This is the second episode of two on the issue of Housing, Land and Property (HLP) in a humanitarian context. The Episodes are co-hosted by: Alexandre Corriveau-Bourque, Co-Founder of Verent Solutions. and Trumanitarian's usual host Lars Peter Nissen.

This weeks guests are:

For Puerto Rico: Dr. Ana Christina Gomez Perez, a professor at the School of Law at the University of Puerto Rico and an advisor to Habitat for Humanity in Puerto Rico.Community Land Trusts featured by: Habitat for Humanity Puerto Rico, the Land Trust Alliance, and World Habitat.

For Ukraine: Yuliya Panfil – Director of the Future of Land and Housing Program at the New America Foundation. Their report : Can Ukraine Transform Post-Crisis Property Compensation and Reconstruction? Other relevant articles in Foreign Policy, and Slate.

Global Progress on the recognition of Indigenous and Local Community Land Rights

Conference on Housing Land and Property in Crises: A Dialogue on Community and Collective Land – April 02-04, 2024, University of San Juan, Puerto Rico

So Alex, here we are again with our second and final episode on HLP.

In the first episode, we first spoke about how HLP is this sort of invisible problem that nobody owns. This sort of affects everything but it's nobody's responsibility. And then we looked at how some actors are trying to address that issue at the global level, strategically developing and positioning HLP. And then, after that, we took a deep dive into Somalia where we had a very pleasant conversation with Shezane, who told us about the fantastic work she's doing there with developing durable solutions. What were your main takeaways from that first episode?

My takeaway from episode one was that when people start paying attention to help, amazing things can happen, but there's always the problem of scalability. It is a problem that affects virtually everybody, but how can humanitarian agencies address those needs when it affects virtually everybody? And so I think that is what I'm excited to explore in this episode is where we are looking at how different organizations and communities are imagining impact at scale.

Yeah, that was my main concern as well. On one side, it was amazing to hear about the work they're doing with durable solutions, but it's hard to see how an approach like the one can really be scalable, and if you're only reaching some thousands of people out of millions in need, then we obviously need to find different approaches. Also, now that doesn't take away anything from the work they're doing, it's amazing, but we do have to also explore different strategies to achieve scale.

Yeah. And I think that is where we are looking at the cases in Puerto Rico and Ukraine will provide us a pathway for seeing how that can happen.

So, let's first go to Puerto Rico. Who are we going to talk to there?

We're speaking today with Doctor Anna Christina Gomez Perez, who is a professor at the School of Law at the University of Puerto Rico, and she works as an advisor for Habitat for Humanity in Puerto Rico.

Let's hear what she had to say.

Doctor Perez, thank you for joining us today.

Welcome. I'm so happy to be here.

So, Dr. Perez, can you tell us a little bit about some of the challenges that communities are facing in Puerto Rico and the types of solutions that are being developed to support those communities to have stronger land and housing rights?

The main problem is that we also have trouble accessing the recovery funds. The statistics of FEMA denials of a request for recovery funds after a disaster, especially after Hurricane Maria are impressive. More than a half of the application were denial.

I think this is very sad because we replicate the same that we already know that doesn't work in this kind of situation. For the most vulnerable people, for poor communities, or low-income communities. And that's the problem that with Habitat for Humanity I have been working on for the last three years.

Rethinking the law, try to find a legal solution, because like you say, I am a lawyer, that help communities to have access to federal funds, to recovery process and also to have more resilience to work with this situation after a disaster.

Yes, it's a very tricky situation, isn't it? On one side, people who live in informal settlements are more vulnerable to storms and other disasters. And then after your house has been knocked down by a hurricane, you cannot even be recognized to receive support, really adding insult to injury. But how do you actually deal with that situation?”

I think we need to rethink our law. I am a lawyer and I said before, we think that a solution, we never change the law. We just have this big law about property and we never have any advance related to that because the property law is the area of law that is more traditional, respond more to the economic power like banks or something like that.

But I think we need to understand that this problem with the recovery funds affects all the population of the island, even the big companies or even the banks. And that is my kind of approach. We need to make a more flexible way to acquire a formal title for low-income communities of people who have no access to the traditional ways to have property.

And also, and this is the second part of my investigation, we need to work more in collective ownership of the property. Because I think in the case of Maria and after the disaster, we realized that people who live in community with collective ownership or community land trust, they have better opportunities to access to federal funds. They had better opportunity to recover after hurricanes or any kind of disasters.

