Welcome to the first webinar of the Think Wider Webinar Series for 2022, New Perspectives on Development. I'm Kunal Singh, the Director of Community Wider. The Wider Webinar Series features a line of eminent researchers and development specialists who present their work and discuss new perspectives on the topic of global development. The title of today's webinar is Why Urban Poverty in Sub-Saharan Africa Needs More Attention. The challenge is facing urban economies in Sub-Saharan Africa constantly. Yet it can be argued that development economics, which is a very established field as we know, hasn't really paid enough attention to urban economies in the global south. So it's quite clear that it's very, it's very, very clear that we need to understand better what's happening to urban economies in Sub-Saharan Africa, especially to the lens of economics. And it's also widely accepted that urban areas are rightly inadequate livelihood opportunities and considerable poverty. The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed the vulnerabilities of those working in the urban economy, especially those who are in the informal sectors of the urban economies with unaffordable and unavailable essential services as well as lockdowns that have prevented the mobility that is essential economic activities. But while the additional costs incurred by both houses and companies through inadequate public service provision are now recognized, improvements have not been delivered. As such, increased productivity also remains a huge challenge for urban economies. I'm pleased to welcome Diana Mitkin, who present today's webinar on the study-specific topic, Why Urban Poverty in Sub-Saharan Africa Needs More Attention. Diana is Professor of Global Urbanism in the Global Development Institute at the University of Manchester. Since 2020, she has been CEO of the African Cities and Search Consortium, a six-year program funded by FCDO. She seeks to generate new insights and approaches to tackle complex problems in Africa's rapidly changing cities and enable them to become more productive, equitable and inclusive. I'm pleased to say that UNIWIDE is a co-partner of the African Cities and Search Consortium, leading on the domain of structural transformation. Diana's work focuses on urban poverty and inequality, including urban poverty reduction programs and the contribution of collective action by low income and otherwise disadvantaged groups. She's had a particular research focus on issues of urban basic services, tenure and housing. She has studied urban social movements and the strategies of confrontation and collaboration with state agencies. Now, Diana's earlier work has involved together two co-authored bodies with David Satterwood, Urban Poverty in the Global South, Scale and Nature published in 2013, and Reducing Urban Poverty in Global South published in 2014. Diana is unusual as a scholar, because she does not believe in living in the RV tower academia as many of us do, and works extensively with civil society organizations. For the last 20 years, Diana's work closely with the Shack Sloan Dweller International, a transnational network of homeless and landless peoples, federations and support NGOs, and with the Asian Coalition for Housing Rights, a network of civil society groups focusing on urban poverty and exclusion. We really privilege to have Diana present in today's webinar. He's also pleased to have a colleague from UNIWIDER as a discussant. Michael Dankwa is a development economist and a research fellow UNIWIDER. Michael serves as the core focal point for the UNIWIDER project, Transnorming Informal Work and Library Hoots, which is very much about the kind of issue that Diana will speak about on informality, especially in urban areas in Africa. And he's also part of the WIDER's team for the African Cities Research Program. So, thanks again to Michael for being a discussant for today's webinar. Now to a few other issues. First, please start with your questions using the Q&A feature that you see on your screen. I will read out your questions on your behalf and sometimes also, and I'll just ask the questions also directly to Diana and Michael. The webinar will be recorded and shared later on our YouTube channel afterwards. Now, I would like to hand over the floor to Diana and Diana over to you 20 minutes. Please, thanks very much. So, thank you so much, Canal. I trust you can hear me okay. Yeah. Yes, we can. Okay, perfect. So thank you for the introduction. I'm really honored to be the first presenting this first seminar of the year 2022. And thanks for such an amazing introduction. As you said, I'm now working as CEO of the African Cities Research Consortium. And I'm absolutely delighted to have you in you wider as consortium partners, in part because I can see that you have really been taking on the challenge of chipping away at the work that needs to be done on urban economies. So congratulations from your work to date. Hopefully we can draw you into new and exciting work. I think the only thing I would add to your introduction is that I am that I have some connection to economics perhaps, although my work now is much more on the social side and is very multidisciplinary. My first degree for the audience was in sociology and economics and I worked for five years for the British government as a public sector economist and I did a masters in straight economics. So, unlike many of my colleagues in the non-economic social sciences, I am perhaps more excited than frustrated at the potential of economics. I think the economics discipline has a critical contribution to make. And I really appreciate the chance to present to this audience, this wider audience that you and you wider has drawn together. I think the sub. Let me just make sure I don't get distracted by the screen. So I think the sub title really is why urban poverty and sub Saharan Africa needs more attention from economists. And I'm going to share with you some challenges that myself and my colleagues have, have, have lived, have lived.  I don't think they necessarily encapsulate all the challenges I would wish to throw it economists, but I have a 20 minute, I have a 20 minute time limit. So the first challenge is a method or article challenge and I want to share my frustration with poverty measurement. The second one is not so much an economist economist challenge is the definitional challenge that deals particularly with sanitation but it again shares with you some of the potentials of the economics discipline. It deepens and broadens and catalyzes a deeper engagement with the urban economies and beyond the urban economies. The third challenge is a challenge of discipline boundaries and what economists can offer and where more collaborative work is needed. And the final challenge is an empirical challenge. And I'll come to that. So looking at the first challenge, the poverty measurement challenge, perhaps, inevitably, in a context in which poverty has been understood primarily as rural poverty. We have ended up with a poverty measurement process that I would argue, and my colleague David Satterthwaite who co-authored the books canal you mentioned would also argue. This draws a lot on his work. But we need to rethink poverty measurement. Typically, a poverty line is what it costs to buy a basket of goods. So the non food element is residual. Now for those living in relatively low dense rural contexts where people don't have to pay for for housing don't have to pay for water and sanitation, probably don't pay for transport, and this might be adequate. As we move into an urban context, this is on the periphery of ginger in Uganda, as we move into an urban context, the non food element is relevant. And there are three elements I would argue to that non food element and economists have struggled to deal with this. There is of course an argument in the literature that says what I'm talking about now is not significant but the body of urban scholars struggle to understand its lack of significance. So one problem that I would say economists don't deal and they deal with well is is the fact that prices are different in urban areas. That's not such a difficult challenge for economists. But you need to include that if you're doing a rigorous poverty assessment and it's not always well included, I would say that to a second challenge is that the goods that are commodified in the urban context that are not commodified in the rural context. So you see here this illustration, people are having to rent rooms probably, probably many of these people rent some may build, but that is a real cost. It's a cost that may not be incurred from housing in rural areas. They have to buy services that have to buy water sanitation. In this case also they almost certainly have to buy transport because there's some distance from the center. Those are very significant costs transport for those living in peri urban areas when you break down household expenditures, maybe 10% of the budget so this is not small. And they are also a third issue in addition to adjusting correctly for prices and adjusting for the fact that there are these very significant non food costs. The third issue is that in some cases quality has to be higher because of the complication of density, and in some cases urban livelihoods. So domestic servants for example may actually have to spend on money on a fair amount of money on clothes to look suitable for the work they do. So there is a real possibility that some of the figures that suggest that urban poverty is not considerable. Some of that is the fact we're not using appropriate methodologies. And as real wages adjust to take account of the fact that these costs have to be higher, but they don't translate into reduced poverty or well being, they are, they are actually misleading this transition can be misleading and we may be misleading ourselves for the urban poverty figures. So the first challenge is to think in much greater detail about what it costs to live in urban areas and what might be in a more appropriate methodology. I'm not going to go through this because I'm going to run out of time, but I was very struck looking at you and you I just work at this working paper improving women's working conditions in the Tanzania urban food fending sector, which deals a lot with employees who are selling food. And as I this quote shows their salary is not sufficient to cover house rent utilities school expenditures health costs and savings for unforeseen expenses deducting transport costs rented you you have a feel you have a feel for this reality. So this is one area I think that the I'm kind of calling on economists to be more creative about. Let me go on to a second area, a kind of definitional challenge. And as I said, this is not