I will try to be brief. The CECI works mainly in the Artibonite, Gonaïves, and Saint-Marc regions. These regions, along with Port-au-Prince and the northeast near the Dominican Republic, are part of the hottest regions in Haiti, politically speaking. We also work in Port-au-Prince.
We work primarily on local agricultural development programs with groups of agricultural producers. We are also working on the local governance plan with local elected officials and various local governance structures. That is our range of activities. As part of this range of activities, we also sometimes provide humanitarian aid, if there are crises. We do major campaigns at that level. Each year, we mobilize considerable resources for Haiti, in other words, money and volunteers to work in Haiti. These volunteers provide assistance not only for local development but also to Haitian institutions. One of the strategies is to support civilian organizations and decentralized state institutions in regions that are extremely impoverished and very weak.
We are also involved in the areas of democracy, culture, peace, mediation, and conflict prevention. We work primarily with human rights advocacy organizations. Moreover, we also work within structures that provide training, like Université Quisqueya.
Our third area of activity is health care. We work in particular on AIDS prevention and developing the Ministry of Health.
Our action is quite diversified and broad-ranging, since we work with funding from various Canadian sources, the World Bank, funds from Europe and the government. Our NGO is very operational.
I would like to conclude by saying that we often do short-term reconstruction work as part of what we call the Employment Intensive Investment Program, or EIIP, to create jobs in the short term for the people. That has enabled us to do rural infrastructure work and work in the area of building social infrastructure.
The CECI's action is highly symbolic. The theme of our annual report this year was Haiti. Our patron and the main spokesperson for our work is a Haitian-Canadian, Luck Mervil. Haiti is extremely important for us. The work that we do there inspires what we do elsewhere, and what we do elsewhere inspires our work in Haiti.
For example, we have done work in community security in Central America, and we hope to be able to repeat that in Haiti. The military approach to security in Haiti has proven a failure. It did not work with MINUSTAH and others, but it will perhaps work with the people.