Public Accounts committee  I'm not sure, Mr. Chair, if I said five priorities. Maybe I'll just amplify. In terms of maternal and under-five health, if you take under-five health in terms of the leading causes of mortality, first and foremost, it's with newborns. Many of them don't survive the first 24 hou

Public Accounts committee  At birth, it's really to do with having obstetrical care and that kind of care in terms of making sure that the baby survives. In terms of under-five health, there are five leading disease--malaria, infectious diseases like pneumonia, and those kinds of things. We know what they

Public Accounts committee  I take your point, Chair. I would also add that I think what the Auditor General's report indicated was that no matter who was at the helm, there were some weaknesses in terms of the management processes within the agency. Although I would personally hope to stay and be able to

Public Accounts committee  Yes, that's me.

Public Accounts committee  It's a nomenclature issue. We are an agency, but we have a minister; we are within the portfolio of the Minister of Foreign Affairs. For your purposes at this committee, I am the deputy head, as would be the Deputy Minister of Transport or....

Public Accounts committee  Yes, I am the accounting officer.

Public Accounts committee  CIDA is like another government department, and I'm the deputy head and the accounting officer. The minister and the cabinet set the policy directions for the agency, through cabinet, so the thematic priorities were approved by cabinet. As you would expect, the countries of focus

Public Accounts committee  What we're doing, first and foremost, is being very clear about where we're going to focus our efforts in terms of the geographic concentration and our areas of thematic focus, and then very detailed country programming frameworks that will lay out over the medium to longer term

Public Accounts committee  One of the main criticisms of the Auditor General's report was that there had been a policy in 2002 but there hadn't been a clear management plan to give effect to those directions. I believe that in our reforms, which we laid out in December and again today, there has been a cle

Public Accounts committee  The primary issue, again, is a management issue, where, for a variety of reasons, it had come to take far too long from the conception of a particular initiative to the actual execution of the project. As I indicated in my remarks, we've undertaken a complete re-engineering of ou

Public Accounts committee  No, there hasn't. As I stated earlier in the month, CIDA has never directly funded abortion services. We do continue to program in the area of family planning, and that's an important area within the area of maternal health.

Public Accounts committee  Not yet, no, sir.

Public Accounts committee  Thank you. Since 2000 there have been a number of re-evaluations and reflections on what actually leads to effective assistance that actually can garner the strongest results. I think there's a strong evidence base to show that short-term individual projects do not build sustain

Public Accounts committee  I really cannot comment on the specific example Mr. Dewar has indicated. I don't have knowledge of the report he's referring to. In the children and youth strategy, which is one of the thematic priorities the government has focused on and CIDA is focusing on, there are three ele

Public Accounts committee  CIDA has always had detailed program frameworks for bilateral countries. I think the Auditor General notes in her report that some of them were out of date. That has now been remedied so that they are aligned with the country strategies that have been approved and are posted on o