid system addressing impunity against rape, (even ?) moving around. And it takes a sort of attitude to move things and to make things happen that is not—that is not so risk averse and that is creative and want to think and do things big, and I think that’s the typical U.S. attitude—American attitude—and that’s why—and I think it’s always about people coming together. So you have—you know, yes, there are governments investing in ECW and working on education but there are people inside those institutions, and this is what I personally enjoy the most working with the U.S. Then it’s the gratitude for the resources that we receive, and then I think there’s the very important aspect—and we have discussed that with Julie—is how we can mobilize private sector because that’s—this is—here is where you have the entrepreneurship—you have the creativity, the—(inaudible)—move things. And you have some incredible private sector in this country, and that can also inspire, you know, other companies abroad. So Julie has kindly agreed to shoulder—(inaudible)—to get this going, to bring private sector in to this sort of normally dusty bureaucracy called the U.N. ECW is sort of trying to open up, like many who are in the U.N., and we are very—we are very appreciative of this. So for us, the U.S. is a—is a—is a key player in many aspects. It’s the attitude. It’s the approach. It’s the—it’s support provided so far. It’s the new—(inaudible)—private sector. And I think the ability to think big and move big because Education Cannot—as a global fund, we are not a little project. We are here to transform the way education is delivered in emergencies and crises, and for that you need to think big and strategically, and I think for that the U.S. is our dream partner. And I’m looking at Julie here but I—I really—she knows how excited I am—(laughter)—because when we meet we think—we think this way and this is what is exciting. I also look to the U.N. for many—I’ve been with the U.N.—the United Nations in and out for 30 years. But no matter. You know, sometimes we get upset with the U.N. and sometimes you feel that you have other responsibilities. But I think every American should be very proud of the fact that the U.N. was created in San Francisco, and it’s still here, and it comes from a history in this country, of the Declaration of Independence, safeguarding human rights, and including individual rights, which is just as important. So I think that there is—there’s a beauty here that we need to spread. STONE: All right. Well, thank you for those words of inspiration. I want to open it up to discussion and questions. I’m going to start with our colleague, Elizabeth, from U.N. Women. Q: Thank you very much for those interesting presentations. I wanted to pick up on your comments about bringing the refugees in and I just wondered if you were able to create some sort of standing committee or consultative body, because it also made me think about UNHCR’s refugee women dialogues, and I think the original were in, what, 2008 maybe and then they’ve held them again. And I, personally, especially doing humanitarian work in the past, have gone back to the findings from those dialogues so many times because they’re rich, they’re informative, and they’re what women refugees are asking for and saying that they want. So it just made me think that, one, something that we don’t do enough of in the U.N. is use each other’s research and data and, you know, not start from scratch and keep, you know, building on what we’ve done before, but also how can you, you know, leverage and build on this group of refugees, and it may not be exactly them but create a group to be part of, you know, ongoing M&E or feedback and things like that. Thank you. STONE: Who wants to take that? Matthew. REYNOLDS: Well, I can—maybe—we’re in a—UNHCR is in a little different situation than many others, in part because we’re principally a front-line agency. So 80-plus percent of our staff are located on the front lines doing operational jobs every day. I’m kind of that 20 percent that gets a nice office in Washington because I’m not on the front lines in Central African Republic today. But I point that out because they’re dealing and communicating and evaluating and getting feedback from refugee women, children, and men every single day and incorporating it into the work they’re doing every single day because it’s there, front and present. So if there’s a challenge of girls getting into a school maybe in a place, that sub-office field director and the protection staff will be on the front lines trying to help that. I think where we can probably do a much better job ourselves in UNHCR, recognizing, too, that each field is a little different. The challenges we’re seeing with Venezuelan—Venezuelans in Trinidad and Tobago is different, obviously, than perhaps refugees in Uganda. Where we, perhaps, can do a better job of that is bringing that information from all those sources and then synthesizing it up for others to use. Internally, we’re able to use it pretty well and share experiences about this happened here—how do you fix that and so on. I think, you know, one of the challenges of probably funding is having more people or more ability to take all of that experience, and all of that information that is there, and solutions that are there, and sort of fuel them up so that others at that broader, more policy level can see them. We’re kind of the practitioners and we need to share more of sort of the academic side, and I know we hold certain conferences but that’s not the answer to it. But I think maybe getting more of our field experience and analysis out there is probably better. STONE: Sounds like a good take away. How about—Yasmine, how are you consulting in authentic and meaningful ways with the community? SHERIF: Yeah. Even as I said, I mean, and this is precisely why we work with UNHCR. Whenever we go in and invest in education on refugees, UNHCR is our natural partner, and while we have staff in the UNHCR office for the region in the Middle East, it’s UNHCR that will—their staff at field level when the—when the program is developed, the one that is going to be launched for Uganda, the next going to be launched for Bangladesh and the Rohingyas, it’s UNHCR’s staff that are drafting it together with UNICEF staff, UNESCO, others, and it’s their engagement with the refugees that will drive the design of the program. So we are the facilitator, the catalyst, but we—everything derives from our partnership with UNHCR or, when we work with UNICEF, their consultations with children. So and this is the beauty of Education Cannot Wait. We are not—we are not created a body on other bodies. We are just pulling them all together and they are the implementers, and we don’t even—when we raise resources, that resources is not going to ECW. It’s coming through us and our added value is that we bring everyone together and make sure that UNHCR gets it, UNICEF gets it, but within what we call a joint program. But it’s through their staff and their field presence that the refugees are being consulted. When we go out on missions—and we travel a lot so that we are connected to the field because we don’t want to be a global fund that sits and open envelopes in headquarters and don’t know what’s going on. So we travel a lot. Then, of course, we go with UNHCR. We meet with the refugees. We go with UNICEF and meet with the children, the teachers, and so forth. So we make sure we are constantly connected. STONE: That’s so good. SHERIF: Yeah. STONE: Well, Imran, I’d like to go to your question. Q: Hello. I am Imran Chowdhury. I’m a professor at Pace University in New York. This is a question for Matthew. We don’t hear much about, or at least I don’t see much about, the Yemen conflict in the U.S. So I wanted to hear about what the UNHCR is doing with respect to women’s education and education in general for people who are suffering from the conflict in Yemen. Thank you. REYNOLDS: Ironically, at 2:00 I’m going to meet at the State Department with the deputy secretary about Yemen. There’s a monthly meeting with USAID’s administrator, as well, because it’s a very important issue. It’s one—I’m going to deflect a little bit in part because UNHCR is not the lead, sort of. We don’t have the largest footprint much in Yemen. Ironically, there are still tens of thousands of refugees in Yemen. They are from Somalia. They are from other places, and so there is still a refugee population. Our concentration in Yemen right now is actual emergency services right away—getting core relief to people. And so our first priority is really—I hate to go back to the old fashioned, but it’s shelter and food and medicines. Access to—access is incredibly difficult. Getting supplies to people is incredibly difficult. So our concentration right now is on that emergency. So I hope we can move into a situation where we spend a lot more time looking at the educational needs of the kids. Right now, we’re just trying to keep them alive, and the situation with the fight for the ports is horrific. So I hate to deflect it, but we’re kind of at that—we’re at the stage one of an emergency and we’re not even at that 1.5 to be able to— STONE: Yasmine. SHERIF: I think on Yemen also—I mean, the refugees from Yemen, they’re not in Yemen. They’re in the region. So you’re doing a lot in Jordan and in those places. REYNOLDS: Djibouti and Yemen. SHERIF: Yeah, and that’s where your refugees are. But Education Cannot Wait—we have actually invested 14 million (dollars)—14—one four—million dollars for education in Yemen, so we have that big investment, $15 million—it’s actually $18 million now—for the Syria crisis, and, in total, we have delivered over a hundred million to—across 16 crisis countries over the—in one year—one year. So it’s—we’re moving in such a record speed, but that’s because we have this title—Education Cannot Wait. So it constantly pushes us to move fast. So we are there. We are there. We are there. STONE: I mean, I know a lot of us noted yesterday as well the administrator of USAID, of course, talked about Yemen in his testimony, and I don’t know if our USG colleagues have anything they want to share about the U.S. response to Yemen. We would welcome it. I know that Stephenie Foster—we’d love to go to you for your question. Q: Hi. I’m at Smash Strategies and formerly at the State Department in the Obama administration. I have a question about technology. I think technology—obviously, we talk a lot about it now and it can be a great equalizer. But, especially for girls and women, often there’s less access to technology, in general and in refugee situations. So I’m curious, just talk a little bit on the practical level—because I’m all about that—like, how do you see technology as part of the crisis response that you all are engaged in in terms of access to education? SHERIF: You’re giving this one to me. (Laughter.) No, technology is very important and we are—we have something—you know, part of our work is to be very normative and also to be adaptable to the technological developments. And I’m not an expert on it but we are—we are very keen to look into—there are many new apps coming out where you actually can do all your education without even having access to 24/7 electricity, and you charge and you have a generator, and then you have these amazing, very creative apps, and I have actually been to some of these exhibitions and we are in talks with them—not me, but people from my team. So yes, technology is very, very important, especially when people are on the move, because when you flee you can’t take your schoolhouse with you. You know, you have to have something in your pocket or something that you can carry with you, not to lose your—the continuity in your studies. So technology is going to be very important, and at Education Cannot Wait we are promoting that and we are looking into possibilities of supporting that through our—the programs and the funds that we provide. Absolutely. STONE: I’ll just say also from the CFR perspective, as we’ve been thinking about how to deepen work on refugees and girls, actually, this issue is one that we feel like has not gotten enough attention, and there’s not a lot of resources right now that you can go to that tells you what’s really working. There’s a lot of anecdotal evidence or, like, fun TED Talks but, like, what’s actually measurably able to scale, what’s showing real results. And so we’re trying to think, as a team, about how to help fill that gap with our resources here at CFR. So we’d love to talk to you about that. Q: Because there—I think there is some interesting stuff happening that is refugee driven out there. So it would be—it would be interesting to talk about that further. Yeah. REYNOLDS: And it’s a way you can penetrate some of the challenges, whether they’re borders or, you know, no availability to have schools and so on. I’ll put on an old hat from the previous job with UNWRA. When you had the Syria crisis—UNWRA has a TV station, and so what they were able to do, they used NileSat, OK, because the Gaza schools have two shifts so kids in the morning, and what do kids in the afternoon get? Well, they watch TV and everywhere—you know, in the Middle East most places you can find a TV somewhere and watch your favorite Egyptian soap opera but also watch—the kids could sit and get education. So recognizing that there were many Syrian—Palestine refugees from Syria fleeing to Lebanon—different education system, math and sciences are taught in English or French in Lebanon, not in Arabic, and in Syria, they only know Arabic. So what do you do with all these kids that are coming from Syria that may be sitting in Lebanon and have access to a TV? Put them on NileSat, and instead of teaching the curriculum for Gaza that day, why don’t you have two or three hours teaching Syrian curriculum? Now a Syrian refugee anywhere in the region that has access to a TV, whether they be in Turkey, they be in Jordan or Lebanon, can continue their studies of the Syrian curriculum. And this was early on in the war because people assumed maybe they could go home in a year. So you can keep up with that education in your national curriculum so that you’re ready for the tests that you need to take to graduate and so on. So there, you don’t need to necessarily have very high tech to actually penetrate into a community and really keep something going for people, whether they were able to go to a school or just sit and, you know, maybe get the little local coffee house to put an hour of that NileSat TV on for them. So there’s a lot of innovative things to do that don’t require huge, huge amounts of, you know, Bill Gates and the, you know, brains that he has. (Laughter.) STONE: We would take that as well. (Laughter.) Yeah. I mean, I think we’re particularly excited—just—I know the U.S. government is revisiting education strategy across the entire USG platform. You know, it’s, like, how will technology be part of that. It’s really an exciting opportunity and I know people are really interested in that. We have about seven minutes left because we end on time here at CFR as a matter of practice. So I’m going to just take these last few questions and then ask our panelists to respond. So I want to start with our colleague from the embassy of Afghanistan. Yasaman, if you want to share your question. Q: Hi. My name is Yasaman and I’m from Afghanistan, and I went to—I finished by secondary school in Herat, Afghanistan. And my question is to Yasmine. I mean, until the past two years we even had incidents such as girls—even young girls being food poisoned in school or thrown acid at, and I wanted to ask how do you deal with challenges like that, or is there a part of your support that finds solutions to keep these girls and families encouraged to send their schools to girls (sic) and to even secondary education. So how do you deal with challenges like that? STONE: Thank you for that. We’ll go to Puneet and get your question as well, and then Katie’s. Then we’ll have the panel respond. Q: So, Yasmine, you've seen the strengths and weaknesses of the U.N. system up front and you referenced U.N. reform. I’m wondering what ideas you have on that front to help address this challenge. STONE: That’s funny. We have seven minutes. (Laughter.) SHERIF: (Inaudible.) STONE: That’s a really great question. Katie, last question. Q: Good afternoon. So you were talking about targeting the local areas where the refugees are going and then helping that country and the refugees. But what are you doing with the internally-displaced people because that is, it seems, like a majority of the displaced persons. So how are you helping them when they don't have access to the schools? STONE: Thank you for that. So, Yasmine, I think violence against girls in Afghanistan and writ large, how you address that, and then U.N. system reform. Do you want to start? SHERIF: OK. For—the good news in Afghanistan—and I was there in February. This is a country I’ve gone back and forth since ’92 or ’91, and is—we today have in place a government who’s really keen to get girls back into school. So you at least, at that level, you have that support. The support is there. They want to bring girls back into school. The international community is invested in Afghanistan today. And I was really—I mean, I travelled to Jalalabad and we met with the provisional governor, and the mullah came and all the shura, you know, with all the, you know, salwar kameez and all. I mean, all these men, and they were saying, I have eight daughters and I want them all to go back to school, and, I have five daughters and they’re back in school. So that whole shift is amazing to see. It’s very inspiring. But then you will have—you have—I mean, because you have—you have this whole ISIL there—you have the Taliban, you know, who are not in the provincial capitals, who will be throwing acid and killing and raping, as has—this goes back many years. I remember even in the ’90s you had some really hard-core fanatics who would throw acid. I remember this Hekmatyar. He was known for throwing acid in the face of women. So what is important is that education doesn’t come alone. It comes with protection mechanisms. It comes with different ways of mitigating the risks for girls to be exposed to that kind of violence. So one is to make sure that the schools are built close to the community—that’s one—and you know how much the community safeguard their area—making sure that provisions are, of course, set in place within the school so that the girls can be kept in sort of a protective environment, and make sure that the curriculum and so forth for young boys are very sensitive to how girls should be treated and empowered. So curriculum, the location of the schools, the engagement of the parental association, so that there’s a community-protective environment. Then, of course, you have the whole issue of external security, and there, it all depends on where you manage to secure the areas where you can actually have girls going to school, and these are difficult in many parts of Afghanistan. I think the government only controls 40 percent or so of the country. So, you know, we are not going to go and establish a girls’ school in some ISIS territory. We won’t even go there. I mean, this is clear. So we can only reach those that are not posing this extreme danger, because there are also security restrictions for very natural reasons. But I remember being in Iraq after the—Mosul was liberated from the ISIL and, I mean, what the government was saying in Baghdad is, we have millions of children coming out of this area now—they’ve been in Mosul for three years, or whatever, under ISIL or ISIS and they’ve been taught to shoot and kill and so on—now we have to reprogram and reintegrate them into society again. And they would be among those who would throw acid and they would do this kind of thing. So these are really—and then the security situation also is what permits you to go in and actually do something. So I can now say that there you have millions of children now that have to be reintegrated in society and you really have to put effort to that curriculum, and there they have to be a very gender-sensitive curriculum—and the girls. On the U.N. reform— STONE: Sixty seconds on U.N. reform. (Laughter.) SHERIF: Sixty seconds on U.N. reform. STONE: What are your top lines? What are your— SHERIF: First of all, I was twenty-four when I joined the U.N. I’m fifty-four now, so thirty years, in and out, you know, and I believe this is the multilateral forum, globally. I’m a great fan of the United Nations. But like any bureaucracy—any bureaucracy—it can become stifling, it becomes risk averse, a lot of paper trails, and we forget the people we serve. We forget to be cost effective, how to use money, how to move funds, how to deliver results, because bureaucracies by nature are like that and that’s the danger of bureaucracies. It programs you into a sort of mindset, and I’m very allergic to that mindset because I see the consequences of it—you are not delivering on the ground, you’re not reaching out to the people, and you're not moving with speed. So I think what we—the primary, primary way of reforming is the attitudinal change, people inside. We need to change, set our bars high. I think private sector and that entrepreneurship can contribute to shift that kind of attitude. So that is—I can tell you, we have just got a most beautiful executive director for UNICEF. Oh, wow, she’s going to change things. She comes from the private sector. So this is—the attitudes. That’s number one, and number two—the attitudes—number two, you need to have—you need to have injections of good models and examples where you see that you can do things differently, and you have to live up to that change and say, you can do it—you can deliver—and I am hoping, as I have tried with the work I’ve done in the past, is that Education Cannot Wait will be part of that injection, and we will just keep pushing. And I know the system. They will pick up and say, wow, look how they’re doing it—you can do it that way. So I’m hoping that that is how we will impact the system. STONE: Well, let it be so. Matthew, sixty seconds on IDPs. REYNOLDS: IDP—just, like, a one-minute on the House of Representatives floor, let me tell you quickly, we—like statelessness, we wish we had more ability to do more for IDPs, for UNHCR. It’s a resource and capacity issue to not be able to do more, and that’s also in our statelessness mandate. But there are innovative ways to look at—for the IDPs, if you were looking at the way that World Bank and others can contribute to countries, and many IDPs are in places like Colombia. Let’s look at Colombia, El Salvador, Honduras. These can be part of a national education plan because there are still Hondurans within different parts of Honduras fleeing MS-13 from one area and going to another. That can be part of a national education plan that’s worked with the bank or the IADBs. We already have in our sort of regional compacts of CRRFs, like the one in the Horn of Africa, countries like Somalia that also have IDPs. Again, it’s one of those places where, when you're looking at the whole of society, you bring in to help the whole—the whole society there. You’re helping not only refugees but also those internally displaced. So I think, in a nutshell, there are a lot of resources but there’s not enough attention given to it. But if you’d like to—us to do more, the world—to the world, the world can give us more and we’ll do more. (Laughter.) STONE: Thank you to the gentleman from—(inaudible)—for yielding the balance of your time. All right. Listen, thank you so much for joining us today. We were so grateful for your presence. I hope you’ll continue the conversation afterwards with our speakers as they’re able to stay, and we hope to see you again soon. Thank you so much. Have a great afternoon. (Applause.) (END) This is an uncorrected transcript.  

