112. Mathemagician

[Lars Peter Nissen] (0:56 - 3:13)

We're in the middle of a deep transformation of the humanitarian sector. It's a transformation that at the same time threatens the progress we have made over the past decades and provides a unique opportunity to address the challenges we have identified again and again over the years and not been able to address.

The past six months have been full of initiatives and papers and the humanitarian reset spearheaded by Otcher and Tom Fletcher our ERC is at the forefront of the efforts to reposition and rethink humanitarian action. I believe that there's a real commitment among donors agencies academics and other humanitarian stakeholders to find a new way forward and I am hugely encouraged by that. At the same time most of the thinking I come across is too familiar for my liking.

It is more refund than we think and part of me worries that we are missing an opportunity to address the fundamental challenges of the sector and that we'll end up with less of the same rather than something truly new. That's why I'm so excited about this week's guest on Trumanitarian. Wigdan Seedahmed is a truly original thinker.

She speaks well and she writes exceptionally well. I'm not going to say much in terms of introducing Wig's ideas. I want you to listen with an open mind and when you have listened do yourself a favor and check out her sub stack and watch the YouTube list of sonic music that Wigdan has put together for Trumanitarian.

You will find both of those in the show notes. If you like the show and you can afford it please go to our website and support the pod by giving a one-off or a monthly contribution to cover the cost of producing Trumanitarian. We deeply appreciate every single contribution and I want to say a big thank you to those of you who have already contributed.

We really really appreciate it. Most importantly, enjoy the conversation. Wigdan Seedahmed, welcome to Trumanitarian.

[Wigdan Seedahmed] (3:14 - 3:17)

Hi Lars Peter, thank you for having me.

[Lars Peter Nissen] (3:18 - 3:37)

Yeah, I've been looking forward to this. Wigdan, I think that you are one of the most interesting thinkers I have come across in recent years on data, on Sudan, on humanitarian action, on many different things and I greatly look forward to this conversation. But first, maybe tell us who are you?

[Wigdan Seedahmed] (3:38 - 3:47)

So, before I introduce myself, I was wondering why are we here? Why are we doing this episode?

[Lars Peter Nissen] (3:48 - 3:52)

Yeah, I'm happy to answer that provided that you will answer my question afterwards.

[Wigdan Seedahmed] (3:52 - 3:53)

I will.

[Lars Peter Nissen] (3:53 - 4:26)

Okay, all right. So, you are here because you write an awesome blog on sub stack and you work in ACAPS now. I don't think we mentioned that.

And you had written a piece about Sudan that blew my mind in terms of rethinking how we shape the humanitarian narrative, what we see and what we don't see in humanitarian crisis. And I really wanted to unpack that with you and just understand better who we actually hired in ACAPS because you just came in the door and then you start blowing our mind. So, I want to know what's going on.

[Wigdan Seedahmed] (4:27 - 5:03)

Okay. First, I just want to say how happy I am that I finally joined ACAPS. I've had my eyes on ACAPS for a very long time and I finally made the application and I'm glad that I'm here.

So, my name is Wigdan. I'm Sudanese. I'm Omdurmanese.

So, that's my hometown. And I like to think of myself as a math magician which is someone who thinks about the world in math and magic.

[Lars Peter Nissen] (5:03 - 5:04)

Nice.

[Wigdan Seedahmed] (5:05 - 6:10)

And the piece on Sudan, it was a mini-series that I had the idea to write. I called it Beyond Algorithms. And why that name?

Because algorithms are constructs. We do constructs all the time. And whoever do that kind of construct control the reality and control what we see.

So, I think there are many things that the algorithm misses. And one of them is music as a sonic data, as a metadata. And in Sudan, especially, as a zenic music, it's a genre that I like to draw parallel more like the house music when it started.

So, it's a music that is not welcomed. A music that is there by force, by soft force, by soft power. So, it was not welcomed.

It still is looked down upon. But it's one of the most creative things and the metadata of the world.

[Lars Peter Nissen] (6:11 - 6:16)

Just unpack that for us. When you say music as metadata, what does that mean?

[Wigdan Seedahmed] (6:17 - 8:11)

It means, in the context of Sudan specifically, when I mean a certain type of music. There is a live music scene in Sudan. But the zenic music specifically is the music that talks back to people.

So, it's not a music that you go in a studio and record. It's a music that is alive, that is spontaneous, and that speaks back to people. And if you see one of these zenic tracks, you would see that the mic is actually shared.

So, it's not just the goner or goner. That's the people call the singers of zenic genre. But mic is shared.

And then those singers, they shout out affiliations. So, you put some lukta. That's the money, the cash money that you give them as tips.

And they shout out a balag. Balag means a report, like a police report. But they give you that kind of moment.

And they shout out the affiliation that you submit in that balag, in that report. So, they shout out the things that you are most proud of. Is it your job?

So, you can hear a lot of things that are jayashi, da'ami. So, the RSF, the SAF. That's even before the war.

They shout out if you are an engineer. They shout out that if you are a jalabi. So, that means you have a lot of money that's a merchant.

They shout out your tribal affiliation. They shout out the thing that you feel about right now. So, it's a music that is metadata in a sense that if you let that music come to mind, it has economic indicators.

