Thank you very much for your observations about the work CIDA is doing, and also the challenges we face.
As I indicated in my opening remarks, Africa is receiving a substantial amount of international support in many, many sectors.
This is one issue that is really important and that we have to address. If you look at the demographics in many African countries, you'll see that increasingly the majority of the population is under the age of 25 or 30, and this trend will grow as we go forward. So it is important that we address the challenges that youth in those countries will face.
Consequently, we are working with the Association of Canadian Community Colleges, which we all know is a quality institution, having done a very fine job for our Canadian youth. We can share and export their expertise to other countries. The ACCC, the association, came forward and proposed doing some work on vocational and skills training in Africa.
If poverty is to be reduced, individuals must have access to opportunities for increasing their income. Without the skills and the literacy training, they will never achieve the opportunities to move out of poverty. Consequently, we are supporting this project by ACCC, called education for employment. There are 25 Canadian colleges and institutions who will be working with their African counterparts. The other exciting part of this project is that they're actually going to be working with institutions in this country. And we're building the capacity in those countries, so they can go on training their youth and improve the quality of the vocational training they're giving.
The range of fields is quite broad. It includes the fields of construction, marine and port activities, agriculture, tourism, mining, fisheries, and the agrifood industry. This program, as I said, is called education for employment. So there is an assessment made of what industries will need in those countries, what businesses are needing, what skills they need, and what they should be trained in, and then the program is designed accordingly.
Building the economy and giving people financial security means, as it does in Canada, more jobs, stable jobs, secure jobs. So if we can give them the tools and skills they need going forward, we believe that our Canadian colleges are probably among the best in the world as a group to do that work in Africa.