We looked at how Global Affairs is managing international assistance to support gender equality in low- and middle-income countries. We found out that it wasn't able to show us how all the spending—$3.5 billion a year—actually improved the lives of women and girls. I would point to two issues, and they will link to the issue that we had about getting access to information.
The first was the significant weakness in information management. That is fundamental, and it was systemic across the organization. It was from gathering data to how you store it, how you manage it together, how you roll it up and use it for decision-making. A lot is done by paper or not even in the same IT system—if there are IT systems. It took us about about four months to gain access to the information that we needed to do our work. That just shows me that senior management is not using it for day-to-day decision-making. Then we saw that it really is an incomplete external reporting because it's only putting about half of its projects in its external reporting.
The second thing I would point to, as to why they couldn't show us how the investment was improving the lives of women and girls, would be with regard to the indicators. They didn't set themselves up to monitor outcomes. Twenty-four out of 26 of their indicators really just looked at results along the way, little things along the way. I'll give you an example, about providing nutritious meals to women. They may track how many meals were delivered, but then they did not set themselves up to monitor whether health would improve over time. Sometimes results, especially in these kinds of programs, take time to measure, but they haven't set themselves up. So, it's really about the design right at the outset of these projects, and then about the management of all the data linked to it to show the value of this investment.