companies, leading ai, leading at the highest level of every profession. it is not going well in many ways and i think if women were running more things that it would be better. as frustrating as this work can be, we have to stay in it. not because women deserve do, be the world would be a much better lace, more innovative, fair and mane if we are there and that is why as long as we have been doing itcommitted because we owo one another to make sure share.

thank you. >> good evening. it's my distinct pleasure to be here for this next panel about women and girls in conflict zones and the participation■j hs been a fantastic afternoon so far, i am frustrated we are still having to rights particularly when it comes to conflict abroad. we have been far and we're goine you overseas with the

extraordinary panel. i want to help you woke us your minds about what it meaict abro. we could think about faraway complex, but i would think of places where you have complex that deal with the same issues and biases, gender pay gaps and on top oft, conflict. the panel we have will help us figure out how we can get practical■é advice to apply that to conflict to solve them and include women in the peace process. i will start by introducing the panel.

everyone here has an illi will . we have a co-founder and leadership in afghanistan, the first and only boarding school for afghan girls that operated 2016 and 2021. she divides her time. the executive director at the georgetown institute was named by president obama as ambassador out large for global women's issues in 2009 which she held,

and virtually you can see there in the corner is the president and ceo of the foreign secretary distinguished fellow. i want to start with you, there is a startling statistic that says more than 600 million women and girls live in conflict affected countries. a % more conflict when it comeso the violence, health and safety. we heard some granular advice

and approaches that people are taking to help women partitehown to change the reality for women around the world? >> it's a perfect question and one we should be thinking about. take the three areas you mentioned. mentioned the caricom he and cara blocks, the extraordinary efforts for and as most of you know, this to test six are

that caregivers are women , we really dominate as women. wouldn't it be wonderful if the world had primary health care clinics everywhere in the world? isn't this ve practical to go to a clinic that could be a few hours away, not days away, get on a bus and have health air. women tend to be leaders main people who take their children to health care clinics. you will save time, effort. if you can do primary health care clinics all over the world, i know very well that we can focus on health.

the secondary is security. secretary continues an interesting phrase who said women could be agents ofn peace and we are. in africa, there is silence guns which has prevention of conflict. ts of young people become peacemakers to prevent conflicts. i know that some of us work together but this has enormous possibilities. the third area youzc mentioned s economics in one of the lessons you had is the number one desire by every girl in the to have a good education. if you can educate a woman girl.

we have to try to educate, there is a number of initiatives doing it. international trade commission's are extraordinarily warned and then we could be on the same level for being able to learn. you will be part of the market economy but we also need to do something else. we have to get public finance to work. i worked on this for 40 years. i don't know it's going to happen in my lifetime. if we're going to be part of the economic driving progress, you have to type public and privethi

would have, which is when i first went to unicef i was in south sudan, you can see how many militias and have meant that women and children have run away from the farms and gee camp because there is shelter and food and the ability to live a life. someday, and this could be a project, we need to move refugee if we could move them they would have all of the economic vibrancy,■- security and economic opportunity for everyone in the community.

>> did you also face the pushback when you're talking about women and girls? people and children, people don't separate them as much. there are some countries in which the status of women is not a legal issue, it's the customs and country they can keep the girls back. in most countries, if you have found an opportunity ahead of you, so the opportunity is they want to look after that smart people.

>> afghanistan is the exception. oíwhen the taliban regained pow, we saw people fleeing. you relocated the boarding school you founded and you have to adapt the■s model provide online education for girls back in afghanistan. access to internet, safety issues, how many students are in youretwork? what have you learned from the experience of having to move, and what could we learn f modele

moment? >> absolutely. when we were operating and with that came a lot of responsibilities. knowing that we could never submit to the telegram vision for afghanistan, especially when girls and women don't either. forced to live under the regime and for us, the oor■á -- we knew it would be a matter of time before he received way moreapple

major ones. levels, we talked about imagining refugee camps■4 we are building camps to accommodate more than doubling our student population in rwanda. we are looking at a time that we would go back to afghanistan. we are for pairing to return one day to afghanistan. we received an application for only 30 spots. you could imagine it's not one

to bragone to be incredibly angry about that was emotionally devastang girls froe world and yet,, they do not have the financial means. we thoug how can we bring seller to them? we're looking at two different possibilities. what it is is primarily text

messaging and we have looked at a lot of initiatives, all well-meaning to reach girls in afghanistan if you look at the amazing videos that were prepared and that's because people don't have access the internet. this is a genius thing, the possib access, we turn to whatsapp and they previously used whatsapp, so if they wanted to shut it down for us, so when we launched

