UN-Habitat Arena - Managing displacement across the humanitarian–development nexus and area-based approach (WUF13)

Okay, so I just have to say that we're going to have this panel both in English and Spanish.
We have the Vice Minister of Columbia.
He's going to be speaking Spanish.
So if you want to grab your translator stuff, do it now.
I promise it's going to be super interesting, so don't miss anything for what she's going to say.
Okay, so let's get started.
Um First, I want to introduce myself.
My name is Paula Gaviria.
I am the UN Special Rapporteur on the Human Rights of internally displaced person.
It's a real honor.
I thank UN Habitat for having me as a moderator in this arena and inviting me to the forum.
We're going to have a dialogue on managing displacement across the nexus, the humanitarian development nexus and area based approaches.
It's wonderful to have you here, I hope more joined during the conversation.
Um, and we gather around a critical issue around how to manage displacement and advanced durable solutions while recognizing that territories, communities, and data are essential for transforming realities.
The global report on internal displacement published by Internal Displacement Monitoring Center just two weeks ago, um, gave a new figure, we have now in the world, 82.2 million people that are internally displaced in their own countries, and this is the second highest figure ever recorded and twice as many as a decade ago.
And, you know, these figures need to also add the more than 40 million refugees and other people on the move.
So I do think that this dialogue today is extremely relevant for the actual situation in the world.
And as I was, um Welcoming each of the panelists.
We are joined by experts on this issue and leaders who will share practical experiences on a diverse context that they are working on.
First, I'm accompanied by the Vice Minister Ade Marsiga Bjo.
She's the Vice Minister of Housing, Water and Territory.
How is administered called today? Yeah? Because water is very important for the actual very government and planning.
So thank you for being with us, Vice Minister.
We have also Sherri Reitman Anderson is the United Nations Resident Coordinator in Jordan.
Um, I don't know a lot about you, but Cherry, you can introduce maybe your work when you have the floor.
We also have Stephanie Loose, very happy to see you again, Stephanie.
She's the country program manager for UN Habitat in Afghanistan.
And we are joined as well by Sergio Blanco, the only man in the panel.
Thank you for representing them.
Senior technical advisor for UN Habitat in the Central Sahel.
That's Burkina, Mali, and Niger, right? Okay.
And you're based in Bamako.
And last but not least, Ariana Plata, who is one of the organizers of this panel.
She's a program specialist at the UN Habitat Andean countries Hub based in Colombia.
So to start the conversation, I'm going to give the floor to the Vice Minister, Ade Marsiga.
Colombia has been working for many years.
I had the pleasure to listen to you in the past panel.
And you are quite well explaining that Colombia has a vast experience in the response for internally displaced persons because unfortunately, we have had a conflict for at least 60 years that has led to the highest registry official registry ever recorded in a country.
We have more than 8 million internally displaced persons.
And so we have learned in the good and bad way how to deal with this response.
Recently, we are addressing in a very, I think, responsible way the issue of climate related displacement, that you also had the chance to talk a little bit about that with the approaches that this government is bringing to the table.
The questions would be to share concrete examples and your own experience on this area based approach and how it has successfully started to support what we call durable solutions.
For internally displaced persons.
I know you have a presentation, so we're happy to listen to you, Vice Minister.
Thank you.
Good afternoon, everyone.
Thank you for being here with us.
Thank you.
Thank you for listening.
I think this international spaces are very important because as Paola said, unfortunately, we have a lot of experiences handling conflicts and displacements.
We would like it not to be like that, but that's the Colombia we have So I'm here to talk about what we are doing about internal displacements.
We stopped working on the problem as an assistant problem and we are changing this shift.
We are changing the approach when it comes to the public policies of our country and we want to tackle it through different permanent solutions for these populations, and that is why from the state, we are getting ready to provide an answer.
Whenever possible, considering our resources, we are a developing country, and our budget is very limited considering all the needs of the populations, but we do know that there is an important need both in the victims populations and also considering the actions of the conflict because we are within the framework of a peace agreement, and we have to talk about assistance when it comes to housing basic services to the people that signed the peace Agreement.
We are working on this topic through the analysis of the territory.