so much economists definitions, but it really shows the complexity of what urban economics needs to deal with. If it's going to be successful in really adding value to addressing the challenges in the urban context. For many years, the joint monitoring program of WHO and UNICEF, who are the key agency reporting on water and sanitation have considered sanitation primarily as a toilet. Again, this is heavily influenced by global context, and they're only really catching up very slowly with the challenge of fecal sludge management, the fact that you cannot just consider a toilet. This is a toilet from Blantara Malawi. This is what's called a Skyloo so it's on site sanitation it collects the waste matter in two chambers underneath the toilet, but it assumes that has relatively low use because each chamber takes four months to decompose you use one chamber you then switch to the second chamber. And while you are carrying on with your business you may compost or the chamber decomposes, but of course if there are too many people using it, you have to empty this toilet. You can see I think from the slide some of the houses in the near vicinity. This toilet was one of very few, which is why it's so well batched. So in this kind of context, you cannot rely on on site sanitation you are moving fecal sludge and that is a whole different complication. So, and this draws on some work that I was doing with the World Resources Institute to really look at the challenge in the context of sustainable and equitable cities in the urban context, even if you live in a shack, not a medium house building, and the shack is dense in a dense area, you have to collect the fecal sludge you have to move the fecal sludge you have to treat the fecal sludge, and you have to dispose of it safely. And that challenge, that challenge is rarely taken account of when you look at figures for sanitation. So the JMP for example, reported that was this figure. The JMP reported actually that 100% of urban dwellers have access to basic sanitation basic sanitation in their context is a toilet is a pit the tree in poor flash potentially, but rarely in urban Africa connected to a sewer potentially a septic tank. It, it, it, it's a toilet where you do not have the problem of moving fecal sludge in this way. So if you have improved sanitation facilities, you need to, to, you need to have safely managed sanitation facilities you need to move the people sludge. So not only do you need access to a toilet, a basic sanitation facility, you need, you also need to move it, and that is where the figures look much less good. So if 99% have basic sanitation and estimated 30% of the urban population in Africa have sanitation that is safely disposed of in situ and to be frank I query that bigger and 0% which essentially means they don't know, they don't know how much fecal sludge is safely managed. So if we're going to successfully address the challenge of sanitation, we have got to address the challenge of what it means to move fecal sludge. Let me just go through one more complication is really considered in in much of the work on sanitation but will be, I think have a sympathetic audience. And that is, you know, the JMP optimistically assumed that 99% of Africa's urban population have basic sanitation access toilets, but may not move fecal sludge but they somehow, you know, they're in place. That assumes that everyone more or less has access to a toilet but we know that over two thirds, well, almost two thirds of the African population is living in slum or informal settlement so called slums. Now many of those people buy sanitation, if you buy sanitation you have short calls and long calls.  Sanitation is simply not an affordable expense for many of these households, and that is also where you incur problems of managing fecal sludge. So the whole issue of sanitation has touched some economists but there is, I would argue, need for a much more creative engagement. There's probably between both economists and engineers as well as social scientists to understand the challenges. Now, this point where I ended up in sanitation in saying that economists need to work closely with health specialists and engineers is in a sense my third challenge. And that is a boundary challenge, and that is to really understand the urban economic challenges. Of course, we need to deal with the political economy and canal this is I think where your work, it has dealt with some of these issues and the work of some of your colleagues. So land, land is, in a sense, urban gold, no land that is well connected that is well serviced that is well located. And it's absolutely what the urban story is all about the advantages of agglomeration, the potential to really start to add value and in adding value, creating a surplus that can be an elite good or can be put to the value of all. So land is worth a huge amount and. But one of the challenges as I think widely recognized is that in order to understand land, you need to understand political economy and you need to really engage with the way in which land provides flows of asset flows of resources to a political elite. This picture is from Nairobi it's a tenement block. And, and you know this, this in a sense, illustrates the conundrum one of the conundrums of the urban economy. So you go around these blocks and someone will, will, will share with me which member of the elite owns which block, but actually of course that's not public knowledge in a sense, because that's that's not formally owned. This is a, this is an area that is partly informal. It contravenes building regulations, partly formal, it has police stations and some access to public services. So the way in which elites are able to control land is clearly critical to controlling the rents that are generated in urban areas. In my experience is one of the hardest areas to research, because it is so dangerous because it has been so captured by elites who generate a flow of resources for themselves and for their own personal benefit. There has been increasing interest in land value capture land value capture really seems to me to be an idea of his time has come. And I think that is clearly critical if we're going to address some of the urban developmental challenges because we need to create a flow of funds that local authorities can benefit from. But there's some other really interesting issues for the people who live in a place like this, perhaps, it's not so much that they need to have Nairobi County with a flow of resources to redistribute that is certainly part of what they need. But these people are also interested in thinking about new ways in which we could do titling. I was very struck by some work Brookings were doing a few years ago around public asset corporations around publicly held land publicly owned land that is managed by consortia and stakeholders. There's working to maybe around the flexible and tenure act and attempt to find ways of titling land that is appropriate to very low income informal settlement dwellers who may not be able to either afford or benefit from individual titles. So the titling story is an idea which really could benefit from more creative engagements from economics. Fascinatingly, before I move on to my final challenge, the payback on these flats is quite extraordinary. You basically invest about 360,000 and you get 100,000 a year. So you have a payback period of less than four years. Now surely, surely, given that scale of income generation, we could find a better solution than this and this for the most part involves a small family often the kids are sent back to relatives in the rural areas and a couple living in 10 square meters sharing services with other people on the same floor. These are primarily informal workers in a proximate industrial area. Whoops. So the final challenge I wanted to throw you is a challenge that is a real curiosity to me. And that is it is very common. It is commonplace now to have a whole discourse around the lack of structural transformation in African cities and laughing because I'm so delighted that you and you I don't taken on this challenge. So representations of African cities as being in deficit as being consumption cities as failing failing to modernize the economic growth story. And it is missing those because they clearly come out of an analysis of global data that is rigorously tested and and assessed prior to being analyzed. But at the same time, I have a real a real question mark in my own mind, because as Kunal referenced, I spend a lot of time learning from low income households and low income organizations. I try and really embed myself in their lives when it's possible to travel which of course has not been in covert times. When I do that, what do I observe. I observe a lot of people doing activities which I think are productive, making furniture, improving housing, creating food food processing, doing urban agriculture and doing processing around urban agriculture, rebuilding cars, making clothes, refitting clothes, etc, etc. So these are neighborhoods in which there is a multitude of economic activities. This is actually another area from Nairobi I can talk more in the questions about this area and how it's developed, but it's not short of economic activity. That's my point. It's really not short of economic activity. The question is, how do you reconcile this reality that there is a lot of economic activity at the very local level, some of which even by conservative standards should be called productive. But at the same time there's this bigger narrative about failure of transformation. Housing very briefly is one of the things that people see very differently in the story.  