Mr. Chairman, I have a few comments to make.
My colleagues may also have comments to add.
The rights of women and dealing with women's issues in Afghanistan have run through I would say all of our initiatives, if not most of our initiatives that we have to date in Afghanistan, through all of the priorities, whether it's the security situation increasing and trying to improve the security situation in Afghanistan, so that it will have a positive impact on the lives of Afghans, but also and in particular on the lives of women.
On the education work we have done, you've heard around this table before the statistics that deal with the number of young girls in school in 2001 compared to the number of girls in school today. Our education efforts--again, improving the education opportunities for all Afghans--have had significant impact on women.
In terms of our focus and the efforts we've had in health, and in maternal health in particular, again, it's affecting and improving the opportunities for all Afghans, but again for women there are significant advances.
Micro-financing is something that we've reported on in our quarterly reports in regard to the number of micro-finance loans that have been provided to Afghans. Again, a majority, or a large proportion of those, have gone to women so they can have increased opportunities from an economic perspective.
So I would say that a wide range of various initiatives and of programs there have been focused on women and have actually produced results for women. My colleague from CIDA might want to provide some additional commentary, because CIDA has done a lot of work in terms of programming for women.