Humanitarian Intervention

Panelists review the humanitarian situation in Gaza and discuss U.S. policy options to address the crisis.  

David J. Scheffer, senior fellow at CFR, leads the conversation on complex humanitarian emergencies. CASA: Welcome to today’s session of the Winter/Spring 2024 CFR Academic Webinar Series. I’m Maria Casa, director of the National Program and Outreach department at CFR. Thank you all for joining us. Today’s discussion is on the record and the video and transcript will be available on our website, CFR.org/academic, if you would like to share them with your colleagues or classmates. As always, CFR takes no institutional positions on matters of policy. We are delighted to have David Scheffer with us to discuss complex humanitarian emergencies. David Scheffer is a senior fellow at CFR, where he focuses on international law and international criminal justice. He is professor of practice at Arizona State University, working out of Washington DC, and was previously a professor of law at Northwestern University, where he is director emeritus of the Center for International Human Rights at the Pritzker School of Law. Ambassador Scheffer served in both terms of the Clinton administration. During the second term, he was appointed the first-ever U.S. ambassador-at-large for war crimes issues. And he led the U.S. delegation to the UN talks establishing the International Criminal Court. Of particular interest to this group is his book, All the Missing Souls: A Personal History of the War Crimes Tribunals, published by Princeton University Press in 2013. Welcome, David. Thank you very much for speaking with us today. SCHEFFER: Thank you, Maria. CASA: If you could begin by giving us a little bit of context, defining complex humanitarian emergencies, and maybe giving us a few examples. SCHEFFER: I will certainly do so. And it’s a great pleasure to be with everyone here today. This is a large audience and a very distinguished one, of students, of professors, of deans, and others in this space in our life, which is an interest in humanitarian needs and causes and emergencies around the world. What we’re going to talk about today is complex humanitarian emergencies. And it’s not too complex a definition. By using the word complex, we really mean that these are humanitarian needs—which usually look to issues of food security, to habitat, to safety, and security, and one’s livelihood—that enables one to live and thrive where one permanently lives and thrives. But then we have humanitarian emergencies. And they get complex when people are being displaced from where they normally live and nominally thrive as normal human beings. They get displaced by armed conflict, or by economic disparities, extreme poverty, or by climate change, or by political upheavals and rivalries within their countries, particularly targeting particular ethnic groups. That creates a complex situation because in order to solve it, you have to think not only of the basic necessities of life to solve it, but you have to think about war, how to solve that, or the climate crisis, how to solve that, or extreme poverty, how to solve that. And that makes it an extremely complex problem. What I want to do is speak for about maybe eight, nine minutes or so, and then open this up for a fulsome discussion among our many participants. And that means not necessarily asking me a question, but perhaps delivering a comment of your own—brief, of course, because we have a lot of people on this—so that you can contribute to this and add to the educational value of this for students now, and in the future. I want to point out the very latest list of humanitarian emergencies that have been identified by the International Rescue Committee. And their latest report, I think is—you know, in 2024 is a very, very enlightening one. And I encourage everyone to link on to it at some point after this discussion to look at it. The top ten are as follows: Sudan, the occupied Palestinian territory—which, of course, many countries would regard as the state of Palestine. More than 130 countries recognize that territory as the state of Palestine. But nonetheless, it’s now in the number two position, which is probably obvious to everyone on this webinar, given the news since October 7. South Sudan is number three. Burkina Faso, number four. Myanmar, number five. Mali, number six. Somalia, number seven. Niger, number eight. Ethiopia, number nine. The Democratic Republic of the Congo, number ten. And then, without ranking, but in the eleven through twenty slots are Afghanistan, Central African Republic, Chad, Ecuador—for the first time—Haiti, Lebanon, Nigeria, Syria, Ukraine, and Yemen. So, among those twenty countries, you can see that there’s a tremendous challenge. Now, interestingly, the total number of people who are regarded as being caught up and trapped in humanitarian emergencies actually declined slightly or somewhat, from 2023 to 2024. In 2023, that number was about 363 million people in the world were trapped in humanitarian emergencies. In 2024, it’s estimated to be about 300 million. But that’s an incredible number. And I think in our recent understanding of humanitarian emergencies, remember that in Gaza two million people live. And they were not really on that list prominently until this year. I want to emphasize that the three major components that we typically see in humanitarian emergencies of this character, the engines of them, are: armed conflict, climate change, and economic