In Colombia, we also have an important problem, which is the access to information.
I believe that the conflict has also led to the information in many cases not being that reliable and that is why we have tackled it through different neighborhoods and areas where different types of populations are concentrating and from the information that we can generate, we create some working plans and programs.
There are different programs that have been financed in these cities and we benefited more than 49,000 displaced people internal displaced people to be precise.
We are implementing more than 120 actions at the territory level.
It is very important in this regard that we move from the assistance and from imposing to co creating with the same groups of people, the different action plans and how we are going to take actions.
They are direct participants of this process, both with the government, through the different territorial entities that also need to participate and actually participate in an active way and the people themselves that are displaced.
UN Abt has been an important and strategic ally and today we have a document about public policies, which is the document called Compass, which establishes the first public policy that is integrated, I mean, that has been conceived to take an integral or full solution to the displaced population.
We have an rising of ten years to provide assistance to these families.
In this regard, I would like to tell you about a specific case we are working on together in the city of La Guajira.
A city that is called Mal, which is a border city in which apart from the indigenous peoples, Waju, the Weiju people that are native from this sector, there is a confluence of different migrant populations from Venezuela that live in conditions of extreme poverty.
This is an airport.
Here, we can see the infrastructure of the airport.
It didn't work, and the space remained there and people settled there, but they did so in a very precarious way without having public spaces, without having decent houses, To be honest, this is very sad.
This settlement became a bit bigger after the pandemic.
During the pandemic, a lot of people arrived and then it grew.
It is a problem, indeed, for the sector.
But nowadays, the territorial entities and the national government takes it as a challenge and opportunity of development for the city and we are tackling it through a program that has been implemented in our national plan for development, which is called Barth Peace neighborhoods.
It seeks the full integral actions in informal settlements in precarious settlements.
The communities themselves manage something that we call habitat management plan, which is like we emulate what indigenous people call plan of life, which is towards where they want to go and how.
We talk about a management plan in which the communities themselves create the way or the path that they want to follow regarding the future of their settlement.
Let's say that this is the process, this is a procedure, but in this particular case, we arrived to the current state thanks to the administration, and we work by legalizing the neighborhood that is going to bring the offer of different services, basic sanitation, among others.
It is clear that we have very limited resources, but initially, we want to talk about taking water for consumption through different alternative mechanisms to provide water.
Same thing when it comes to the mayor, we are working on the basic sanitation issue.
But what is interesting is that the community themselves have designed their future neighborhood.
Nowadays, they all make their contributions.
I would like to show you something else.
For example, here, it says creating the theater.
We can see a woman at the background and the way you are characterized by having very traditional tissues, different bags, and they are creating their future neighborhood.
In this sense, people left some space so that we can create different spaces like a school and among other resources.
They said, Okay, this is the space of the school.
I'm going to give you a little piece so we could work hand in hand with the community when it comes to the design of this neighborhood so that they feel that this space is a space where they will remain and they will grow.
That's why I said that there is a shift of the paradigm of the approach.
It's not based on the assistance, even in this sector, there is an Ackner stand and they used to offer assistance services to the migrant people.
And in this location, we hope to create a hospital that is going to offer different services to the neighborhood, but not only that, also to the city of Macau.
That is why this became a real opportunity for development for the city of Macau.
We want to take it forward through different programs, territorial planning around the water, et cetera, which is one of the key pillars of our development.
We also have different proposals of public spaces to really adapt to the circumstances and to offer a house for these families.
We also bear in mind the importance of sustainability and the most important thing is the participation, the direct participation of the families.
Because nowadays, let's say that they live in precarious conditions, they believe that this is not theirs, but it's important that they feel it as their own and they feel that they have a decent life and they have had an accompaniment, not only by the national government but also by the territory based organizations.
And these are some pictures that you can see on the slide.
This is how they leave.
The idea is also to respect the environment, the spaces, work with different materials of the region, and not just impose different designs.
Everything needs to be done in a coordinated manner with the family.
So that's an overview.
That's what I wanted to tell you regarding the case we are working on in Colombia.
Thank you.
Thank you very much, Vice Minister.
I'm very interested in the project.
I hope you also shared the same interest.