And that's my research. I tried to work on law, tried to change some kind of law, tried to make more flexible way for access to a formal title and also to educate communities to understand the importance to have a new way of property in a community land trust or maybe in a different community property. They had more power to work. They had more power to request from the government, from the central government or federal government to have more aid for them.

For the non-experts out there, could you, in simple terms, explain what a community land trust is?

Yeah. The property, we always think about it, is that one person will have all the rights over a property. But when we talk about community property, it's that a community is the owner of the property and the people who live there, the residents, have some rights over the property.

They have the right to construct, to live there for generations, but the land is always for the community. If a person left the property and nobody is there, the land comes back to the community and the community can sell it or can give someone else from the same community rights over the property. And I think that's the magic of the community land trust or the community property, the collective property, because it keeps the community together and helps the community to be their self-government.

I think it's the best way to explain it.

It's such a fantastic idea, community being self-governing and owning the land together. But can I ask you in terms of the legal side of things, how does that work? Is the community registered as a legal persona? Do they have a bank account? Do they have elections and governance? How does the whole thing work?

They could have that kind of government. We had a wonderful example in Puerto Rico that already work as community land trust. And I will give you a wonderful example.

First, I want to talk about Caño Martin Pena Trust. This is a well-established community land trust. It had been a land trust for the last, I think, 20 years with a power community, local authority and nonprofit organization that has managed to block the political intention to displace the community, a community in a very central and rich metropolitan area.

This is a very low income community. And this, Caño Martín Peña, had bank accounts, like you asked me, had some kind of democracy. They work on the way to establish rules for all the community already.

And they also obtained very important world recognition because they are very famous in Puerto Rico and very famous around the world. Now, they are working in a... They have a Caño Martín Peña.

They are working in different ways to help people after the hurricane, for example. They give titles, certification for FEMA. And FEMA has to recognize that title, even if it's not the title that we had in the regular property law in Puerto Rico.

Because this is a way that they work on it. And I think it helps people, especially low-income people, to have more resilience after a disaster. We also have this very famous, too, Land Trust that's named as Pueblo Trust, that was created by a nonprofit organization to conserve a forest in a central area of Puerto Rico.

And now this community Land Trust is working with the community to create a network for energy, for renewable energy, for solar energy, and had access to federal funds and also to grants, nonprofit organization funds, and work to be independent from the energy from the government in Puerto Rico, to be completely energy independent. And it's a very famous community land trust. We also had Rio Pedro Trust and something else.

But we have examples that can prove that this kind of community land trust works and can be a solution in Puerto Rico.

You mentioned a couple of really strong examples here. How far do you think this can be scaled? How big a part of the population can be held through this sort of solution?

Right now, it's a very small portion of the population, but I think if we empower the community, we educate, because it's even very technical for me. That I am a law professor, this very technical law concept is very difficult for them too. But we are working with Habitat for Humanity. We already made these toolkits for the communities, not just for lawyers.

I have been giving a conference for a judge, for a lawmaker, for the legal community, but we think the next step is to educate community, to empower community, that they understand the concept and they can choose this concept, because it's a very different concept of property, I know, that they can move to the next level, maybe, and they can work in a different kind of community land trust. I think the best thing about community land trust is that it can change according to the community needs. It can be different from one community to another community, but the central concept that the community is the owner of the land and the community made their own law for the land, I think is important, especially when you have different needs for community.

One of them can be environmental needs, some of them energy needs, or some of them just to be a planification needs.

It sounds like establishing a community land trust has to be a community driven process, but that often requires some external technical supports. In addition to external technical supports, what are some of the ways that agencies can help communities to establish these kinds of trusts?

I think we need to work with communities because I don't think that the solution has to come outside. They have to realize that they have this problem. I think after the disaster, most of the community, low income communities, realized that they don't have enough power or they have a huge problem related to title or to formal title in Puerto Rico.

Now we need to work with them, to talk to them, to educate them about what solution, legal solution we have or they have to work with this before the next disaster comes. And I think education, not just from lawyers, just from different sectors, and also support with different ideas is important. Like I said before, El Caño, Community Land Trust Casa Pueblo, it has been working in an energy solution for the community.

And I think that that's something that a lawyer can do, but also another kind of experts like engineers can help this community to do. But I think it has to be a different approach, but also with respect to the community decision, because not all communities have ideas for community land trust, and not all communities are ready for this type of solution that is very different from the traditional way of property.”