It was not a productive activity. It was a consumption activity. And then they spent a bit of time in places like this. And they realized that if you have a room from which to do your tailoring with a concrete floor with safe areas to keep your goods, and somewhere nice to receive your customers, you absolutely earn more value, you add value to your skills as a tailor. So then they began to see housing a bit differently. I was reading one of these articles actually about consumption cities and it talked about real estate development as being a tradeable good. So that entered into the production side. So housing for me is a real illustration of how economists have viewed this differently and arguably failed to capture the real value of housing to people who are seeking to secure their living, look after their families, build their businesses and living in these low income areas. So my excitement in this work, and this broader engagement on through the seminar is to really challenge the economists who are listening to think differently about urban economics to hopefully be drawn into some of the challenges some of the contradictions that I have raised to to embrace complexity to accept that it may look like a model but spend time with these people and you will understand and by understanding you have the potential to add insight. It's not unusual I think for us all to recognize what our disciplines, our disciplines can do and what they can't do. And of course economists must be modest about the boundaries to their discipline, but they must also embrace collaboration with other disciplines. And that to me is really where you see economic urban economics begin to grow. And then I think finally, there are many. There are many recommendations, you know urban sanitation to be frank is an example of recommendations. The recommendations in the case of sanitation about how valuable it is and how much governments would save and they invested more, but governments don't take that up. How can we improve the scholarship that we do so that it is taken up. And how can we make sure that when recommendations are taken up, they don't fail. So I guess my final request is that we are reflective in what we produce as scholars and we really think about how to take scholarship beyond the academic frontier into policy and practice and programming. And we make sure that we follow up when that is the case, and we understand when it succeeds, and we understand when it fails. So thank you for giving me this time. These are all the challenges that I wanted to throw out to you on the first of February. Thank you. Let me now pass, pass to Michael. Michael, over to you. Can you see my screen. Yes. All right. Thanks. Thank you for coming out and thanks, Diana, for the, you know, you know, interesting talk as, as, as well. I have 10 minutes and I'll try to do, and yeah, but you raised a lot of issues here, and what I'll do is I'll just pick and choose and focus on, on two of them. So the first thing I'll talk about will be organization and in informalization, because what we are this cousin here today, which is urban poverty has some lateral roots, and one of the roots is actually the issue of organization. And then what do you call it. And then, you know, in informalization as well. I'll talk more about that, just to set the scene. And then also, I'll talk about what I've turned some, some what attempts, because yes, there is a lot about urban poverty, but there is some attempt also to pay attention to urban poverty. And in, you know, trying to do that, what actually happens is that the issues that you are raised about poverty measurement about the definition of, you know, issues have to be dealt with. Otherwise, there is no way we can pay attention to, you know, that's, but here, let me say that many of this are actually country specific. And so they are not that in general in that, in that case. So, so I'll try and look at this, these two issues briefly, and then we can have time to discuss them as well. So, let me start with urbanization and what do you call the informalization. So yes, there are many folks moving from the, you know, we are areas into the urban areas. But one would ask, why do they move into the urban, what do you call the areas. And one of the factors is that many of them would want decent jobs in this case. But when they get into the urban areas, one, there are no jobs for them. And then to the urban areas are also not prepared for them. So you then talk about the issue of sanitation and all the other things that come with it. What really happens is that this folks will have to survive. And what do they do, what they do is to tend to informal work in this case so if you look at many of the urban areas, you find seven, eight, nine out of 10 people working as informal workers in this case. And then we throw some light on informal work here. And here I'll draw on a book project we are working on here at UNU, just to throw some more light. And what we've done is we have a set of a set of the developing countries. And then we have tempted to categorize informal work into lower tier and then upper tier. And we do this for both wage and for self-employment as well. But if you look at the table, if you look at sub-Saharan Africa, if you look at Ghana, Mali, Nigeria, and then Tanzania and Uganda, what you find is that these countries are dominated by lower tier informal work. And where those in the self-employment category in this case. This is more in the urban areas. And if you do compare this to say Latin, what do you call America, you don't see this. And then to even a larger extent what do you call Asia as well, you will not find these, you know. Okay. But that is not all. So we had what you call the access to panel data. And we looked at the transition as well. So if someone is at the lower tier informal self-employed, does it move up to say upper tier? And then go up again to say the former. And what we find is that there is a lot of persistence there. So we don't even see this. So those who find themselves in this lower tier are at a dead end. So they are there and don't move over the years as well. What does this mean? It means that largely we have many informal workers, low productivity, lower what you call the incomes. And just as you said, for example, with the very high cost of living in the urban areas, they become poor. And so to a larger extent what has been done is that there is a lot of work trying to explain how we can enhance the productivity of informal workers in the urban areas as well. So this is something we would have to take into consideration over here. The other thing I'll talk about is trying to deal with some of the what you call the issues you did raise is what I call the somewhat attention. So if you look at the data sets, it's quite clear that urban poverty is going up. And then what you call the rural poverty is actually coming back. So I mean, many of the data sets that I have, you know, we've looked at show that. And the issue is also that urban poverty is very visible as well. So there is a somewhat what you call the attention there, and there is that political will to also deal with it. One of the direct responses has been in the area of social attention. So there are many cases where you've had cash transfers, which are really based being transferred to urban areas in this case. And there are cases of this in Cameroon, Mozambique, Ghana, and then Kenya. Kenya even has what you call a public works program as well and then Niger and order. One thing I would want to pay attention to is this, there are, there are bigger issues of the design and the implementation of these cash transfers in the urban areas. In, you know, trying to do that, what needs to be done in order to do this is to pay attention to many of the issues that you have raised. And so these things tend to be country specific in a way, but for it to be done, they have to pay attention to one of the key components of this. Trying to adopt a rural PMT into the urban setting.  But the issue is this, you cannot use the same approach in identify the poor in the, you know, rural area in the urban area as well. It just doesn't work and we've had many, many, what you call the experience of that I mean, a very good example is Ghana when they were trying to expand the cash transfer into the urban areas. Yes, they didn't use the you know rural PMT. And what happened was that they couldn't find any work. So what this tells is you is that urban poverty is very different from, you know, poverty in a way. And in order to deal with this, you would need to engage with many of the things that you did raise here. And in the case of Ghana most seven developers also, you know, first up and some other folks did some good work, trying to explain how urban poverty is, how do we measure it within the urban, what do you call it, a current context, what are the main challenges and what are the way forward in this case. So many of the things you have raised in a way, yes, although country space is separate, but there are things that some attention have been paid to in this case. And then there are other issues. So you don't just identify those what were in the urban areas in this case, what you do is that the urban cash transfers should also work. And so once you understand the nature and the geography of the urban pool as well. In some urban areas, you would find them in one, what you call the place so they are concentrated in, you know, the place. In some of our areas, they are all about the, you know, open area. In some places they move from one area to the other. So, these are things that one would have to appreciate and then trying to appreciate that the things you do, you have raised needs to be, you know, looked at. So they have big issues of targeting enrollment, what ability and, you know, all that that comes into play when we want to pay attention to urban poverty. And then also, just as I said, I mean, most of the work, this is not this, there is a lot of heterogeneity here. And so most of the work is actually country case studies. And so, yes, as I said, we work by the diverse and look at Ghana and some other things, but in an attempt to pay attention to urban poverty, some of the issues are actually engaged. And so I do agree that there is a need to, you know, work to get together. And I know the work in say a place like Ghana, the work by what you call the seven, the diverse has other folks involved in this case. Folks from the geography side from the political science and, you know, what you call the development, you know, economists as well being involved in, you know, also, so there's a lot in there, but I'll say that these are issues that are being dealt with, but I'll be at the country level, because otherwise, the, the, you know, efforts in, you know, trying to combat urban poverty will not work in this case. So let me end here. The rest of my head, I wanted to say that yes, how would work in the ACRC in a way help to push some of these things that we are thinking about. I didn't mention that, but it would be great to throw some more light on what the ACRC work would help us to, you know, understand in this regard. Many thanks. Thank you very much, Michael. I think actually what you said problem is very well. What Diana also said, in the way economists can try and look at some of these issues around the special cash transfers to urban areas around informality and so on. And maybe Diana can come back to its end, especially on the question on African cities and how African cities can visit consortium can contribute some of these issues that both Diana and you have discussed. We have several questions here in the chat. And I'm going to first start with somebody who actually works with us in African cities in with you and wider in Harare in our subject estimation research that's Mofundo Milo and Mofundo would try and unmute you. And you can ask your question live if you wish to or even and also perhaps with your camera on. Go ahead. So if you can, if you are, I think you want to go ahead with your question. Yeah, I think it's much more. I mean the reflection really about. I think the interesting. A question that Diana was talking about with regards the issue of land, particularly that I mean when you come to Harare you see that she was talking about the complications around. I mean issues to do with it. I mean, with managing land and when you see on the ebony, I mean on the ebony periphery in a lot in our area. You see that a land tenure has been politicized. So there's a continuation of people remaining. They are not giving the tenure to control the land as a means of political control, which then exacerbates this whole issue of, I mean, of urban poverty. And then you look at the issue of, I mean, of corruption with regards to land. I think just last year, the stuff I tried to do a land bank, and they failed to do it, primarily because the whole discussion around land has been so politicized, which then creates this partial unrolliness that we see in, in this of our art. Thanks well done if it's okay can we take a couple of more questions because just want to make sure we cover. Yeah, okay.  