Foreign Affairs Committee on March 26th, 2015

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

Pursuant to Standing Order 108(2), our study on the protection of children and youth in developing countries will continue.

I want to welcome our guests here today. We have with us Janine Maxwell and her husband, Ian Maxwell, co-founders of Heart for Africa.

Welcome. I am glad to have you here all the way from Swaziland. Thank you for joining us today.

We also have with us Tim Lambert, who is with the Egg Farmers of Canada.

I want to welcome all of you once again. I had a chance to meet with the Maxwells yesterday and hear a bit more about their story.

I am looking forward to having the whole committee hear what you are doing and what you are about. We are going to turn it right over to you for your opening comments.

Tim, I believe you have some comments as well, so let's do that and go from there.

[Janine Maxwell, Co-Founder, Heart for Africa]

Thank you.

Good morning, members of Parliament. Thank you for inviting us to present to the Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Development.

My name is Janine Maxwell, and I am here with my husband, Ian Maxwell. We are the co-founders of an NGO called Heart for Africa. While I grew up in Matheson, Ontario, which is between Kirkland Lake and Timmins, and my husband grew up in Crystal Beach, just down the road, we now live in Swaziland, Africa, on a sustainable farm that we call “Project Canaan”.

Swaziland is a small, landlocked country that borders on South Africa and Mozambique, with King Mswati III as the last absolute monarch on the continent of Africa. Swaziland has the highest HIV rate in the world. While statistics vary, we believe that the HIV rate is 46%. The average life expectancy is 29 years, and more than half the total population is orphaned and vulnerable children. Swaziland also has the fifth-highest infant mortality rate in the world.

Food insecurity is one of Swaziland’s largest problems, with 95% of all food consumed in the country being imported. Sixty-five per cent of all Swazi people depend on international food aid to receive one meal a day.

Furthermore, there are an estimated 15,000 households headed by orphans, where the eldest person at home is 15 years old or younger. The majority of children are severely malnourished because they do not have parents or adults to provide for them. Most of these children eat only one meal a day from Monday to Thursday, which is provided through the government-sponsored, internationally funded food program that I just mentioned. Friday through Sunday, there is often no food for these children.

To help this chronic and severe situation, Project Canaan was born. It is a large-scale farming initiative that focuses on hunger, orphans, poverty, and education—an acronym that spells HOPE. The land was purchased by the Heart for Africa charity in 2009, and it is title deed land. Our hunger initiative feeds 3,500 orphans and vulnerable children more than 74,000 hot meals every month through our network of 27 partners in the most rural communities of Swaziland.

Our orphan initiative works directly with the deputy prime minister's office, which has given us legal guardianship over 90 orphaned or abandoned children. They are all under the age of four. These children live at the children’s campus on Project Canaan and will stay with us until they complete their high school education.

Hopelessness drives women to dump newborn babies in pit latrines or place them in plastic bags and leave them on the side of the river to be eaten by river crabs. These are the children who now live at Project Canaan and are being cared for and raised in a loving community where they will grow and be educated. These children are the hope for the future of Swaziland.

Our poverty initiative is focused on employment and training. We employ more than 250 people on Project Canaan, each of them providing for an average of 13 people back at home. This means that 3,250 people directly benefit from our employment. We also train people in carpentry, jewellery-making, mechanics, child care, and agricultural practices.

Our education initiative includes the Project Canaan Academy, which was created to provide an excellent education for the children living on Project Canaan. We currently have a preschool and kindergarten, and will build a primary school and high school as the children grow up. Our medical clinic also provides education on HIV/AIDS, maternal health, and general health issues.

The Swazi government places a new baby with us every 12 days on average, so by the year 2020 Project Canaan will be home to 260-plus children. Our goal is to become self-sustainable by 2020. All of our initiatives are working towards that goal by either generating income or reducing our overall operating costs by producing food for consumption for our children, such as vegetables, dairy products, and, of course, eggs.

Food security is of utmost importance to us as an organization, and that is why the partnership with the Egg Farmers of Canada is so critical to our achieving our goals. On that note, I would like to introduce Mr. Tim Lambert, the CEO of Egg Farmers of Canada, to share more details about their involvement in our initiative.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

Before we get started, I'm just wondering, Ian, if you guys could talk briefly about what you did before you got involved. How did you end up where you are today?

