This is a great question.
I would start with CIDA's 20 countries of focus, and I would crosswalk it to the diasporas. I would start by mapping that.
I think you could engage with diasporas in a number of ways. One question is can CIDA use its ODA money here? Why do I ask that? Because DFID, for example, several years ago used ODA money to publicize the cost of sending money from Western Union versus other money senders just to make it transparent and make it easier in immigrant communities. One of the issues we talked about is how we reduce the cost of remittances.
DFID said they were going to let the market work; they were just going to make it more transparent. They used a small amount of ODA money. You could see it in the immigrant communities, they had little cards that said this week this is what you can get from Western Union, and you saw prices starting to go down for some reason. I don't know what that was, but the point.... Well, there's that.
Coming back to this issue of the collective work of development, I also think they should be working with Canadian NGOs to encourage them. You could even create an RFP to say you're going to create a diaspora volunteer corps that does short term.... It doesn't have to be a peace corps; those are big-ticket, expensive programs. But there's often a very sophisticated private sector with diaspora linkages here in Canada, and it seems to me that as Canadians you could put out an RFP, and with a little glue money from CIDA you could build some sort of capacity.
They could also partner directly. Some diasporas are more organized than others, so it can work with some of the more organized groups.
Going back to can we use CIDA money in very limited amounts to build the capacity of diaspora communities to organize themselves better so they can do these sorts of things, I'm not saying huge amounts of money, but small capacity-building grants to do that.
I think there are some opportunities to partner with the NGO sector, to partner with diasporas, to leverage volunteerism. I also think in a number of these countries that Canada has made as a focus there is often a conflict component to it, so I think it's increasingly important to leverage these diasporas in terms of their language or contact skills. So how you're hiring, who you're hiring, and how you're engaging them could be on a short-term consulting basis in places like Haiti or Pakistan or Afghanistan, where Canada has significant investments and is going to be there for a long period of time.
Thank you.