Okay. So could you just start by saying your name and what your position and affiliation is?
I'm Lucy Clover. I'm professor of child and family social work at the Department of Social Policy and Intervention and here at Nuffield College.
Okay.
And without telling me your entire life story, can you just give me a rough idea of how you got to where you are now and develop those interests?
Well, I trained as a social worker here at Oxford and worked in South Africa,
where I'm originally from, and started working on research with children orphaned by HIV AIDS.
And that's that progressed to working on on child violence against children because those kids were at higher risk and moved
towards developing with a whole set of colleagues on these evidence based child prevention and child abuse prevention programs,
which which is what led to the COVID work. So what you both a practitioner and an academic at this time in social work?
I tried I tried at first to do part time of both.
And it was a complete disaster because you're when you're a social worker, your clients don't have their crises conveniently on three days a week.
But I you know, I think what I do now is kind of academic social work.
Right. Right. Yes. So you mentioned that a lot of your work has been in HIV.
So what were the issues particularly? Just tell me a little bit more about the projects that you worked on with HIV.
We we we did a whole set of projects on.
Understanding the needs and what we could do to help children who had lost parents and whose parents were very sick with with HIV AIDS.
And and it's, you know, incredibly relevant to COVID because you've got this sudden and across sub-Saharan Africa,
we had this sudden wave of loss of caregivers and very unwell caregivers.
And so many of the lessons that we've been thinking about for children in COVID have come from from HIV.
But but one of the things that really came out was that when a family is under enormous stress,
and that happens when you have a health crisis and an economic crisis and a mental health crisis,
that and also when this bereavement in the family that you see rates of of violence
against children go up and actually rates against violence in the household go up.
And and that's even worse when you're trapped in a household together and unable to go out.
And UNICEF showed, you know, 50% increases in violence during lockdowns.
And so what we need is evidence based services that can reduce those risks and and help families to deal with these
incredibly stressful situations without getting to the point where they're screaming and shouting and hitting each other,
which is, you know, I think everyone who who's just made it through this last two years probably feels closer to.
Than we ever have before, because we all saw what a huge strain it was on our relationships.
So let's before we get to without trying not to get to go to. Sure.
What kinds of interventions did you develop through your work with HIV AIDS?
Well, we worked very closely with W.H.O. and UNICEF, and we continue to do so.
And really, the and the there are a range of interventions which help reduce family stress and reduce violence against children.
But probably the most effective one is parenting programs.
And they are they're all pretty much the same.
There's lots of different ones, but they're all pretty much the same.
They're like, you know, I don't know, personal and aerial, you know, laundry liquids and and they what they do is they traditional and based programs.
They bring families together in a group for, you know, five or eight or 12 or 14 sessions.
And they they help families build positive relationships.
So you do things like spending time one on one focussed time every day with your child or your teenager,
and you learn about how to do problem solving with them, you know, when they when they stay out late at night.
How do you deal with that? How do you how do you work out a solution that works with them?
It teaches you about building household rules and managing problem behaviour.
How do you how do you manage it in non-violent but effective ways?
Because that's what parents really need. Actually they need something which works, which doesn't raise the stress and also teaches families,
particularly for adolescents, about how do you how do you manage the risks out in the world for them?
How do you plan with a teenager to keep them safe and online risks increasingly so that
these sort of sets of of interventions and when we started the work in about 2012,
all of the evidence based interventions and there were some and that there are some were commercialised.
So they were developed by academics and then turned into companies.
So they're really only available to families who could pay for that resource for governments in very high income countries.
Yes, yes. So so the US in Australia, in some parts of Europe, they were using these commercialised programs, but they're very expensive.
And so for a for a low income country, it was completely impossible.
And so we decided with W.H.O. and UNICEF and a colleagues in South Africa in the UK to develop and test a set of free versions,
non commercialised versions. And we spent about ten years doing that.
You have to have different ones for different age groups. It's different strategies between a two year old and a 17 year old.
So some commonalities there. And as we developed and tested them, they were also scaled up.
So by by the end of 2019, they were delivered in, I think 29 countries took to about 300,000 people, which by these NGOs is global and generally.
I either governments or buy us the US aid, but also by NGOs and some faith based organisations.
I mean, some we didn't know about, you know, everything was free and available online.
So you only know about the people who contact us.
And at the time we thought that was good. But then everything, you know, everything changed.
So yeah, so we've got to cope with now. So how, where can you remember when you first heard that something was going on in China?