It tells you if it's today, the day that RSF has been recruiting from this slum or that slum. Because you can hear it more and more. That's sliding.

That's quantitative data is coming. It has grouping. It has hopes.

It has dreams. It gives you a map of what does power look like.

[Lars Peter Nissen] (8:12 - 8:21)

Just to make sure I've understood this correctly. So, you have a party where there is a singer, a gona. Was that correct?

[Wigdan Seedahmed] (8:21 - 8:23)

Yes. Beautifully said.

[Lars Peter Nissen] (8:24 - 8:42)

Thank you so much. And this gona then takes requests or lets the audience shape the song. You can give money and then you go, hey, there's Victor who just got the new cool job with ACAPS and she is from the Nuba Mountains or whatever.

Something like that.

[Wigdan Seedahmed] (8:42 - 8:42)

Yes.

[Lars Peter Nissen] (8:43 - 8:45)

And then they put it on Spotify or what?

-: 10:54

No, they don't. And that's why it's beyond algorithm. Because there is coding that happens even before that.

So, they don't just say a verse. There is a way to code. So, they can only shout your affiliation in a coded way.

So, you have the name and then you have the affiliation. It has never, it doesn't have, think of it as an Excel sheet. A cell.

That cell has only two coordinates. X and Y. So, if you have more than one affiliation, you do more and then you guarantee yourself another cell.

So, there is a code. And when that happens, it's the party, it's live, it's never on Spotify. Actually, it's on SoundCloud.

Because again, there is a digital divide. Not a lot of people can afford the airtime to go and listen to Spotify. And then we are in Sudan this time where there is sanctions.

A lot of American software does not really work. So, that's why we are so great at open data. And open platforms.

So, your best bet to get that data online is actually through SoundCloud. But also, that's also another challenge because SoundCloud also requires airtime. So, what do people do?

They record the very same song. It has 20, 30, 80 variations. They record that and they go to kiosk.

The kiosk has a laptop. And the laptops, they do the mixing. So, if you are, let's say, with Dan from Omdurman, right?

So, I take the mixage of that collection point and I make a mixage, I make a mixtape for one hour that is only for me. It takes out all the affiliation even if I did not pay for it. And they make me my own mixtape.

And those are our data points. We collect the multitude of all the lyrics and how do they mixage them. And then we take that data and we tag it geospatially, we tag it, we have a timestamp, we have all that.

And then it sits cleanly in an Excel sheet or air table.

[Lars Peter Nissen] (: 10:55

So, you take the messy reality of really wild parties in Khatfoum where people get bragging rights for paying to be mentioned in a song. And then this somehow is mixed up and somehow transmitted to SoundCloud. You take all of that data and you, as you say, take the metadata from what people, where people, with people's desires really, or people's identity.

You geolocate, timestamp. And then what do you do with this dataset? What does it tell you?

[Wigdan Seedahmed] (: 11:33

So, at first it was purely exploratory data. So, we collected it, we did not know what it's going to tell us. So, it's deep innovation, that's what you do and you don't know what's the outcome of that.

But when we brought it, we had a very different perspective. We did not ask the data, we let the data tell us the story. What is it telling us?

So, we took that data and we tried to cluster. So, at the time we were a team of 33 people, actually. And all of us, we didn't have to work on that project, but the whole team wanted to work on that project.

And when you come to our office, you would hear the zany music in the most unlikely place in Khatfoum.

[Lars Peter Nissen] (: 12:14

You were actually partying at work.

[Wigdan Seedahmed] (: 12:16

Yes, they allowed us to, they were paying us to. So, we took that and each and every one of us came with this kind of conceptualization, what are you hearing? So, we heard, you know, LGBT is a very sensitive topic in Sudan, the riots, you know.

That's the only place you get to see it. We had a visual anthropologist on the team too, actually. And you get to not just see it, you get also to hear that.

And that's actually the only place in Sudan that's a space for people to shout that. So, we took it and we were able to understand that there were actually recruitment by RSF in these areas. So, those are the soldiers, they go to Yemen, because you started to hear Yemen, you started to hear dollars, because they are paid in a dollar.

And that's how we know that there are actually not two exchange rates. There is a third exchange rate for RSF at the time. So, that's how we got the intel, right?

We started to hear that actually the narrative is changing. So, in these areas, in these slums of Khartoum, those are places. Janoub al-Hizam is not all slums.

Some gentrification happened, but when you listen deep into that, you get to listen to even the people who are coming from Darfur at the time. Those are the people, a couple of years ago, so many atrocities have happened by RSF. Those are the very same people who are getting recruited, right?

So, we started to ask questions. So, if those are the people who did that atrocity and you are here because of that, why are you joining again? What's happening?

So, legitimacy sounded very different on sonic data. What are people, you know, the voter memory at the time, there was two years time, the elections is happening. So, we managed to get this data and triangulate it with more structured data, and we were able to tell that actually, if the voter's memory is two years, probably a candidate that we never thought about might win.

So, it tells us that kind of affiliation, that kind of popular public pulse, codifying that.

[Lars Peter Nissen] (: 14:39

Fantastic. So, just to dig a bit into the LGBTQ issue. So, what, people get shouted out, I'm gay and I'm proud?

I mean, what is it concretely?