Girls and women make up more than half of the 36.7 million people living with HIV globally. Research shows that gender inequalities, including gender-based violence, exacerbate girls’ and women’s vulnerability to HIV and lack of access to HIV services. According to UNAIDS, women who have experienced violence are up to three times more likely to be infected with HIV than those who have not. But when adolescent girls are empowered through secondary education, they are less vulnerable to HIV. Experts Mark P. Lagon and Olive Mumba discuss how the U.S. Congress, Donald J. Trump administration, and global institutions can invest in high value partnerships with local leaders to empower girls and help end the AIDS epidemic.        STONE: (In progress)—with us today. I tried to get around and say hello to everyone because I am a new fellow here. My name is Meighan Stone. I am a senior fellow in the Women and Foreign Policy Program. And I just joined the team a couple of months ago and previously was the president of the Malala Fund. So I worked for the last several years with Malala Yousafzai and all of her work focused on girls’ education. So I am thrilled to be part of the girls’ and women’s focus programming here. And thank you for voting with your feet by continuing to come to discussions that focus on girls and women because it helps us have even more ambitious programming. So we’re really grateful that you are here today. So our mission at the Women and Foreign Policy Program is to analyze how elevating the status of women and girls around the world advances U.S. foreign policy objectives. So to that end, today our conversation is on the record. And so I want to encourage anyone in the room who would like to tweet or post on social media about our conversation, we are on the record today. And feel free to tag us. Our handle on Twitter is @CFR_WFP. Or if it’s just easier for you, you can use a hashtag, which is just #CFRWomen. And so I want to encourage you, if Olive says something inspiring and if Mark drives you to action as you leave here on policy, don’t be afraid to put that on social. We’d love to retweet you or to engage with you there. So looking forward to that. We’re going to have our conversation with our speakers today for about 30 minutes and then open it up to questions. We really want to hear from all of you when we go to questions. I think most of you know CFR style is to put your placard up like this and that’ll help me know that you have something to share and to call on you so you can be part of the discussion in that way. So why don’t we get started. Today, we are really focusing on how local and global actors can work together to empower girls through education and reduce their vulnerability to both gender-based violence and HIV/AIDS. So we know we’ve made incredible progress. We were just talking amongst ourselves about how far we’ve come and how far we still have to go. So, you know, many of us know that since 2010 HIV infections among adults, they’ve fallen by 11 percent and that AIDS-related deaths have fallen by 48 percent since the peak in 2005. And I know that’s due to the efforts of many people in this room, so thank you to everyone that’s been part of working on this issue for so long. We also know that there’s so much work that we still have to be done and that every day when we look at adolescent girls, there’s about a thousand adolescent girls and young women who are infected each day. And we all know that number is far too high. So we know that adolescent girls’ vulnerability to infection not only undermines women’s empowerment in their own agency and lives, but also hinders an overall nation’s development efforts and economic progress. So this is an issue of specific girls and women that we want to stand with and also of national interest when it comes to economies and international development success in achieving SDGs. So we’re really thrilled and honored to welcome two experts today to share with us, Olive Mumba and Ambassador Mark Lagon. So we’re especially privileged to have Olive with us. She’s traveled from Tanzania where she serves as the executive director of the Eastern Africa National Networks of AIDS Service Organizations. And so she’s been working at this for over two decades as a leader in civil society efforts to reduce the spread of HIV. And today she’s going to share what I believe is really an invaluable perspective about how we can truly support local leadership on this issue and what international institutions and policymakers can do to make that work, have the most impact. We’re also joined by Ambassador Mark Lagon who we’re welcoming back to CFR. He is a former senior adjunct fellow here. He is currently the chief policy officer at the Friends of the Global Fight Against AIDS, TB, and Malaria. And I want to shout out he’s brought his two incredible interns, Sarah (sp) and John (sp), to join us today, and so we’re thrilled to have young-women leaders here at CFR as well. Previously, Mark served as the deputy assistant secretary at the State Department’s Bureau of International Organization Affairs. He served as the executive director and CEO of Polaris as well—more incredible work—and the president of the Freedom House. And we’re just so thrilled to have you both with us today. So why don’t we start our discussion. We know, Olive, we were just talking before when we were meeting about how you’ve literally just come on a train from New York where you were part of high-level discussions at the U.N., you know. And you were there to bring your perspective as a leader in Tanzania. You know, in your work there, what is your mission at your organization and what have you seen in your work over the last two decades about this issue of bringing together a focus on adolescent girls, preventing gender-based violence, looking at education as a tool to combating the spread of HIV and AIDS? What have you learned in your experience, and what are you committed to right now in your work every day? MUMBA: OK. Thank you very much, Meighan. First of all, I also just want to say thank you for having me here. It’s a pleasure, you know, knowing that there are people who are also helping us who are working at the community level, but that we also have very good will up here in Washington, D.C. Yeah. I come—I’m a Malawian, but I’ve lived and worked in Tanzania for the past 20 years. And my organization, EANNASO, is really involved in I can say three things: First of all is policy and policy advocacy, making sure that policies that are being developed really reflect the needs from the community. But also, secondly, is providing in terms of technical support to communities and civil society. When I talk about communities, I mean in the various forms. This can be communities of women and girls, adolescent girls and young women. It can be communities of key population sex workers, people who use drugs, and, you know, other communities as well. But today, I’m going to specifically talk about adolescent girls and young women. So when I say communities, that is what I’m going to mean. So EANNASO, we’ve been working for the last—since 2002. Can I say that’s around 13, 14 years? And what we have been seeing is that for effective policies and effective programs, we need involvement of adolescent girls and young women, and this has not been there in the past. And it’s also because of the political, economic, and social/cultural environment where as Africans we’ve seen that most of the times women and girls never would have a voice. And because they would not have been given space to know, to relate, to talk about the things that matter most about their lives, then they would not be given space to really talk about what are the key issues. And if you know that, like, in most of East and Southern Africa, HIV is amongst—60 percent is amongst adolescent girls and young women. So it is very, very key that we also make sure that they are engaged, they are involved, and even in terms from the planning up to the implementation and monitoring of the activities that are happening. Yeah. So the organization I work with, EANNASO, is also part of the can I say committee rights agenda program within the Global Fund. And we have what is called the Anglophone Africa Platform which mainly talks about engaging communities, strengthening their ability to participate, and also inform policies and programs. Yeah. So that’s what I can say for the time being, yeah. STONE: Busy days. Busy days. So, Mark, I’d love to shift to you to hear from you just from, you know, all of your deep policy experience. You know, we know that girls who experience gender-based violence are up to three times more likely to be infected with HIV. So could you speak, too, from a policy perspective and just, you know, looking at how these different issues intersect between gender-based violence, education, and HIV and AIDS, how they come together? LAGON: And it’s really a pleasure to be here. And thank you for inviting me. And I’m happy to be an adjunct to the opportunity to listen to all on the front line. You know, if you’re thinking about women and girls’ empowerment, before you ever get to the idea of economic opportunity, you need to think about debilitating pandemic disease. So in and of itself, there needs to be a focus on this for female empowerment. But if you are to actually imagine epidemiological control of HIV—like a report from my organization “At the Tipping Point” looks at, and there are copies outside—you have to grapple with this demographic of young women and adolescent girls, especially with a growing, huge youth bulge in Sub-Saharan Africa and other parts of the global south. So if you think about that, you have to, I think, focus on the driver of gender-based violence and the deterrent or preventive dimension of education. There is some good evidence that’s really, you know, coming together that, you know, really shows what we know in our gut: That those who are experiencing gender-based violence have a higher risk of contracting HIV and those who have contracted HIV have a higher risk of facing iterated gender-based violence. And some of this is about what you might call by the all-too-gentle euphemism “involuntarily sexual debut” in Africa. But so much of the issue is young females not having the ability to negotiate their sexual life, whether it’s if they have sex, whether they’re going to have protected sex, whether they feel empowered or stigmatized in seeking HIV testing and treatment. I mean, you see really, you know, some governments that have gotten their arms around this, like Rwanda where sort of they’ve created these, you know, blended efforts. I got to see in Kigali on a trip about a year ago of blending law enforcement, you know, gender