And how can you can you recall the stages of how you became aware that this was actually
going to have a global impact and was something that way that you could step into?
I think. I think the moment where we realised it was not about the epidemic,
it was lockdown and there was really about a week when lockdowns hit across the world and it was must have been in the end of February 2020.
And for me it was a realisation when my, my,
I had a one year old and a three year old at that point and we got a message from the nursery saying
the nursery was closing at the end of the week and it was I think it must have been about a Tuesday.
And I woke up that morning at 5:00 in the morning with this absolute horror of thinking, how was I going to look after two children and work?
Like, how is this going to be possible? And when I was a social worker, what you saw consistently and of course this is reflected in national data,
is that every time there is a even a school holiday, you see rises in child abuse.
And if you look at data on Ebola, on HIV, every time there's a health emergency, you see rises in child abuse and.
And we also could see that these lockdowns were going to cause economic crisis,
and economic crisis leads to rises in child abuse, also violence against between adults and families.
And I think what I realised in this in this very sobering moment was that we were going to be seeing that on an on a global scale and that we needed,
if we were going to we had to do something and we had to do it very, very fast.
And that morning, I think I literally got up out of bed at 5:00 in the morning and wrote to colleagues
at Oxford and University of Cape Town in Stellenbosch who had worked with on this.
And then to our colleagues at W.H.O., at UNICEF, at U.S. Aid,
at CDC and the Global Partnership to End Violence and a range of kind of partners that
we'd worked with over the years on these evidence based parenting programs and said,
you know, we have to do something now. And I think that email might be something that Baldwin would like to have.
Gosh, I don't know where it is. It's a huge chain it became because, of course, they all responded.
I mean, amazingly, you know, I've never seen the speed. They all responded.
By midday that day, we had a meeting and and I have like three days because the nursery was closing.
We had a meeting that day. We all decided we were going to convert these evidence based programs, in-person programs,
into the simplest possible digital resources and remote resources that we could do.
And everyone threw in, you know, what should they look like? We said we'd do simple worksheets.
USAID's said, Let's do public service announcements, let's do radio announcements.
We thought like, what can we do? That is the simplest possible distillation of all of this, and then over a whole set of other partners, you know.
So they brought in partners like UNODC, who we hadn't worked with before and, you know, kind of KDC office for drugs and crime, right?
Yes. So new partners within the UN and a colleague brought in a set of faith based partners, World Without Orphans,
which is this huge global Christian network that, you know, we'd never worked with faith based partners before.
And over a sort of ten fairly horrendous days, we wrote these tip sheets, which is what we started with,
and then we had inputs from every single agency, but not just every agency.
So, for example, UNICEF sent to ten teams within UNICEF, each of whom had five people in them, all of whom wrote comments and sent them back.
And this was true of every agency. So we then had to collate this kind of massive comment.
How many colleagues did you have working on that? It was Jamie and myself, Jamie Lachman and myself.
Yeah. At that point, we didn't we didn't have it wasn't possible.
Like we didn't have a team, you know, we were just starting to work and at the same time colleagues were setting up.
So we were trying to collate and incorporate and adapt, you know, all sorts of things we had to think about.
Like, you know, if you were going to make it global, you couldn't have you couldn't have a picture of a table.
We had to make the people look like no one. They were blue, you know, they couldn't have clothes on them.
You had to adapt things for COVID.
You couldn't say when you're when your kids make you want to scream, take a step outside and take a deep breath.
Because you can't take a step outside because a lot of places, you know, you are in your house.
So we have to think, how do you deal with with those situations where you might be in one room with ten people?
So we had to adapt. We adapted for some specific COVID advice as well.
And all of this in this kind of crazy cycle, whilst colleagues led by Enga Wessels and colleagues were setting up a kind of system.
So we were getting designers to design how it would how these would look.
We were setting up a system for delivery, you know,
how do you get the resources to as many people as possible and track who you're getting them to and how they're how they're reaching?
So they could you you used the word digital earlier, but you presume you can't assume that people have got access.
Absolutely. And what happened was and we made them open source, we made an instant decision to make it open source, which is, you know,
sort of slightly more than we'd ever done before, because open source means people can change whatever they want and you have to trust people.
But we didn't have time to have control. We have to trust people.
And. And we at the same time, of course, amassed a team.
You know, we diverted lots of our colleagues onto this work. They built a website in 4 hours.
You know, it was it was it was an amazing piece of work.