Then we'll turn it over to Tim.

[Ian Maxwell, Co-Founder, Heart for Africa]

Janine and I had a marketing company in Toronto. Janine founded it and was there for 16 years. I joined and was there for about 10 years. We worked with packaged goods companies like Disney.

Janine was in New York City on September 11, 2001, and I was on an American Airlines flight flying to Chicago. Our worlds were turned upside-down, and we were really looking at our lives, because we had everything, but we could have lost it in a second. From that, Janine started a journey and went to Africa to see what was happening in Zambia, in Lusaka. Then she went to Kenya, saw what was happening there, and really felt that we needed to do something more than we were doing.

In 2004 we closed down our company and started focusing on working in Africa. In 2006 we started Heart for Africa, and we worked in Swaziland, South Africa, Malawi, and Kenya, just helping where we could from an agricultural standpoint. Our focus then zeroed in on Swaziland because of the great need there. The HIV pandemic there was leaving a country filled with children and elderly people. The children were hungry and starving and they needed help. We decided to combine all of our resources and efforts in that country to help them.

In so doing, in 2009 we purchased a piece of title deed land and started Project Canaan. That's how we got there.

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

Thank you.

I'll leave the other questions for people when we go through the rounds.

Tim, welcome, sir. We're going to turn it over to you.

[Tim Lambert, Chief Executive Officer, Egg Farmers of Canada]

Thank you very much. I would echo that appreciation, my appreciation and our appreciation, in regard to being able to have this time with you today.

As you've heard from Ian and Janine, they have a real message of hope, and hope in devastated areas of the world is of particular interest to us. I'm not sure how you would connect that to egg farming, exactly, but I guess it's my job to explain why.

At the Egg Farmers of Canada, the thousand regulated egg-producing families or companies in Canada, which I represent, we have a long history of involvement in a lot of socially responsible activities, such as food banks and the Breakfast Club of Canada. We sponsor CIBC's Run for the Cure and have been involved in food banks and breakfast clubs for many years.

In effect, eggs are the perfect protein, or the perfect product for a hungry world. You have the high-quality protein and all of the other micronutrients all in one package. They can be hard-cooked and stored for extended periods of time.

Also, you have an incredibly efficient little biological unit in the hen. There's only one other form of animal protein production that is more efficient at converting a pound of feed into a pound of whatever the product is, and that would be fish. Next to that, you also have a very small animal. Also, a very few birds can feed a lot of people. It's a very scalable business. In other words, you can make it as big or as small as you need to. It's absolutely simple. The humble egg is an absolutely brilliant solution for malnutrition in countries such as Swaziland and, indeed, in countries around the world that are suffering from problems of malnutrition.

In addition to our partnership with Ian and Janine, we're founding members of an organization called the International Egg Foundation. Egg businesses and company owners from around the world are putting money into this foundation. They support Heart for Africa's Project Canaan, and they also support capacity development projects in eight other African nations, mostly in the south. What we're doing there is providing some technical expertise.

We also have farmers who go over there and meet with small farmers who are looking to build their capacity, learn modern agricultural practices, and do a better job of caring for and feeding the birds, housing them, and learning to look after them. Our farmers volunteer their time to transfer their knowledge and expertise.

That capacity-building project is completely unique to what Ian and Janine have described around the orphanage in regard to what we try to do as a foundation. Our chair is a gentleman named Bart Jan Krouwel, who was formerly the head of the Rabobank Foundation, I'm a trustee, and Carlos Saviani, a vice-president at the World Wildlife Fund, is also one of our trustees. It becomes a little bit of different horses for different courses, if you will, and we recognize a fantastic opportunity with Ian and Janine.

We're doing capacity-building. We're involved in Mozambique, where they identify small landholders and have designed a little production system, a little model. They bring them in, train them, and then help them get a microloan to start their own small-scale egg production.

We're looking at doing some work with a foundation in South Africa called the Hollard Foundation. They are looking at things on a somewhat grander scale. They want to connect different businesses with entrepreneurs. In other words, they are looking for somebody who isn't going to do it just on a subsistence level or for the local villagers, but who truly wants to try to build a sustainable egg-producing company. It's all rooted in the belief that the humble egg can play a role in providing protein and improving the efficacy of vaccines, even the efficacy of antiretroviral drugs for HIV and AIDS.