shocks. And sometimes there’s a combination of them, where you will see a country and it’ll be identified—for example, Syria, Somalia, and Ethiopia, are described as humanitarian crises or emergencies driven by both conflict and climate change, coming together as sort of a double power punch at the people to forcibly displace them from their homes. I think in the readings—one of the most interesting readings that we offered to you on the list is the one regarding Sudan, which is kind of a sleeper now because it’s overtaken by the situation in Gaza and in Ukraine in the last couple of years. But Sudan is getting worse and worse and worse. And it is now at the top of the list. You’ll recall that in 2003 we were struggling with genocide in Darfur in Sudan. And that has actually resurrected itself in the last year or so in terms of continued genocide in Darfur. But that’s just part of the entire conflict in Sudan, which is an armed conflict. And it is driving tens and tens of millions of Sudanese across the borders into Chad, into South Sudan, forcibly displacing them within Sudan itself. So that is a true emergency. I want to point out a couple of sort of larger cosmic issues for you all to think about. One, you know, since after—well, in the early 2000s there was a tremendous amount of focus—and I was part of this—put on creating this principle called “responsibility to protect” (R2P). And it was memorialized in an outcome summit statement of the UN General Assembly in 2005, you know, in two paragraphs—I think it was paragraphs 136-137. But it was focused on the responsibility to protect populations who are victimized by atrocity crimes. Not by climate change, not by economic shocks, not by armed conflicts, per se. But rather by atrocity crimes—genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and they also listed ethnic cleansing specifically, even though that is part of crimes against humanity. But the point is that the world’s focus was on a duty to prevent—or a responsibility to protect—exposed populations to those crimes, a responsibility both domestically and then, if it’s not done domestically, the international community has to put that focus on it and ultimately work through the Security Council to address the problem. I would suggest that we’ve reached a stage now where, first of all, the responsibility to protect principle has come under great strain, particularly given the fractured character of the Security Council, to the extent that it’s not achieving the promise that it originally held. But we need to start thinking about what I would call a responsibility to survive, R2S. I’m just throwing this out at you. Because the humanitarian emergencies of our time are enormous. And they require very, very rapid action. And they require a focus on the responsibility of governments to address these humanitarian emergencies, both governments that have to address them domestically because they’re happening inside those countries but, of course, also the world community to try to staunch the egregious sort of assault on the humanity of various populations. And I just think we’ve reached that stage now where we have to have a responsibility to survive principle out there that holds governments accountable. And that takes me sort of to the next cosmic point I want to point out, which is I have—because my career has been in international criminal justice for decades now, and I’m always looking at, you know, who’s the next war criminal. And we just got that announcement yesterday out of The Hague with respect to indictments on two Russian military officials with respect to war crimes and crimes against humanity against the Ukrainian people during the winter season in that conflict. So that’s good. That’s good. Accountability for atrocity crimes is definitely part of our system now. It doesn’t work perfectly, obviously, but it’s there. What we are missing is holding accountable what I would call burden shifters. These are leaders who just dump burdens on the rest of us. They’re just dumping. A humanitarian emergency is a burden on the rest of the international community. That’s not a critical step. I mean, I’m just—obviously, we have to react to that and deal with it. But I always marvel at how certain leaders think that they can just act in a manner that shifts an enormous burden for taking care of just the basic necessities of life of tens of millions of people—they can just sort of dump it on to the international community. And so, we don’t have a system politically where we call out the leaders who—they might not be doing anything illegal, per se, but they sure as heck are shifting an enormous burden off of their shelf of responsibility and governance onto the rest of the world. And I think we should more clearly identify those individuals. We should figure out a way to identify burden shifters among leaders, strongmen or otherwise, around the world. And finally, I want to just make a final comment about Gaza, which of course has seized our attention so much particularly since October 7. What I have found disconcerting in analyzing this from an international law perspective is that I found myself in October-early November, rather easily stating principles of law pertaining to the right of self-defense, how one engages on a daily basis in combat in terms of recognizing principles of law that focus on proportionality, distinction, necessity, humanity, in how one wages combat between two combating forces. And to keep the fate of the civilian