Thank you, Chair.
Thank you for being here.
I'm new on the committee, so I have a lot of reading to do to catch up to where the rest of the committee is, but I appreciate some of the reading material that I have been provided.
I would like to pick up on the issue of education. In some of my reading I found that there were some differences in literacy rates in different pieces of material that I had read. So as one of the benchmarks that we established, I wonder if you could just expand on that issue of education. I read the minister's notes when she said women and girls are now pursuing an education, which is one of the strongest tools we can provide them as they pursue their futures. So I wonder if you could expand on where we are.
One of the things you did identify were some of the barriers that we see to girls being in school. Are those starting to be mitigated? Are we seeing some changes? What response are we getting from women in having access to education, and what are they choosing to pursue in those things?
If I could just wrap one other thing into this question--just following up on what my colleague Mr. Wilfert said earlier--about doing one thing and one thing well, I wondered how well the education component will work if there isn't security attached to that. What do we need to do in concert with education in order to ensure that these programs go forward?