So she left me very interested in knowing more about what these plans are consist of, and we definitely see that we're learning from past experiences.
I really like the image of the woman where you indigenous.
It's also a women led community, indigenous community.
The women are the ones that lead the discussions and the decisions.
So it's very significant, as we have seen here in the World Urban Forum, all these tapestry and all these arts and crafts, that are also part of the identity of the Azerbaiyani community.
I thought that was very beautiful, how to embed planning into what is really significant for communities and, um, all the responses from a coordinated plan from the national government.
I just wanted to mention that Colombia is an example of what we have been seeing recently on how to work better together, not only with a national responsibility, which is the first responders and responsible for internal displays.
The citizens are the governments, but also we have seen a UN working as one UN as the UN AD reform asks the UN to do, and as the solutions agenda for internal displacement also has requested as the only way to move forward.
I just wanted to thank the resident coordinator of Jordania Sherri for being here, but also I just wanted to ask you about those coordination mechanisms between the humanitarian the development partners, obviously seconding and supporting the government's and how in terms of data information and solutions and public policy, those mechanisms are put in place and if you have any experience that you want to share on good practices regarding coordination mechanisms.
All right.
Thank you very much.
A by way of background, because I am here covering for a colleague, I'm the resident coordinator in Jordan, but I actually spent the last 20 years with the UN Office of Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, OCHA.
And I've worked in a lot of different locations where we have done what we call the humanitarian to development transition or nexus.
So in my answer, I will draw more from my previous experiences than from Jordan because in Jordan, we do not have internally displaced people.
We have refugees.
It's a different discussion.
But I previously was the head of OCHA in Iraq, four years ago.
I was working in Palestine for OCHA as well in Indonesia after an earthquake a number of years ago and in South Sudan and a number of other places.
Pulling from that experience, what I would offer is that these coordination mechanisms are key to getting it right.
The issue, the first criteria above all else, is that in order to do a proper humanitarian development integrated approach, you have to have government leadership.
This has to go under local government leadership, national government leadership.
It's important to say that because often the humanitarian response will race ahead.
Governments are usually very overwhelmed.
Let me draw from my experience in Iraq.
I was there in 2014 when ISIS emerged and took territory.
The government was very overwhelmed.
We had millions of people, 6 million people displaced in a very short period of time.
The violence was enormous.
Everybody was overwhelmed and the priority was just to save lives, just to get basic humanitarian services out.
Save lives.
The government, of course, was fighting a security battle, first and foremost.
So as time went on and as we got towards the end of that conflict, and it became time to look at long term solutions for internally displaced people, we recognized the need to bring the humanitarian work and the coordination back under and closer to a government led approach.
We were always working in collaboration.
It's not that we weren't.
It's just that the government was obviously focused on security battles.
We started a process in, let's say, I think, 2021, where we in Iraq took a very large humanitarian operation.
At one point, it was a $2 billion operation.
And started to bring that closer back in to the long term approaches, to durable solutions approaches.
So first and foremost, that had to go back under government leadership.
Secondly, is it needed to become locally anchored.
So I think as we know, often we organize ourselves based on sectors.
So I do water, you do shelter, somebody else does education, and this is an efficient way of working in an emergency.
It's a way of doing things at standard.
Bringing together the various partners.
When you get into a different place, you need to make a shift, and this is what we saw in Iraq.
We needed to shift out of these sectorally dominated approaches and come back into a local approach, a locally integrated approach.
So as we were making this shift, we started moving out of the humanitarian organizational structure and back into local structures.
As the United Nations, we put in staff into working with mayors and governors and championed an approach where we brought together sectors and looked at it from a holistic perspective.
Again, that's the third point would be that it has to be multi sectoral.
The fourth point is that it needs to be data driven.
What we started to see six years into the response, six, seven years after ISIS emerged, was that people had started to return home, but some people still needed a lot of assistance.
Returning to your place of home does not mean you have a durable solution.
What is it that you still need? We needed to bring out that evidence and then sit as humanitarian actors, development actors, local government, national government and agree how do we actually create long term solutions for that.
Then finally, let me say two key points.
One is on financing and public systems.