And, um, and then they just started spreading, you know, we had them ready and starting to go out.
Within ten days, a colleague set up translators.
So we had translators from the university, from Facebook.
Um, we had an Italian insurance company called generalI got, um, did a hackathon, a staff hackathon.
They translated into 30 languages, this faith based network world without orphans that had people all over the world did another 40 languages.
You know, it was within two days, you know, it was incredible speed.
And then they had to set up a system whereby you could get the translated versions into the into the tip sheet.
So they were setting up digital systems for translation.
I would say that the imagery was, as you say, what you tried to make that universal so that yeah, although then people started changing the imagery.
So we saw, I mean, many of them use the these kind of blue blobs,
but we saw in all sorts of countries they would develop their own versions and create their own graphics and change it for what they wanted.
And I think Saudi Arabia, they put hijabs on some of the blobs which we Yeah.
Which we were amazed at because they were kind of non gendered of how they managed to decide which ones were male and female.
But um, and then, and then this kind of, there was just this incredible adaptation and sharing, you know,
and people use them in all sorts of ways, I mean, ways that we could never have anticipated, you know, we would.
And what about there's just one question in my mind. I mean, presumably some of the people you wanted to reach weren't literate.
So. Yes, so able to. So, for example, in in places like Lao and I think Cameroon, they actually put them on loudspeakers.
So they they recorded them and put them on data sticks and they plugged the data
sticks into loudspeakers and people walked up and down through the villages.
People wouldn't look down, so they couldn't come out of houses, but they walked up and down through the villages,
blasting out the messages, and they did that in something like 50,000 villages.
Um, in other countries they did lots of radio shows.
They were on national TV in places like Pakistan and Kyrgyzstan.
They made them into cartoons. And then because they were in Russian, they managed to get them right across a whole set of Eastern European countries.
And the cartoons had these very glamorous looking mothers with high heels, which wasn't quite how we were experiencing it.
And then doNis started coming in actually after the first couple of weeks of the OQ Foundation, the Lego Foundation,
the Human Safety Net Foundation came and offered support and just said, Look, we've heard you're doing this, can we help?
And we managed to get very swift. You know, within a couple of weeks they'd given us money that allowed us to continue.
I think we probably couldn't have if we hadn't had that,
which was amazing because we kind of weren't even thinking, you know, we got some money from the university.
They had a COVID fund, which was incredibly helpful and quick and just allowed us to move.
And then and then we built a whole team. We had 30 people, you know, because we had to have people with every language from every region.
It was a completely global team. None of them ever met each other.
You know, they would. They would. It was almost impossible to have a meeting time because it was, you know, from Indonesia to to, you know, to Kenya.
The time difference is so huge. Um, but, you know, it was incredible.
So, and that was called the COVID 19 Emergency Parents Parenting Response.
Yeah, I mean, it got called lots of things. It's just who cares?
Yes. Well, I just have to sort of document these things and.
Oh, and yeah. So I made a note that it was cool to play.
They were cool, playful parenting responses. Is that right? How important was the the playfulness side of it?
I think there's there's some things that we realised very rapidly as we were working and engaging and the first one was the parents.
You know, traditional parenting programmes focus a lot on the parent child relationship or parent can mean anyone looking after a child.
You do have to be your biological child. You could be a grandparent or a foster parent.
Um, but what we realised in COVID was that we needed first to support parents with their own stress and mental health.
And our first tip sheet was all about parents. And all about what they could do to support their own stress.
Because when you're under so much stress and pressure, you know,
and people were trying to like homeschool their kids whilst working or they'd lost their jobs or they're, you know, desperately poor.
You can't deal with you know, you can't deal with the kids if you don't have some strategies for yourself.
So parent support was kind of became very much a number one, but also to, to, um,
to just introduce some moments of time that could be enjoyable for parents and children or teenagers.
And, you know, we often I think, you know, we weren't thinking about playfulness.
We were thinking about, um, you know, all the horror and fear that was, was at that time.
But there's this amazing evidence that shows that if you play with kids for 5 minutes a day,
you know, and even the most stressed parent can probably manage 5 minutes in a day,
you know, even if it's while you're doing the washing up together, you know, you can you can improve relationships and outcomes.
You can reduce stress and violence really substantially over time.
And so we really wanted to say, you know, how can you just have some moments?
But not not not in a stressful way.
You know, I remember reading when I was, you know, and I was doing all this for two small children at home.
And I can remember reading this was months later. People were putting up, you know, like advice for parents of things to do, activities to do.