this month, the idea is solar education will be available we are targeting girls but the beauty of it is boys, even not traditionally students would have access and we have to be honest about this. it's not a replacement for an in classroom experience. we have to innovate out of ity that it is about keeping hope alive for thousands and thousands of afghan girls. i was one of the fortunate ones

pens my parents have the education, so i ended upschool t time where the majority of my classroom were. us, we looked at the previous barriers to imagine to make it easier accessible. each of them can open the page to sign up for a class, ato request content and after completing the, they receive a certificate of

completion that can be verified. the next step for us is to be able to work with international organizations who focus o access and making sure in the long run that it's a way of documenting progress in schools. the other thing we're lookingt is the possibility of opening communities closer to afghanistan. have this incredible support, there are girls we bring from refugee communities. we partnered with the government to then travel from those

communities but we also agenciey different offices across the world, people who partner with us to safely come to us in rwanda. finally, the other we are focusing on is. creating a reay robust group of highly educad women. right after the regime collapsed , thousands poured back into afghanistan and out of that group of leaders.

they ended up becoming some of our afghanistan. we look at this as a time we cannot waste. we need to remain laser focused so when the time comes, and i am hopeful it would come in my lifetime, when we go back to afghanistan, there are thousands of afghan women who going to go ■% kim: truly inspirational, incredible work. i would like to imagine the education you are providing as a template for other countries where education for girls because of conflict in

sudan, gaza, other places. shabana:we are focused on solutr afghan girls and afghan women, what we are doing is a model that is incredibly easily replicated. along the same lines of looking at refugee populations in general, parti■ccularly girls wo look at12 it not as a burden coming upon us, but a wealth of resources that are forced to move. certainly the case for afghanistan. when i was evacuating our community, at the i witnessed the brave power of

afghanistan. not because they wanted to, but because they had to. i knew when i was watching them, they were going to passfrom froe to crossing the line and immediately being an ute a refu. we have to equip them with continued learning, especially higher ads -- higher

institution and all institutions at every level have to work together and open up a wealth of scholarships andnities for the students from afghanistan and ukraine and there has to be a very comprehensive well thought out response so that we can see these young people who are on the move go from place to place and to be a continuity for tirly transition. kim: and return eventually to build■5 peace. david, thank you for joining us virtually. in the irc annual report emergency watchlist you highlight organizations are underfunded and you have r shocking stats that say only 1.2% of humanitarian financing

so not only are women the main recipient of the violence and conflict, the first affected, but when they tried to do good they end up being underfunded as well. what can the international community■a do to first take stk of this quickly, and also address it quickly? é women should not only be half of the economy, but half of the s -- half of the can we adj? david: thank you. i need to apologize for not being in the room with you. i had to be in the ioc office the f -- this afternoon. there are three important points to answer your question. ?wfirst, we are aanization for

people whose lives were shattered by conflict and we say we cannot be a successful organization unless we are also taking seriously the structural inequality that faces women and girls in the communities we work in. d within our sector and sometimes even our own organization. the framing is very importansecn afghanistan, we have 5000 people working in 12 provinces in afghanistan and 22 owomen despin women working. lifeline for their clients and also for the families each of the them

support and the point about what's up, we have evidce fddlee run a very large early childhood development program and we use techniques where you can make one years worth of primary progress in 11 weeks of our program so in the right hands, it can work. to your point=y about the fundig and support of women led organizations, if there was a percentage of funding related to thet of political rhetoric on the issue, funding for gender equality would be through the dealing with here is a massive mismatch between the political speeches and amount of political

. it is all about political leadership, transparency, clarity, consistency. one crisis response, a humanitarian country team, 80% of them have no plan to reduce gender inequality, despite all the rhetoric about it. that is how you end up in a situation of underfunding of local organizations in general and of the women led in our area this is all about information that is secret and leads to reform, you have to have transparency,, leadership role modeling, and progress, whether it is about hiring or financial flows and i

hope the idp will make it part of its business to make sure fragile states are not just marginal to the global political conversation,ieved the status they need, because if we know anything, it is the unintended humanitarian crisis that leads to the instability and that is what we are seeing in many parts of the world, and frankly, there are 25 million people in sudan who are suffering from an extraordinary military and political crisis and it is impossible to get anyone to pay attention to it at all. kim: thank y, david. we are talking about conflict and how women are affecte and first affected alongside children as well in a suit on,

gaza, ukraine, afghanistan, but there is also what happens after the conflict. one could argue perhaps if women haddiscussion, perhaps better represented, we would have made more progress. women are often excluded from the process and yet we know they are -- when they are included, peace is more sustainable and achievable. we have seen examples of that. i think of northern ireland. tell us a little about what people are missing when they go into peace negotiations if women are not included. melanne: there is so much wisdom in what you said and before i make an attempt to addressehe organizers, this is my second trip appear in a few weeks and