It's really a very organic way to think about law and what I really like about what you say is that at the core of it is really the mobilization of the community and the community realizing and understanding the issues facing them. And if you don't have that basis, you really can't do anything.

And I think that's the key because if you make this wonderful law.

“I already work on some of them, but the community doesn't feel that it's her law. The law is that, you know, it's no law at all. Because law responds to the needs of the population, but the population is not taking an account when you make a law.

It's not worth it. It will be a death law, at all.

You're obviously touching on a very political issue here. Land ownership is very contentious. There's a lot of power involved. Have you gotten any pushback on your work?

“I have been working with Habitat in three different laws. One of them was to simplify the proof title procedure. And that's a law because Puerto Rico, if Puerto Rico doesn't approve that law, we are going to lose a lot of federal funds.

And that's why the law was approved. But I also draft a bill to reduce the terms of advert possession from 10 years to five years, because I think it's a very long term.

And the banks are against that law. And it's very sadly because I think if you can have more flexible way or reduce the term for advert possession, the people will be more active taking care of their land because they know they're going to lose the land if they put the land in a productive way. But the bank thinks it's against the traditional concept and they're going to lose money or I don't know what.

And they were the main opponents to my bill in the last few years.

Of course, you've already talked about how having that legal status can make communities more resilient to disasters because they can make their claims more effectively. But how does the process of having a community land trust change the way the community itself responds to disasters?

My impression after the disaster is that, at least in the community, they now want to work to be prepared for the next challenge. And they are more active, more worried. They now realize that maybe this year we are going to experience this kind of disaster again. What are we going to do?

Thank you so much, Doctor Perez. I think the example that you shared in Puerto Rico is truly inspiring.

Doctor Perez, thank you so much for coming on humanitarian and sharing your experience with us. It's been fascinating to hear about the work you're doing.

Thank you, you guys.

Alex, that was such a fascinating story Dr. Perez told us from Puerto Rico, especially the way they work with collective ownership of land as a way of scaling. Because as we talked about, when we had Shazam from Somalia, tell us about their work, it's fantastic work they do, but it seemed to be very hard to scale to a significant, but it seemed to be very hard to really scale it to meet the millions of people in need in Somalia. Now, how do you feel about Puerto Rico? Is that really scalable, this focus on collective ownership of land?”

“Absolutely. And I think over the past few decades, we've seen this movement of community land, community land trusts emerge all over the world and they are popping up in dozens and dozens of countries. The movement is still fairly small in comparison to another movement that I actually draw a tremendous amount of inspiration from and that is more of a rural movement led by indigenous peoples and local communities around the world.

And now just to give you a bit of context, 100 million hectares in five years, that's 300 Puerto Ricos in total surface area. And we still have a long ways to go. There's over 1.3 billion hectares of indigenous lands that have not been formally recognized.

But what this window of five years shows us is that with political will, with adequate technical and financial resources and with patient support from donors and supporting agencies, and you giving communities the power, they can make transform of change at a large scale.

Those are really impressive results, Alex. I get that. And I can see that in many of the countries where we operate, collective ownership of land is quite prevalent.

But what do we do in situations where it's not like that or in the areas where individuals own land, there's still a need to be able to scale interventions to meet the needs.

Yeah, and you're right. And with climate change sort of driving disasters and making them more and more intense every single year, governments and agencies are going to need to find tools to address individual and collective needs at scale. And I think that that's where we can turn to the example of Ukraine, where the Ukrainian government has taken charge of this compensation restitution process in the process. It emits an ongoing conflict and the tools that they're using have the potential to transform the way that agencies and governments do this all over the world.

Great. And who have you found for us to discuss Ukraine with?

So today we are joined by Yuliya Panfil, who's the Director of the Future of Land and Housing Program at the New America Foundation. Welcome, Yuliya.

Welcome, Yulia.

Thanks so much. It's really great to be here.

So we've been kicking off most of these interviews with the first question, which is why are you an HLP nerd and what got you working on the future of property rights?

That is a really great question. I think that like a lot of HLP nerds, I sort of stumbled into this field. I am a journalist and a lawyer by training and was working a long time ago now at a corporate law firm and had a pro bono client at the UN.

And this client was trying to negotiate agreements between mining companies and indigenous communities in the Peruvian Amazon. And we were sort of helping to ensure that the rights of these communities were respected. And while the project wasn't really called a land rights project, it quickly became apparent that it was actually all about land and property rights.