rights, counseling, and health as crucial. On the education side, there’s kind of a very strong correlation of education with not—with reduced rates of HIV infection. And I think it will be interesting over time to look, learning what element of education is most important. But, you know, The Lancet has documented this in Botswana where, you know, there’s an 8 percentage drop in the risk of HIV infection with each year in school and particularly among young females. With each additional year of secondary school education, you know, a reduction in the risk of HIV infection by 12 percent. And so across the board on education, that is really a crucial element. And it needs to focus on women and their knowing about the risks, equipping them to be economically empowered so that they can negotiate their situations in sexual relations, and special measures for those who are not in school, those who are vulnerable, so that they—you’re not, you know, you’re not getting the easy-to-reach. And then, ultimately, education must address males. There needs to be change of norms and education systems are crucial for changing the minds of the boys. STONE: That’s critical. You know, I know we didn’t discuss this before, but I wondered just as you were talking and I can’t help but notice when we say, you know, terms like “involuntary sexual debut” and we know what we’re really talking about, which is rape—it’s OK to use that word, sexual assault—you know, has the #MeToo movement, have you seen any sign of that in your work, Olive, with some of the young women or with women’s groups that you’re working? Has that reached Tanzania in terms of being something that women are talking about? Because I know we’ve been seeing more and more in our work here at the Women and Foreign Policy Program that it has been having an impact globally. And we’re hearing reports. I even talked to an activist in Pakistan this week who told me that #MeToo is having a really big impact right now for girls and women and advocating around these issues, whether it’s education, HIV/AIDS, and women’s rights in particular Have you seen— MUMBA: Yeah. STONE: How has that been happening? MUMBA: Yeah. Yeah. There are groups now that are coming up and talking more about issues around women. And also, looking at, you know, in terms of the traditional cultural aspects, the ones that are harmful, and how can we change that status quo. And also, when it comes to education, we’ve seen the change where, in the past, if a young girl gets pregnant, she would not be allowed to go back to school. But right now, we’ve seen that now they are able to go back to school. Also, in terms of, like, inheritance, you know, when maybe if your husband dies and then—yeah, the property that he leaves behind, right now we are even seeing that there are organizations and corporations that are supporting to make sure that we get—you know, that the widows get their inheritance back. But also, we’ve seen a quiet shift, a big—a big shift in terms of—I think, Mark, you talked about it—engaging men. Because there’s been that fight to say, OK, why are we only stressing on women and girls and we’re leaving out the boys and the young men? So there’s also been that element of engaging men with the effort—with the efforts of trying to make sure that women are also in the forefront, so it’s not seen like it’s just a women’s agenda, but it’s a community’s agenda. Yeah. And there’s been increase in terms of dialogue at all levels down, which is at the grass roots in the villages. You see that women now are able to talk more about their issues and also come up with solutions and, you know, suggestions on this is what we would want. Yeah. And the good thing is, like, we have what are called gatekeepers at the community level. These are chiefs, these are traditional leaders. These can be religious leaders. They’re also coming up and saying, OK, let’s involve women more, and also let’s listen to the women. So, yes, there is a lot of that force, yeah. STONE: Yeah. I know that work can be so important in helping girls go to school and stay in school, especially through secondary school where we see a lot of this protective, effective education. Why don’t—why don’t we talk a little bit about what works, like, what is working? You know, I think, you know, right now as we’re looking at the policymaking landscape and the budget landscape, the United States especially, you know, it’s important to see, like, what do we really need to lean into that’s showing real results in terms of impact? And we’ve seen some real wins and some real achievements on impact from global institutions, regional institutions, you know, of course, PEPFAR, the Global Fund, UNAIDS You know, Mark, do you want to start with some thoughts on this? Like, where have we seen these programs really work in terms of empowering adolescent girls? LAGON: Well, I look forward to dialogue with Olive. STONE: Yes. LAGON: And I won’t presume to talk so much about the on-the-ground, you know, things that you see in civil society in the countries you’ve worked in. So why don’t I concentrate a bit on the— STONE: Perfect. LAGON: —on the international programs. You know, the DREAMS program of PEPFAR is very promising. You know, and you sort of go down the map of the DREAMS countries of Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania, Zambia, Malawi, Mozambique, Zimbabwe, Swaziland, and Lesotho, South Africa, these are places where there’s beginning to be evidence that interventions that are not biomedical, but that are social can help empower girls and gird, you know, defenses, as it were, against HIV. We need to look a little more deeply into the data and see whether it’s correlation, whether it’s real causation, but it’s promising. And I think the Global Fund, you know, which is my job to study and speak to in my current role, its best role is as a multiplier so that the United States is not singly this big funder, you know, of a huge transformational program as with PEPFAR. And so just as the Global Fund gets other countries to share the burden with the United States and there’s an alignment—like on, you know, the U.S. has decided on malaria that it will only work in the same countries in the president’s malaria initiative as the Global Fund so that there’s a reinforcing rather than redundant effort. And so, too, the Global Fund has formed the HIV Epidemic Response initiative, which, of course, spells HER. And it works closely with HER Voice Fund that Olive is quite involved in in her regions of Africa, but on prevention programs, on sexuality education, educating women in economic rights and their financial literacy, trying to grapple with some of these issues of GBV as well. And I think that’s promising. And in particular, it’s promising because the purpose of the HER initiative is to get the private sector to kick in and, better yet, to be involved in a substantive way in kind. So, you know, I think that Ambassador Birx has the view that this is something that is reinforcing, not redundant, that it extends the reach of the United States, like a number of ways that the Global Fund does. STONE: Olive, would you share from what’s working that you’re seeing in communities? I know we talked about DREAMS quite a bit in our own conversations. But what does the DREAMS program look like in communities and what are you seeing that’s working that you would like to see the international community to invest in? MUMBA: OK. I think Mark has already talked about, you know, the countries where DREAMS is operating. But one thing I would like to say is they, like, this year and last year, when countries were developing their COPs, their country operating plans, we’ve seen more engagement of communities and especially the adolescent girls and young women in the formation of the program itself. And at first, you know, that’s something that we can talk about because in the past there was not known that participation. So this time, yeah, that’s— STONE: How does that look when you are doing consultation? Like, what does it mean now to meaningfully include adolescent girls that you’re seeing that’s working in the consultative process where they weren’t being included before? MUMBA: At country level, they will have consultation meetings before having the country plan. So you’ll find that civil society are sitting together and especially addressing girls and young women, would sit together, come up with what they see as their priorities, and then also then take them to now the country stakeholders’ meeting and then make sure that they have been included. But then also, you find that during the country operating plans, there are the regional meetings. And again, civil society are involved, and this is the first time. Because I think, in the last two years, we’ve seen this really, really change, and that has a lot of addressing girls and young women, actually putting in their issues in the country plans. But also, when it comes to operationalization at community level, because they have been involved in the planning, it also becomes quite, you know—they own the programs and the implementation of the activities. What is more interesting also is that implementers are now also coming from the communities, meaning that they involve, like, adolescent girls and young women in all forms, not specifically from the general community, but also other communities. I don’t know when I say “other communities” whether you understand. That will mean maybe adolescent girls and young women who come from the sex workers’ community, those who come from, like, the very marginalized, like orphans. So you find they also are part of, you know, all that, what is happening. Yeah. Yeah. STONE: That’s good. It’s heartening to hear that things are changing and that we’re actually starting to build more programs around the actual needs of the community and having, you know, God forbid, the community themselves be at the table crafting these programs with us. So it’s good to hear that you’re seeing real traction. You know, Mark, I wanted to ask you just about the budget process specifically. We know that President Trump put in his budget request—which we all, most of us, know in the room is nonbinding, and even when you have the same party on the Hill and in the White House, is not really considered binding either—but we know that there were some significant cuts in the FY ’19 budget proposal. So we saw an 11 percent cut to PEPFAR and a pretty steep cut, 31 percent potentially, to the Global Fund. And, you know, I know a lot of us who talk about these issues saw in the last budget cycle that champions on both sides of the aisle on the Hill saw the budget request and then, you know, maintained U.S. support of a variety of