population, you know, front and center in how you engage on a day-by-day basis in combat. International lawyers, military lawyers, we can all talk about this. And there are lots of principles. It’s sort of a microscopic aspect of international law. We’ve got the Geneva Conventions of 1949. We’ve got the 1977 protocols to them. We have the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. We’ve got the statutes of the other tribunals of the last thirty years, all focusing on how, particularly judges, would determine, have war crimes been committed? Has a crime against humanity been committed? Has genocide been committed? That can all be determined on a sort of classic, day-by-day basis. It’s very granular. It can get very, very granular, in the courtroom particularly. But what international does not have—international law has not done yet is what we see in—what we haven’t accomplished a structure for yet is what we see really unfold in Gaza, whereby even if one can justify a daily use of military force, there has to be some structure in international law that defines the totality of what is occurring, and whether that is justifiable under law. Namely, how long does a military assault take place in Gaza, against what collection of targets, with what impact on the civilian population? At what point would international law step in and say: There is a red line here that you cannot cross any further. We don’t have that kind of structure in international law. It’s not there. That has to be a political decision. And you see that being played out now in the news, with the United States becoming more concerned, obviously, about the humanitarian situation there. Sort of coming late to the party. And the rest of the world being somewhat outraged by it. And yet in law, we don’t really have that structure for that totality analysis. And whether or not, when you start a conflict if you want to comply with international law—and, of course, you know, one could argue Hamas has no intention of complying with any law at all, so it’ll just proceed as it sees fit. But if you’re a law-abiding force, then you might sit down and say, well, over the next two to three months if we use military force in the following way in order to defeat Hamas, what does that mean in terms of the totality of the destruction, the totality of deaths, the totality of injuries? And where does it leave the population at the end? Are they in a state of starvation? You know, what do we anticipate? Does law give us any guidance here? And so, I just want to put that position down on the table, that I have found it somewhat frustrating that in analyzing the humanitarian emergency of Gaza, international law helps to some extent it just doesn’t go far enough in giving us guidance beyond that. It really becomes very much a political dynamic, as opposed to a strictly legal one. So let me leave it at that for my little introduction and let’s dive into it. People are free to share a comment or two. I strongly encourage students to participate. This is for you, the students, primarily. And so we want you to participate. Do not be shy. And obviously, we’ve got many other distinguished faculty members, deans, et cetera, on. And I welcome all of you for comment, for questions, but everyone should keep it short so that we can get as many people as possible. So I turn it over to Maria. CASA: Thank you, David. (Gives queuing instructions.) We will start out with a question from Jonathan Cristol, adjunct assistant professor of political science at Yeshiva University. Jonathan. You have the unmute prompt to accept. Oh, we can come back to you later, Jonathan. Let’s go to Stephen Kass, adjunct professor at the Center for Global Affairs at New York University. Q: Thank you, Maria. David, thank you so much for this very modest, self-effacing series of comments, and for all the great work you have done for the world. My question is not about the second subject, Gaza, but about the first. You raised the R2S suggestion. The problems of conflict, and climate change, and economics that are driving the migration and the humanitarian crises you focused on are hard to pin on particular leaders. In fact, it’s the international community that, to a very considerable degree, has flooded the world with arms, and certainly has led to the extraordinary climate impacts that are driving people off their land. I agree that corruption is an issue, but it seems to me hard to pin responsibility for the first two significant causes of these crises on individual leaders, particularly in the developing world. SCHEFFER: Stephen, I accept the premise of your question. I would simply add that really what I’m focusing on are those leaders that self-initiate, in particular, armed conflicts that drive—that are sort of power-seizing conflicts internally that drives so much of this. I mean, I could—you know, the Myanmar military would be, you know, sort of candidate number one. But even on climate change, et cetera, I mean, I would look back at the presidency of Mr. Bolsonaro in Brazil, and ask during—you know, during his term what did he do with respect to climate change challenges in Brazil that either exacerbated the situation there or, you know, diminished them? Not necessarily for purposes of legal culpability, but I think to call them out, to essentially almost shame them under old human rights principles of shaming. That they were part of the problem and not part of the solution. So it’s—I accept exactly what you’re saying. I’m just saying