Foreign Affairs committee  Absolutely. One of the cornerstones of CARE's programming across many different sectors, whether it be food, nutrition, security, humanitarian, or maternal, newborn, and child health, is that we use sometimes a village or savings and loan association type of programming. As was m

Foreign Affairs committee  In relation to disasters?

Foreign Affairs committee  I'm going to link these two points, because one of the things that's important is disaster risk reduction, including prevention of any kind, whether it be in training mothers, or giving access to infrastructure and medical facilities, etc. Women can be trained and it can create

Foreign Affairs committee  I think one of the things you need to build in good humanitarian programming is safe spaces for women and children, where you can have some professionals and put together a good psychosocial program. In that case management centre I talked about, for example, you can't sit and d

Foreign Affairs committee  Good question.

Foreign Affairs committee  I would build on that by saying working with local organizations is about partnership. Partnership is about building trust and knowing each other. Security is created through trust as well. Corruption often exists because you lack that and you work around the system. I think it's

Foreign Affairs committee  I think one of the best ways to understand that is to understand the root causes, or where the inequalities are happening. I was just in Jordan. One of the things that struck me the most there is that most of the refugees are in urban settings, and we think of them in refugee ca

Foreign Affairs committee  One of the points Julie brought up a couple of times was about local women's organizations and groups, and their role in conflict prevention, humanitarian response, etc. Gone are the days when a group of international expatriates descend on a community and deliver food and water.

Foreign Affairs committee  Thank you very much. It's really an honour to be here today, and thank you so much for inviting CARE. CARE Canada is honoured to have been invited to contribute to the committee's deliberations on women, peace, and security. CARE is a rights-based, international non-governmen

Foreign Affairs committee  I would just add that this has to be seen under the umbrella of poverty and the injustice of poverty and the inequality of power associated with that at all levels. If we want to take a holistic approach, seeing it under that umbrella is really going to help us. In the Village S

Foreign Affairs committee  Yes.

Foreign Affairs committee  I just want to say that a lot of it is around economic drivers. We tend to go to the religious or the cultural, but really, sometimes it's just about survival, and this is a way that has worked for them over the generations. Of course, now we realize that it's not. We're coming

Foreign Affairs committee  That's a loaded question. I think it's important to understand that agencies like ours are independent. We don't take sides. We're neutral, so political strings attached would not work for us. It doesn't allow us the access that we require to the vulnerable populations. As for w

Foreign Affairs committee  Yes. To be fair, I think that this was really innovative funding, and it was a little bit of a learning experiment as well, so I don't want to be totally negative about it at all. The impact was that we had to choose programming that built on other programming so that we weren't

Foreign Affairs committee  Yes.