Thank you for your questions. There are quite a few; I'll try to answer them all.
We ensure aid effectiveness at two or three levels. First, the team provides close follow-up to each of our projects. Second, in the context of the program, we conduct evaluations, often country-wide, and they are public. Third, the agency has criteria. For example, there's the percentage of aid granted and the percentage of our projects that have succeeded. That gives us an aid effectiveness measure in the context of these specific projects.
If we consider the effectiveness of aid for democratic development, we can also see very specific things in the field. For example, actions have succeeded very well in Haiti. For the first time in 200 years, Haitians have had municipal, legislative and presidential elections that have succeeded. We've also given three million Haitians identification cards providing them with some access to services for the first time in their lives.
In Afghanistan, where Canada spent $30 million to support the 2005 elections, we've seen that those elections in fact were held. If my memory serves me, 63 % of the population voted, including a number of women never previously equalled in an election in Afghanistan.
Future evaluations of specific projects are the responsibility of the departments that do them. Furthermore, we have a department responsible for evaluation and audit. After putting a new emphasis on accounting, we'll also have a chief audit executive, who will conduct audits for me on specific programs in order to ensure that the money is being well spent and producing results. As I said, we can directly see results, especially in the case of elections.
As regards the processes, they vary. Sometimes we work with multilateral organizations such as the organization of American states, the OAS, on some projects. On others, we call for competitive bids, for example for the Democratic Development Deployment Mechanism. This results in competitive bids from a number of persons who have expressed interest.
On the question of the role of the Office for Democratic Governance versus reshuffling, the intent of the office is explicitly to provide additional funds to the already large amounts of money we're investing in CIDA and across the government for democratic governance.
More than just the additional funds, the intent is to improve the quality of what we're doing in two ways. One is by supporting innovative programming such as some of the elections programming being done and this democratic deployment mechanism. The second way we can add value is by being the place to bring this all together. Far too often in the past our projects have been across different geographies and departments without being brought together. This is to provide a home for thinking, reflection, and coordination.
So in addition to the specific dollar amount, the quality and coordination of our engagement in democratic governance will go up significantly.