Foreign Affairs committee  We could work with our local partners and make long-term investments in quality education for the communities that we're concerned about. We're unable to do that fully at the moment, but longer-term, predictable funding would allow us to do so and would be of great benefit to the

Foreign Affairs committee  We have a tremendous network of people here in Canada who have the lived experience of being refugees and who have actually come to Canada because of the educational opportunities offered to them in other parts of the world and here in Canada. This is emphasizing that focus on ed

Foreign Affairs committee  We've seen the gap actually close in a lot of countries in Africa, in a lot of the places in which we work, and particularly close at a primary level. In some respects, in a place like Kenya, girls are actually better off than boys in many of the districts of the country. That ga

Foreign Affairs committee  We don't know the details of the campaign yet, because they are still being worked out. We also don't know the financial commitment behind the campaign. The campaign and the focus are well justified, but now we need to make sure they're backed up by the resources necessary to hav

Foreign Affairs committee  Yes. Similarly, we haven't experienced the same reticence of teachers to return to the classroom or of parents in general to send their kids back. We are witnessing a situation in which girls in particular are not returning in the same numbers as boys. We also have a situation i

Foreign Affairs committee  Thank you. My organization, WUSC, works to expand education and employment opportunities for marginalized youth, and has a strong presence in Iraq, in Jordan, in the refugee camps and host communities of northern Kenya and northern Uganda, and in South Sudan. In all of these pla

Foreign Affairs committee  I think that opportunity is greater now than it ever has been. Fifty years ago, if you left home and came to Canada, it would be very difficult to have an ongoing relationship with people in your home village or home country. That is so much easier today, in part because of socia

Foreign Affairs committee  Certainly in our experience you always also find people who are innovative, entrepreneurial, in most of the societies in which we work. It's identifying groups of those individuals and working with them in terms of strengthening the kinds of things they are doing, developing them

Foreign Affairs committee  I think you focused on a couple of key bottlenecks that are present in many countries. One is land title. Who has access to land and how do they use it? That one is really tricky, particularly in the Ghanaian context, where local leaders have a lot of rights over land that they a

Foreign Affairs committee  Well, I think there has been an under-investment in institutions, I think both generally and certainly on behalf of Canada in terms of the way in which it thinks about poverty in many countries. I would also say that our understanding of how to actually build institutions has not

Foreign Affairs committee  The other thing Asia did that Africa has not done sufficiently was an initial huge investment in agriculture, in thinking about agriculture as that initial engine for growth. That just hasn't occurred to the extent that it still needs to in Africa, where industry is often very na

Foreign Affairs committee  I think Dambisa Moyo makes a very powerful point, which really speaks to the lack of accountability between government leaders and the populations they represent, and how aid can distort that accountability. It can actually undermine the accountability that needs to take place. F

Foreign Affairs committee  Our work in Haiti and Afghanistan is specifically in the technical and vocational education sector. That work is a little more mature in Sri Lanka, where we've been working for the last 15 years with the government and with industry associations around the standards and the focus

Foreign Affairs committee  The laws are drafted at a national level, not the local level. There's a process in place already to take this extractive industry's transparency index at a national level and bring it down to a local level, so that's what we're experimenting with at the moment. We would like to

Foreign Affairs committee  That's already established, but it's establishing the policies and mechanisms through which district governments will be able to call down the resources that they already have the right to, but are not yet getting.