And you can ask that question directly to Diana. I was really interested in what you said about some of the more positive aspects of African cities being hidden. I'm doing a PhD actually on housing and data from a gender perspective. I'm really interested in kind of how you bring out some of those more positive narratives in, in terms of measurement, thinking of indicators as well as other statistical frameworks so we're not just reinforcing the idea that African cities are negative rather than also positive environments. Thanks very much Natalie. Can you take a third question would you like to answer these two questions first. They're very different canal so maybe I should go ahead and answer them, you know, I'm sure. I'm going to do, as you said it's not a question it's a more of a comment and I would agree that I think herari in a sense though it's particularly interesting because for so long, the government really, you know, controlled options in in it for people developing land on the periphery it was very fast to control informal settlements. Arguably it had a very strong modernization narrative so you had to be able to afford this concrete block house these full services in order to be an urban citizen and that I think created all kinds of challenges and indeed a huge housing that which in a sense burst the banks, once the zhanu pf government really raised issues of land ownership and it created this context in which, as you alluded to that that people who control the farms around herari could sell that farmland and create farmland. So you've got now a really a very fascinating situation in herari around land development, and clearly a lot of challenges on the city council that desperately need to acquire the resources to put in the bulk infrastructure, such that this housing can be safe and secure. And you know that to me is absolutely what characterizes urban areas that land gets value from public investment and that value is appropriated private gain. So clearly that needs a very astute and capable local government to manage that contradiction, and I would argue we really don't talk about that contradiction enough and how we can manage it. It's a very different question Natalie around data collection and I worked very closely with slum shack fellows international particularly we've done a lot around community data collection. I would argue my experience of doing research and I'm not sure what your potential is for doing research with women working in the informal sector that you know really spending time with them to understand the ways in which they create. They try and improve their livelihoods, the constraints they face because they're real constraints, and I absolutely recognize the concerns about a very positive narrative in a context in which people struggle a lot. But also the strategies they have to overcome those constraints, both within their household their neighborhood and more widely that has always been been really significant to me in terms of my own learning experience that dedicating sufficient time to understand people's realities as they see it, and spending time with them experiencing their work as they go ahead. I'm sure canal will want me to mention we goes work, we go work very closely with you and you wider and absolutely have done amazing things around women's work, bringing together bringing delight, the struggles they face and the constraints that they have to overcome. Thanks, Dana. There is a question from element band alcohol. I mean should I unmute you and you can try and see if you can ask a question. Thank you for the wonderful presentation. I don't understand you on the multi dimensional profit index and the feasibility of deploying that, you know, in sort of diversity and context. I mean one of the things that you mentioned is the challenge in terms of the measurements of poverty, you know, are there any efforts to kind of harmonize them. It's not feasible, you know, based on your own experience, and what are the implications for policy. It's a kind of different questions but yeah. There's also questions I find very interesting myself there's a question from gap who says that we focus too much on urban poverty. And we don't really look at the middle class, who are very important in making productive investments or on. How would you respond to that question of making sure that you also keep in mind, those who are absolutely important in terms of economic transformation, especially the middle class perhaps. I think there's two questions. Okay, two very different questions. And I think I would, with reference to the multi dimensional poverty index so I think they've certainly done important work in challenging the way in which we understand poverty and in trying to broaden out our understanding of poverty into deprivation of assets, as well as a lack of income poverty. But at the same time, if you're trying to take their work into the urban context questions arise. Let me just pick one of the elements of their index drinking water. So you know that their measure is actually the JMP measure. The household source of drinking water is not safe or safe drinking water is 30 minute or longer walk from home. Now, that's one really important measure of lack of access to water. You know, water is not safe, or you have to walk a long way to get water. The further measure in an urban context is that you can't afford enough water, and water is excluded from the food basket, although the WHO have a measure of adequate consumption of water. The WHO measure of water in a non emergency situation is 50 liters per person per day in an emergency situation, I think is 20 or 23 liters per person per day. You're very little money and you're buying water from a kiosk or a private vendor or your neighbor, you are unlikely, I would say, to be able to afford that scale of water, except in countries where there is an effective subsidy. I mean, Nairobi is actually somewhere in my observation where water is relatively cheap, but that's often not the case. I would say that the MPI has gone some way to helping us understand the measurement challenges, but has not gone far enough, really, to understand the realities of urban households, and how we can think about overcoming them. And maybe moving on to the second question. You know, I would, I would really agree with the question that we need to think about this without a kind of a poor non poor categorization. They are clearly many degrees of that and clearly generating improvements in livelihoods has to recognize that there's a continuum in the income scale. And, you know, when we have 60% plus of the urban population living in informal settlements, the so called slum population, then clearly a lot of those are not super poor. Some of those are absolutely managing to cope are finding ways to well educate their children, their children may be going to college, they may be trying to accumulate assets to secure a little bit of land on the periphery of the city, etc, etc. So we do indeed need to understand these households. I think potentially your question also related to the people the low middle income groups and, and I mean certainly if I look at what I've observed in Africa in Asia and Latin America those have become increasingly significant groups. So, absolutely. If we're thinking about urban prosperity, we need to look at those groups we need to understand how they operate politically, how they put pressure on local government to improve services to themselves and trigger improvements for other people, and also how they can help to help people growing a growing industrial base, be it around services or around potentially goods that could also be exported. So I absolutely agree those are all really important characteristics. Just very briefly canal I would also say, you know one of the things some of the more interesting work on cities that has gone on recently and has drawn in economists has been worked to understand peri urban development, sometimes of these lower middle income households who are unable to afford to buy land in well located areas. So they identify land on the periphery and they begin to develop those areas. And one of the most fascinating things about cities is understanding that spatiality so looking at, you know how can you potentially generate a slightly more prosperous area do you need to try and invest in transport services that could be financially viable because of the scale of people travelling and might might provide nodes of development on the periphery with very positive benefits for low income households living around those areas, because they're opportunities to diversify their livelihoods. So I, I would agree with the sentiment of the comment and indeed your comment for now that chat really for me, understanding how to progress cities has to be about understanding how to progress the well being and prosperity of all residents in cities. Thanks Diana. I'm going to let this again several questions which I probably don't have the time to get into. But there's a question from Ivan to rock which kind of goes into this work we are doing on such automation in African cities. And so perhaps you want even you want to ask the question to Diana, and then I also had a question for you. Thanks very much. I really appreciated Diana's rich insights from sort of grounded understanding of what's actually happening and showing that there is a lot of enterprise and indeed economic dynamism