That's how eggs fit, and that's a bit of our broader vision for the role that Egg Farmers of Canada can play in the process.

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

That's excellent. Thank you very much.

What we're going to do is start with our first round, which will be seven minutes of questions and answers. Some of the questions may be in French, so please take this opportunity, if you need translation, to put in your earpiece..

We're going to start with you, Madam Laverdière, for seven minutes, please.

[Hélène Laverdière, NDP, Laurier—Sainte-Marie, QC]

Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.

I also want to thank our witnesses for having come here today to tell us about their very interesting projects.

Mr. Lambert, you talked about eggs with a very special eloquence, and even defended its ecological side. I found all of this quite interesting.

You said that your organization was present in eight African countries. I was wondering if it is present essentially in South Africa or if you are also present in other areas of the world.

[Tim Lambert]

Thank you for that question.

We are looking at a project in Pakistan and at a project in Nicaragua. This foundation was only started about two years ago. Rather than having our reach exceed our grasp, if I can put it that way, we've tried to focus on making sure we engage in projects that are going to succeed and be sustainable.

If I can relate this to Ian and Janine, before we committed to their project, Janine spoke at our international conference. Our chairman of the board, Mr. Peter Clarke, and I were quite intrigued. We had the opportunity to be on other business in South Africa and we went to see their project. What both impressed and amazed us was that what they were talking about and planning to do, they were doing. We saw dams. We saw buildings. We saw the children.

That's a long answer to a short question, but we are trying to make sure we succeed by partnering where we have a high degree of confidence that it will succeed, and as we have that success, we hope to draw funding and international interest to the International Egg Foundation's vision and mission. We don't think we can do that by having multiple projects that we just hope will succeed. We're being extremely selective, so we have two. Two may be pending, but it's too early to say if we'll take them on or not.

[Hélène Laverdière, NDP, Laurier—Sainte-Marie, QC]

If I may say so, I think that is a very wise approach.

I have another brief question. You mentioned your farmers. How many farmers are involved in those projects from your side?

[Tim Lambert]

Our entire board of directors has endorsed the project, but we have a project team of about seven farmers, the chairman of our board of directors, and several executive committee members. Interestingly—and it's by coincidence, because people volunteered—we have one guy who builds farm buildings and barns and another person who owns a feed-milling company. They all have egg production. They're all egg farmers. One person owns a transportation business. We've managed to grab all of the right skill sets.

We're fundraising to build our farm in Swaziland, but Egg Farmers of Canada is donating the travel costs to get there, and all the people are donating their time.

[Hélène Laverdière, NDP, Laurier—Sainte-Marie, QC]

Fine. Thank you very much.

Ms. Maxwell, currently the international community is very concerned with the issue of registering children, if only to allow them to have an identity when they begin their lives.

I was wondering what the situation is in Swaziland in this regard, given the challenges that country is facing.

[Janine Maxwell]

That's a really excellent question. It's a big challenge for us. Ian and I are legal guardians over these children. In fact, we got baby number 91 yesterday, so we have one more than we had on record today.

It's a challenge. Many of the people living in Swaziland do not have identities and they do not have identity cards. From a payment perspective for our farm workers, we were paying them with cash and now we want them to have bank accounts. We're pushing them to get bank accounts, but in order to get a bank account, you need to have an ID card. In order to have an ID card, you need to have a birth certificate.

For 250 people on the farm, we are working tirelessly to provide transport, provide days off, and continue the payment for their workdays so they can go and get the birth certificate, which requires them to go home to their local chief and have someone prove that they exist. It's a bigger problem that we are addressing on a large scale on our farm. For our babies, when a baby is dumped.... Last week, a newborn was put in a plastic bag by his mother and left by the side of the river. Before the neighbours found the baby, the river crabs found him and ate a good chunk of him. The baby has lived. The baby has had a colostomy and is now with us. He will be one of the future leaders of the nation, but getting a birth certificate for that child is hard.

But the government works very closely with us, and the deputy prime minister's office is very committed to making sure we get the birth certificate of that child, so if that child needed to leave the country or, down the road, attend university internationally, which would be great, we will have that birth certificate.