[Wigdan Seedahmed] (: 14:54

Not exactly that, but something that is very similar. So, it's in a way, so those go nuts, usually, and I made a playlist for Trumeterian. I'll walk you through it, maybe after.

[Lars Peter Nissen] (: 15:10

But we will put it in the show notes.

[Wigdan Seedahmed] (: 15:12

Okay, great. So, for those who are listening, so they can see a Khartoum that you don't usually see, because Khartoum is under Sharia law, even after the revolution, because the Sharia law is in people's minds, right? So, and the centers are very conservative, in a way that is, you cannot express yourself.

So, these are the places where the very same people, LGBT community, get to express themselves in a way that you, them, after a party finishes and they get out of that, they start to act in a very different way, because you need to signal a thing that does not really put you in danger, right? I mean, I cannot talk about their experience, but that's from my observation. Non-gender conformity, you get to see how they dance, you get to see how do they put makeup, you get to see a lot of gonads.

They have a personal assistant who happens to be non-gender conforming, at least in the way that they put themselves out there. In other places in Khartoum, you don't see that. In the most, like in the parties that end at 11 p.m., because we have a security emergency situation, you don't see that. So, that's the visual anthropology part, and then when they shout out these affiliations, because again, it's not always about money, sometimes it's about the assistant, sometimes it's about the person that is expressing themselves so beautifully and giving a life to the party. So, you get to, they get to have that. One example is that some certain gonad was saying a man's name, the girl, the bit, because this gender, so...

[Lars Peter Nissen] (: 17:08

So, really playing around the edges of gender activity and publicly showing appreciation for something that doesn't fit sort of a heteronormative reality.

[Wigdan Seedahmed] (: 17:20

Yes, and there is no one way that is shown, I would say, from the data that we collected. But you can take that thick data and you get to see patterns more visually, but there are also traces in the sonic data as well.

[Lars Peter Nissen] (: 17:38

It's such a fascinating way of thinking about data collection, about how to understand the mood of a country. It's a very innovative way of crowdsourcing, in a sense. And I think you describe it extremely well in your blog, and I can only recommend the listeners to go and actually read the blog.

You write exceptionally well. You also talk about Macondo. I mean, Gabriel Garcia Marquez is one of my favorite authors also, and he clearly has made an impact on you.

So, just tell us about the Macondos, as they exist in your head and in your world. What are the Macondos?

[Wigdan Seedahmed] (: 18:23

Okay, I did not know that about you and Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

[Lars Peter Nissen] (: 18:28

I started my career in Latin America. I lived two years in Central America, and I read a lot of the authors back then. And since then, I found a new favorite author, actually, which is Roberto Bolaños, who is radically different, and actually has made me...

I dare not to say this, but actually made me like Gabriel Garcia Marquez a little bit less, having read him. Yeah, yeah. Because it's such a raw, hyper-violent, hyper-realistic representation of what's going on in Latin America, and it's fascinating.

We're getting sidetracked. Tell me about your Macondos.

[Wigdan Seedahmed] (: 19:16

Okay. So, Macondos, to me, is the places that we don't understand. And by we...

[Lars Peter Nissen] (: 19:26

Maybe first tell us what is it in his books.

[Wigdan Seedahmed] (: 19:28

In his books. Okay. So, Macondo is a fictional town that is grounded in magical realism.

So, that's the place where very fascinating magician things happen, but people don't blink, because that's the norm of they are. But you, from the outside, when you read the book, or when you... There's a Netflix, I think, show on it.

You know that, I don't know, things don't float, because you know the rules of chemistry. If it's floating, that means there is, I don't know, gravity hole or something. So, but in Macondo, people live in that magical realism that is so real, but so magical at the same time.

So, that's Macondo. And the whole story happens in a span of 100 years in Macondo, with that magical realism of things. And that's exactly our...

Is the place that we don't understand. We put a lot of assumptions, and we see things with a fresh eye sometimes. And that's the visual cultural anthropology lens of things.

But to the people who are living there, that's the reality. That's what it is. And when I say we, as well, because I do put a lot of hats.

I think of myself as a humanitarian. I think of as a woman of intersectionality. And when I say we, I speak in the multiverse.

And the things that you don't understand, and you call it, and you label it, and you just put it as alchemy, as something that is pseudoscience. And you don't question your ability to investigate. You just appreciate it for what it is.

And that has been happening for a very long time in our practice. Because again, also, I have this fascination of quantitative and qualitative data at the same breath. I cannot even choose a favorite.

But especially in quantitative spaces...

[Lars Peter Nissen] (: 21:25

I will call you out on that. I will call you out on that. I think you have a clear favorite.

[Wigdan Seedahmed] (: 21:31

A quantitative one?

[Lars Peter Nissen] (: 21:33

Yes. You introduce yourself as a magician.

[Wigdan Seedahmed] (: 21:42

Well, it's my favorite tool. So?

[Lars Peter Nissen] (: 21:49

I'm right.

[Wigdan Seedahmed] (: 21:50

Yeah, you are partially right, because it's my favorite tool to do qualitative, if that makes sense.

[Lars Peter Nissen] (: 21:56

Okay. Fair enough.

[Wigdan Seedahmed] (: 21:59

Quantifying the qualitative.