that I still think there should be some focus on the responsibility of leaders to get it as right as possible while they’re in governance, and not to sort of cross what I would call as red lines that clearly exacerbate situations that that can lead to humanitarian emergencies. That’s my basic point. CASA: Thank you. Your comments on burden shifting has interested our audience. We have two written questions that I’ll put together for you. One is from Fodei Batty, professor of political science at Quinnipiac University, who says: Dr. Scheffer points out leaders who dump their problems, burdens, responsibilities on the rest of U.S./international community. But don’t such bad leaders do so because the rest of the international community is complicit in their actions? Every bad leader has a powerful friend somewhere in the international community who offers them some level of protection because of their own national interests. How do you go around the problem? Should great powers be more responsible in who they regard as friends and who others consider bad leaders? And second to that is a written question from Elke Zuern, professor of politics at Sarah Lawrence College, who writes: My class is interested in a bit more detail on your interesting point regarding burden shifters. SCHEFFER: Right. Well, let me—let me answer both of them. I think what you’re identifying is a clearly acknowledged point, which is the double standards involved. And I’m extremely conscious of that. The Global South in particular I think today looks at the actions of the major powers—whether it be China, Russia, the United States, the European Union—and their responsibility for climate change over the decades, and also for economic issues that they perhaps could have had much greater influence in solving rather than exacerbating, whether it be almost, you know, punitive tariff regimes, et cetera, that put a great burden on developing economies. So I get it. I’m not trying to exclude the great powers from burden shifting. And I know it’s probably controversial to sort of place the United States in yet another position of responsibility in the world, but I think we always are recognizing the contribution the United States made, unfortunately, to climate change, and also to economic situations in various parts of the world that we try to solve, but that we also have to recognize sometimes we’re the cause of, at least partially, in the beginning. So yeah, it’s not—I mean, I’m not trying to establish legal accountability. I’m just trying to say that there must be a recognition in governance. What is governance of a society? What does it comprise of? Does it comprise, regardless of double standards or whatever, dumping these problems on other countries? Is that good governance, or is that bad governance? How does one define governance today? It might sound a little simplistic, but I see it every day in the news. And so, I think that gets to the second question that I just want to emphasize. I find that in almost everything that I approach these days with international parties—whether they be in academia, in government, in journalism—that the double standards argument is constantly being made. For example, I have tried for two years just on my narrow beat of the world—international criminal law—to work with others to construct a special tribunal on the crime of aggression against Ukraine. And yet, it has proven so difficult to do that because of the allegation of double standards, particularly by the Global South. That we’re paying attention to what has happened in Ukraine as opposed to paying attention to what has happened elsewhere in the world, even with respect to the crime of aggression. And in particular for the United States, you know, the first utterance is, well, what about the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq in 2003? Please explain. So that comes up again, and again, and again. And it’s a very, very difficult hurdle to jump. CASA: Thank you. We will take the next question from Clemente Abrokwaa, associate teaching professor at the African Studies Program at Pennsylvania State University. Clemente. Q: Thank you so much for your insightful talk. I have two short questions. And the first one is, the numbers that you mentioned, regarding the humanitarian crisis and so on, I could tell that—we could all tell that a greater number of it is from Africa. And I wanted to know why that is so. And second—my second question also is—echoes the first speaker, that mentioned about by the flooding of the—of guns or weapons at the international level that goes into Africa, and elsewhere. I know that Africa is—you know, they don’t really manufacture these guns. They buy them. So how can that be checked? Yeah, so basically those are my two questions. Thanks. SCHEFFER: Well, thank you so much, Clemente. I will do my best to answer these. In terms of their first question, what we have seen in the last year in particular in Africa is the tumult and somewhat the collapse of democratic governance and stability in the Sahel region of Africa, the middle part of Africa. One country after another. And those countries are all popping up on the Humanitarian Emergency Register now. And it is driven by internal power struggles, internal armed conflicts. I don’t think I would—I mean, I could be proven wrong on this—but I don’t think we’re looking in the Sahel necessarily at cross-border armed conflicts. I think almost everything there right now is internal. I could be proven wrong on