And I just became obsessed. I sort of became so fascinated with the ways in which housing, land and property is foundational to everything. It truly is the base of Maslow's hierarchy of needs.

And without a stable home, you can't hold down a job. You can't access food and have economic security. Just all of those intersections, it felt like if I was going to do international development work, it felt like a really interesting and worthwhile topic within that work to venture into.”

And so what is it about the future of this sector that excites you?

“I think that traditionally in much of the world, it's been incredibly expensive, time consuming and difficult to map people's land and provide them with documents. That show that they're the owners of the land and the homes that they live in. And over the last 20 years, really, there have been several technological advances that can really turn this process on its head, speed it up, make it cheaper and also decentralize it and put it into the hands of communities themselves.

So they don't have to rely on a central government who may not be able to or may not want to help them secure their rights for various reasons. And so I think that it's, like many fields, just one that has a lot of potential to be transformed by new advances. But I think that the way in which we navigate that transformation really matters because it can be taken in a positive constructive direction or some of those technologies can also be used to disenfranchise people and make land more opaque and unequal.

And so it seems like we're in this moment where we have the tools to really chip away at the problem of land insecurity at a scale that we couldn't before.

And I think that this scalability is one of the challenges that we've been grappling with. And so I think this leads into really well into a report that New America recently published called Can Ukraine Transform Post-Crisis Property Compensation and Reconstruction? Did I say that correctly?

Yes you did.

OK, so most of our audience are familiar with the scale of destruction that has happened in Ukraine. But can you put some figures into context and tell us sort of what the implications are for reconstruction?

Yeah, so it's been this interview is taking place almost exactly on the two year anniversary of Russia's full scale invasion of neighboring Ukraine. And in those two years, more than 11 million Ukrainians have been displaced from their homes. It's been the largest exodus of people as the result of a conflict since the Second World War.

And more than a million homes have been damaged or destroyed, mostly along the front line in the south and east of Ukraine, but not exclusively. As you know, Russians are shelling as far in as Lviv. And so the government now and these losses, I should say, I mean, the figures are just astronomical.

They're in the trillions of the amount of damage and the cost of rebuilding. And the government in the midst of all of this has done something that I think is really incredible and sort of without precedent. They've rolled out a program that allows Ukrainians whose homes have been damaged or destroyed by the Russians to file compensation claims and receive funds to rebuild their homes in the midst of hostilities.

And since then, the latest figures from Ukraine's Ministry of Infrastructure are that eRecovery has processed more than 83,000 compensation claims and paid out more than 45,000. And another half million or so claims have been initiated through the Ukrainian government's Diia platform and are in the queue.

OK. So when you say that it's unprecedented at what's the typical practice that has preceded this moment? Like what, what did this look like before this example emerged?

Yeah, so typically getting victims back into their homes after a war, first of all, the process typically does not start in earnest until after a war is over. And then it stretches on for many, many years, often decades. It can be incredibly expensive.

It's mired by corruption. And a big reason for why it's so difficult to get people back into their homes after a war is that often the records that victims use to prove that they had lived in the home that they want to get compensation for, that they want to get back into, those property records are often missing, destroyed, or they maybe didn't exist to begin with. So many countries don't have functioning property registers.

And so victims are unable to present the necessary evidence to prove that they are the rightful owners of those homes and get compensation. Sorry, there are a lot of other factors that sort of complicate things in the meantime, often belligerents make things worse deliberately by destroying property registries, courts and other civil infrastructure that would help with property return. And you actually see the Russians doing this in this conflict.

You saw this happen in the Kosovo conflict where the Serbian forces stole property records as they were treated. Oftentimes occupying forces will actually move into the homes that are being abandoned by the people fleeing and that further complicates property return. You saw, for example, the Islamic State confiscated and then later sold the homes and land of displaced Iraqis to fund their activities.

And so the longer a conflict drags on and the longer people who are displaced from their homes have to wait before being able to get back into their homes, the more potential there is for these knock on impacts and these further complications, the more potential there is for their property records to be lost, for example, or destroyed or for somebody else to move in. And so for all those reasons, it's the fact that Ukraine is able to process these claims almost in real time and get people back into their homes in a matter of months instead of years or decades is just such a leap forward for this process.

And what were the baseline conditions in Ukraine that made this type of approach possible now that may not be existing in other places?

Yeah, so I would say that Ukraine had three major advantages that sort of poised this type of transformation to happen here. The first is that property records in Ukraine are in large part digitized. The registry is not fully complete, but it's about 50% complete.

