It's a mixed picture. I'm not going to get into the business of drawing up a G8 lead table of who is doing the most, who is second, third, fourth, and so on, but there are clearly some leaders within the G8 on this, and I would put Canada and the U.K. as being part of that broad leadership group that has consistently attempted to keep this at the centre of the agenda or tried to mobilize resources consistent with the goals, and so on.
There are other countries that are doing an awful lot in education, in terms of the overall aid envelope for education, but tend to direct their effort not to basic education but to higher education and often provide that support in the form of money that actually ends up in the donor country itself—in other words, paying for scholarships for students to study in certain well-known universities in Paris, or Germany.
Of course, there's a place for that in development, and whether we're talking about Canada or anywhere else, hosting students from developing countries is one of the great contributions that can be made to development. But when you have financing gaps in basic education on the scale that we have described in the report, where the majority of kids in many countries don't have a chance to get through primary school, particularly if they happen to be born female, to load your aid support to higher levels of education in the host country is not the appropriate strategy. Ironically, many of the countries that are following that practice, at least in the public statements of their leaders, do recognize the supreme importance of what you've described—equity for girls in education, reaching the marginalized, and so on—but somehow that's not getting translated through into their aid priorities.
That's one of the reasons all of us in UNESCO, through the 1Goal campaign and other initiatives, are really trying in advance of the G8 to get leaders to focus on this goal and to deliver the resources that can accelerate progress.
I'd like to make one small additional point relating to the last discussion that we had. I just want to make it clear and to reaffirm the point that Karen Mundy made that Canada has been a leader in this area and that what we are communicating, certainly in our report and I think in the briefing paper, is that there has been a step increase on exactly the scale you described in terms of real money. If you're using a 2009 figure, we didn't have that disbursement figure when we were preparing the report, but the commitment numbers do matter, because what we've seen globally in recent years was three years of decline or stagnation in commitments, which subsequently translated in the fourth year into a drop in disbursements. That hasn't happened in Canada, and no one is suggesting that it has happened, but I think any shortfall in commitments raises that potential threat, and that's the point being made.