[Lars Peter Nissen] (: 22:01

No, I think that's exactly it, actually. And I am just messing a bit with you, because where I see your real, not your real strength, but at the core of what I really like about your approach, is this comfort with messiness, right? With ambiguity, with the alchemy, that you recognize that alchemy is there.

Most of us try to pretend it's chemistry. Yes. But I think you go straight in at the magic, at the things we actually don't understand, the things that we just like in Macondo say, oh, you know, yeah, it floats.

] (: 22:47

Yeah.

[Lars Peter Nissen] (: 22:48

Right? And then you start pulling it out of that magical space towards something that is more scientific, that is quantifiable, that takes a wild party in the suburbs of Khartoum and actually manages to link that into a spreadsheet that tells us something quantifiable, something that indicates changes and patterns and a signal in the noise. And you do it in a very wild way.

So I'm all in. I buy it. Why do you do it in this way?

Why is this your approach? Apart from you obviously having a lot of fun doing it, but why?

[Wigdan Seedahmed] (: 23:33

The first part is true. And why? Because I think, first is, I enjoy turning alchemy to chemistry.

I enjoy explaining things to myself and to others, to show you how I see things. Because early on, I realized that we see the world in a very different way. And that's why I love talking to people, because you get told the very same story in seven different ways.

And that's how you hold the multiverse in a way. So that's the first one. The second one is to claim space.

And it's something that is, in this humanitarian work, the optimism of the 90s has long gone. So in a way, sometimes you need to explain to yourself, why are you doing this? Do you have a savior complex?

[Lars Peter Nissen] (: 24:25

Sorry, the optimism of the 90s. Were you around for the 90s?

[Wigdan Seedahmed] (: 24:29

I was born in the 90s, actually. But I've been hearing stories and reading about it.

[Lars Peter Nissen] (: 24:38

Okay, what are the stories? What is that optimism? Can we dig into that?

[Wigdan Seedahmed] (: 24:41

Yeah. So the 90s was the turn of the millennia. We came a very long way.

The Soviet Union is not there. So you have America reigning the world. And everyone believed a version of the American dream, even if it's not in America, it's somewhere else.

That was not the case in Sudan, because we got sanctioned. But I mean, you still have that. And the rights movement was peaking.

It's one of the very first time in human history, where people get to marry whoever they want. And it has that. So it got us all thinking that, us as humanity, we are going in the right direction.

And we are going, we're not going back. And that's not true. Because sometimes you need to fight very, very hard not to go back.

You run twice as much to stay in your place as Alice in Wonderland. So we were not running twice as hard. We need to run four times as hard to go forward.

And that's not the case anymore. I think.

[Lars Peter Nissen] (: 25:53

Yeah, I agree with that. And I think specifically for the humanitarian sector, I think an era of humanitarian exceptionalism, where the overlay of the Cold War disappeared, as you said, in 89, when the wall came down. And suddenly, there was a space for humanitarians to operate.

It was actually as if we were floating without realizing that that was against the laws of gravity. And it feels like gravity is kicking back in these days.

[Wigdan Seedahmed] (: 26:24

Yes. Sadly.

[Lars Peter Nissen] (: 26:28

Sadly, but undeniably. Yeah. And so I think that brings us then to that gravity coming back in, us figuring out that the Macondo we have lived in for the past what, 30 some years?

That maybe that was more magic than reality?

[Wigdan Seedahmed] (: 26:51

I think so. I think so. And you cannot count on magic, but you can always count on science.

You can enjoy magic. And magic is science at the end of the day. So and that's why I think that's what's unifying the human experience.

Not magic, but science, the theory and methodology of science. It's the one thing that we can always test. The one thing that we can always replicate.

So that's why I think going back to the idea of turning alchemy to chemistry is doing that. And it's also a shared human experience. It's a shared history.

It's a shared, if you understand, if you see the world, if you see the science behind things, it doesn't really matter what tags you put into yourself. It's more about the system. It's more about dynamics, if that makes sense.

[Lars Peter Nissen] (: 27:48

Exactly. And so now let's look at that system. Let's look at our industry.

Let's look at the humanitarian sector. Where do you see that going? And before you answer, I'm going to say that, full disclosure, we did this interview yesterday also.

Yes. Right. And when we got to this point and I asked you this question, okay, great that you're doing all these things.

Now we are in a pivotal moment for the humanitarian industry. What do you see there? You actually, and I've never seen that with you before, but you went blank.

Or you went into your head, I think, and started thinking. And then this morning you woke up and you wrote a blog post.

] (: 28:32

That's right.

[Lars Peter Nissen] (: 28:34

Yeah. So with 24 hours delay, let me ask you again. Where do you see our industry right now?

Our craft?

[Wigdan Seedahmed] (: 28:44

Okay. So yes, you're absolutely right about yesterday. I stared too long in the abyss, I think.

I went into a rabbit hole during the interview. I blanked. But I only knew one thing is that we really need to show and we really need to say, I mean, we need to show the people, to remind the people of why we are here, what are we doing.

But where I see us going, think of me as, how to say that, think of me as Pythia. And we are now in the Delphi, we are in the Oracle of Delphi. And there is smoke, okay?

[Lars Peter Nissen] (: 29:27

Yes, I see the smoke.