that. But, of course, you have the outside influence, particularly of the Wagner Group from Russia, and other nonstate actors, are ginning things up in the Sahel. And I think that shows the increased focus on Africa in the humanitarian emergency space. As far as the weapons are concerned, I have found it rather ironic—and sort of understandably ironic, but still ironic—that when it comes to the flow of weapons, on the one hand we have an intense need—at least many of us would argue—for there to be arms manufacturing and arms transfers to Ukraine to defend itself from Russian aggression. That has—you know, in the human rights community we normally and naturally argue for regulation of arms transfers, for limitation of arms transfers. All of this is bad. However, in the last couple of years, I’ve seen a very clear shift in attitudes, whereby, frankly, the task of saving humanity actually requires manufacturing arms and delivering them to countries in need who are acting in self-defense. And we didn’t really—you know, we didn’t have an adequate capacity to do that when the Ukraine war of 2022 broke out. And we’ve been catching up ever since. I mean, the stories out of Europe with trying to regalvanize their arms manufacturing plants, building new ones in order to meet this need—not only for Ukraine, but also in the future for the defense of Europe under NATO—is all an arms manufacturing, arms transfer issue. And of course, here in the United States it’s a huge issue now of gearing up the arms industry and paying them with public funds to actually provide all of these arms. So then you come to Africa. And unfortunately, the spillover is a lack of focus on regulating arms transfers. There’s a treaty out there on arms transfers that is more or less been—you know, has laid fallow now. But it just means the focus has turned away from actually regulating arms transfers to ramping up arms manufacturing, and presumably legitimate transfers. But I think the blowback is, in Africa, you’re going to see a lot of that just gin up more availability of arms for conflicts, particularly non-international armed conflicts, which are not helpful to peace, security, stability, and good governance in Africa. So I’ll leave it there for that answer. CASA: Our next question is a written one. It comes from Zoe Hughes, a graduate student at Stanford University: What value do legal frameworks of war hold in the now, if the global audience cannot confidently assess in the now proportionality and necessity? How do you recommend the global audience factors the laws of war into their response to wars? SCHEFFER: That’s a very, very good question, because it makes even my job very difficult too. In other words, on a day-by-day basis how am I supposed to assess, sitting here in Washington, DC, the extent to which the Israeli Defense Forces have complied with the law of war and international humanitarian law yesterday in the conflict? How do I understand what Hamas has or hasn’t done in that respect? It’s very, very difficult for the public to know what, ultimately in a courtroom, would be the evidence of whether or not a military force has complied with the standard principles—which we do have in customary international law; we have it in rules of engagement, et cetera—of, proportionality, namely you don’t kill more civilians than is absolutely necessary to get at the military advantage of hitting that combat force you’re trying to hit at, and necessity, that the object here is to go after Hamas and no one else. And distinction, between trying to identify between civilians, and, in this case, Hamas. If they’re in a residential building, do you know who’s the civilians and who are the Hamas fighters? How do you calculate that? And if they’re firing back at you out of one window, what’s the story with the window on top? Is that fair game? Who knows? Those are determinations of distinction. And then just basic humanity, which sometimes the military describes as fighting with honor. Namely, yeah, there’s an enemy. There’s combat. But there’s also the honor of doing it in a way that complies with law and, of course, preserves the civilian population to the greatest extent possible. I think my point is, when I say, “the civilian population to the greatest extent possible,” yes, on any given day, with any given strike. But the question is, are you asking the larger—I mean, does one ask the larger question of, at what point is the civilian population, frankly, perhaps of more significance than totally defeating the enemy? Literally, at what point does that red line get crossed? And so that would be my response. CASA: Next question comes from Otávio Cunha, an undergraduate student at Lewis University, who writes: With respect to the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, what role, if any, is the United Nations Security Council playing in addressing the situation and promoting a peaceful resolution to the conflict? SCHEFFER: Well, they have—they have been convening and holding sessions, and resolutions have been introduced calling—particularly those introduced by almost everyone other than the United States—call for a full ceasefire. And I think in the minds of many of those who introduced those resolutions, a permanent ceasefire. Now, the United States, as you probably know from reading the news of the last few weeks, has been shifting its position now to this term “ceasefire.” I think has been somewhat confusing for the general public because I think most of the public sees