GDL Coffee Break Podcast Khaldun Al Saadi

In this episode of the GDL Coffee Break Podcast hosted by Khaldun Al Saadi,GDL Member Ghada Zribi talks about the importance of including youth voices in policy making processes.

Ghada co-hosted a GDL Lab on "Bringing Youth Voices into 21st Century Policies" in July 2022. The project aimed at bringing the voices of youth to the negotiating table and designing policy recommendations on future work, capitalizing on the demographic dividend and addressing the aspirations of youth. 

Ghada also discusses the challenges faced by the youth and their aspirations for the future. She touches on the importance of role models for youth, talking about her own story to give an example.

In this episode, host Khaldun Al Saadi talks to GDL Member Eleonora Tafuro Ambrosetti. She is currently working as a research fellow at the Russia, Causasus, and Central Asia Centre at ISPI (Italian Institute For International Political Studies). Prior to working at the ISPI, she completed her PhD at the Middle East Technical University (METU) in Ankara, Turkey, and is a Marie Curie Fellow.
 
In her field of work, Eleonora is focusing on Russian Foreign Policy and Soft Power, EU-Russia and Russia-Turkey relations as well as EU neighbourhood policies. Just recently, she published a paper on Russian Soft Power Sources at the South African Institute of International Affairs that you can find here.
 
Putin’s war of aggression in Ukraine has drawn a lot of international attention and has impacted Eleonora’s field of work profoundly. Naturally, Russia’s usage of Soft Power seems to play a critical role during this time. It uses narratives that construct an attractive image of itself towards other countries and social groups. That image mainly involves anti-Westernism and Russia as a conservative and alternative pole of power. Eleanora explains that one of Russia’s main goals is to promote its influence, especially in countries that already show anti-American tendencies, while simultaneously exploiting its social differences to the West.

In this episode, host Khaldun Al Saadi talks to ElsaMarie D'Silva. She currently serves as president of the Red Dot Foundation Global, an NGO that works to end violence against women.  She is also the innovator of Safecity, an online platform developed by Red Dot Foundation that uses crowdsourcing to track reports of sexual violence and harassment in public spaces and maps this data to show unsafe areas in cities.  Since launching Safecity in 2012, Elsa has overseen the platform’s rise to become the largest crowdsourcing app on the issue in India, Kenya, Cameroon, and Nepal.  For her pioneering work in addressing gender-based violence, Elsa received the 2013 Digital Women in Social Impact Award from She The People, the 2015 Female Entrepreneur of the Year Award from Dusan Stojanovic, the Government of India’s 2016 #WomenTransformingIndia award, and Vital Voices’ 2017 Global Leadership Award.  In 2015, she was listed as one of BBC Hindi’s Top 100 Inspirational and Influential Women.  
Safecity is a platform that crowdsources personal stories of sexual harassment and abuse in public spaces. This data which maybe anonymous, gets aggregated as hot spots on a map indicating trends at a local level. The idea is to make this data useful for individuals, local communities and local administration to identify factors that causes behavior that leads to violence and work on strategies for solutions. You can find further inormation on Safecity here: www.safecity.in 
Elsa contributed to the following publications: 
"The Demographic Dividend and the Power of Youth: Voices from the Global Diplomacy Lab" by Anthem Press here. She Is - Stories of Women Advancing the Sustainable Development Goals in India. 

In this episode host Khaldun Al Saadi talks to Dulguun Batmunkh, from Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia. She is pursuing a MA in International Policy at Stanford University, California, United States. She earned a BA in International Relations from the National University of Mongolia, and a MBA in Public Policy from the University of Finance and Economics in Mongolia. Dulguun worked as a Program Manager at the Konrad-Adenauer-Foundation, where she established civic education programs and networking platforms for promising young politicians and mid-career women to promote their proactive participation in politics. In her function as the Development Cooperation Officer of the German Embassy in Ulaanbaatar, she helped at concluding negotiations and official project agreements between the German-Mongolian governments on development cooperation. Dulguun served as the Secretary-General of the UN Youth Advisory Panel Mongolia 2013-2016 and is co-founder of the UN Association of Mongolia. Dulguun is a recipient of the President’s Scholarship of Mongolia, the Women's Scholarship for Peace by the UNODA and the first Knight-Hennessy-Scholar from Mongolia.  
·       You can find further information on the Knight-Hennessy-Scholars program here.  
·       Details about the Educational Opportunity Project at Stanford University Dulguun talks about can be found on the project’s website.   

Welcome to the third episode of the Global Diplomacy Lab Coffee Break Podcast. Tamara Gómez Marín is our guest in this episode. She is the Consul General of Costa Rica in Rome, Italy. She talks about putting people first in her work as a diplomat, climate change and how the project Circular Cities tries to solve it as well as her believe in solidarity as a source of inspiration. 
·  You can find an article on Developing a circular economy at the local level in Costa Rica here.
·  Last year, the Government of Costa Rica was honoured with the Earthshot Prize in the “Protect & Restore Nature” category.
·  You can read more about “The National Forestry Financing Fund” (FONAFIFO) in Costa Rica and how it contributes to sustainable development here.

Welcome to the second episode of the Global Diplomacy Lab Coffee Break Podcast. This time our guest is Kebba-Omar B. Jagne. He is Team Lead / Head of Experimentation at the Accelarator Lab at the UNDP in The Gambia. He talks about working with unconventional UNDP partners such as start-up and scale ups, elaborates on the challenges of digitally transforming informal markets in The Gambia and gives an insight on what inspires him most.
·        You can find an article on Experimentation into Informalities – Digitally Transforming Informal Markets in The Gambia here. 
·        Further information on the work of the Accelerator Lab can be found on their blog