Humanitarians, and I say this as a long time humanitarian, humanitarians are very good at coming in and delivering and saving lives, especially in a situation like Iraq where the whole country was really overwhelmed by this horrific violence that had erupted in the country.
We needed to find a new way of working.
We needed to find a way that we would collaborate and the long term approach.
We would use national systems, that we would use the way the government did things because in fact, when you talk about humanitarian development coordination, It's tempting to think of that as and I often say as OCHA handing over to UNDP.
That's not the case.
OCHA does not hand over to UNDP.
Humanitarians do not hand over service delivery to a different part of the UN or a different NGO.
It hands to government.
So whatever we've been supporting with government, we actually start to step back and we ensure that what we're doing really reinforces those national systems.
So we have to look at the holistic approach from policies, legislation, government entities.
How can we reinforce them? Ideally, this happens as early as possible.
This should start at the beginning of a humanitarian crisis where that's possible.
We need to be using national systems.
In Iraq, that was not the case.
It was so overwhelming.
We just had to get out there and save lives.
It was horrific.
But we really needed to, and this is one thing that would change from how we did that response.
I would have actually started our move back towards the use of national systems much earlier than what we actually did because it would have reinforced the social protection system, for example, that became key.
Instead of the World Food Program giving people food, instead of the UN and NGOs giving cash assistance, we would have actually just used the government's social protection system.
How do we link into that? How do we reinforce that? How do we take all the humanitarian money that's coming in and not merely feed people, but actually reinforce government systems, reinforce local capabilities.
That's something that needs to come as early as possible.
If it's not possible to come at the start, we need to think very carefully about how we do this, and again, recognize that the government has to be in the lead.
Then the final thing really is about financing because humanitarian assistance often will come in, can be quite significant, but it's short term money.
It's not designed to create long term solutions.
In a country where you don't have a lot of resources, you need to look at that financing to do some recovery to do the long term recovery.
So if we look at Syria, for example, Syria has had a conflict now for 12 years.
It needs significant financing to be able to recover, significant financing to empower local government and national governments to actually move from short term humanitarian response into a long term response.
The same thing is true in many countries.
So those financing mechanisms are very different.
My experience as a humanitarian, I will tell you, I think that we need to find creative ways to bring in those long term systems, policies, financing tools much earlier and then have them go in parallel with the lifesaving activities because you don't want to do a trade off between life saving and long term.
It's not a one day to the next.
If we don't start early in that conversation, sometimes we're forced due to lack of funding to make it a one day to the next transition, which is much more difficult.
Thank you, Sheri.
You definitely have a lot of experience, obviously in a very challenging context like Iraq, but reminding us the importance of government leadership and I think those coordination mechanisms at the UN level start from having national ownership from the governments and leadership.
That's why it's so important that we start with the Colombian experience because definitely there's a vision, there's a way forward, also learning from mistakes, but in a clear vision centered on the people.
I was thinking about what you were saying about we, OCHA handing over to the development actors, et cetera when I was in the government for many years leading the policy and the response, I always talked about that people are not divided.
People from here to here, humanitarian, from here to here development.
They're the same person with trajectories and they just need to rebuild their lives and overcome their vulnerabilities and be able to belong in a place and rebuild their lives.
So definitely that coordination needs to work differently as you were reminding us.
And obviously, um starting and supporting those national systems and the different challenges that we also have with the financing.
So now moving to another very important and equally challenging context, Afghanistan.
We have the experience from Stephanie Loose, as I said, she's country program manager for UN Habitat in Afghanistan.
And I just wanted to remind all of us that it's been said in this in this forum, maybe in different panels, at least in the ones that's been reiterated.
Those 82.2 million internally displaced persons that I spoke to you about, at least 60%, I'm talking about 50 million people live in urban settings.
People are tending to stay in the places that they were displaced to.
And this is a big challenge for them, obviously, but also for local authorities.
So I just wanted, Stephanie, to share a little bit about your lessons learned around opportunities and limitations of townships compared to settlements, upgrading and area based approaches in advancing durable solutions, especially in the context that you know more about, if you know about others as well, but especially in Afghanistan.
Thank you, Stephanie, and welcome.
Thanks a lot.
Thanks very much, Paula.
