Thank you very much. I appreciate the opportunity to be here.
It can't be overstated how significant it is for these girls and their parents to have the opportunity to go to school. This is a fundamental shift in their society.
And you're especially struck by it when you go to one of the schools that Canada or another donor has helped to rehabilitate and you see seven-year-olds, and I say seven-year-olds because of course when you're watching the seven-year-olds and you're looking at them and they're counting and they're reading and they're singing, you are immediately struck by the fact that that is not something they would have been permitted to do seven years ago. This is new, and this is changing, and it's an adjustment for their society.
Now, I'm not going to sing to you a happy freedom day song. There's a lot of work to be done. Kandahar in particular, the south, is extremely conservative. It is the most conservative part of the country.
Nevertheless, whenever I talked to the teacher-parent committees when we would go out and about--because we didn't construct schools unless the committees agreed to it--they wanted their girls to have the opportunity to go to school. They were asking for that opportunity. And it wasn't just girls. It was also adults.
One of my favourite projects in the field--and permit me to blow my horn on this one--is a small project we're funding through the Kandahar local initiatives program for adult literacy and numeracy. We have about 14,000 adults who have gone through the program, 80% of whom have been women. When I would talk to the graduates of that program, those women would say to me, “I can now go to the market and know that I'm getting the right change.” They'll also tell you that it's changed the way their husband looks at them. Now, that's just anecdotally, from talking to some of the graduates. You also have them telling you that it's also meant that their family dynamic has changed, that the husbands are now a little bit more willing to allow their kids to go to school, both male and female.
The other things we've been doing to try to facilitate this in those contexts where there might otherwise be some concerns--because kids are often, obviously, also viewed as an economic asset to the family--is to provide additional support. Through the World Food Programme, we do food-for-literacy programs. So we'll give pulses and oils in order to encourage the family members to allow their children to go to school. There is a range of things we're doing from that perspective.
But it's not only education; it's also employment opportunities. One of the things we've been trying to do through the Kandahar local initiatives program is specifically target, with the Afghan Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs, opportunities for women's employment.
Again, Kandahar is different from the rest of the country. I know the committee has talked before about MISFA, the microfinance program. It's been extraordinarily successful elsewhere in the country. We've had a much harder time of it in Kandahar. Why? Anecdotally speaking, it is because the south is much more conservative. What makes microfinance programs generally successful is that women can work outside the home.
We've been working with our colleagues in the U.S.A. to try to find ways that women can have employment generation opportunities inside the home--poultry raising, tailoring, and other kinds of opportunities--that will make them economically viable, but also respect the culture in which they're operating.
The last thing I'll flag is on health care. Access to health care for women in the south has improved in a way that is unbelievable. If anybody had been there before, they would know that frankly women were not allowed, for the most part, to seek health care by themselves. They would always have to be accompanied by a male family member. And frankly, the health care system itself was just not at a level at which it could meet women's needs.
Some of the things we've been investing in have been specifically to facilitate women's access to better medical services, whether it's midwives, for instance, or things like the first maternal waiting home to open in Afghanistan, which is in Kandahar. That's going to significantly improve the chances for women to survive childbirth, and subsequently, for their children to be able to grow up.
So there are some key advances we're making, but this is just the tip of the iceberg. This is going to take significant amounts of time, and nobody should be under any illusions otherwise.