[Wigdan Seedahmed] (: 29:28

Okay, super. And now, I'm not going to give you something ambiguous as, you know, as the prophecies, but I would want...

[Lars Peter Nissen] (: 29:40

And they were high most of the time, I think, actually, if I remember my history correctly. They were stoned out of their heads.

[Wigdan Seedahmed] (: 29:46

You know, I've thought about that. Because I don't think it's out of some sort of marijuana. I think it's the absence of oxygen.

With all that smoke, you cannot really breathe.

[Lars Peter Nissen] (: 29:57

Maybe. I just remember a hallucination and, you know, I thought there was some chemistry in there.

[Wigdan Seedahmed] (: 30:05

Probably, the incense. So, I think where we are going as an industry, I think, think of us as an octopus, right? So, the octopus is the center that we always gravitate back to, and we have so many arms.

And these arms have a thinking, has a brain on their own, they have reflux, they can, you know, do so multiple different things. So, we're not one organism anymore, but we are, we have a center, that's our core, that's our ethics, that's why we're here. But we respond and we correspond in very different ways according to the atmosphere.

What do we really need to do in there? And I think if you cut one arm of an octopus, it won't be alive. So, it just maybe, it does not rejuvenate, maybe.

But I, and I think that's what's going to happen. We might not, there is a crackdown on so many things, and some things are not going to survive the crackdown. And I think that's what's going to happen.

But to also quantify things, or to quantify signal, signal density, I see certain things that are emerging. And now this is less of an oracle thing, or a Delphi thing, that's more into foresight, that's more into strategic foresight of things, where you see signals and you quantify them.

[Lars Peter Nissen] (: 31:33

Let me just pick up on the octopus. Because when I read your blog post, and again, listeners, go in and read that blog post, it's great. But what I thought, okay, why doesn't she talk about a starfish?

That for me is what we normally, or normally, that's in my world, but what I would normally say the humanitarian starfish, because that's a fully decentralized system. And actually, if you chop a starfish in two, you will eventually, with a bit of luck, end up with two starfish. But the way you just said that, I can see how the octopus might be a better description of where we are, in the sense that there probably is a center, the IAC institutions and agencies is the center that sort of tries to guide the arms.

But we also know that the arms have a relative autonomy, and sometimes two arms start fighting with each other, and they don't quite pull in the same direction. And yes, it's quite possible that we may end up with seven, or six, or two, or three arms, because a couple fell off and died along the way. So you're probably better off with the octopus than the starfish, actually.

[Wigdan Seedahmed] (: 32:42

But I want to read also more about the starfish one.

[Lars Peter Nissen] (: 32:45

I think the starfish is the ultimate level of resilience. That's how I think about it.

[Wigdan Seedahmed] (: 32:52

Why?

[Lars Peter Nissen] (: 32:57

Because the different parts don't rely on each other. It's a fully decentralized system that senses its surroundings and adapts to what it senses. And so in that sense, if you go back to Sudan, the emergency rooms, we had an episode a while back on the ERRs from Sudan, who, by the way, are doing an amazing and inspiring work.

The way the representative of the network spoke of it was so organic, and it was almost like when the formal system come in, they kill us. And then when they withdraw, we regrow. And I was thinking that's because there is no center.

That's because it is a movement where each chapter is an autonomous part of the starfish. And for me, one of the really interesting parallels outside our industry is Alcoholics Anonymous, which is a huge sprawling starfish across the world. Nobody actually knows how many chapters there are.

There's a book with some steps in it, and so on. And there's a practice, and you can go to some meetings, and hi, my name is Lars Peter, and all of those things, right? But actually, it's free for anybody to start a chapter.

And so that's how we can do what I'm trying to think through, is how can we do humanitarians anonymous? You see what I'm saying? And what are the 12 steps of humanitarianism?

How do we codify, in a very basic way, what it is we actually do, so that it can travel freely across the world, inspire people to start their own little part of the starfish, and connect and collaborate. So that's why I think the starfish is the ultimate symbol of resilience.

[Wigdan Seedahmed] (: 35:01

But do you think the starfish can be large enough to coordinate, or they're resilient because they are small enough to...

[Lars Peter Nissen] (: 35:09

I don't think you coordinate it, I think you influence it. Right? And so that for me, for example, I think we should change the title of Tom Fletcher from the emergency response coordinator, the ERC, to the humanitarian gardener.

Right? Because really his job is to run around and sow some seeds and water, and maybe weed out a little bit here and there, right? But really, humanitarian gardening is, for me, what we need to start doing.

[Wigdan Seedahmed] (: 35:48

I really like that term.

[Lars Peter Nissen] (: 35:55

The naked gardener, so to speak, right?

[Wigdan Seedahmed] (: 35:58

Yeah.

[Lars Peter Nissen] (: 35:58

He used to write a blog called The Naked Diplomat, I believe, so now it'll be The Naked Gardener.

[Wigdan Seedahmed] (: 36:05

Very interesting.

[Lars Peter Nissen] (: 36:09

All right, back to your foresight. What do you see?

[Wigdan Seedahmed] (: 36:14

Okay, for the foresight, it's mainly... And may I say a couple of things about strategic foresight? It's something that I also I'm very passionate about.