And I clicked on one and it said, Find six sheets of sticky back plastic.
I thought, Why the [INAUDIBLE] would I find that spiky but plastic, you know,
like I'm looking after two children are working full time and all the shops are shop
like what you know and I just thought you you've got to come at it on parents.
So what what were some of the tips that that you did put in your resources?
So they were really mainly distilled versions of what was in these evidence based programs.
And that was actually how we were able to get all the and all the UN agencies to endorse
them because they had already were already endorsing these evidence based programs.
We hadn't had 12 randomised controlled trials showing they're effective.
They they wouldn't and shouldn't have endorsed them.
But things like very simple things like when you when you when you get to a point where you want to scream,
you know, and it can happen once a day or 50 times a day.
You take a moment, turn away and breathe in and out ten times.
And usually at that point when you've done that, you're much less likely to, to do something you'll regret.
Um, to take, to take one minute a day for every parent and just do a simple breathing exercise, you know,
to at the end of every day as a parent, to praise yourself for something you've done well that day.
You know, rather than thinking, God, another terrible day. How can I do this tomorrow to just take a moment and say, you know, it was hard.
This one thing I did, I did well, even if the one thing was I didn't scream, you know.
And what about the play aspects of the I mean, we. Did you have specific suggestions about how play could be introduced into interaction?
Yeah. You know, it's actually really simple. You don't have to get you don't need sticky back plastic.
You know, what you need to do is for five or ten or 20 minutes a day,
you you sit or stand or whatever with your child and you let them direct what you did.
You don't have to create something.
You know, a small child will will want to do something with you, show you them their Lego or, you know, take you to look at something they've made.
And an older teenager might actually not really want to interact at all, but might just want to sit with you, you know, or you might.
And we did have ideas, you know, but, you know, with a teenager, you can say something like, you know,
what's a country you'd like to visit, you know, and just just have something where it's led by them.
Um, teenagers tend to be a bit less, um, they show their,
their enjoyment in appreciation of a lot less than the younger children, but that doesn't mean they're not appreciating it.
And sometimes with teenagers, people say, we just sat and watch TV together for 10 minutes, you know?
But when you don't have you know, when you've got so much on.
Parents weren't able to do that.
Or the only time they were interacting was when they were trying to get kids to home school, which is not a fun or playful interaction.
It's a miserable, stressful interaction for many, you know.
But, you know, we were also trying to suggest things that would work for a, you know, a high income parent in Washington, D.C.
Right through to a, um, you know, a parent in Nigeria in a shack with 15 people.
And so it's pretty hard. You know, you've got to make things very simple at that point.
Yeah. So what I mean, this is a question I meant to ask before we talked about the actual interventions, but.
Were there specific threats to children and young people that the COVID pandemic presented
that weren't just the same as other stressors that you've talked about earlier?
I think what we learnt about COVID was that it wasn't that things we knew, it was that they were exacerbating.
So, you know that suddenly at a global level, people are experiencing economic crisis and incredibly challenging mental health.
You know, there's been lots of data on this, but, you know, the stress and uncertainty, the fear, the fear of contagion,
the fear of death, that there was very, you know, very sharply rising levels of bereavement and severe sickness.
Can you put a figure on that? How many? Well,
we we know now and I've been working with colleagues that there have been now about 10.5
million children who've lost a caregiver in the space of two years to COVID associated death.
That many more, you know, family members and parents with COVID, with long COVID and all the stresses of trying to parent with that.
But also, I think there's, you know, lockdown and lockdown itself presented this, you know, huge stress,
not only trapped together, but you're also unable to access services that alleviate that stress.
So you're not able to you're not able to send your kids to school.
You know, you're not able to get social services if you need them.
A lot of you know, for a lot of families, that's a that's a break that you have from your kids.
And is there data on that, on the extent to which children were subject to increases in violence and and abuse?
Yeah, UNICEF's done some really good evidence on this.
It's hard because what you what you see in many cases you saw reduced rates of reports,
of calls to things like child lines because people didn't have privacy to make calls.
So you saw the ups and downs as mainly as you saw lockdowns change.
But they estimate of 30 to 50% overall increase in in violence against children during the lockdown period.
My colleague Jamie Lachman, who co-led all of this.
You know, we did everything together.
