Okay.
Perhaps I can pick up on that question and say that if one steps back from the local level and looks at the projects we end up doing or the different countries we end up working with, a lot of those decisions are made around the analysis of the context within the local countries. What does the democratic set-up look like? Do municipal governments have a sufficient mandate to do things, so if we're going to work with them they are able to take that capacity and then deliver effective services? There is an analysis. It's not unlike the analysis CIDA would go through in identifying the countries it works in.
As for the question about the biggest obstacle to achieving the global program for local governance, in a nutshell the biggest obstacle is CIDA, but I have to caveat that, because I can't leave that unexplained. Part of it is that CIDA isn't organized in a way that easily accommodates this kind of idea. We're suggesting we take all the different work we're doing for different countries and bring it together under one coherent umbrella. This is very difficult for CIDA to do, because it's so divided up into its regional desks and its country programs. Even right now we're trying to work a deal with CIDA that brings some Africa work into a broader framework, and it's a very difficult conversation with CIDA.
The second part of the response is that CIDA doesn't have this kind of money within the partnership branch for local government. CIDA is still very much a rural-based organization, and they're trying to make this shift, but it's very slow.
On the comment related to the $12 million, this global program for local governance is an attempt to rationalize some of the work we're doing into this coherent program, as I mentioned. The $12 million is built on an understanding of the existing budgets, where we're assessing the amount of activity required through travel, etc., but not covering volunteer time. It's built on our experience of how to knit together a global network and work locally in the municipalities, work nationally with the national associations in selected countries on each continent, and then bring these players together to a global level to help that sharing.
We're going to Europe in a week and a half for a meeting with other organizations like FCM that do this work--typically the Dutch, the British, a little bit of the folks from Belgium, the Norwegians, the Scandinavians, and to some extent the French. But there are really only two countries in the world that do this significantly, and that is Canada, through FCM, and the Dutch, through FCM's equivalent organization called VNG. When we get together anywhere, it is understood and recognized by all our peers and the World Bank and others that Canada and the Dutch lead in this field of engaging municipal government in international cooperation.
The last question was about youth. There is some work done with youth, particularly through the HIV/AIDS programs in Africa. We're working with some local programs that engage youth in soccer leagues or other kinds of sports activities that then could be used as venues for education on HIV/AIDS, in one particular case, but there is also some work done on other ways of integrating into the communities. As much as possible, we run an internship program where, through CIDA funding, we can get people in their mid-twenties who are aiming toward careers related to our work--urban planning, architecture, that kind of stuff--and engage them overseas as interns on six-month placements in the places where we work.