Strategic foresight is the opposite of the Oracle of Delphi. It's mainly not to predict the future or to see the future, it's just, it's more like a cliche that I really love, that is a bird, that a bird does not really trust the tree or the branch, it trusts its ability to fly, it trusts its ability to navigate. So foresight gives you that kind of thing, that kind of ability to navigate whatever that is coming.

And it's less about what's going to happen, it's about preparing you to see all scenarios and do that.

[Lars Peter Nissen] (: 36:57

Yeah, exactly. For me, it's the same when we do scenarios in ACAPS, right? It's not about predicting the future, it's about stretching mindsets and enabling lateral thinking and a shared situation awareness.

[Wigdan Seedahmed] (: 37:08

A hundred percent, a hundred percent. And here is the foresight of the signals I can quantify, the signals I can see and then put some sort of density to them, you know, how of a signal, is it a weak signal, is it something that is coming, that's emerging and it's becoming bigger. So the ones that I'm going to share with you right now are the emerging issues or the things that are not signals anymore, but we can see them.

So the first one, it would be cash, cash programming. A lot of people are doing cash programming right now out of necessity, a hundred percent, but if you go back a couple of years ago, those who are working with cash, they're pitching cash. They are trying to tell you cash might be the thing that you need to do because of how good it is.

But now the question shifted from should we do cash to more, whose market are we enabling? So the very first one is there and maybe rightfully so because now in Sudan the emergency rooms, as Hadjuj was saying, I love that episode by the way, people know what to do. Maybe they don't need that kind of intervention, just give us cash and let us do what we know how to do best, you know.

And here comes also a danger and I want to get your opinion on that one, is that sometimes when something works so well, we take it as a panacea and the problem happens here. What do you think?

[Lars Peter Nissen] (: 38:42

I think you're right. Maybe a reality check first, around 20% of humanitarian money is spent on cash. So it's not 60 or 70%, it's 20% and it's falling.

So we have to be careful not to think that this one is in the box. And let's just get on with it. So I would say the first thing is, I think the argument has been decisively won and I actually don't have much time in terms of entertaining, you know, cash is risky in this and that way.

So is distributing stuff, I'm sorry. So for me cash is, not always, there are exceptions, but it's been proven beyond reasonable doubt that it is better to give people money than tennis socks.

[Wigdan Seedahmed] (: 39:36

A hundred percent.

[Lars Peter Nissen] (: 39:38

So that for me is the first thing and I think we need to reflect on why are we at 20%. And I also, I have, I almost get an allergic reaction when I heard near the term multi-sector cash, right? It's cash, right?

And multi-sector basically just means that you did not get in the way of how people spent that cash. And the whole idea with cash is that it enhances the agency of the people we help. So why the heck would we come up with cash for nutrition, cash for work, which is a job, right?

That's what we call that. When somebody, you do work and somebody gives you money, it's a job, not cash for work, right? Cash for education, whatever.

It blows my mind, you know, how we managed to replicate our humanitarian coordination architecture. And yeah, anyway, don't get me started. So for me, 20% and the bit about just give people money.

And then I think for it to work, you would have to give people money and then listen to what happens. Instead of trying to predict what happens and develop all sorts of expert opinions about, oh, we must do cash in this way and that way, why don't you put some cash out there and see what happens? And if you don't like everything that happened, stop doing the things that don't work and do something different.

So I think that there is a big piece around how we see our own value added, our identity as humanitarians and us as the good guys providing cash for work, right? It just, yeah. So I get really annoyed, as you can see and hear.

Then there is a more strategic, I think, issue. And I think that is what you speak to when you talk about the Trojan horse part, which is the term you use in your blog post. So I think there is a danger in cash in terms of how scalable it is.

It lends itself very well to scaling. And so you can serve a lot of people by pumping it through from donor to WFP to Mastercard to ATM. And while that is probably good from a very narrow sort of efficiency point of view, there are some dangers in terms of, we work in countries where the government may not like what we're doing.

And if you have one pipeline that can very easily be controlled. And so, I mean, I think the scaling is a double-edged sword. I also don't know where it leaves.

I mean, if we talk about cutting out the middleman, is national civil society also the middleman? Right? I mean, how far do you cut?

And what is humanitarian action apart from just giving people some cash? Are we then happy with that? We just give them cash and leave?

How do we reshape our role in a way that respects the agency of the crisis-affected populations on one side, and at the same time enables us to understand the outcome of a system that is as distributed as that? That's probably where I am on cash.

[Wigdan Seedahmed] (: 42:50

I think that's probably the signal, because it's not you alone. Much more people are joining that kind of view that was not popular a couple of years ago. That people are not saying, oh, if cash works or not, that's not the debate.

It's exactly, how are we going to do that? How are we going to help in doing that? And to that, I think localization is key, because you cannot...

[Lars Peter Nissen] (: 43:21

Yeah, I used to be on the board of CALP. And I remember once reading a report, and my comment was, okay, so we can conclude that scaling cash is anti-localization, just to be a bit provocative. And that wasn't necessarily that popular to say.

And we had quite a robust conversation around that. But I think we have to be realistic around what's the impact here. Cash is not a religion, even though a lot of people pray to money, right?

I mean, it's not a religion.