international development priorities for the most recent budget. You know, as you’re looking, going back to this process again, you know, what would be the impact of this level of cut? Who do you see as the most promising champions on both sides of the aisle? You know, in our nonpartisan, bipartisan spirit here at CFR, who do you see as partners in this? You know, what is the call to action around looking at the impact of these programs and how important it is to fund them? LAGON: Thank you for asking a tough question and an important one. I mean, the good news is that Congress has stayed steady in the last few years at flat funding for fighting HIV. The bad news is that it’s been only supporting flat funding. But this is in the face of proposed cuts from OMB and President Trump. You know, if you—if you were to make the cuts that President Trump proposed, for instance of 31 percent to the Global Fund—which I don’t expect, I expect, you know—and I’ll turn to who those champions are who won’t, you know, have it happen—but, you know, there are 400-and-you-know-55 thousand people who wouldn’t be put on to antiretroviral treatment. There would be, you know, 18,000 less who would get the key drugs they need on TB. And then if you really kind of widen the aperture and you think about it, there might be, you know, by a conservative estimate, 9 (billion dollars), $9.4 billion of lost economic gains by those lives of people who no longer can thrive. You know, the champions are on both sides of the aisle and in both chambers. You know, they range from Senator Lindsey Graham and Senator Boozman who are very seized with this issue on the Republican side, long-time stalwarts on the Democratic side like Nita Lowey and Barbara Lee. The crucial thing we need to do is to have a new generation of legislators and champions who were not there at the sort of birth, you know, present at the creation of PEPFAR, and kind of get those left-right-face, secular, business, civil society coalitions going. And I think it is quite possible. And in fact, it’s one of the reasons why I came to the job I’m in, is that I think even in this particular environment, which is caustic and difficult, that’s possible. The question is, you know, can we also get executive branch support for that? STONE: I want to shift to our last question. So just in a few moments, we’re going to open it up, so this is your moment to think about what you want to share with the group. And again, when we open it up, if you want to put up your placard, that’s how I know that you have something to share with us. So I want to go to Olive. You know, we have come such a long way, you know, in this fight. From 2005 to 2016, the number of people who died of AIDS has gone from 2 million to 1 million, so 1 million too many, but much progress has been made. You know, as you’re looking to the future and going forward and thinking about how global and local actors need to work together, really work together, not just in talking points, you know, or in statements of intent, but in actual work in country, what do you think that local leaders need most from policymakers to be successful to truly say that we can end AIDS in our lifetime? What do you need as a local leader that a room like this that engages on policy could think about bringing and fighting for alongside you? MUMBA: Thank you so much, Meighan. Before I answer, I just wanted to talk about one other program that I think has really worked well and that will also touch upon, you know, the question that you just asked, and that is the Global Fund for AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria. In most countries, for us to reach the progress, it’s because of the Global Fund and the funding that comes, you know. Because we know, like, most of the funds come from America, and it has made a significant change, not only to HIV, but also TB and also malaria. But also, we’ve seen the increase—in terms of the process that the Global Fund follows, is it’s a stakeholders’, you know, consultation, coming up with the actual plan that needs to be done. So we’ve seen in terms of, like where the DREAM countries, you know, which are 10, there’s been the 13 countries, the catalytic funding, where the Global Fund has said, OK, if you invest in the catalytic funding specifically for addressing girls and young women of such an amount, we will double that amount. So this has actually made countries want to invest more in adolescent girls and young women. And then also, I think, Mark talked about it, about the HER initiative, where now we have what is called the HER Voice Fund. These are the same 13 catalytic countries, where now my organization, EANNASO, is providing small grants to adolescent girls and young women and ensuring that they can, you know, be part of processes, not—if they have any logistical issues, they’re able to utilize that funding to be part of it, but also in terms of information. Because sometimes, lack of engagement is because of lack of information. Yeah. So they can try to come up with information packages that suit the age group as well. And this cuts across up to youth and including young men. Now, coming back to what is it that we need or—yeah, there’s a difference between need and want. Yeah? (Laughter.) STONE: You can answer both. We’ll take your answers on need and want. MUMBA: OK, thank you. So the first is, in terms of information, I think information is power. It helps you to make the right informed decisions. And once you have information, you are able to translate it into knowledge. And that is what addressing girls and young women need, for girls to be able to know that I need—I have a right to choose when to, you know, to start having sex, they need that. They also need to be given that information. They need to have the comprehensive sexual education information, but also the access to health services. So information is power. And I think that is something that requires us to—we need to continue working on it. The other is technical support. Technical support can be in the form of expertise. It can be in the form of even funding, yeah, such that when there’s a need for an activity to happen, there is the required, you know, technical expertise around that. Yeah. And when we talk about funding, especially for policymakers, in our countries, we are also trying, as civil society, we are trying to push for domestic resource mobilization, such that we don’t—you know, it’s not seen, like, it’s only the extent of funding that is coming in, but we also are pushing for the 15 percent Abuja declaration, which our presidents and our countries signed on to. And we understand that, you know, inasmuch as we are being supported, but our countries are the ones who are a hundred percent responsible for their citizens. So our governments need to ensure that they’re putting in resources. And the other thing that we are also requiring is we are also requesting is, yeah, we are seeing the decrease in investments specifically for HIV. And it may not be fatigue as such, but it may also be that we have seen that the emergency situation is not—it’s not as emergent, you know, as an emergency situation as it was. Yeah. But we need the continued global support in terms of the funding, but the continued rallying behind, yeah, this. STONE: So you don’t want a sense of success to create a sense of complacency and lose ground. MUMBA: Exactly. STONE: Yeah, that’s a good message. That’s a good message. Mark, from, you know, from your policy perspective, what do you feel is this role that the international community needs to play in backing local civil society organizations and leaders when it comes to this intersection of gender-based violence, education, and adolescent girls, and HIV and AIDS? LAGON: Well, I’m biased because I’ve had a career focused on civil society. So it will not, you know, surprise you that I’ll focus on that. But if you’re thinking about females who can thrive, then you need to grapple with these issues. If you’re thinking about epidemiological control and if you’re thinking about this thing that everyone talks about in the international community and especially in Washington, transition, graduation from international assistance, you have to think about civil society. You cannot only think about the capacity of governments. Civil society, very simply, whether it’s more broadly on HIV, but particularly this role of young women and adolescent girls, is the advocate. It’s the set of voices that are attached to eyes, that are seeing the affected communities from their own, you know, in their own shoes. They are the watchdogs. I mean, they are in fact a source of data to see whether governments are delivering. They’re implementers. They’re the ones who reach for any one of these affected populations that Olive spoke of, but for young women and adolescent girls, those who reach them. They’re the ones who will implement GBV and GBV prevention programs and on education. And so in a situation in which there is a squeeze on civil society around the world under autocratic governments and under, ostensibly, democratic governments, which makes the context even harder, I think the international community and American policy needs to think about putting its thumb on the scale for civil society. And that means looking at those policy instruments that do it. UNAIDS is famous and rightly so for its data and its establishing targets. But it’s also really good about integrating civil society. And I think it’s worth thinking about also the leavening role of the Global Fund, that at its governance level and on the ground insists on a role of secular and faith-based civil society. STONE: Thank you for sharing that perspective. I want to now open it up to everyone else’s questions, thoughts, perspectives, and so if you want to go ahead and put up your placard. If I call on you, please do identify yourself, let us know who you are and what organization you’re from so that we can really appreciate the work that you’re bringing to the table today. And so we want to open it up to questions. I would like to start with our colleague Regan, actually who has joined us from UNAIDS, in the spirit of Mark’s comments just now about data and about all the important work that UNAIDS has done for so long on this issue. So, Regan, I don’t know if you have any thoughts or something you want to put to the group as a question as well for us to discuss during the Q&A. Q: Sure, thanks. Is this already on? It’s on. OK. First of all, thank you for having me here today. And as a woman living with HIV for more than 20 years, I’m just always so impressed with leaders like yourself and Mark. Thank you for all that you’re doing, and so many of you in this room. It’s exciting that we’re