I mean, as we've known each other when I was working in other contexts, I'm happy to provide maybe a mix perspective on things.
So in Afghanistan at the moment, we do have still around 7 million internally displaced people from, let's say earlier times.
The main reason for internal displacement at the moment in Afghanistan is climate change and among the top ten countries hit by climate change, which has an impact on rural livelihoods and of course, I would also say the inequalities, the push and pull factors that bring people to cities.
On the other hand, we do have more than 5.5 million people who've returned to Afghanistan from Pakistan and from Iran with a projection of more than another 2 million to come and that is ten to 12% of population increase in just two years.
For any country a population increase of more than 12% would be a real challenge.
It puts a lot of pressure on services, it puts a pressure on land, it puts a pressure on livelihood, opportunities for people.
And so in Afghanistan, you add this sort of pressure through huge scales returns, internally displaced people to a population which already is like 50%, and you might know that no is classified as people in need in the humanitarian response plan.
So We do have quite a challenging situation, vulnerable host, local population, plus a mix, specifically in the unplanned, informal, and under serviced informal settlements across the country, but specifically also in the urban areas because as you mentioned, people will settle where they have opportunities.
They will settle where they hope to find not only services, but also liveli opportunities where they can actually make sure that they can feed their families because waiting until someone helps you from the outside is simply not an option.
There's never enough for everyone and also people don't want that.
People want to be independent.
No one wants to be I'm sorry to say a beggar Everybody wants to be empowered to leave their lives, to feed their families, to make sure their kids go to school, to make sure if there's someone sick, they can access health services, and of course, to have a roof, which you're not at risk that it falls down every second moment and in a country which you have also reoccurring hazards like earthquakes, but also flash floods and droughts.
Just having a dignified living environment already empowers people to then advance towards livelihoods.
So in Afghanistan, this is not the first returnee wave to be very clear.
I mean, this country has been seen displacement for decades due to different reasons, but it is the biggest.
It's the biggest been seen for decades.
Of course, when people return or are displaced with just what they can carry, they have, as you said, humanitarian and then development related needs, but they also have cross sectoral needs.
You don't work as a person sectorally.
You have housing needs, you have basic services needs, wash, but also, you want to live in a neighborhood where you're not afraid that your child when it plays outside picks in waste.
You want to make sure that the children have access to education, to health services.
Of course, you need livelihoods in order to not only survive but also live in dignity.
So compare all that with climate change hazards, and it just shows how complex a response needs to be.
And so I very much agree with what you said.
In the end, it doesn't and I also agree that humanitarian response needs to be fast tracked.
You need expert who know exactly what to do in what situation and just go for it.
So when you speak for the reintegration of such a huge number of people, an area based approach, or how we call it, an approach which is actually tailored to the location where people have settled.
That is an important approach because many of the vulnerabilities that people face depend on where they live.
If you live in a part of the city which is planned, where you can turn on a tab, where the next clinic is next door, you're less vulnerable than someone who's settling in an informal settlement where there's no sanitation, where there's no adequate living conditions, and where you're at risk of climate change, floods, but also, of course, landslides.
I don't know how many of you know Kabul, but it just grows along the mountains that it has.
In those densely populated neighborhoods, you also need a whole of society approach because you cannot implement an approach where you say, Oh, you've arrived on this date, so you're ready for getting support.
Oh sorry, you arrived three days earlier.
That's beyond across our lines.
You have people who are in vulnerable situations because of where they live in addition to many other factors as well.
But if they're neighbors, would disrupt social cohesion.
In Afghanistan, what we're seeing is a huge solidarity for people when new people come, when people arrive in neighborhoods.
But if you start separating people based on their displacement status, it's very understandable what happens.
Through an area based approach and by providing people, for example, services, that everybody benefits from those investments or climate change resilient infrastructure where everybody is protected, not only one group of people in an urban area, that is really a crucial approach to make sure you don't separate people, but you bring them together and say this is our neighborhood.
This is where it comes to the second point I want to make.
You need participatory community based approaches.
You need to make sure you have this ownership at local level, at the localist level possible so that not only when you do investment people feel they have had a say in what are their priorities.