[Wigdan Seedahmed] (: 43:57

Yeah. And I remember watching, not watching, hearing the podcast episode you made with GiveDirectly. So they're also doing an amazing job when it comes to cash for development.

And if it's working for development, I mean, that's more of an evidence. We don't need it, but yeah.

[Lars Peter Nissen] (: 44:19

Okay, cool. So number one was the octopus future, fragmented by design, intelligent by necessity, is what you wrote in your blog post. Number two is cash is king, but also a Trojan horse.

I think you covered that in our little chat now. And then you talk about the crackdown on DEI. What's that?

[Wigdan Seedahmed] (: 44:41

So it's what's happening now in the US, and whatever is happening in the US is affecting us all, whether we like it or not. And it's not just the US, but it's happening across the world. And that's exactly speaking to the optimism of the 90s.

So some terms are now getting recolonized, I would say. And here, colonization and decolonization, sometimes, to be very honest with you, sometimes it drops me the wrong way when it's used the wrong way. But we can call this colonization.

It's not just of the past century. This is colonization. That's when you take power, and you reshape things, and you tell people what does it mean, what they can say, what they cannot say.

You police identity, you say inclusion is bad, and we're going to not give you money if you did not do this and this and that. So that's colonization as I understand it. And there is a crackdown on policing language, policing what kind of humanitarian work that we can do, or else there are going to be consequences.

And that's what I mean by that crackdown.

[Lars Peter Nissen] (: 45:53

So where does that power come from? You link it very closely to the U.S. in your analysis. But the U.S. just more or less wrote themselves out of the humanitarian sector. They took away the money. So where does the power come from?

[Wigdan Seedahmed] (: 46:09

I think when it comes to international politics, I can just draw a parallel between Sweden, let's say, and the U.S. That's where I live now.

[Lars Peter Nissen] (: 46:21

Yeah, you live in Sweden now, right?

[Wigdan Seedahmed] (: 46:23

Yes, I do. And that's what's happening. And what the U.S. is doing, and we know when we had Trump and integration and whatnot, so many Swedish companies actually went and kind of paid money to contribute to that. And if that is not pledge of legency, what does that mean? There can be pushback, but I think that's how you bully people into your narrative.

[Lars Peter Nissen] (: 47:00

Yes, there's a lot of bullying going on, and there is a reshaping of the narrative. I agree with that. But what does it mean for the humanitarian sector, and how do you see it specifically in our work?

[Wigdan Seedahmed] (: 47:13

I see it in two polars. The first polar is that we go fully into a civil rights movement kind of thing, and we say no, and we resist, and we go back to where we started as humanitarians. You know, protest.

You take your rights. You get to do what you want to do. And we don't forget that this is a sector that is born out of atrocity, so we know how to do that very well.

So we either stick to that, and we say, okay, we don't want the money. We're going to do whatever that is necessary, and whatever kind of scale of whatever kind of programming is going to go down, because there is a price for resistance, right? The other polar opposite is going to be some sort of some organizations.

They're going to comply. They're going to take out any word that drops the power the wrong way, and they're going to be more into that thinking. I mean, if it's legal, I'm going to do it.

I'm not going to check anything else. I'm not just going to, you know, that polar. And then if those are the two polars, there is a spectrum inside.

So some, I think they would say, I'm going to stay true to protection work, and I'm going to speak about gender and whatnot, but I'm going to drop anything that is environmental. So I fight on one front. So that's how I think about that.

That crackdown is going to affect us. We might be a phoenix that we're going to, you know, just a salamander of a sort. We're going to come out of that.

Or we're going to be a humanitarian palantir in a way, you know, that company that is doing that kind of thing. And we're just going to put a label that we are a humanitarian, but we are private sector.

[Lars Peter Nissen] (: 49:10

Interesting. So that was your third foresight. Your fourth one you call digital adjacent equals existential adjacent.

[Wigdan Seedahmed] (: 49:19

Mm-hmm.

[Lars Peter Nissen] (: 49:21

What does that mean?

[Wigdan Seedahmed] (: 49:23

It means that we cannot exist physically alone anymore. We have a physical existence, and we have a digital existence. And if humanitarian works happens in the digital, in the physical world, it also needs to happen there.

There is a dark web. There is digital harm that has been going on for a very long time. The humanitarian work has been doing a lot of protection maybe when it comes to technology-enabled gender-based violence.

But the 360 of digital harm is void. And even before going to the meta, maybe meta is going, a metaverse is going to be here maybe 10 years, maybe it's never, but we cannot just jump. We need to ease ourselves there.

These are symptoms, and this is a signal that existence is a deal, if we can say that.

[Lars Peter Nissen] (: 50:20

All right. Narrative legitimacy will matter more than operational speed. Interesting.

[Wigdan Seedahmed] (: 50:27

That is a change of pattern because for a very long time, a good organization is the organization that delivers at 99% at the end of the financial year. How many programs you did, and that's the autopilot of things. So you don't have to think about a lot of things.

You have the mandate, you have the donors for having the money, and you do everything according to an autopilot. And I think the autopilot was there for a reason because these are the needs, this is your mainstream, and you do things that are very fast, and you know for sure that they are needed, right? But along the way, this autopilot started to grab some junk.

