I'll try to answer your questions as well as possible.
I don't know whether you noticed in the text, but earlier I talked about supporting whole groups, groups already deployed that have put immense distribution networks in place in recent years.
We are dealing with that issue at this stage. Direct intervention in the base community is done by the Africans themselves. It is they, our partners, who are increasingly doing this work using their own resources.
We have fewer and fewer actions where we start from scratch, where we enter a community to establish the first caisse. We hope these enormous projects will come up again, but for the moment we are doing more to increase the penetration rates of the existing financial institutions, to reinforce their governance and to bring in technology so that they are able to go further in their communities.
Here's an example of a more limited impact. We are in Ségou, in a small village in northern Mali, where there is only one financial institution. Only the local caisse is open, and it must be open three or four days a week. It is mobilizing the savings of the people there. It grants credit, mainly to farmers. The caisse reinvests in its community through its surpluses and its network because all the caisses are now in a federated network. So it can have community development activities, such as supporting a dispensary or a school, with its resources. So it is contributing with other resources. As a result, a relationship of trust is being established between the community and the base financial institution.
I just thought of a clearer picture that I'm going to give you. During the governance problems in Haiti, no caisses in the Le Levier federation's network were attacked. I'm talking about the period before the earthquake. Four caisses were destroyed during the earthquake. People joined forces to get them back up and running, and they are still operating. I believe this type of institution is very deeply rooted in the community. The institutions serve the needs of the community and they work.
You also asked me what problems a financing deadline can cause. However, it isn't exactly working that way for us right now. If, for example, the program of support for the Le Levier federation in Haiti stopped, technical support would be withdrawn and programs would slow down.
I can tell you that we did not experience that. Even with all the problems, for us CIDA was really dilligent in readjusting the programs. There was no discontinuity between the events on which undistributed funds might have had an impact. We didn't experience it like that. Others may have experienced it in various ways, but that was not our case.
Naturally, if a commitment has been made and that financing is interrupted for various administrative reasons and does not reach its destination, there will of course be repercussions, since a series of activities is under way. In our case, however, we have not experienced that kind of problem recently. Historically, we have previously dealt with that, but not in the past 15 years or so.