ceasefire as a permanent thing. Whereas you can have a temporary ceasefire for humanitarian purposes as well, and it’s still a ceasefire, but for a temporary period of time. And that’s really what the United States has been supportive of. And I know that Vice President Kamala Harris recently emphasized in Selma on Sunday that the United States supports a temporary ceasefire of six weeks to get this humanitarian situation under control and to get the hostages returned. Those are the two big, you know, priorities. But it’s that dispute within the Security Council over are you permanently ending the war or are you just temporarily. The United States has not been prepared yet to say under Chapter Seven authority of the UN Charter under the Security Council, Israel must completely, permanently cease all combat actions in Gaza. Why? Because of the threat of Hamas. But that is not how the rest of the Council sees it. And since the United States has a veto, there remains somewhat of a gridlock. But it is possible, ultimately, to work our way out of that gridlock in the Security Council if we sort of do two things, from the United States perspective. One, just to almost ignore what the Russian ambassador is saying. He’s there to score points, as hypocritical as it is. And, you know, he’s just going to say whatever he wants to say. And let’s not get too worked up about it. But I think the other point is that we can actually start to use our leverage within the Security Council I think to get, if I may put it this way, Israel to the right place on all of this. And to make it clear that, you know, we’re not simply going to follow directions from Tel Aviv in terms of how—or, Jerusalem—in terms of how to conduct ourselves in the Security Council, because we need to meet the priorities that are in the best national security interests of the United States. At this time, I would describe them as, obviously, the security of Israel, but also the humanitarian survival in good order of the Palestinian population in Gaza. And the two of them are going to have to come together as twin objectives and to be achieved as twin objectives. It’s not binary. It’s not one or the other. It has to be both. And that’s what the U.S. has to keep pressing for and persuading other Security Council members to buy into to that formula. And, of course, part of that formula, if I may say, is the end game, which is moving towards a negotiated outcome to all of this that resolves, in large part, this situation that is triggering so many humanitarian emergencies. And to solve it, shall we say, quote/unquote, “once and for all.” CASA: Thank you. We have a lot of written questions. We would love to hear your voices. So please, don’t be shy about raising your hand and asking them verbally. In the meantime, we’ll go to Evan Maher, undergraduate student at Buffalo State University, who writes in, asking: We have heard a lot about Palestine and Ukraine in the media lately. Why do you think that these receive so much attention while others, such as the conflict in Sudan, are also popping up? Would you say that it is due to these issues being in nations which the U.S. and the rest of the Western world interact with more? SCHEFFER: Well, I would say that answers—or, the answer you provided more or less explains it. But I would take you back to, you know, there was a time in 2003, when the situation in Darfur was at the top of the list of attention by even the United States government. And that was in Africa. It was in Sudan. It was a genocidal situation in Darfur. So, it’s not as if just because something is in Africa it will not accord attention. I do think that it’s being out-competed by the urgency and, you know, the attention by everyone on what’s going on in Gaza, and before that, in Ukraine. I mean, even the media exposure of what is occurring in both locations—in both regions is swamping us, particularly with Ukraine. And then once journalists could get closer and closer to see what’s going on in Gaza, it just—you know, there’s a shock value to that every single day. And politicians and government officials have to react to that. That’ll be issue number one at the morning meeting, you know. And you just—there’s no way of avoiding it. And that means that it’s going to be prioritized for action. But it also explains why you see someone like Secretary of State Blinken, even though there’s the continuing war in Ukraine, the conflagration in Gaza and Israel, you still see that he has to do his job dealing with other issues in the world, whether it be traveling through Africa, or traveling through South America. He does that, even in the midst of all of this, in order to address those issues. But I have to acknowledge the point of the question, which is right now, the worst humanitarian disaster, emergency in the world is in Sudan. That’s where it’s happening. It’s also in Gaza. It’s also in Ukraine. But just in terms of sheer numbers, it’s in Sudan. And the modest proposal I’ve made, because I work the law beat on these things, is I do not understand why the United States is not taking a clear initiative in the Security Council to address charges of genocide in Darfur under the authority of the original referral by the Security Council of Darfur in 2005, I think, to address the issue of accountability for that crime. Well, that’s still on the books. It’s still alive and active. It can be reenergized, reactivated for the current situation that is hitting Darfur. And so that’s a way for the United