talking that we’re talking about women and girls, obviously, at this moment. I just wanted to make two quick comments. Well, one comment and one question. So at UNAIDS, you know, women and girls have always been central to the work that we do. And obviously, we’re not going to end this epidemic without dealing with women and girls with a thousand new infections a week and women and girls—it’s just imperative that this becomes a focus of acceleration for us. You know, one of our goals, as you said, is to hold targets and put data out there. But the thing that we really want to do is mobilize governments and keep them accountable on these targets. So we have periodic meetings throughout time that elicit responses from governments and then also put forward political declarations. So in 2011, we had a specific target for women, the first time that we had a specific target for women. And then in 2016, we had another specific target for women, which further evolved the language and the specificity of what we’re doing. We bring the governments back together every year. Every five years, we have a large meeting and we put out a large report, but in between we have an annual meeting and we take a tally of where people are. So next week, we’re actually meeting in New York with the secretary-general and we’ll report back out on what the progress is. And we’re seeing progress, which is good. I mean, we’re seeing it in a place like South Africa where South Africa is beginning to take the DREAMS program and scale up to a national level. We’re seeing movement in Malawi. I think we need to take a look at that progress and maybe highlight that. We highlight the absolute data, but showing specific progress against these targets and packaging that in a slightly different way. But just back to the issue of empowerment of women and girls and HIV, I think when we invest, I mean, what is empowerment? To me, it’s telling someone that they’re worth it, that they have value, giving them the tools that they can then use to protect themselves. I mean, I contracted HIV in a moment of vulnerability in my own life. I was not a young girl, I was in my mid-20s, but I was divorced. And I didn’t know the information. I was paranoid about HIV in the ’80s, didn’t think it could happen to me in the mid-’90s. I had never heard of anyone my age or my ‒ from my place in life having HIV. So I think that investing in women and giving them the specific tools to navigate their lifestyles and teaching women the negotiation skills that are specific to the context in which they live. And I think just the very act of investing in them and telling them that they’re worth it is something that we need to sort of highlight more. And I think I guess I would turn to the group and say, how can we frame this work as more than just something that’s necessary from an epidemiological standpoint, but how is this building a different future for everybody? And how do we quantify those benefits? Because I hear a lot, you know, when I do my work on Capitol Hill, well, how does this benefit Americans, how does this benefit the world at large, you know? So I think we just—so many smart people here, helping me think about those messages would be very helpful. STONE: Thank you so much for sharing your perspective and that question, really important. I can see both Olive and Mark are ready with their answers. I see—no, go, please. LAGON: It’s not really a question, but I, of course, you know, deeply agree. You know, there are very difficult issues on reproductive rights that are in our politics today. But there is a very strong consensus about women’s economic empowerment. And you see advocates on both sides of the aisle here. And so one way of thinking about this—and this would not be the bumper sticker, it would not be the talking point for Capitol Hill—but if you think about UNAIDS and you think about on-the-ground civil society organizations and the Global Fund and so on, the goal here for females is their agency, to be able to thrive. And so what we want is to fund and support and reform agencies for agency, agencies for young women’s agency. That’s what it comes down to. And I think that’s what you’re talking about. Q: I like that. STONE: Olive, do you have any perspective on that from your day-to-day work? MUMBA: Yeah. On my side in our country, we say when you educate a woman, you educate the whole community. And that, I think, is true, because once you give information to any woman, you find that it also—it does not only reflect within her household, but also reflects within the community that she lives, and, you know, the encouragement that she provides to other women, to other children, and even to the country as a whole. Because once you educate one person, it will—you know, it’s like a tree. And the tree, especially when you look at the roots, yeah, it spreads out. So it’s the same thing, that at times we may not be able to quantify specifically in numbers, but we can in terms of the quality. Yeah. And I think that’s what, in most cases, we’ve been forgetting, that we want to look at numbers, but in terms of the quality, sometimes it’s a bit hard to really specify. But we’ve seen—we can see, you know, the change. And unfortunately, also, sometimes change takes time to see. Yeah. STONE: And we all know this is a common challenge in foreign policy advocacy, especially around girls and women. There’s a human rights argument and the rights of girls and women. And then we also need to quantify. And it’s a sensitive balance between those two needs and we want to strongly defend both. We know there’s an intrinsic right and we also know that there are intrinsic measurable benefits and we need to be able to have both arguments. I see Sarah (sp) has a question for us. Q: Well, I’m just going to kind of build on Regan’s comment. And I just want to say, I was at an event at the Wilson Center yesterday on ending preventable maternal mortality. And one of the speakers or participants who came in, she said, oh, I was in this other room and it was all men so I knew I was in the wrong event. So I just want to say I was really happy to be in the right event today and that a man is here talking about very important and tough issues. So building on something that Olive said and, like, pushing you a little bit more, Ambassador, Olive said one of her strategies is to go to the chiefs and the elders and knock on the door and say how important this is. Granted, we live in tough political times. What is your advice to all of us to go to the chiefs and the elders in this community, in this new administration, and put the urgency on this? Because one thing I’m frustrated about is, under DREAMS, you know, a year ago, they’re talking about comprehensive sexual education, now we’re talking—I think the euphemism, and some is going to correct me if I’m wrong here, sexual risk reduction, which I think is abstinence. So that’s a big difference in the lives of girls in the community. So what is your advice to us? How do we do that breakthrough that we have to do so that the elders and chiefs in our country—I’m speaking not as the U.N., as an American—what would you suggest to us that we do so that we come into this room and it’s a lot more men at the table? LAGON: Well, I think you, you know, you can probably identify some figures that you will get nowhere with. And then you will have some champions who understand that there is a kind of a broader, holistic approach to women’s and girls’ empowerment. And I think we need to, you know, look at those who live in the world of conservatives and the culture of Republicanism. And, you know, I think there are more Lindsey Grahams out there than appear. And he may not have, you know, the views that you or some of us do or UNFPA, but finding those or minting those. And I think I admire the idea that you don’t just wait for a future day, but reap gains where you can within some parameters that are tightening. STONE: Olive, what is your perspective on this? Because you’re having these kinds of conversations in your community. And I heard Sarah (sp) say, what is your advice to us because we’re—how can you encourage us or what are your learnings from having those conversations with traditional cultural leaders? How do you bring somebody onside to agree that a girl should go to school or that you’re going to need to talk about these issues if you actually want to prevent HIV, that you’re going to need to address gender-based violence with both girls and boys and men to really make measurable change that we’re all seeking together? Like, what would have been your experiences in that or what would you counsel this group? MUMBA: OK, thank you so much. In terms of—Mark had already talked about champions. It’s the same thing that we do. We identify who is on our side, know who is our ally, and we would give them information to say, OK, you know, if this doesn’t happen, these are the consequences, or if we do this, this will be what we will be able to gain. And once they get that information then they will be able to influence the others within that community. But secondly is we also have ambassadors, you know, those that have—ambassadors will be, like, not Ambassador Mark. (Laughter.) But ambassadors in terms of, like, someone from the community who has done quite well and can influence in terms of, like, a mentor within the community where, like, for the women, would say, like, you share your experience, share your story of how you’ve been able to make the change. And then they, too, are also able to influence in terms of the other chiefs. In Malawi, we had the traditional chiefs came up and signed a declaration to say that if any child, if any girl—because this was around child marriages—they said that if someone is pulled out of school without a proper reason, they have to sign and tell us why is it that this has happened. So this was an example of where, you know, they looked at one another, they gave each other, like, a peer support, but also, in terms of being accountable to one another. Yeah. STONE: Yeah. I think that’s such a helpful story from your work as an expert and as somebody working. You know, it’s interesting that we hear that about working together with the traditional chiefs in such a new and productive way, but then we look at our own policymaking environment and feel like it’s impossible. But yet, when we do diplomatic work, it’s always seeking to bring together different sides, but then we look at our current environment and think it’s—that just can’t happen. And, of course, it can. And I hear in these questions and discussion that we need to recommit to that. And I think for so many people here, especially colleagues at the ONE Campaign and other organizations, that we’re