You don't really need to be as fast as many things because sometimes things need to shut down, but you cannot shut it down because it's a current, it's a very strong current. Right now, I think, and the narrative, if you see, if you just go through the reports in the past two decades, I would say, they look the same, they feel the same, they read the same. So it tells me that the narrative was not important, it's the dashboard that is important, the delivery rates, you know, how much money you can mobilize, and I was part of that grind as well.

But right now, with the lack of money, and then you don't have, you're not in that wheel anymore, I think people are, what kind of narrative, what kind of intervention, what kind of analysis, that kind of deep thinking is what matters, because it will separate those who are on autopilot and those who can interact with reality. And if we can look back to the previous point of harm and digital harm, I think if an organization right now did not really think about the humanitarian work in that space, that's because of the autopilot as well.

[Lars Peter Nissen] (: 52:24

So that's a very hopeful message, actually. So basically what you're saying is, we have fewer money, so the best, the most humanitarian in the true sort of sense of the world will survive, and the more mechanical, scalable, autopilot, one-size-fits-everything and context is just noise, that will go away.

[Wigdan Seedahmed] (: 52:49

I think so, I think that was going to happen.

[Lars Peter Nissen] (: 52:58

Okay, I hope so. I don't think so.

[Wigdan Seedahmed] (: 53:04

Okay, why not?

[Lars Peter Nissen] (: 53:05

I think the business model as it looks now is driven by perverse incentives. I think that it is the concern of living up to to being compliant with the terms by which you got the money, meaning anything from anti-terror legislation to anti-corruption to whatever, which is really, they're really important things. It just seems to be that if you do that, it is less important.

I don't think we think it's less important, but I think the outcome, if you look at what the machine does, if you look at what comes out over time, the pattern, the way the autopilot is clogging up, or whatever you want to call that, I don't think, I don't see what would change the incentives to creating a squeaky clean financial report over a more messy but appropriate intervention. Yeah, we changed this thing because that's what made sense, because reality changed. Yeah, but that's not what you got the money for, so don't do that.

You will lose the money if you do so. The system censors itself and delivers these autopilot outcomes, and I don't know what would change that. So what would change that?

[Wigdan Seedahmed] (: 54:22

Okay, I think because the system itself, that system that gives the money is changing. People have more, they've always had, these governments, they have accountability to the taxpayer, but the taxpayer of today is a taxpayer that votes against so many things in what we do. So, and here why, here comes the narrative, because I think the faith, the good faith, the good will took, as they say, the last chopper out of Namno.

Now, if you did not have the narrative, the right narrative of why you should care, and you speak to that, then the money that they are giving you is very different. And if I, just from, not from intelligence or anything, just from seeing things, I think maybe FCDO is doing, can we say FCDO?

[Lars Peter Nissen] (: 55:18

We can absolutely say FCDO.

[Wigdan Seedahmed] (: 55:20

Okay, FCDO, they are doing that. They are trying to find things that are more meaningful, the way that they are putting a lot of things out there, I see it in a very different way. Is it because the UK is doing great?

No, then it's not doing great politically, it's not doing great economically, but they managed to find that. Why? Because of the narrative, because they have always been looking at narrative, and they have always been doing those crazy things the other donors are not willing to do.

And the, again, the good faith, good will thing, it did take the last chopper out of Nam. Now, it's about that narrative. Now, it's about, you know what, we're humanitarian, we're not judging what's happening, but if you did not fix this the right way, it's going to affect the whole world, not just you.

And the plea needs to be made in a way that so many people can relate to. Because, again, I don't think people are evil, you know. People just get different ways of looking at things, and you need to meet them where they are.

[Lars Peter Nissen] (: 56:28

This is what I like about your writing and your way of thinking. You give me hope, because just talking through this with you, I think makes me realize that part of me has probably lost faith in our ability to change. Because I think I've seen us so many times put a new wrapper on the same piece of candy, and not changing.

[Wigdan Seedahmed] (: 56:52

I understand that.

[Lars Peter Nissen] (: 56:53

That candy at all. And then, but I think, I hope you're right.

[Wigdan Seedahmed] (: 56:58

I hope.

[Lars Peter Nissen] (: 56:58

And I think, yes, let's make you right. I think that's where we need to go. Now, let's get to the last part of your blog post.

We're not headed towards one future. What does that mean?

[Wigdan Seedahmed] (: 57:14

This part is speaking to the foresight practice that I embody, which is, reality has never been one thing. Reality has been multiple different things. So why future would be the same?

And it matters less because you can foresee, and you can put scenarios, and you can build scenarios for multiple different futures. And those three, four futures can happen at the same time in different places, due spatially spread, or they can happen in sequence. So to me, I'm not worried about the future in the sense that we need to get it right.

I'm worried about the most scenarios that we don't want, and we work towards preventing them, and try to make, try to choose, not to be imposed on us. We make that future. So we're not heading towards one future.

It means that if we did not choose the one that we want, we're going to live the one that we don't.

[Lars Peter Nissen] (: 58:19

Wigdan, I think this is a great place to end the conversation. Thank you so much for your unique perspective, for your ability to weave a story with many, many different threads, and with colors and flavors from all over the world. It's a joy to discuss our craft with you, and I look forward to working with you in the future.

[Wigdan Seedahmed] (: 58:42

Likewise, and thank you so much for the space, and thank you for having me.