in African cities. So the question is, you know, what's what is constraining its productivity, what's constraining investment, what is holding back incomes. And in particular what can governments do because the political economy is often unfavorable. You know, I think we have to be clear about what the agenda is and not over complicate the task given the problems of weak capabilities of African local governments. And Diana just my one question to you. So this is the question that Michael actually asked specifically that what would your be your wish list on African cities delivering on challenges to see it as a research. And how do you think any wider can contribute to this, to this research program in the kind of challenge you set especially for economies to deal with some of the measurement questions around understanding politics and power, understanding the importance of land. So all these issues where you think economists can actually try and contribute. What would your wishes be in this regard. That's my last question point. Thanks. Thank you, Ivan. I feel I should also leave enough time for Michael to come in and have a maybe a couple of minutes at the end. I think, and I then I think your question is a very real one and I feel I'm only going to give it a partial answer. I would say, for me, one of the most critical things is to think about how to deliver essential services. So think about how to deliver water. I mean it is terrifying how often pipes are water is not running in pipes. If you look at the data, the data we looked at this in the WRI study so if anyone is interested you can you can go on the World Resources Institute website and find out this working paper so we documented how, how often water is not in pipes and it is terrifying in African cities. I think also thinking about ways to expand energy access be let people access energy reliable energy energy the electricity that the is a reliable source is also seriously important if I when I think about the people I know who are struggling to put in place micro enterprises or even to ensure that household incomes are well used in order that they are not super vulnerable in order that they have money to send their kids to college etc etc. You know some of those expenditures often some of the most critical. And I would maybe not always local government often its utilities or national governments but I would say that you know improving service delivery is really important. And from where I sit being realistic. This is the international agencies not just the local ones being realistic about what the data tells you because too often I think we've set up these measurements I tried to explain that don't give us the information we need and doesn't trigger change and reform. So I would start there and then I would also start the quality of the dialogue. And I think in my experience where you have a local government with mid level and high level officials who make an effort to talk to people to reach out to people to visit low income areas. Then you get a better quality of governance I was very struck. Not long before the pandemic happened in Bulawayo about sitting in a low income community with the housing officer and the low income community explaining how someone had come saying they were from the council and and essentially coercing this informal neighborhood to pay them. In order to be allowed to remain and not being evicted. And in fact that was completely fraudulent. But this community have quite a good relationship with the local authority, so you could check this out quite easily with lower costs, so where local government has that has that ability then I think you have potential to improve situations. And so I would start there if you asked me but I'm conscious also that the others were better qualified than me to answer that question. I think, you know, in a sense, can I ask the question about what my aspirations are for African cities let me just find it because I think it's just jumped. It was, did you put it in the chat or not. Okay, so I think that for me. It's really a matter of thinking about the quality of work we do, and then bringing together a multidisciplinary perspective. So that's why I've been so excited, can Alan Michael about the work that you're doing in newer and new wider. And I think, you know, you have such expertise around thinking through issues to do with structural transformation. And at the same time, you will be exposed not really through the work of myself, but the work of our colleagues and indeed the work of some of the African experts who've been trying to challenge and drive through this process for decades. So you have this dialogue whereby you have a chance to understand the world as they see it, and they have a chance to understand the models that you're using the things that they help them inform a new understanding of the constraints they face. That to me is where we really see traction by bringing together experts the frontiers of their field and putting them in dialogue with each other. We immediately see some of this conversation happening at an uptake meeting we had recently, not excitement about economics yet, but excitement from one of the people working on housing reform in our craft about the chance to engage with the frameworks of political settlements and understanding what that level of political analysis might offer to their strategies. So for me African cities is a chance to take scholars and practitioners and program experts at the front of their field and put them into a structured conversation, one with each other, and hopefully contribute to nudging forward the reform frontier through that that structured conversation and through a commitment to achieve urban reform. I'm going to ask the same question to Michael now, actually Michael, since you're the one that leads our work on African cities on economic transformation. What do you want to see to happen in this program that can answer the question that Diana raised in the beginning in a presentation. So what's your wish list, what's your aspiration here. They can't hear you. Sorry, I was muted. Okay, so one thing that one would want to see is to be able to be is to be able to engage. I mean so so the work we are, we are doing at ACR she has different facets right so the issue of the what you call the city as, you know, a system, we call it the political settlement, the lens and then all that.  All right so so that is, that is one thing I would want to see how because we just getting off the ground, how best you know, can we be able to put all these ideas to get in order to generate the, the, you know, the party complex problems that can come up. I think these are things that I do look, look at for. Thanks very much Michael. I think it's all very clear I think for the first time it's not exciting research to be done here. And I suppose some wonderful questions for economists in this audience for us to think about. I think just to end on this very quickly I think the two issues you brought up which I think economists have a little problem with very well one is politics and power. I mean anybody goes to any city in the global south, they know the land is political deeply political and land is contested. You have to use the power and politics lens to understand land, and certainly also the way land is organized in cities. It's very important to go outside mainstream economics tools. And I think this is where perhaps the political economy work that we're doing in African cities and elsewhere and the work that I have also done. It's very important to bring in because mainstream economics I might look at our answer this is the questions. One thing I think is where this big problem in economics is that we don't really have a good understanding of separate. So, most of our thinking about economic economics is about wage labor, wage, wage employment, and how to measure some employment that as you mentioned, it's very challenging and we don't yet have proper methods to understand the employment which is a dominant mode of employment in most urban areas in Africa, and even elsewhere. In areas which I think we need to do better in economics. And it's really great that you have put some wonderful challenges for us to think about, and hopefully in any wider, you can keep on working on this in collaboration with others, and trying to do some challenges as we go forward. Thank you Diana for your time, and thanks Michael. And we look forward to, to more work in the African cities and such center which I think some Chris Dodden is a communications manager in Africa to put the link to the programs website. So others can take a look at what so what's happening there. And I'm concrete here by saying that we have a second webinar in the 2020 series on Tuesday March 8 women's day special. And to be provided by Shreem Deshpande and Yankee Peters of its work. So look forward to seeing many of you there in that particular webinar in about a month's time. Thanks very much, all of you, and take care.


Live from New York City, it's theCUBE at Big Data NYC 2014. Brought to you by headline sponsor, Juan Disco, with support from EMC, Mark Logic and Teradata. With hosts, Dave Vellante and Jeff Kelly. Welcome back to Big Data NYC everybody. Shreya Mbadi is here as the CEO and founder of Hex Data doing some really interesting things with machine learning and really at the heart of what's going on with Hadoop. So Shreya, welcome to theCUBE. Thanks for coming on. Thank you, thanks for having me. So you're just coming over from the Javits Center. We're of course here live at the New York Hilton Times Square. So what's it like now at the Javits Center? What's the buzz like this year at Hadoop World? It's like Times Square in Javits Center. Busy and a lot of customers, a lot of adoption. You're seeing maturity in Big Data space. You're seeing adoption around Hadoop and Spark and a lot of show me the money. I need ROI from my investments on Hadoop and Big Data. People are coming to different vendors and trying to see what can I do with data that I've stored in HDFS. And they're asking lots of questions on what kind of analysis I can do. What kind of insights I can pull out of this data and how do I transform my business using those insights. I think it's about the next stage that's been set very well. So big themes there are actually finding about making money with the ROI and internet of things must be a hot topic. Everybody's kind of crazy about that. Sort of put the carrot out there. But let's talk about that ROI equation. Jeff Kelly's done some research and said, on average, the people that are deploying Big Data projects for every dollar they spend, they're only getting 55 cents. This is on average, that's the mean. If you look at the