advocates. And, you know, part of PEPFAR originally in the Global Fund, it was very much an exercise in building coalitions across the aisle and finding shared values, even if there were other values that were very different, finding that middle space of that Venn diagram where we could agree and could come together. And that’s at the heart of the challenge for every policymaker. I want to go to Elizabeth, if you want to share with us your question. Q: Sure. Hi. Elizabeth Cafferty, U.N. Women. So U.N. Women, this isn’t a priority area for us, but we do work on HIV in a number of countries. And one that was most interesting to me was Ukraine which is not the first that comes to mind. And most of our work there is women’s economic empowerment and women’s peace and security. But it’s something that the women’s groups had raised with us that this was an issue that they needed assistance on. So that makes me wonder, and I think particularly maybe for Olive, working with young women, are there issues that they have raised, challenges that they have, or maybe ideas they had for solutions, that hadn’t occurred to you that you’ve been addressing because it came from the young women themselves? MUMBA: Thank you. Yeah. Just to say that recently we just had a call with U.N. Women and that was around HER Voice Fund. And I can’t remember, but I think the lady who—(inaudible)—I think is based in New York, yeah. And she’s one who connected us to the 13 other U.N. Women offices within the 13 countries that we work with. And, yeah, there is a—there is—one time we were having a conversation. Actually, it was a meeting within our Anglophone Africa Platform meeting. And one young lady, she’s from Kenya, that’s Lucy Wanjiku, and she mentioned, you know, like, sometimes—she’s someone living with HIV, sorry. But then she talked about, you know—she was expecting and then she wanted to give a solution to something. And the other—can I say the older women tried to tell her, no, please keep quiet, you know, this is not the way we’re supposed to handle. And then but she said I had to insist to say no, this is how I think this should be done. And at the end of the day, it really worked out well. So, yes, at times know when we give a voice to young women and especially new ideas—and even, like, most of the things that some of us would do with—they may not—you know, they may do it better. So it’s always good to give them a platform to voice themselves. Yeah. Yeah. STONE: Yeah. I know from our work at the Malala Fund, this was a question for us all the time, especially when we were looking at the SDG development around Malala’s focus, around girls’ education, secondary education, was, how do you meaningfully engage adolescent girls? So it’s not Youth Day at the U.N., which means the girls come to the same building, but actually don’t interact with anybody that makes decisions at the U.N. And so then our goal is not Youth Day, it is—it’s actually meaningful interaction between policymakers and young women. I mean, just as a show of hands for those that are with us today, how many of you do work that touches adolescent girls in any—in any way in terms of issues that pertain to them? I’m seeing a lot of hands. How many of you have any sort of active consultation process with adolescent girls? A smaller number of hands. How many of you have an active consultation process that has a feedback loop to go back to them and say, do you feel like you were heard and do you think there was a meaningful impact? I see one hand. So, OK. So our expert Olive has inspired us today to maybe take some of these learnings back to our organizations and how we think about crafting our work. I want to go to our colleagues here. Do you want to introduce yourself? Q: Hopefully it’s on. I’m Sanyukta Mathur, I’m with the Population Council. We are a research organization based in New York where we have offices around the world, including Washington, D.C. I’m a social and behavioral scientist and I lead our DREAMS implementation science research portfolio, meaning we’re doing research around trying to answer the practical questions on how DREAMS is working, who is it reaching? So I’m really thrilled to be here at this event and recognize that it’s a really important topic to be talking about where, as you said very well, Meighan, we’re 30 years into the epidemic and we’ve made huge strides. And the focus on adolescent girls and young women in because there has been a group of people that has been left behind in some of the successes. And part of what the DREAMS or DREAMS-like programming that is now being taken on by Global Fund and other counterparts at the U.N. is really around understanding and reaching those that are the most vulnerable and understanding how to reach them and understanding that their risk is really multifaceted. You know, so their—you know, schooling works really well. So the strategy of schooling is, how do you keep girls in school? And then for those that are out of school, how do you think about getting them back in school? And so that’s one of the things that we’re finding, is that the programs right now are doing really well in getting girls who have a lot of vulnerabilities, come from orphaned households, who are hungry, who come—who don’t—who have high-risk perceptions or high-risk behaviors, how do we do better to get the girls that are out of school? Can we provide them strategies or ways back into schooling or training that can reengage them in a meaningful way in their communities? I also appreciated the comments around engaging men. Gender-based violence is a huge issue in these young women’s lives. We surveyed about 3,000 young women in Kenya and Zambia, 20 percent of them had experienced sexual violence or coercion in the last year. These are 20 percent who were willing to report that to us, so you can only imagine that this is the tip of the iceberg. And almost none of them had received any services or post-violence care. So this is something that the DREAMS programs and partners are working actively toward. So I think the issue of addressing that topic and bringing men into the discussions, community-based programming becomes really important. When you ask men—and one of the interesting pieces that we’re doing is talking to both adolescent girls and men—when you talk to men, many of them have experienced major trauma and violence in their own lives. And we find that this cycle repeats. So the men who have experienced violence, everything from being beaten themselves or experiencing, you know, seeing violence in their community go on to, you know, perpetuate that violence with their partners and risk behaviors. So a lot of these issues are complex. I’m really glad to see so many people at this in this sort of forum because I think we need to talk about some of these complex issues to continue to invest towards this population and this topic. STONE: Do you have a question for either of our speakers as well? Q: I think it would be really helpful to hear from Olive a little more about how we can better engage in-country policymakers. That’s one of the things that the Population Council tries to do actively, is taking the evidence that is being generated so that they can feed it into programs and policies. So it would be—you know, that—I would love to hear you reflect a little more on that. STONE: Olive, do you want to speak to that? MUMBA: Yes. Just last—was it last week, two weeks ago, we were in Dodoma and Dodoma is the capital city of Tanzania and there was a parliamentary session happening. So we were working on TB, because what has brought me here is the TB high-level meeting preparations. And during that time, we had realized that most policymakers actually don’t understand some of these issues that we talk about. And when it comes to, like, DREAMS, you know, like, the successes that are happening right now, I think there’s a delink because, yes, they live within that community, but they don’t have that information. So they even request it as, OK, TB, we see people with TB, and I think the same thing, that we talk about HIV, but we don’t understand what causes it and what can we do as policymakers. And that is now the role of civil society, going and informing them. So similarly, when it comes to adolescent girls and young women, there was—there is a gap in understanding. You know, like, hearing from adolescent girls and young women themselves, you know, the issues that they are facing. And if policymakers are there, they would be surprised because they really don’t have that one-on-one, what I can say, experience. So that is one thing that I would like to say is providing dialogue space between the adolescent girls and young women and policymakers such that the issues can come directly to those who are making policies, and sharing experiences from projects and programs that are working so that they also encourage, you know, investing more in areas that support the change. One other thing is, when it comes to, like, funding for adolescent girls and young women, our countries normally don’t look at that as priority. They would rather look at infrastructure or other things that, at the end of the day, when they look at their balance sheet, you know, the assets are better than the liability. And most of the things, like education, health, is not as priority. Yeah. STONE: And I would agree. I mean, this is what we all talk about in terms of data. It’s, like, even the data’s not gender disaggregate, you know, not only in terms of impact or intervention, but also how money connects to that. And so we don’t even really know many times exactly what we can see because we don’t have the data available to us. I know we have about six minutes left and I really want to honor everyone that has their placard up because we’re really grateful that you’re here to be part of this dialogue. So what I would suggest is we’re just going to go around the room. If you can share your name, your affiliation, and your question with some brevity so we can make sure we get to the four people that I see. And then maybe if, Mark and Olive, you can respond to this last set of questions, that would be good. So we’ll start with you, Janet. Q: Thank you. My name is Janet Fleischman with the CSIS Global Health Policy Center. And thank you both for very—all of you, all three of you, for the interesting remarks. Olive, I wanted to talk a little bit more about the challenges that you see. Many of us have been working on these issues for a long time. We know adolescent girls and young women have been left behind since the start of the epidemic. We’re excited to see DREAMS and HER and other efforts moving forward, and yet the multisectoral approach, the engaging governments—I mean, Tanzania is a place