these -- up here in a few weeks ortant conversations. there is au construct put in place by the security council of the united nations which focuses on peace and security. yythe resolution has been strengthened nine times over, realizing how critical it that women fully participate in peace and security, whether it is in presenting conflict, anticipating in conflict negotiations, whether in relief recovery, restction ing the trad also recognizes that women need to be protected. we are talking about ways agency when it comes to the resolution and regrettably the goals of the

resolution have been largely unfulfilled. half the peace agreements put in place are aggregated within five years. many conflicts are occurring. many genuinely important issues that have to be addressed are not. and women are not present, as so often we h be in one important conversation or another that could have made a difference and i think when retrospectives are■á written, oe of the most important reasons that we have what we had today in afghanistan is the failure to of half the population and incorporate it. so what can governments do that are n doing? this is an evidence-based case. the evidence and data are there that show that when women are at

the peace table, unfortunately not as much a in columbia peace agreement slowly being fully implemented and one of the peace processes in the philippines, northern ireland, dealing with the troubles, that there is■f solid evidence that the issues that women put on the table would not be there otherwise. most of the conversations are the men on one side or the other or the rebel groups talking to one another and what we have seen is of the first things they do is give themselves amnesty for what they have done to the women. th is no way to move to a better future, clearly. so recognizing the importance of

this precipitation -- participation, reconciliation, human rights, economicmunities k together, being an honest broker, those of real tangible input that women bring that have real positive conclusions to them. so recognizing the evidence i think important. secondly, understanding the role that women play at the local level. david brilliantly expressed the critical role that is being played and stealing from you, david, as i often do, really recognizing the centrality of that role at the local level. ringing community, facilitating dialogue among them, understanding the conflict, having central knowledge about what is going on, knowledge that

the conflict and a better future has to be incorporated in the discussions. so what you have is a bifurcated process. track two were track three happening at the lower -- local level, really important work going on, but it does not inform the formal level, track one. women are rarely in that level. so there has to be conductivity between one and two and preferably bringing more women to the peace table. secondly, what david said about women's organizations, they are underfunded. and i agree completely. if we could take all of the wonderful rhetoric about how important this issue isn it into something tangible, we would have countless women at peace tables on a much more peaceful world and plenty of

resources for these organizations. it is not happening. it needs to happen. and we more women in positions of responsibility, certainly as negotiators, as mediators, there are very, 10% of negotiators and even fewer signatories to the agreement. so this recognition of thvital role is another critically important element. the security council also said that government should adopt national action plans to take the important work that this represents, implement it, realize it, and there are over 100 national action plans tod or the realization for the first time of the united states national action plan.

á'some are shut the box, -- chek the box, that is all the government can say, we have an action plan and that is all we can say about it. others, governments revisit year after year to see what they need to better implement the resolution. but there is still a lot of work that still needs to be done. israel and palestine, for example. no national action plan. it seems to me to really begin to deal with the dramatic absence of women from a peace process over decades, it needs to it needs to have happened years ago. but one place local peace builders are working on is the national action plan. another area that has to be addressed is for this to be real in government. you have a about we

have an app, we believe in women peace and security, but it is not connected to the foreign is something you mentioned earlier, kim, where afghan policy needs to be women peace and security. not separate women's issues. ukraine policy, women's peace and security. middle policy, this needs to be mainstream integrated gender perspective participation of women. only then willable to get the kind of effect we need to see. and i think also we increasingly need to bring governments need to come together. in london they have commitment 2025, which is to take some of the resources, some of the commitments, amplify them by them coming together to have greater impacts than going at it one at a time.

but in the end, this is about political will. it is about leadership. it is about power. and it is easier to talk about this than the reality of what is happening and i just want to read this quote to you from a former secretary of state you may recognize. she said, the timethe world thit and how we stop it and prevented , how we think about security and how we provided, how we think about peace and how to realize it, and it is past time for women to take their rightful place side-by-side with men in the room deciding. negotiations, to make the piece, and institution to keep the peace. and women are still not there in

the great numbers that they should be. kim: thank you so much. up. we could stay here and have a whole session but it is important to remember that just as we discussed, including economies in the west, not looking at the issue of women as justo in areas of conflict but as part of the solution about peace and security in having women seeingt also agents of change and empowering them and counting on organizations like david's to find women led organizations. thank you very much. thank you to the panel. thank you. [applause] samantha: hello, everybody. i'm samantha barry, at the editor-in-chief