Diia means action in Ukrainian. And he put forward this vision that Ukraine would be a digital state in a smartphone. So he had this vision that Ukrainians should be able to interact with the government and get basic government services digitally through an app.

And in fact, currently about half of all of Ukraine's population uses Diia regularly for everything from filing tax returns to receiving their pensions to registering companies. And so the government had this existing app that was pretty ubiquitously used. And what happened was that in the first couple of weeks after the war broke out, the government was able to add new functionalities onto that app, including the functionality that allowed Ukrainians to file claims for damaged property.

And it was a platform that was already trusted. And so people used it. Which sort of brings me to the third differentiator, which I actually think is a bit of a differentiator, but is very, very quickly closing.

And Ukraine, I don't think is so unique in this way. Ukraine's population is highly digitally fluent, digitally sophisticated, very, very high smartphone penetration, very high digital fluency. So the learning curve for being able to file a compensation claim online was relatively shallow.

I think that truthfully, the rest of the world is very much catching up if not caught up. And I think that that differentiator will go away very soon. But I would say that those three factors to me were what enabled Ukraine to spin this thing up pretty successfully.

And what are some of the challenges and the risks associated with doing this type of approach that the Ukrainian government is pursuing right now?

So, as I mentioned, one of the main advantages of E recovery is that it is digital first and that lowers the costs of the program. It increases accessibility, it can increase transparency and lower the opportunities for corruption. But the flip side of that is that for older claimants, folks who might not have a smartphone and otherwise who are not online for whatever reason, that does make the program harder to access.

eRecovery does have offline brick and mortar options, but it really is a digital first program, and so its digital primacy can pose some challenges. Other than that, I would say that the program experiences some challenges that are both expected and not insurmountable. So in the first months of the program's rollout, there were certain inefficiencies that became obvious, certain gaps between what the laws say and how DIA interprets those laws, things that are being worked out in real time, but I'll give you an example.

The eRecovery program for a property that is owned jointly by multiple people in order to file a compensation claim, you need to get the consent of each co-owner of that property. Now, in the middle of a war where a co-owner may be incapacitated or deceased or held on occupied territory, that's not necessarily practical. That's the type of mismatch between the structure of the program and the realities on the ground that is both understandable and being worked out in real time.

So there's an active NGO community that is liaising with the Ukrainian government to try to iron some of these things out. For example, up until a couple of months ago, people who had repaired their homes out of pocket before the compensation program was spun up were not eligible to retroactively claim compensation and get reimbursed for the repairs that they had made out of pocket. That has since been fixed.

And so these are the types of challenges that I would anticipate will be continuously surfaced and addressed as this program moves forward.

And do you see an application to this for disaster recovery? So there was that massive, massive earthquake in Turkey and Northern Syria last year. There's been sort of historic floods or multiple historic floods in Pakistan recently.

Do you see that this could also be a tool in those types of situations?

And they allowed those people to just sign affidavits saying that they were the property owners, which is kind of all the way to the other end of the extreme. But I think that there is so much potential in any post-crisis context.

Well, thank you so much. We are truly talking about the present but also the future of this sector. And I really appreciate you coming on and telling us about how we are witnessing a scalability on an unprecedented level with this great example in Ukraine. And hopefully we can take some lessons from that to other contexts.

It's always great to talk to you and to talk help to nerd out about help and also to talk about my home country of Ukraine. So yeah, thank you for having me on and doing this.

So Alex, that brings us to the end of our interviews. We have more or less completed these two episodes. So, where does that leave us?

Well, at the beginning of this podcast, we likened HLP in the humanitarian sector to the invisibility cloak from the Douglas Adams series, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. And the invisibility cloak is created by the generation of a field that convinces people's brains that it is someone else's problem. Now that you've been to Somalia, Puerto Rico and Ukraine, has that invisibility cloak been lifted for you?

I have to say it's an extremely accurate framing of the problem, such a precise metaphor actually. And I think we have to recognize that we generally underutilize Douglas Adams in the humanitarian sector. I think we need to put him up there next to Henri Dunant maybe, the second Henri Dunant.

Oh, I mean, he was a public policy nerd and he was committed to pointing out the absurdities of large administrative systems, overly bureaucratic systems.

Yeah, and I think he nailed it with this one, right? Because I have to admit, I was slightly ashamed as we got into this to discover how little I actually knew myself about HLP. I mean, I've worked in this sector my entire career.