For that, as you inhabitat in Afghanistan, we have a long tradition of including people in the assessment of what are the risks and what are the needs in this specific location.
And then when you include people when you listen to people for understanding what they actually need, there is this sort of approach of taking ownership of the investments being made.
And that is based on a hazard assessment, but also based on the assessment of existing services.
And I'll finish with that.
Of course, you do have different options when you have large scale displacements.
You do have the options of land allocation, but something that we see happening, urban areas in Afghanistan, they explode.
Then you have people living up to 80% of the population of the city in informal, unplanned under service areas.
The question is where to invest.
I would say there's quite a strong understanding at the moment that we have to support people where they have chosen to settle because there is a reason for it.
I think maybe let me stop here, happy to explore more.
Thank you.
Thank you, Stephanie.
Definitely vast experience in a very complex context as well.
You're talking about 12 million people between the ones displaced by climate and disasters and the ones that have also started to return, et cetera So very challenging times in terms of the response and the coordination in that response.
So what echoed in your presentations was the tailored solutions to the location, obviously with those assessments from meaningful participation from people affected throughout the process.
I've always said that that participation and ownership not only gives legitimacy, not only it's a right, and it's the moral right way to do it.
But it also gives legitimacy to those processes ownership, obviously, and then sustainability, processes that are not embedded in what people really prioritize and their real needs are processes that you will probably have to repeat or they are not going to lead to sustainable solutions.
So thank you so much for that input, and we're going to turn now to A very complex context, Sergio Sahel, where displacement as well as in other contexts in the world, and as what Stephanie was sharing with us, is not only driven by violence, conflict, climate change, but also by government instability.
And challenges regarding governance, which are also another ingredient that adds to the different challenges.
So Sergio is you inhabitat chief technical advisor for these three countries, Burkina, Mali and Niger.
And for you and maybe, Stephanie, I forgot to ask you because you also have an experience on data.
But for you, it's mostly about how data and information have supported the identification of durable solutions at neighborhood level in West Africa.
So we are key to listen to your experience out here.
Thank you.
Thank you so much, Paola.
Um Well, truth is just to give you I lost my it's gone.
Can you put it back, please? Well, just to speak a little bit of our experience in the Central Sahel, these pictures are from Burkina Faso, by the way, where 2.3 million people have been displaced in the last over ten years.
That's about 10% of the population.
Again, a little bit like what Stephanie was saying about Afghanistan.
You can imagine what that means in terms of displacement, but in terms of stress of access to services and so on.
There are cities like Kaya, which have doubled their population in the last ten years.
So imagine being the major of the city where you are already struggling to handle the needs of your population to add on top of that, another 100% of people.
I would like to share what we have managed to do, but also what we haven't managed to do because I think there's a good point on looking at the things that you haven't been able to do and why that will help us, I think, explore more answers to the difficult challenges that we are facing.
But before that, I think it's also important to think a little bit on how we address this my presentation.
I call it the so called Humanitarian Development continuum.
The nexus.
Because it's true.
Like you're saying, people go from one particular situation where they need to be fed today and given water because they will die tomorrow if they don't.
This is the work of the humanitarians.
Then they need to transit all the way to full fledged development, which by the way, no country has ever achieved.
Imagine the gap that we're trying to cover.
This is not a linear process either.
It goes back and forth and all of a sudden you're doing a little better, but then all of a sudden you don't have food to put on your family's table, you need to be helped again.
And all of these in particularly complex context, in many ways that come back and forth and change every day too.
So the task at hand is just humongous.
I want to go back to a little bit of Sheri was saying on how As development and humanitarian actors, we address these very difficult task, but also governments because we also have to admit, even if we work with the governments at the different levels, I mean, there's still lacks of coordination between sector there might be the Ministry of Water doing great things, but next door, health is not doing his job, or at the central level, but then the municipalities are not there, maybe not because they don't want to, maybe they just don't have the capacities.
That is something that you cannot change overnight, okay? So but going back a little bit to Burkina Faso, I'm glad to be able to serve.
And then this is very much also thanks to Stephanie, who was in Burkina before I came.
So I'm honoring her work.
We have managed to provide services not only to IDPs, but also to host communities, which by the way, are not just bystanders.