guys that are at the edge, they're getting three, four. So what are the guys that we're getting ROI doing differently and how do you guys fit? One of the things that was very important for us, even talking from a technology center like Silicon Valley, which kind of builds lots of cool stuff, is when you come to the real world, you want to kind of embed yourself into what's happening in the real day-to-day life in a business. Businesses are now not only seeing new data sources, new sensors that are producing data everywhere. They want to monetize the imprints that are happening. They want to know if people are coming to their website, they want to impact the customer decisions as they are on the website. So real time is kind of more taking front stage. People want to see interactive analysis of their data. They want to connect into dashboards like Tableau or connect into their traditional way of doing data through different data sources. And so post-installation, what do I do? Right now that I've beyond Hello World, I want to actually take and take quick data and analyze how my customer is behaving. How do I understand the end-to-end journeys of my customer? How do I do better things for him? And I think one of the interesting things about that is you have a very high-dimensional data. So it's big data is not just in the rows. You're seeing very high-dimensional data come from different data sources unstructured and structured, and you want to be able to combine and fuse these data sources and still come up with the nuggets that can give you a pattern for your data. So machine learning is at the heart of this. It's all machine-generated data that we're dealing with. And if you think about the doubling, great doubling effect of big data, is mostly machine-generated data in a networked world. And networks follow power loss. So you're seeing this fundamental inundation of businesses with real data. And data is the new gold. So I'm sure you have H2O, which is, of course, your product, right? It's an open source in-memory prediction engine. So there's a lot in there. So tell us more about HECS data, what you guys do.  Some of the things we were doing in prior lives led to trying to build really good tools to understand patterns and data. And at the heart of big data is this core, I would say real profession called data science. And data science is actually about understanding data and its patterns and pulling out interesting information patterns from within your data so you can take real conclusions from it. And what are the top five features that matter for me? What are the top five customers that we're going to convert in the next quarter? What does the segmentation of my users look like? All of these are really not exact answers. So if you think about the whole NoSQL moment that preceded and then Hadoop unstructured data, in the new world ML, which is machine learning, is the new SQL. There is no, SQL gives you the exact underlying answers, but people are looking for patterns in the data. I know that X likes movie, the latest Bond movie. What are the movies can I recommend to this person? So kind of trying to look at patterns, not just exactly what he wants. So ML is the machine learning is the new SQL. Am I inferring that you're taking humans out of the equation there or where do humans fit into that? Let's unpack that a little bit for us. So if you double click on that a little, right? So what is the role of the humans in a machine intelligence world? If you think of a Google, the way they packaged machine learning, Google search engine is one of the most popular killer app on machine learning. Page rank, distributed page rank. Scaled page rank is packaged as a search engine. And suddenly humans are now tasked with asking the right questions and the right keywords. So if you go one step further, you have this enormous amount of data sources and nice interfaces and algorithms and H2O provides some of the most cutting edge Google scale machine learning algorithms for the average user, for the average business to take and package and run in their businesses. These machine learning algorithms are still only gonna be as good as the questions that the domain experts can ask. So for example, today you're trying to set this up event you know that you need to go from point A to point B, you have all this traffic, you have all this event pieces that you want to actually capture. All of that is domain specific to your business. And knowing that in your terms is kind of what you can add in addition to the traditional prediction that you get from the algorithm. So it's all about the context. Algorithms are very powerful, but they're not necessarily going to replace the emotional response that you need from doing data science. So data science is eventually it all produces a pretty chart. Now is this pretty chart going to cause action from your end user? So it's almost as powerful as art. Art needs an action response to every art form. Data science is you're working with this clay called data and come up with this phenomenal result from your analysis. You want your businesses to take decisions from them. And what we found time and time again from our customers is data-driven decision-making is actually very hard. You almost always know that the truth and you want to follow the truth but it takes courage to follow the truth. And for that you really have to be able to take a very, you take Moneyball for example, one of the biggest example of applying real analytics on as boats and that sport really was transformed by the whole Moneyball effect. And they had to make decisions that were unpopular at the time but they went with the data and they transformed the entire game around data. And that's kind of what is going to be a food with every business. They're going to have to make courageous decisions after coming up with analysis. And that analysis is what we power with using history. So you brought up Moneyball, I have to ask you Shree. So when I read the book from Michael Lewis, Moneyball, I said, I can't believe that Billy Bean has given away all his secrets. This guy's crazy. Now it has transformed the game but at the same time, the Oakland A's have been able to maintain their lead. Somehow, some way, they seem to have stuck to their knitting. Maybe it's because they have to because they don't have the money. Yet they've still never won the big one. Can we, how much can we apply that to the big data world? Are people sort of obviously transforming businesses but as I said earlier, some people are getting ROI, some people aren't. You've got the sort of the best of the best and then you've got the mean. Am I taking this minute for too far or is it similar? Why is that? Help us understand. So there are, so this place, I mean, before we got started, before we had H2O as a machine learning platform, there were prior art here, right? So if you think about Goldman Sachs, they took over almost all of Wall Street with better intelligence, more sophisticated algorithms and taking those algorithms into production to be able to actually run those algorithms in production against real time data. They had the full sophistication all the way to apply what you've learned. They were like the Yankees playing money ball. Exactly, exactly. And then you have Google and Amazon and if you look at Amazon's earliest shareholder statement, it says, I want to understand which book you will buy before you come to my website. And I've achieved a lot of that. Recommendation engines have become mainstream today and Netflix, again, one of the powerhouse in data science and machine learning, they've all applied these to a point where they're dominating their spaces. So in some sense, the transformation, if you think about Netflix, is transforming entire movie and TV industry in ways that have taken on a 100 year old system in a matter of few years. So the transformation that you can do with applying machine learning, and we've seen that happen with the likes of the insurance space. You're seeing tremendous transformation in that space. You're seeing tremendous transformation in healthcare space. Internet of Things, as you brought up, is going to transform most of these ordinary new businesses to the powerhouses of tomorrow. So to some sense, the money ball effect has to be completely applied with the real transformation all the way through. And that's kind of what you're seeing. That's why you're seeing a big shift towards applying big data, applying data to go and take your business to the next stage. I want to come back to that notion of dominating spaces, but I want to let Jeff Kelly jump in. Well, Sree, I mean, I think you're certainly hitting on something that's very important. It's all about finding insights and taking action based on all that data that people have been storing in this new big data infrastructure, whether it's Hadoop or other platforms. So I guess my question would be, so you talked about the courage that's required to take sometimes unpopular decisions. So what role does the big data industry, players like yourselves, have in helping companies find that courage and deal with some of the more cultural people process issues related to big data, machine learning. It's one thing to find these insights, but it's another thing to change the culture inside an organization so that they can actually act on them. Does industry have a role in helping customers do that? Is it going to take another outside force? How are we going to make that shift? Or is it only going to be an elite few that do it that really recognize that those are going to be the winners? I think the key thing is to make it fun. People like to learn new things, but learning happens more naturally in a playful environment. Being able to create this cross, almost cross, I would say not cross, discipline, almost cross-border teams. Because when you look at IT and business, there are really two different teams today. And the promise of big data was to just bridge the business in IT worlds into one world. And I think that cross-disciplinary teamwork is something that at every decision our customers make. There's a business guy, there's an IT guy, there's a big data guy. And the big data guy usually spans two different groups. And there's data scientists who just corner the classic believe-in of every company. And the key piece is to empower this Billy Bean with enough tools that he can actually come to a simple conclusion out of all the noise that's in the business, on a day-to-day business. And I think knowing that outlier effect, which is really, it's like Google was an outlier when it got started, it was a 13 search engine that nobody even cared for, right? So it was just pure word of mouth that brought it into the mainstream. And so being