Finance committee  My name is James Haga, and I work as a director with Engineers Without Borders Canada. EWB is a movement of 55,000 Canadians who are committed to creating opportunities for rural Africans. We do so in a systematic way that you would expect from engineers, focusing not on symptom

Finance committee  On the first side of the question, I would adjust the estimate a little bit. Now, to be able to say specifically what this will cost Canada is a little bit outside of our reach. We don't have those internal assessments that I believe are being looked at by the Canadian Internatio

Finance committee  We have a membership of 55,000 people.

Finance committee  Yes, we're a Canadian organization. We were founded in Waterloo, 10 years ago. I would say 55,000 is a big number. Not all of those people are out going to bat for Engineers Without Borders on a daily basis, though they are providing donations and they receive information about o

Finance committee  No. About 80% of our network are engineers, but we are not exclusively made up of engineers. In fact, though I'm little bit ashamed to say so, I'm not an engineer myself. But most of my colleagues and a lot of our network across the country are engineers. We have about 60 staff w

Finance committee  We're a non-profit. There are other Engineers Without Borders around the world, though we're not aggregated in the same way that Doctors Without Borders would be, because there's a difference of approach. We like the way that we do it, and we're not so fond of some of the other a

Finance committee  I think that's excellent. I think there have been many cases where the Government of Canada has been generous, and Canadians have also been generous, which is only going to ramp up the amount of money that ends up going to the cause. It's a great partnership. Just to be clear, we

Finance committee  To be totally honest with you, I feel that I would be making it up a little bit to answer that question right now. But I would love to engage you in a conversation about that more broadly, in terms of incentives.

Finance committee  First and foremost, as an organization we've been looking at this issue closely for about a year and a half. As I said, we have a strong network of people across the country who are involved in what we are doing, in the professional engineering community as well as in universitie

Finance committee  I hope that today is part of the process of moving it forward. We've been in conversations with all parties and with people who work in different departments within the bureaucracy that are involved in delivering Canadian foreign aid. There is a lot of support, quite frankly, fo

Finance committee  Great. We currently operate in four countries within Africa. We don't operate anywhere else. We used to be all over the world. We found that we weren't really doing much anywhere. So we tried to focus those resources, not all that dissimilar from what Canada has done in the last

Finance committee  One thing is that we're not starting from zero with this idea. The government has already taken a number of steps that have gotten us really quite close to what this standard would achieve. Only two months ago CIDA, for instance, launched its open data portal. Essentially, taki

Finance committee  It means having common definitions. If I am a government line ministry worker in the government of Ghana, I'm not really interested in knowing uniquely what Canada did and uniquely what another donor government did. There are probably 50 donor governments that are operating in my

Finance committee  I can speak to it a little right now if you like. One of the things we find right now is that CIDA, for example, as the biggest foreign aid distributor in Canada, has a project browser in which you can find project information. It is largely incomplete, because it doesn't actual

Foreign Affairs committee  Good afternoon, everybody. It's my pleasure to be here today. Thank you very much for fitting me into your busy schedules. My name is James Haga. I have the privilege of working as a senior director with a Canadian organization called Engineers Without Borders. I've been working