It's very often there are not such a difficult situation as the displaced population through the construction of health facilities, there's water, and there are employment and economic development opportunities and so on.
But I would say more importantly, we have been able to reinforce the social cohesion between these two communities which otherwise don't really know each other and they're sometimes even competing for the literal resources and services that are available despite the traditionally solidarity of most of these people and the Central Sahel is famous for that.
Um, but also, and this is also important in that continuum, we have been able to support municipalities in handling the whole process.
So it's not only us who are working on it, as Terry was saying, but preparing for those municipalities to take over not only the situation with IDP through displaced population, but also in addressing the many urban challenges that they're facing every day because there's no water in the neighborhood next door.
Okay.
But I would like to also talk about, and that was my whole point, what we haven't been able to do.
Um, and that also puts a little bit questions how our own institutional architecture is set up.
This humanitarian development divide, for instance, but also the funding mechanisms from donors.
This isn't humanitarian money.
Don't spend one of these dollars to pay for anything that is not life saving.
What? And even the conceptualization of it all.
Okay? And that's my other point.
I think it's not linear, it's not perfect, it's dirty.
We need to try and have the the space for error and learn from that.
So despite everything that we've been able to do, I would have to say, for instance, one of our bigger questions is, how are you going to build all these nice little houses that you see there for the 2 million people that have been displaced in Burkinafas at $500,000 apiece.
And I don't have an answer for that.
I mean, it's more expensive than a temporary shelter, much cheaper than most of the houses that are being built by the Ministry of Housing, for instance, but still not doable, okay? And how about employment or economic opportunities? If you're a little realistic, you would have to think, well, you cannot always give a sewing machine to every women in the camp.
You don't need another 1,000, you know, women doing other shirts or dresses and so on.
You need to customize your answer to respond to their particular interests, their capacities, the market, and then diversify your.
We haven't been able to do that either.
But also, and more importantly, for me, um, And this is one of the things that I think is important.
We tend to walk towards development if there is no backlash.
I remember there was this one person who's saying, Okay, you want to train this person to become a carpenter, and that's going to take three months of his time and then training and so on.
But he doesn't have food on his table.
So you still need to give him humanitarian aid while you try to pull him out of that situation because otherwise, you would only be benefiting those who are already less privileged than the others.
Those who need to put food on the table, they will go out to find that money, whatever it is, rather than attend your training course.
Okay.
So I think, and this is my final point, if I may, I think we need to have to come down a little bit from those, you know, humongous expectations that we put ourselves into and give us ourselves the space to, um, have some of the answers, and I think we have done a little bit.
We have provided part of the answer.
We think we have set the path towards that.
But then every step that we take brings new questions, new problems, new issues that needs to be addressed and perfection that I'm not going to even call it a methodology, methodological framework approach to the maximum and move on from there.
That's also something that we need to tell the general public.
Because sometimes these from abroad, from those more developed countries, the taxpayers think this is just a wonderful world that we just come there and everything is solved one day to the next.
Then when we make a mistake, it's all of a sudden it's a scandal because their money has gone to waste.
I'm going to say, no, it hasn't gone to waste.
It's a difficult country.
It's a very difficult situation.
Solutions need to be as complex as difficult and we need to be able to make mistakes.
Thank you very much.
Thank you, S H, and very important for the actual context of the um restriction of resources, et cetera I think the space for error and learning from mistakes is very, very important as long as we don't make the same mistakes because I always say that we're going to make mistakes and we're in the public service and working at the UN, we're going to make mistakes.
But let's try to make the least mistakes or at least not the same mistakes and we learn from those.
Also, thank you for the powerful reminder about host communities not being bystanders.
And it has resonated throughout this panel and in other panels, the solidarity that we find.
And we always see the destruction, we see the disregard, the violation of human rights, et cetera.
But at least what keeps me going in this work is to see all these powerful communities, resilient communities, communities that are are willing to share their houses, share the little that they have with the people that are coming because maybe tomorrow, they're going to be also this place like them.
So this solidarity is very important to talk about and also the continuum that you mentioned.
So to end this panel, we're going to listen now, Again, reinforcing maybe Adriana, the presentation that the Vice Minister already had on the importance of the area based approach in advancing durable solutions at local level.