States to say, yeah, we recognize everything else going on, but we need to get back to a problem that has reignited. And that is genocide in Darfur. And it needs to be dealt with by this Security Council, in part to support the work of the International Criminal Court, which has been investigating the 2003 genocide and issued indictments with respect to it. But the United States can bring that to the forefront again and seek action in the Security Council. CASA: We will now take a question from JY Zhou, who is executive director of the Center for Global Engagement at James Madison University. JY. Q: Hi, can you hear me? CASA: Yes. Q: Hi. My name is Chris Nelms. I’m a student here at James Madison University. And my question is, you mentioned the list of the twenty countries that are facing the humanitarian crisis. I wanted you to know if there were nations on that list—or that are there were countries that have left that list, and how they succeeded in getting off that list, and how other countries can learn from that. Thank you. SCHEFFER: Yeah. Well, one of them, although it’s in the second ranking now, is Yemen. Three or four years ago, we put Yemen at the very top of the humanitarian emergency list. But there has been a truce in the armed conflict in Yemen. And, of course, this is where, as you know, the Houthis are operating in order to cripple the commercial shipping through the Red Sea in protest of what’s going on in Gaza. But nonetheless, despite the Houthi, frankly, attention to those kinds of issues, the humanitarian emergency in Yemen, while it’s still there, has greatly receded, and is not even in the top ten anymore. It’s in the top twenty. So, I think I’ll leave it at that example. I don’t think, for example—well, I was going to say one that I see is now there. I think the interesting thing is what has newly arrived on the list in the top twenty, and that’s Ecuador. Who would have thought, you know? But the situation there is quite dire now, politically, and also with armed gangs and stuff. So that’s a very difficult one. And, by the way, I would also just make an editorial comment about Haiti, which is in the top twenty. Not the top ten, but the top twenty of the IRC list. It is—it’s not as if millions or thousands of people are being displaced in Haiti. They honestly don’t have very much territory to go to, even if they were. But rather, it’s the state of life in Haiti as controlled by the gangs as opposed to a government in Haiti. And there’s—just to go back to the last question on the Security Council—the Security Council has been laboring for a long time now, to try to get some kind of law enforcement capacity into Haiti. Kenya offered peacekeepers for that purpose. And then there’s been some backtracking. Everything is now under discussion again. But I have always thought, you know, because I dealt with Haiti during the Clinton administration and saw it upfront. I’ve always thought Haiti really is a special responsibility of the United States. It’s in our neighborhood. It was the first real surge of democracy in the western hemisphere. And we have a lot of immigrants from Haiti. And I just think if this country were to have some special responsibility for any particular nation in the world—in other words, responsibility to respond, to deal with the problems, to address the problems of Haiti, it’s the United States. And I’ve always been a little distressed that we don’t have a greater push domestically to address this terrible emergency that’s taking place quite close to our shores. CASA: Ambassador Susan Page’s class at the University of Michigan is joining us, and they’ve written in: What do you think a new international law defining totality would look like? More specifically, would it be another atrocity crime or under a different designation? SCHEFFER: Right. I don’t know if I would list it as an atrocity crime, per se. I think you might be able to get there eventually. But I would like to see something a little more towards the state responsibility construct to begin with, as opposed to just trying to pinpoint this on individual criminal responsibility. I would like to see more of a state responsibility treaty of some sort, whereby nations agree—it’s sort of like an extension of the Geneva Conventions of 1949, but primarily on a state responsibility platform. So that governments are on notice that once they go down this path of armed conflict, there needs to be a greater sense of the totality of the conflict and what their responsibilities are to acknowledge the realities of that totality, and not try—to put it quite bluntly, you don’t want to slaughter humanity in order to save humanity. There’s got to be a better balance. And I think it’s an excellent question. And don’t assume I’ve thought this all through. (Laughs.) This has really occurred to me, frankly, from the Gaza experience of the last several months, that we have this great gap in international law. And I do think it could be filled with a better attention to what do we need more than just the Geneva Conventions in terms of a focus on the entirety of the conflict? CASA: We have a raised hand now from Charlotte Langeveld, college lecturer at Ocean County College. Charlotte. Q: Yes. Hi. Thank you for taking my question. And thank you for hosting this session. It’s very informative and important. I worked as a humanitarian aid worker in the Sudan from about 1998 to 2001, and I saw the brewings of the genocide. And, you know, I didn’t see it happen. And I left and