able to look at the outlier idea within your own enterprise. Some of these big companies have a lot of pockets of really new thinking coming out of fresh hires, new acquisitions, and new trends, and people going to the conferences and meeting other people, picking up these kind of the memes, the tech memes. Being able to foster that idea of let's have a play space where you can try different ideas, it's okay to fail, and let's just make new mistakes. Kind of picking up the new idea of building companies which are much more tolerant, much more flat, and building teams that are very equidistant from the farthest idea to the top most powerful person in the room, try to equalize some of these effects. You can have a real democratic effect inside companies. And that should happen not just at a startup level, it's happening now with the help of data-driven thought processes happening at big companies as well. And that's kind of where we're seeing the outlier. We just need one person in the entire, oftentimes this is only one person in the entire big company who is interested in an open source technology like H2O, and he just brings it up to the table, and then before you know, and this summer was quite a revelation. There were seven interns, one at Thompson Riders, one at Trulia, one at ShareThis, one at PayPal, and just real interns, Sharon, who were given this not-so-popular project, go work on H2O and come back. And before we know, all of these became customers by the end of summer. Basically, the intern goes there, quickly shows results, ease of use has never been any more important. The post-consumerization of enterprise where you carry your Apple iPhone to your office, you don't have an office-given cell phone anymore. So you're carrying your consumerization of enterprise happening dramatically, and to some extent enterprise, as we know it, is dead. People are transforming enterprise through their personal lives. And so that whole effect of one person who is basically going to transform your business is happening. Now, can that one person be, you mentioned interns that led to customer engagement. Can that one person, does that one person have to be a PhD trained data scientist, or can that be a more, you know, a business person, someone who doesn't necessarily have the training in statistics and mathematics and some of the other, you know, tools and skills that we hear about when we hear data science? Is that possible? I think one of the transformations that's happening, if you will, is the, so the first level of, so our core constituents for H2O, if you will, we focused on data scientists. They have been historically, so we started with R and making R really powerful, in other words, go beyond small data to real big data on R. And that's something we really focused on because R existed before Silicon Valley existed. It was invented in the Bell Labs. And they never had a real cohesive software team building products for them. So we took the R metaphor and made data science lives easy, right? Now that's step one, but the constituents from data scientists are really producing work for the business analysts. And the business analysts are coming from like the transformation with Tableau are using new click tech. They're using newer tools, which are not necessarily traditional BI and more drag and drop analytics. They want to, and Excel spreadsheets, they want to move from there into a little bit more sophistication because BI historically showed you trends of what happened. Prediction, which is kind of the new search is doing what's likely to happen with what percentage of likely to happen. It's likely to rain and kind of likely to have a big quarter next quarter, right? So kind of likelihood of success is kind of what you're trying to predict. And I think that's what business analysts have been doing all along. They wanted to forecast. The reason they were keeping the books was to be able to forecast. And so historically there was a desire to do it, but the barrier to entry was very high. And so what's happening with the next few, almost next few epochs in the big data cycle is to simplify the application of data science to something that even a grandma can use. And that's almost all the way, take it to search. Page rank is difficult to use, but search is very easy to use. So Sri, we're out of time, but I want to give you the last word. Awesome conversation. Things are moving fast.  I mean, data stacks, platform, hex data. We talked about sort of going from tire kicking to real hard ROI. Where are we going to be a year from now? Where do you want to see this? So machine learning will become much more embedded into a lot of things. You're not even knowing you're using it. Your Nest device knows what's happening. Edge becomes more and more intelligent. We're powering consumerization of data science in ways that it really becomes an application. So our core vision, if you start with data stacks, which is a layer in the data, we really wanted analytics to not be offline processing as data mining was. Instead, make it online, all the way online modeling, real time online learning of things. So you plug the algorithm straight into your application. So building smart applications is going to be the future of the space where big data becomes really vegetified into your application. So you can now, as a CXO or a CMO or a CFO or a business analyst or even a day to day person, humanize big data to find where you can actually look at a widget that shows. And that begins to sort of collapse the skills gap that everybody talks about today. And one of the things we're seeing is open source is also mainstream. So the trend, big trend, if you think about data stacks and all the various evolutions, open source has taken primary stage and big data has become very much of an open source revolution. We had 100 users in January. We have about 6,000 installations today. So it's growing in a very exponential pattern. So we're going to see how the next one year. The enterprise, as we know it, is basically dead. Sree, thanks very much for coming on theCUBE. Some great sound bites there and appreciate your time. Yeah, good luck. Keep right there, everybody. We'll be right back. This is theCUBE. We're live from Big Data NYC at Times Square Hilton. Be right back.


Hi everybody and welcome to our channel. Today we wanted to make a video on the coronavirus situation and talk a little bit about how this could potentially impact immigration and our clients. I'm here with my executive assistant Jolie, so she's joining us today so she can discuss with us a little bit later on in the video how our office functions and how we're going to be continuing to work on files for our clients. So the first thing I want to talk about is how immigration is canceling major events in terms of when a lot of people are together. So for example all citizenship ceremonies, landing appointments, interviews, so these are posted on the immigration website. We've also received some emails for some of our clients who had for example a citizenship interview scheduled next week that has been a citizenship old ceremony that has been rescheduled, well not rescheduled but canceled essentially. So of course these are very disappointing and it's scary because you know you're like well I was gonna become a citizen and now I'm not, but in those cases it's not that bad because you know you've already gone through all the processes and there's just like an administrative step in order to overcome that and I know by reading because in our legal community we have access to a group of lawyers from the Ontario Bar Association, there's an immigration section where all the immigration lawyers can talk to each other and share information and it's amazing to have this group as lawyers because we get sometimes information first and we can share it with our clients and the public and I read that some appointments might be done over the phone for landing for example or some interviews. I think if this pandemic situation goes on for a long time I think these measures will be put in place especially nowadays with the technologies that we have I think it might create a new way of working and and doing things. I don't know if you'll be able to become a citizen by doing it over the phone or by Skype but perhaps that's that's the future I'm not sure of that. One thing that I wanted to mention is that already we have some of our clients that have messaged us and emailed us like what's gonna happen with my file what's gonna happen if I'm applying for a visa I've heard that Canada is not issuing any visas right now offices are closing what's important to know is that it's very important to look at the immigration and citizenship website or if you have dealings with Canada border service agency to look at that website to look at official government website about health and you know transport customs travel because there's a lot of blogs out there a lot of website a lot of fake news a lot of people will write certain things there's one website that's going around saying that no visa is being issued or even like Canadians cannot even come to Canada and things like that so you know I think in this situation a lot of people have panicked in some situations understandably it's scary especially in North America we've never really experienced something like this but my recommendation is to look at the official websites and wait for information and listen to what the authorities are are saying it about traveling and borders so for example we had one client ask us well I have to apply for my family members applying for visa but how am I gonna get the how are the documents gonna come to Canada so for example there's a lot of applications that we can do online for example a visitor visa a super visa and an extension application our office does them all online and we actually don't even need physical documents we just need scanned copies I have not yet heard of courier companies like FedEx FedEx Canada posts and things like that like halt operations so if we do need original documents I think the mail is still okay and hopefully you know that will keep working and we could get documentation now I know in a lot of situations for example you know people we have deadlines for example for files and clients have to get biometrics or photos or medical examinations police certificates right and they can't you know if they're in a country where there's a curfew or they can't get out well they can't get any of those documentation is done and there's deadlines but what the information that we receive from immigration is that they're going to apply additional time so I don't think anybody is gonna be negatively affected by this because they couldn't meet the timeline because of