[Hélène Laverdière, NDP, Laurier—Sainte-Marie, QC]

To become the leader—

[Janine Maxwell]

To become the leader, so they can actually come to Parliament in Canada. The DPM's office is working very diligently with us, and it's not easy, but of our 91 babies, we now probably have 88 birth certificates, which is huge.

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

Thank you.

Ms. Brown, please.

[Lois Brown, Conservative, Newmarket—Aurora, ON]

Thank you, Chair.

Welcome to our committee. We're delighted to have you here.

Ian and Janine, it was really nice to have time to chat with you yesterday and to find out about all the threads of our lives that have crossed in the past.

Mr. Lambert, you'd be interested in a little story. When I was in Ethiopia the last time, I was taken by our embassy to visit a couple of projects that Canada has invested in. For both of them, the objective was to sell eggs at market. The projects had about 1,000 hens each. I figured that the best way I could leave my money in the country was to buy the first 10 dozen eggs from each of them. They were doing very well, so it's really exciting to see this kind of project take off.

As you all know, our whole discussion here over the last little while has been looking at the issue at it relates to child protection.

Janine, you just talked about the importance of vital statistics—and I'm really glad that Madam Laverdière raised the issue—an area on which Canada is focusing between 2015 and 2020 with our maternal, newborn, and child health money.

I wonder, first of all, if you could talk a little bit about child protection in Swaziland. Could you touch on issues as they relate to how the work you're doing meshes with the larger country plan that Swaziland would have for its own growth and development, however elementary that may be right now?

Then, Mr. Lambert, could you talk a little more about the sustainability aspect and how you see yourself connecting into different countries in Africa, particularly in Swaziland? Could you tell us what the objectives are for the egg farmers and what is your involvement?

[Janine Maxwell]

I'll address the question of child protection first, because the issue of children at risk is a major issue around the world. As Ian was explaining, it's really why we moved to Swaziland. The farming is very important, but the farming is a means to an end. We need to be able to feed the children and we need to be able to provide incomes, so that we can care for these 91 children—soon to be 260—who are our children.

The government of Swaziland is working very hard to elevate its level of child protection to a global level. As we understand it, they're members of the UN. In order to be a member of the UN, you have to adhere to the Hague Convention.

In the constitution of 2005, Swaziland did not have a child protection act the way we would like to see it. From 2010 to 2012, they worked very diligently to get a child protection plan in place. It's called the Children's Protection and Welfare Act. It does all of the things we would like it to do. In fact, every time I'm in the social welfare office, which is under the deputy prime minister's office, the child protection act is sitting right there.

It is well used. If we're dealing with a child who has been left alone by the parents, which is very common in their culture.... At any time, day or night, I could go to the farthest reaches of the country, go to a homestead and find one of these households headed by orphans, where 15- or 13- or 12-year-old children are caring for younger children and have been alone for many days. The child protection act directly says that children under the age of 15—I'm not sure what the age is—are not to be left alone.

We can't go and collect all of the children to come and live at Project Canaan, but we can use that act. If we know that a child is being abused, or if there's a specific area of care that we can help with, or if there's a baby under the age of 12 months, we can take that act and walk in. They are very responsive to it. They know it inside out, which is great.

The other thing that's interesting about the child protection act is that it's very progressive, in a way, because it does not allow girls under the age of 18 to be married, which is very first world. Now, is that enforced every day in the country? No, in different areas and in different pockets, it's still culturally acceptable to marry off a child who's 12 years or 13 years old, because the family needs the money. They need the lobola. However, if we knew that was happening and it was reported to us, we would have no problem. Ian and I would be the ones in the car, with the child protection act, driving to a homestead with the police, and they would take action against it. It might not be a popular decision in the community at that time, but it is being upheld.

We're very encouraged by that. It's going to take time for it to be totally implemented, but it's something that we can hold onto and, through the deputy prime minister's office, we can make progress on behalf of the children of Swaziland.

[Tim Lambert]

I would like to divide this into a couple of parts.