I saw it happen. And I’m like, oh, makes sense because, of course, there’s a lack of resources that people begin to fight over. In this case, I believe it’s water. And then—it was water, and then you had, you know, different ethnic groups from the north, and the animist Africans’ land being trashed, villages, et cetera. I just wonder, do we need to look at the political economy, the global political economy, and figure out how to stop gold as being the interest, then conflict minerals in the Congo? And, I don’t know, because as long as governments and corporations are connected, how is the United Nations going to make a difference in trying to address these things? I’m sorry, I’m a little passionate, but there you go. SCHEFFER: Thanks, Charlotte. Very, very, very good question. And, you know, one of the readings that we assigned is by my friend John Prendergast, “Dirty Money is Destroying Sudan,” from February 27, only a few days ago in Foreign Affairs. And that article points to the very point that you’re making, which is that the source of a lot of the trouble in Sudan is, frankly, a race for gold. And those who are trying to influence that, and money laundering, and, you know, countries like the United Arab Emirates that are just knee-deep in—obsessed with the gold of Sudan. So that’s all very, very important. But it actually gives me an opportunity to make a larger point, which is I’ve spent, oh, gosh, thirty years on not only accountability for atrocity crimes, but also the huge challenge of prevention of atrocities. And so there’s a lot of focus on that. You know, how do you prevent atrocities from occurring? Is it an armed conflict, where you can prevent war crimes from, you know, being the sine qua non of every day of fighting, et cetera? So that’s—we’ve got a lot of history with prevention of atrocities. But we don’t have that same kind of sharp focus on atrocity—on prevention of a humanitarian emergencies. We respond to humanitarian emergencies. And there’s a huge school of thought and practice on how do you most effectively respond to humanitarian emergencies, whether it be the provision of food, dealing with refugees, employment issues, you know, political settlements that return refugees to their homes and their countries, et cetera. All of that is part of dealing with humanitarian emergencies. But I’m not aware of a kind of a school of thought out there where we place a lot of focus on, well, wait a minute, how can we prevent this humanitarian emergency from occurring? We see it coming. And, yes, there will—there are—even the IRC report, if you were to look at it, will say, yes, we need to have, you know, better educational issues dealt with, we need to have better economic relations established, you know, better farming techniques—I mean, all sorts of things to address what could be a humanitarian emergency. And, of course, we need to deal with climate change. But I don’t see it as a coherent sort of school of thought, or there’s no academy of prevention of humanitarian emergencies that I’m aware of. I could be proven wrong. It certainly has not come to my attention. Because I’ve been so immersed with prevention of atrocities that it occurs to me that one could also address prevention of humanitarian emergencies. CASA: Thank you. I think we can squeeze in one more question. Sebastian Kandakudy is an undergraduate student at Lewis University. Sebastian. Q: Hi. My question is, how should global actors navigate a delicate balance between the living essentials, humanitarian aid to vulnerable populations, and avoiding unintentional bolstering of oppressive regimes or prolonging conflicts in negotiations over aid access? SCHEFFER: Yeah. Let me take one prong of your question, if I might. Which is, unfortunately, the reality of responding to humanitarian emergencies so often rests upon, you know, negotiating and getting relief to the oppressed, to the population that is in dire need of it. But in doing so, one can be bolstering the very regime that is causing the problem, because—that’s part of my burden shifting argument. That, yeah, I know, we got to—we got to accept the burden now, and deal with this, and basically save your people because it’s our responsibility as decent international actors to do so and through our allegiance to, you know, the United Nations principles, our participation in the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, et cetera. But at the end of the day, it can actually be a facilitator for the survival of the very regime that’s causing the problem, because it doesn’t have to deal with the problem anymore. So I think I probably should leave it at that, Maria. A very rich subject to talk about. CASA: Thank you. I’m sorry we can’t go to the rest of the questions. But, David, thank you so much for speaking with us today, and to all of you for your questions and comments. The next Academic Webinar will take place on Wednesday, March 27, at 1:00 p.m. Eastern Time. Moisés Naím, distinguished fellow at Carnegie Endowment for International Peace will lead a conversation on authoritarianism. In the meantime, I encourage you to learn about CFR paid internships for students and fellowships for professors at CFR.org/careers; follow @CFR_Academic on X; and visit CFR.org, ForeignAffairs.com, and ThinkGlobalHealth.org for research and analysis on global issues. Thank you again for joining us today. We look forward to tuning in for our next webinar on March 27. (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.