circumstances outside of their control so I'm really not worried about that what we're telling our clients is if you if you're confused if you you're wondering what's gonna happen there's a deadline you have to do a biometric and you're not sure just call us call us first you can go on the website on the government website but better call us first because sometimes we have other information from our legal community that's maybe not online that's gonna be more beneficial for you so instead of talking to other people talking to friends looking online and getting scared and panic call us and we'll guide you the right way and if we don't know the answer we'll look into it we'll research and we'll let you know there are talks today for example I think the prime minister announced that they're closing the borders for not for Canadians and permanent resident and certain flight you know diplomats and crews but they're trying to mitigate the the situation and there's exceptional circumstances where you wouldn't be able to travel to Canada now that is that is a big deal I think for a lot of people it's gonna be a big deal for a lot of clients but we don't know how long this is gonna last so it's important to take things day by day at the office we try our best to keep up with the news as you know in real time so if you're wondering what's gonna happen with your flight you let us know if there's something we can do to contact immigration on your behalf we'll do it if there's except exceptional circumstances we'll try our best last thing is about about this is information changes very fast so you know Monday March 16 today I think it was on Friday that the government announced that kind of state of emergency only go out if you have to and all you know public places have been closed your school has been closed for how long for roughly two weeks and then going online two weeks following that so close for indefinite so yeah exactly so you know things change a lot so we have to sometimes especially that this is very new I mean maybe next week things will be completely different maybe next month things will get back to normal you know I heard that things will get worse before they get better but maybe it won't take that long and you know we have to trust our government we have to trust that our leaders are gonna put things in place and you know the idea is that we everybody tries our we try our best to do social distancing so that we don't affect the most vulnerable people so for example in our office we're taking some measures so I'm gonna let Jolie talk a little bit about what measures we decided to take today we are still fully operational so you can tell us a little bit what we've kind of started to do yeah so I mean I think it's great that our office already has these effective measures and effective policies in place that where we don't actually need to be in the office to work so our office is largely paperless and that has over the time been very advantageous to us especially now so we don't actually have clients coming in for consultations anymore they're not coming into delivered documents but again as Mary says businesses as usual we're still working tirelessly to finalize these applications and if anything we're reachable by phone by email and many of our clients send in documents by email anyways so we're doing our part to try and limit the amount of social contact that we have with our clients while still maintaining our usual office flow so I think that's really important for people who are looking either to hire us or current clients that we already have that we're still you know we're still low working on their applications in a timely manner exactly so we had a staff meeting today and we decided that you know some of most of our staff would like to work from home so you know it's not complicated for us we bring the computers at home we transfer lines printers and because we're paperless because we have everything on a very safe and secure cloud-based system we're very organized in this office and we're very proud of that so I think in a certain in a situation like this it allows us to use those tools even more so like Julie said like where you know we we we talk on the phone we do Skype we fax we get faxes we email we Google chat between each other our staff has a WhatsApp group that we communicate if need be so with today's technologies I mean we've been doing this for a very long time and I think in a situation like this it's it's perfect for our current clients like I said if you have any questions about your file or the future you contact us and we'll give you information as we we we go if for some reason this is one thing that I want to talk about I don't know if immigration is actually going to shut down their offices I I know there's a lot of different immigration offices in Canada obviously there's all the embassies in the high consulates and outside Canada but in Canada there's you know in Sydney and Edmonton Vancouver Ottawa Montreal a lot of offices I don't know how big those spaces are I don't know how many people work in those offices I don't know if goes government employees work from home if they have online systems so I I'm not sure if that's the more they're gonna say we cannot file up those file applications anymore because if no one's working and we're just sending application and they're piling up in a mailroom I don't know if immigration is okay with that but then in some cases we need to lock in applications for example if a dependent child is going to turn 2022 so what's going on with that so we'll find out as we get along I think it's important to give some time to these agencies to you know figure out you know there's urgent situations like borders and you know cancelling festivals and big events but for example the IRB immigration refugee board CBSA they have shut down a lot of their non-urgent services and they've also delayed all hearings but in terms of IRC actually processing like can we file things online can we submit an espousal sponsorship they haven't really given notice about that I think what they've talked about is delays potential delays on certain applications especially for example landing appointments and things like that but if for some reason we can't file an application but you know you've hired us well what we're implementing is that well we work on your file this is a good opportunity to have more time to perfect your application we put on hold and then when things reopen which I'm sure they will then we reopen we reassess we update the forms if need be and we take it from there if there's a lot of delays on your file I mean delays of immigration we're used to that right so there might be now more delays I don't know how long but there's just just something you know expected in these kind of situations and like I said I you know if we get information that immigration is not accepting applications then we have a newsletter we have a Facebook page we advise clients when we do consultations now we're very upfront and honest we say look okay you want to do espousal sponsorship but just so you know this is the current situation so if things happen we might put your file on hold it's not going to jeopardize your your your file with us we're not going to charge additional legal fees we're gonna put it aside if for some reason when we really open there's a new situation maybe reassess in terms of legal fees but it's something that we've done before a lot especially when there was parental sponsorship caps we couldn't follow the application because the cap was met so we would put the file on hold and reopen the the following year so yeah I think that's that's everything like I said a staff can work from home if need be we have means to communicate with each other FedEx courier we're asking our clients to send the application to us even our Montreal we have clients in my we're in Montreal and we have an office in Toronto our processing office is mainly in Montreal we're asking even our clients in Montreal to not come to the office but FedEx the documentation to us we have a lot of clients in all provinces we have clients outside Canada so scanning documentation is not an issue FedEx sync documentation is not an issue we actually have a lot of clients that we've never met I if you know a lot of times we do Skype consultations but sometimes I've many times I've talked to clients from beginning to end over the phone or by email and I actually only see what they look like if I get a photo so that's something that we're very familiar with and I like I said with today's technology it's good for for our law firm that we can still continue helping people we're gonna send out a newsletter soon with all of this information we're gonna like I said we have a Facebook page and we every month we send out a newsletter and if you're thinking of finding an application you have an inquiry you can contact us we schedule phone or Skype consultations for the time being we give a lot of information by email and my advice is to not panic take a day by day I know it's hard for a lot of businesses a lot of people especially you know I just think in our world in the world that we we work in you know I'm thinking about elderly people that had to travel to Canada or people that had to you know come and help with like a newborn you know immigration visas this affects like real people it's real problems but it's important to take a day by day as things unfold and to call us if you have a question contact us is there anything you wanted to add I think I mean also in light of the recent events one to not panic but to to also refer to reliable sources of information so stay away from Facebook stay away from blogs fear mongering all this it's really important to go to government websites World Health Organization in terms of immigration IRCC and the IRB websites are really useful and they provide news daily updating the situation so I think if you're in one of these vulnerable situations to refer to these sources and from there you'll get credible information exactly and as lawyers law firms we get a lot of information from our Bar Association so I'm a member of the Quebec Bar I'm a member of the Law Society in Ontario member of the Ontario Bar Association and we've been amazing at providing information about how to you know what are you gonna do with your law firm how you're gonna deal with your clients what source to look at so if you have a lawyer talk to your lawyer if you're really confused about something get on a call with a lawyer send an email get some information to get the the right information so thank you and thank you Jolie for participating and we'll see you in our next video and hopefully next time things will be a little bit better out there in the world