He did a series of really kind of amazing pre-post studies and retrospective studies on the COVID 19 resources and found,
you know, they're not as good as a randomised trial in evidence. We couldn't do a randomised trial but found very that the parents reported that
these resources really gave them very substantial support and that we were
surprised by how strong we had sort of 70% reported reduction in violence and
80 something percent reported improvements in parent child relationships.
And so it's probably an overestimate, but at the same time you realise that that.
Something. You know, parents needed something. Evidence base that could get to them.
Mm hmm. And I guess even the fact that somebody had worried about them and produced these resources because they felt they needed them,
must have been in itself supportive. Oh, I don't know. You can't tell.
I can't tell if that was helpful or not. Yeah. Um, I'm a bit more of a fan of.
Of the hardcore evidence, what works. And so, I mean, I think your work has always been very collaborative,
but would you say that this project sort of increased the level of collaboration that you did with academic colleagues?
I mean, I think traditionally academic life is regarded as quite a bit competitive and embracing to get papers out.
But I mean, certainly what I've heard from others is that working on the projects,
everybody was after the same goal and not worrying about the ref and all the rest.
Um, I think I'm lucky. You know, we worked as we've been working as a big team who haven't been worrying about that for years.
So that kind of wasn't, um.
I think, you know, I don't think that was a concern, but what it really did was increase and strengthen our collaborations with our policy partners.
Yes. And widened your networks. You talked about things you hadn't worked with before.
And and and one thing that it really led to, which has been amazing is that and I mean,
I guess I should say that to set up an interagency, um, partnership normally takes three years of careful and complex negotiations.
And we did it in days. Had we waited two months or a month, we probably wouldn't have been able to do it at all,
because by then all the agencies had set up covered committees which had to approve everything and it slowed things down.
But we got in before those were created. And what would it led to actually was that, um,
a group of UN agencies have now made a formal commitment to reach families with evidence based parenting support globally,
and it's called the Global Initiative to Support Parents. And it's led to this kind of, you know, for the first time,
a sort of formalised interagency partnership to to take what we did during COVID and deliver more intensive support.
That was the big feedback we got from everyone was they said, this is great, but we actually need more.
Um, you know, tips are helpful, but what we need is we, we really need to try and deliver the more intensive programs on a global scale,
which presumably involves being more 1 to 1 more, a more personal interaction, or it involves really getting good at digital versions.
And we and and Jamie Lachman is now leading a huge, huge initiative.
It's it's probably about £20 million in total of developing these these programmes into digital and hybrid kind of interventions.
So you might be using an app with a parenting programme, but you're also part of a WhatsApp group with other families and a facilitator and,
you know, trying to work out how could we deliver them on, on the scale to which they needed.
So do you think the pandemic has has I mean, that's obviously something that needed to happen anyway.
Do you think the COVID pandemic pushed it, gave it a higher profile and made it easier to raise funds, for example?
Absolutely. I mean, we never intended it when we started, but I think what happened was that suddenly.
Suddenly parenting was foremost in the minds of many people who it had not been.
And we would talk with senior government ministers and, you know.
Senior people in UN agencies, particularly men, often men.
And we would talk to them about the, the work we were doing and they would say, I'm, I'm stuck here with my three kids and they're driving me crazy.
Can you send me the tapes? You know? And for many of these many of these people, they are not in in daily looking after their children.
You know, many of these people are in situations where the you know, they're not stuck with their kids 24, seven for long periods of time.
And I think it really did raise the profile of.
Both the stress on parents and what parents needed, but also the the opportunities to deliver services.
Mm. Since it's all covered.
Yes. So you yourself were at home with two small children and you said you had those first three days before before the nursery closed down.
How did it go on thereafter? How did it impact on your life? Clearly, you've had masses of work to do since it was pretty chaotic.
My husband, my husband's also an academic at Oxford, and we we did about two months of kind of half days each, which was pretty, pretty chaotic.
I can remember doing.
I can remember once doing a big inter-agency meeting on Zoom whilst my three year old, my one year old tipped the kitchen table over together.
Luckily, they were both fine, but and I used to have to do things like, you know, clean the bathroom while I was on UNICEF calls because,
you know, if you're looking after kids and working full time, there's no time to clean the bathroom, you know?
And I had to do the hoovering at 1:00 in the morning because my one year old was frightened of the Hoover.
And, you know, it it was a pretty chaotic, you know, we just about money.
And then because of the COVID work, I was able to get key worker status and that that really helps.
You know, the key workers scheme was pretty fundamental.
Yeah. So then I was, we were able to get a bit more support which took some of that maybe the first after the first four months.