One, how will we make the farming part of it financially sustainable or self-sustaining? We're trying to raise a little over $1 million to build a farm. We're going to start with 5,000 birds and scale it up to about 30,000. It costs us about $120,000 to provide pullets and feed for a year for those birds, so the initial part deals with fundraising. However, there is a large-scale commercial egg production company in Swaziland. Obviously, orphans don't have money to buy food so that creates a different short term, but that company has offered to help. In fact, they're currently donating eggs to the project while we gear up the farm.

They have a small I guess expatriate population that is looking for different types of eggs—free-run, free-range—and they will pay more. They're looking to partner with us in the project, and they will pay a premium for those eggs. We are also even looking in the longer term at an idea about creating a Project Canaan egg brand that we can sell at a premium. There is some long-term thinking on how we can create ongoing financial stability.

The other part that's really important is the human sustainability part. Ian and Janine do not adopt these children out. They're going to educate them and raise them. They will have them right through until they are adults. Part of that process, both for the children and for the farm workers, is to learn. If you contemplate the impact of the adults dying off, you can see that the skills of how to produce food or how to do carpentry or electrical work are all being lost, so there's a significant human education and vocational training that's part of this for the children, ultimately, and for all of the farm workers.

The impact of what they're doing at Project Canaan is rippling way beyond what the obvious benefits would be of the farm and the orphanage. We were sitting out late one evening—before the snake story arrived, which we'll tell you at some point—and we could see all these lights going on in the dark. Janine and Ian said that was something they're most proud of because they never used to see lights. There were a few cook fires, but no one had electricity. The whole standard of living is coming up. There's the financial and human sustainability on this project.

For the IEF, as we identify opportunities to tie in, every one of our projects is helping somebody do a better job of the business they have, helping somebody start a business, or helping somebody who is an entrepreneur. If I use the Hollard Foundation example—which is not a project we're doing yet, as it's at the conceptual phase—it's about matching training and expertise with a much larger vision for a bigger business.

For us, we inherently get I think that the sustainability question is imperative and that you have to work with the local people for it to be achieved. Whatever your project is, it has to fit with the circumstances on the ground, if you will, and you have to be adaptable to change.

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

Mr. Garneau, please, for seven minutes.

[Marc Garneau, Liberal, Westmount—Ville-Marie, QC]

Thank you very much. May I say that your stories are inspiring? I have great respect and admiration for what you do. If more people did what you do, the world would be in better shape, there's no question about it. That also applies to the Egg Farmers of Canada, who have done this wonderful outreach to different countries in Africa to help alleviate hunger.

I have a couple of technical questions, but I'll get to those in a second. You have described what you do. If there's one message that you want to get across to us today, in terms of a message that you really want us to understand here in the Government of Canada, what would that be? Perhaps each of you could go one after the other.

[Janine Maxwell]

I would say that my message...and I think each of them will be different, because my job on the farm is the children and the women, the children at risk and women at risk. My message to the Government of Canada and to the people of Canada is that there are people suffering and there are children suffering, and they don't need to suffer. We can do something. We may not be able to save them all and we may not be able to fix it, but we can do something to make a difference.

Our children of Canada will be the leaders when the children of Swaziland are the leaders. We need to do something now to help in the future, and we can do something, whether it's through government, or policy, or individual people supporting a child, or whether it's feeding children one egg at a time and saving children one egg at at time. We can do something, and we must.

[Marc Garneau, Liberal, Westmount—Ville-Marie, QC]

Thank you.

[Ian Maxwell]

I would like to echo what my wife said, but also, if I had one message for the Canadian government, it would be that I would like to explore the opportunity for free trade with Swaziland. One thing that is a barrier to us as an organization is that it doesn't matter what we make, getting access to larger markets is always challenging. Swaziland was a part of AGOA, and the country has fallen out of that now, but if we could trade freely with Canada, that would be a big help.

[Tim Lambert]

In a word, I suppose that we would ask the government to help us make this a success. As you heard me say earlier, countries such as Swaziland and many others desperately need adequate nutrition. You can't learn, can't live, and can't grow without adequate nutrition. Nothing else is possible without the basic fundamentals of food and water, and part of that has to be protein. The egg just happens to be that perfect product and that perfect package.

We have the will. We have the talent and the expertise. We have people who are committing their time and will continue to do so. We're in this for the long haul. We need the resources to be able to continue the work to build the farm, but then also to extend this beyond this project, because I think this serves as a type of model for many other countries that need nutritional help.