that’s had the VAC study. They’re supposed to have this governmentwide approach to violence against children. We’re seeing resistance to moving forward with the DREAMS program, communities that aren’t always as engaged as we would like, implementers that aren’t coordinated. There’s lots of challenges that we see from here. But I wonder what you see as the key challenges that really could help move the dial on addressing the issues and the needs of adolescent girls and young women. STONE: Fantastic. We’ll go to our second one, with Harry. Q: Hi. This is Harry with American Jewish World Service. Mark, I love what you said about moving from agencies to agency. I really liked that. My question for Olive is, what do you see as the key legal and political barriers for adolescent girls and young women accessing not only—not only treatment services, but prevention services, to access their full range of rights? And for Mark, how does the donor community—how is the donor community responding to resourcing and not only kind of the clinical and commodity work, but around the broader social environment by which young women do or do not access services related to HIV? STONE: That’s a great question, we appreciate that. Katherine? Q: Katherine Marshall, Georgetown University. Three things that I think we should take away from here and not lose sight of. One is Mark’s comment that we have to develop a new generation of advocates. I think that that has great importance. I think the civil society space issue in this—in connection with this issue is one that really is worth thinking about. And then the other is, just for people who have been dealing with this issue since the ’80s, having sort of fresh story with fresh generations is important. But my main question is, where—we all know—I mean, everyone here at least, this is sort of a no-brainer, we should be focusing on gender equality and women’s rights, et cetera. Where is the opposition coming? I think you put your finger on it with the indifference, other priorities, this is really not very important, the sort of general attitudes. But looking more specifically, how are you dealing strategically with the religious communities? Clearly, there’s been a huge evolution in thinking within many religious communities since the start of the pandemic in the ’80s. But I know we work on family planning and the basic view is there is no sex outside marriage, can’t happen, a tremendous difficulty in dealing with adolescent sexuality. And this is true pretty much across. There are very few religious communities that are able to deal with that. What kind of strategy and dialogue is there for trying to deal with what in Africa is by far the largest civil society community or—I mean, it outstrips the NGO world by orders of magnitude. So how are we thinking and approaching that issue? STONE: Great question. And our last one, Chris? And then we’ll have our speakers give us their responses. Q: My name is Chris Farrar. I’m from Senator Boozman’s office. And I promise, I didn’t force the ambassador to name check my boss. (Laughter.) So a couple of things that really struck home. One was the building new champions piece. One thing that is difficult for a principal like my boss is that you have constituency and you can’t spend—you can’t focus all your efforts on one issue, as much as you would like to, so it becomes difficult to kind of carry the water repeatedly. And so I think some members—like I think Mr. Yoho is a good example of someone who campaigned against these issues and was educated, is now—has now moved back to, according to him, I think education is a big issue. So one, you know, for the ambassador, how are you kind of working to engage the policymakers in terms of educating them and their staff? And the other thing, I was also going to ask kind of about the faith-based community. I’m Episcopalian. I’m a little biased, we have a pretty good track record on this stuff recently. But, you know, how are you identifying members of the faith-based community who are supportive of the efforts? And how do you engage them, especially on—(off mic)? STONE: Great. So I heard a lot about current barriers and challenges to the work in country—Olive, especially for you—and trying to figure out where is this opposition coming from, where is the place for the donor community to engage on these issues and how to engage staff and the faith community writ large, in the donor community and also in the country as well? So do you want to start, Olive? We’d love to hear from you. MUMBA: Yeah. I think—thank you so much, Janet, for the question on what are the key challenges. And I think the very biggest challenge is learning from the past mistakes. Yeah. Because I think we don’t reflect quite a lot, so that’s around M&D, looking at documenting, evidence, and seeing what is working best. In HIV, we always talk about know your epidemic, know your response. And that can’t happen if we don’t have the evidence and also stories, you know, where we can learn from. Yeah. And the other thing is we need—I think also young, can I say, leaders, young adolescent girls, young women leaders, to be talking about their own issues. And I told Meighan when I was requested, I said I’m not the proper person, because last time when I talked about HER Voice, we had an audience of young women. And they were saying, but you, you’re not young. So we need to ensure that when we’re talking about young women issues that they are in the forefront and we don’t speak on their behalf, and provide them with, you know, the platform so that their voice is amplified. The other thing is in terms of, I think we talked about policies, policies that are there have always not included, you know, the voice and the needs that are there from the young women’s, you know, can I say young women’s needs? So that is also the other aspect. And prioritizing, I think that has not—we need to ensure that we’re prioritizing everything that we’re doing. We also make sure that we are prioritizing young women’s needs. Harry, you talked about what are the legal barriers. I was going to talk about this. The two, you know—in most of our African countries, we will find that the age of marriage is much lower. You know, it can be between 16 to 18, then the legal age of—can I call it age of consent—which will be around 21. And there’s that, you know. There’s a need to balance these two ages. Because one, you know, if someone wants to go access health services, then they require to, you know, have their parent’s consent. And therefore, that already acts as a barrier towards accessing comprehensive sexuality, you know, health services. And those are some of the issues. Also, most of our countries are right now developing adolescent girls and young women strategies. So in the past, it’s not been there. So right now, what we’re also trying to do through HER Voice Fund is trying to encourage the young women to also be able to be part of these processes that are taking place. Yeah. And there’s also a need for those legal assessments to be carried out so that we appropriately know how to respond to some of these issues. In East Africa where I right now am developing what is called the sexual reproductive health bill, which is going to look at all these other areas, you know, in terms of the legal ages as well. Yeah. I don’t know whether there’s any other question. STONE: I think we’re going to close in two minutes. We’re a few minutes over. So I don’t know if, Mark, if you want to bring us to a close with your response. LAGON: I’ll be brief. And I’m just thankful that she had the first word as opposed to thinking that I have the last word. (Laughter.) STONE: We appreciate that. LAGON: Chris, you know, I think to simply answer about this question that some of you have raised about building new champions and so on, you know, I think any political leader or advocate outside should not concentrate on necessarily, you know, creating 10,000 champions, but a buddy system of a handful. And that, I think, really can matter when a, you know, a legislator like your boss, you know, sort of takes a few people from, you know, the Arkansas delegation or some other newer senators and says, you know, these things happened with PEPFAR a few years ago and you may have the general sense of it, but it’s been really impactful and it was, you know—Republicans were really onboard and so on. We feel that mobilizing the faith-based community, youth, and business as advocates to try and engage political leaders is crucial. And that’s what we do. On the faith front, Katherine, you asked, you know, a super-easy question about religious communities. But I do think, when we think about civil society and programmatic work out in the world, we have to think about working with, not despite the faith community and really as crucial implementers. And, you know, the views you, you know, say that are held in that community are what they are. But I think it is deeply important, whether you’re the Global Fund or PEPFAR or other advocates, to do that. And then finally, Harry, you know, you talk about, as much donor community support for social interventions as for commodities and biomedical interventions. And I just think we need to have data, but we also have to have a comfort level that the data is not going to be the same kind of data that you have with biomedical interventions. And I just would say, if one is afraid that some constituencies would not be in favor of social interventions, just there might be a more robust consensus about, you know, engaging particularly when it comes to young women, you know, and civil society to enhance their voice. I think that is something that the gut instinct can go along with the data. STONE: Well, very good. Thank you so much. Again, we welcome your engagement on social media at #CFRWomen. And I just want to invite you to thank our speakers, Mark and Olive, for joining us today. (Applause.) Thank you so much. Have a wonderful rest of your afternoon. (END) This is an uncorrected transcript.

Robert Kaplan of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas discusses his outlook on the energy market, the future of trade relations and NAFTA, as well as potential threats to U.S. and global economic growth.

Diane L. Moore, Farah Pandith, and Chris Seiple, with Linda K. Wertheimer moderating, discuss religious literacy in global affairs, as part of the 2018 CFR Religion and Foreign Policy Workshop.

As part of the 2018 College and University Educators Workshop, Toja Okoh, Craig Albert, and Karen Lynden join Daniel Kurtz-Phelan to discuss CFR and Foreign Affairs resources for the classroom, including the National Security Council simulation Model Diplomacy, World101, and the Academic Conference Call series.