Um, but I think that was one of the most challenging things.
And actually that's something that I think, you know, I had a huge UK or I grant and I said to them,
can I use some of my money to pay for childcare, which I could do if I was travelling and they said No, because you're not travelling.
And I thought that was there were some there were some decisions that could have been made better at that point.
It would have really, really helped. But, you know, I think that's also the joy of working in a team that we were able to backstop each other.
And did you and your family feel personally threatened by the virus itself, by the risk of catching it?
I think we all did, didn't we? I mean, you know, I didn't say they didn't, but I think.
I mean, I did. Yeah. Um.
I think. Yeah. I mean, I think. There was so much confusion, wasn't there?
You were trying to follow the rules, which constantly changed.
And, you know, and I think you must have found that when every academic you speak to is not only looking at the government rules,
but is also looking at the data in the evidence and questioning the government rules.
So so we were looking at that, and that is the balance of trying to keep your children safe whilst also not leaving them as anxious messes, you know?
And that's a real challenge. My one year old loved looking well, anything really.
And he would lick the bollards in the street outside our house, the girls, you know.
But but also what kind of you know. I was always having to think as well.
What kind of advice do we give people that that can.
That is feasible, you know, feasible for parents.
And I think you have to be realistic. Mm hmm. Um.
About about what you can do. And I you know, I don't know.
It's easy with hindsight to say what we should or shouldn't have done.
I think we all did the best we could.
Um, but, you know, things I think things that were a real challenge with things like how do you, you know, kids need exercise.
They need to run around. How do you do that in lockdown conditions, you know, and we we know.
Wilks. Yes. WICKS Yeah, of course.
And if you're in the UK and you have an Internet connection. That's right.
And if you're in, you know, the Philippines or or Ghana, you know, what do you do?
And we we had advice like, you know, everyone walks around the room, you know, ten times a day and,
you know, can you like games that you could play that just got some energy out?
Really a huge challenge. And did you do you think that.
The fact that you were working on something that was going to help parents through the pandemic, help to support your own well-being.
I mean, a lot of people, as you say, were stuck at home and couldn't do whatever it was they normally did.
And so in some sense, I suppose, lost that sense of agency that is part of well-being.
I don't know. I didn't think about it. I didn't have time.
So, you know, we but by you know, by a couple of months and we were running a, you know, a massive program of of work and and research.
And, um, and we were also starting to develop these digital programs, you know, which we rapidly realised we needed.
So it was, yeah, I didn't have time. Well you exhausted.
I mean, I think every parent was exhausted.
I had, I had a colleague actually, um, who has five children and we used to go to university parks every day and walk around the park.
So I used to see them with their five children. And I just think, okay, I can't complain.
I have five. I had two. So has the experience of working on COVID changed your attitude or your approach to your work?
And how would you like to see things change in the future? I think it definitely has in several ways.
I mean, one way is that, you know, before COVID, I was only working in Africa.
And, you know, then suddenly we were doing something absolutely global.
And even I mean, I never thought I would never work in a high income country.
But, you know, 33, 34 governments used our programs as part of their national COVID responses.
And, you know, so we were working with all sorts of, you know, you know,
all sorts of governments, anyone who needed or wanted it, you know, we were working with.
And that was very different. And it really made me think for the first time, you know, can we do something global?
You know, I hadn't thought on that scale before, but, you know,
at the point where by the time we sort of stopped counting, which was probably about six months ago.
And what had you do? You have these figures in your head? It's rather unfair to ask the figures.
I can never remember numbers, but the numbers are on your website. But can you remember that the reach, the ultimate, the global reach?
We did a low estimate and a high estimate, and we followed some guidelines about not sort of avoiding risk of double counting,
but the low estimate was about 210 million families.
Now there are 2 billion children in the world. So it's it's reasonably likely that we reach 10% one in ten children in the well,
probably more because you tend to have more than one child in a family. And at that point, you start thinking if the need and demand is that great.
Then something which we had been thinking about.
You know, in January 2020, we were thinking about reaching hundreds of thousands.
And you start thinking, okay, can we start thinking about hundreds of millions?
And that is a step change. It's a real step change.
And it's changed our perspective as we move forward.
I still mainly carry US-Africa, but I'm willing to concede.
And Jamie in particular has led this like so much work in in Europe, in Eastern Europe and in Asia and Francis Gardner as well.
Really? I think you know, I think I think we there is capacity now to to reach globally.
That's fantastic. Thank you very much.