I should have known more. I should have been more acutely aware of these issues and I was not. And I've actually thought a lot about why that is.

And I think it's partly because it's simply not our thing. You can't do it on a nine-month ECHO contract. It's deeply political, it's structural.

You can get in trouble. It's about protection. It is really, really difficult to tackle this issue.

It's also incredibly important. But it just doesn't sit very well with the way we've structured the business. And that's why we talk it away in the corner of the protection cluster, rather than actually placing it front and center in the humanitarian architecture that is giving it a cluster of its own.

A cluster of its own or making sure that it is embedded in each of the clusters and coordinated by, because it affects all, it affects rather than siloing it away as its own separate thing, making sure that it is something that everybody appropriates, that no one can say that it is invisible to them.

The second reflection I have on HLP is this thing we've jokingly said to all of the people we interviewed, why are you such a nerd? It's that, you know, it's the geekiness around the people who engage in this and the passion that they have for the issue. And I think it reminds me of cash land.

It reminds me of all of the people Who have been fiercely fighting for and are passionate about scaling cash as a modality for humanitarian action. It's the same combination of on one side, a highly technical issue where you really need to think very closely around how do you actually get the distributed and have to use data to understand how it works and so on. So there's a real geeky side to this. And on the other hand, there's a clear Transformational potential in both they should be and in cash and so in terms of the community around this issue, it reminds me of that, of cash.

Yeah, but I think what cash has done really, really well in the past few years is done a great job. One of communicating its impact and the second has been really great at communications in general. It has great marketing.

And I think that that's something that we need to do better as the geeks is to bring other people in to get people to connect with their own stories, their own HLP stories.

Yeah, I agree with that. But I think it is– I haven't thought this through, but I think it's also an easier sell somehow.

Yeah, I agree with that. But I think it's, I haven't thought this through, but I think it's also an easier sell somehow. I'm not taking anything away from the work it took to actually get it onto the agenda and how much resistance there was, but it's a more intuitive idea.

Don't give people tennis socks, give them cash. I think, and if we worked in the sector, we've all seen the adverse impact of inappropriate in-kind support, right? So I think it is an easier sell, but I agree with you.

You guys need to bloody rebrand, right? And you also need to start answering questions with less than two and a half thousand words.

I think that that's going to be the biggest challenge for us. But I think that cash also fits into what you just described, the nine-month quick distribution program, whereas HLP is the ultimate nexus issue. It is the thing that cuts across all the different phases of displacement.”

I think maybe an additional thing that crossed my mind is around clearly technology plays a role here in a big way and will enable us to scale in ways as we see in Ukraine. That potential is there now. Ukraine is in terms of capacity and government support, in many ways a best-case scenario.

But clearly something can be done much faster and better than what we are doing today. And a side issue that really pops out there that I have been interested in for a while but haven't heard spoken about in this way is the issue of identity, of your personal digital identity and how that plays in terms of being able to document what you own and receive assistance and all of that. And I think that's really an area we need to put spotlight on.

And so I think that our potential for growth, we don't need to reinvent the wheel. We often just need to look to people who have already been doing a lot of that heavy lifting. So anybody who's interested in these issues, there is an ongoing series of conferences on Housing, Land and Property rights.

In crisis contexts that Iru and Ibere mentioned in the first episode. We have actually the follow up events to the one that was held in DC last year. And the next one is actually going to be in Puerto Rico, where we are going to be meeting some of the communities that establish community land trusts.

Yeah. So I mean Alex and All in all, I'm just hugely grateful for you bringing this idea to the table. And and I've thoroughly enjoyed working with you on it. It's it's been a great journey through LP land. If we can call it that.

Yeah, so, I mean, Alex, all in all, I'm just hugely grateful for you bringing this idea to the table. And I thoroughly enjoyed working with you on it. It's been a great journey through HLP land, if we can call it that.

And I've been truly impressed with the colleagues we have spoken to, their passion, their professionalism, the important work they're doing. I don't know whether we'll get it right in the future, to be honest with you. I think it is difficult.

There are many reasons why it is really difficult with the current humanitarian modalities. But it gives me a lot of hope and encouragement to see all of the great work going on.

Well, thank you so much for this opportunity to highlight some of this amazing work and hopefully it will inspire others to continue and do some even more amazing things so that in a couple of years we can do a follow up episode.

Yeah. Yeah, maybe, maybe if you guys, de-nerd yourselves, yeah, we can talk about it.

It sounds great. Sounds like a good challenge, alright.