Adriana is the program specialist at the UN Habitat and the region countries hub and as the Vice Minister, thank UN Habitat, I think it's very important and we are seeing, I would say progress in the way we are addressing this issue in Colombia.
Maybe you can share a little bit what you have learned from this experience, Adriana.
Thank you.
Sure.
And thank you, everyone, actually, for joining us and you too for being here with us, having this conversation.
But mainly what I would like to highlight and that's why for us, it was very important to have the Vice Minister showing what Colombia is doing and inspiring us on how in different places we are all working into these doable solutions.
Maybe just to give a little more context about Colombia is that we have over 9 million of people displaced in a displacement situation in the country, representing 70% of the national population.
And this has been quite a long time ago.
But there is something interesting that I want to put a Zoom on and we have been talking about the city, we have been talking at national level, we have been talking about sectorial approaches.
But there is one place where we all meet, and it's a neighborhood level.
When we live in our cities, our neighbor is someone that is close to us that has everything on the same place because we are talking about economy, politics, even, social care in a small territorial place in our cities.
There is where durable solutions can work very well.
This area based approach permits us to cut those sectorial views and actually talk to the people and see that we all live in the same place no matter where we come from.
That is this project based that we are doing in seven cities in Colombia, one of them, Cali, that I see the Secretary of Cali over here.
We have been at the neighborhood level.
Building with people, people that faces the same problems and issues that actually permit to us to build solutions like targeted, like customized level.
I think those are the best alliances that we can make because in the neighborhood level, we find everyone.
I mean, we have the local government, we have actually the communities working together.
We have cooperation that we can work at that level and actually create very good, how can I say, to increase what we do, the impact that we have in that level.
We also can call the attention of the national entities to put the pressure or to put the offers in those places.
With Colombia, that is the work that we have been doing.
I think the interesting part is this joint collaboration.
We are four agencies of UN, we are the national government and the local entities.
We started with data and information that actually you were mentioning Paola, the importance of this, I mean, of having information.
It's not only that, behind that information, we have people's stories of life, and there is when we find the solution.
That's why the plans of habitat that the ministry is working are very interesting because it's something that is not as normative as a territorial plan, but it is as important for the planning and development of those sites inside the city.
So I think and I want to close my intervention just with a small video with a very short video to show you how Colombia it's moving forward on these variable solutions, but that we are also very close to the other experiences that we had a chance to see today.
So if you want, you can put it.
Thank you.
Colombia records more than 8 million internally displaced people.
Behind this and main figure, the Global Solutions Fund, driven by UNHDR, IOM, UNDP, and UN Habitat works to support sustainable local integration processes for these communities in their new territories.
But true integration cannot be measured in charts.
It has lived in the subur neighborhood in Ko.
There, families who fled violence joined efforts to build block by block their own community center.
After its recent renovation, one of the prioritized actions by the neighbors themselves, this place has been reborn.
Here, we understand that technical work is in reality, a story of the leftover sills.
Because durable solutions are not metrics on paper, they are proof that behind every piece of data, there are lives being rebuilt together.
Who Yeah, just on time.
It's 530.
I just wanted to thank you all for being here, Vice Minister and UN group.
And I think this reflects the messages that we were sending and what Adriana just finished with government leadership with one UN working towards common objectives, putting people at the center, using data to assess the needs of people as one, as we have said, with particular needs, but also with immense capacities to also contribute to transform their own lives.
Now, it's them that are really transforming their present and their future.
So I just wanted to thank you and to invite you to continue following this.
I don't know.
I think it's a new way of working at the UN with different countries worldwide, not only Colombia here, obviously, we have the experience in Iraq.
I am not too aware on the ownership in Afghanistan.
I know about some of the Western African countries, but in the world, there's quite better awareness on the state responsibilities, government responsibilities, and increasingly, as we have seen in Colombia, with the seven national and local authorities working on these plans from local authorities.
It's there where people are based and it's there where the solutions need to be found.
So the support that we can give to local authorities is crucial for the transformation of those realities of people in the ground.
Thank you all for being here and enjoy the rest of the forum.
Thank you.