Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.
It's great to be here again. It's always a pleasure to be in front of the committee talking about the kinds of things with which you are regularly seized.
As most committee members will know, the council is an organization of about 100 non-governmental organizations working to end global poverty and ensure sustainable human development worldwide.
The committee members, of course, know that there are lots of things that can be said about democratic development. It can be about electoral politics and balloting, judiciaries, the recognition and implementation of the rights of citizens. It can be about economic, social, and cultural rights. It can be about lots of stuff.
For those of us who work in the international development cooperation field, who are preoccupied with questions of global poverty, democratic development very often goes to the role of citizens' organizations and social movements in the fight against poverty. And it's a key role. There are more than a billion people around the world living in absolute poverty; a further 1.5 billion who are desperately poor by any reasonable standard, living on less than $2 a day; and together, their combined number approaches half the population of the planet.
The thing about this poverty is that it's fatal. Every day 50,000 people die of poverty-related illnesses and insults readily avoided. More than 800 million people go hungry every day of the year. So the resources to address global poverty, through levels of aid, equitable trading arrangements, and cancellation of the debts of the world's poorest countries, matter immensely. What matters equally are the approaches taken by donor states around the world, as well as by developing country states, to democratic development and human rights.
The Nobel Prize-winning development economist, Amartya Sen, demonstrates pretty incontrovertibly that there will be success in ending poverty when the rights of the vulnerable and the poor are recognized in the face of very highly unequal cultural, social, economic, and political power relations. And with women forming the majority of the poor and the vulnerable, issues of gender equality and processes for women to claim their rights are central, absolutely key, to tackling poverty reduction. Absent these things, we will certainly, but certainly, lose the fight against poverty.
The millennium development goals roll up, in list form, a number of targets from a host of global meetings that occurred throughout the nineties under the auspices of the United Nations to chart social objectives for the planet. They articulate some of the more achievable goals developed at those meetings as an action agenda for the first years of this century. But whether it's about hunger or potable water or access to basic education or HIV/AIDS or malaria or tuberculosis, what is at the heart of it is the question of rights and the circumstances of those whose rights have been denied.
That's why people sometimes talk about the millennium development goals as the minimum development goals. It's a cautionary comment meant to signal that while it is important to set out targets, there is no list, really, that captures poverty. Looked at through a human rights lens, there is no single set of needs that, when materially met, can be said to settle the question of poverty. Poverty is all about impoverishment. It's about a process, and inequality and marginalization are the twin engines of poverty. If our aim is to beat it, equality and inclusion are the ways to go.
Civil society organizations working with a human rights framework know that effective sustainable development change will not take place in the absence of engaged citizens. That's the key ingredient. It is the thing without which success will not occur. And just as in Canada, as members of this committee know well, actions to counter poverty are inherently a political process.
Government actions, national political will, and building the capacity of governments are certainly terribly important, but they are in and of themselves insufficient to support sustained development impact. You get the full picture when you include political and social movement organizing a direct engagement on the part of those who are living in poverty or who are otherwise marginalized by their society. It's the other part and the key part, the crucial part, of democratic development.
In the course of your study of democratic development, it is almost certain that you have run into the Paris Declaration of March 2005, in which donor states agree to approaches to development assistance that help to establish ownership of development programs in developing country economies themselves, that align donor policies with beneficiary state policies; there's an agreement to harmonize, to manage for measurable results, to in some measure accept mutual responsibility and accountability in the development process as between donor and developing country states.
Important as they are, these new donor strategies focus pretty single-mindedly, almost exclusively, on donor-government relationships, aiming to express institutional reforms in both donor and beneficiary states for a more effective and efficient aid system.
For civil society groups, the final question has to be how much aid actually reaches the poor and mobilizes them to address their own problems. That's the key question for measuring aid effectiveness, and it is a question that the Paris commitments have yet to answer. So Paris is important when it comes to donor practices, but it's more about aid than it is about development.
It's when we get to this development vision side of things that issues such as the role of citizens, their social movements, the way in which aid can be used to mobilize people's participation, come increasingly to the fore; it's where democratic development arises. And it's a very good thing, therefore, that states are now tracking to a key meeting in Ghana in 2008, where the role of civil society actors is going to come in for some very special scrutiny and the question of the inclusion of this important piece of the puzzle will be raised.
In this connection, I think it's very worth noting that this committee, in its previous incarnation during the last Parliament, reached some key conclusions when it gave its twelfth report to the House of Commons. The committee called not only for increased resources to attain the internationally accepted standard of 0.7% of GNI as an aid level, but also called for steps to improve accountability and the quality of Canada's aid, with all parties agreeing—all sides of the House. The committee cited the need for aid legislation that would ensure that, beyond humanitarian assistance, aid spending would be targeted specifically at poverty reduction with an approach that takes account of Canada's human rights commitments and a rights-based approach to development, and that aid delivery would occur that takes respectful account of the perspectives of those actually living in poverty.
The committee also said that in order to ensure aid effectiveness, CIDA should take account of the particular contributions of civil society organizations both in Canada and in the developing world overseas.
So the committee's report to Parliament, which got unanimous support in the House of Commons, puts democratic development and a rights-based approach at the centre of the development paradigm.
I want to say congratulations for having got it right in the last Parliament, and I encourage you very much to keep on this track as you continue to look at these questions of democratic development, which are so key to poverty eradication.