I have a couple of things. There are several legatums. There's the Legatum Center at MIT. Let me just speak to that as well. Iqbal Quadir is the founder of the Legatum Center at MIT. He's from Bangladesh, and he started 15 years ago, when no one thought it was possible to have the first real cellphone business in Bangladesh. It made a ton of money, but more importantly it brought the power of cellphones to poor people for the first time. This was before East Africa. Maybe you're familiar with Celtel, by which Mo Ibrahim--one of my personal heroes, who brought cellphones, cellular power, and cellular connectivity to poor people in Africa--is a billionaire as a result. I'd like to see more African Mo Ibrahims, frankly.
Iqbal Quadir's a great man and a hero for our time and he leads the Legatum MIT Center. The other Legatum Centre I referred to, in London, has a metric around a prosperity index. There are a number of indices around the world around development, and it in essence mimics an index that I think is the most successful of all of them, which is the World Bank's “doing business” index.
I'm going to come back to what this means for Canada.
The World Bank's “doing business” index is one of the most significant things that any development agency has ever done, because when the country of Georgia is compared to Azerbaijan or Armenia and they fall short compared to Armenia, the Georgians don't really care how they compare to the French or the Canadians, but they sure as heck care about how they compare to their neighbours; they're really sensitive to that, and it forces.... Leaders in those countries say “I don't want to be 50 points behind those Azerbaijanis; we always thought we were better than those guys anyway.” They don't say it this way, but I think that's sort of the undertone, so it forces significant change by naming and shaming.
Getting into formality is very important around this issue and Hernando de Soto talks about that. People need to be able to pay taxes and participate in a society—to be able to get loans beyond micro-financing, to graduate into the banking system, to be "bankarized". This isn't really an English-language word, but in Spanish it works. I don't know if it works in French, but I suspect "bankarized" probably works better in French than in English. So the formality is very important.
What does that mean for Canada? As I was saying, Canada has this sustainable economic growth strategy. Building economic foundations is one of the sub-themes in the sustainable economic growth strategy for Canada. I think asking hard questions of CIDA on how they are supporting think tanks, how they are supporting a strong rule of law, how they are supporting countries.... If countries want to move up on the “doing business” rankings that the World Bank produces, how is CIDA at a bilateral level helping governments to do that?
That's what CIDA can do. They can provide this sort of policy dialogue. We talk in the development business about policy dialogue. They can provide capacity-building and support policy. It's not a huge amount of money. Canada has a significant role to play, and CIDA has recognized it. It's very important that they hear this committee say “We're really glad that you're building economic foundations; we want to hear more about that, and we think you've got to turn up the volume on that.” That's how I think CIDA could play a role and how this committee could play a role in some of its reporting.
Let me just come back to one other thing. I want to underline this issue of development finance instruments. Canada is the only G-7 country that doesn't have a development finance agency. This is a moment of austerity. I'm not suggesting to this committee that you ought to go and build another bureaucracy. I don't know if there's an appetite here in Canada for that at the moment. I cannot imagine that there is. I do think that CIDA could perfectly well have some additional instruments that can allow for this, to help to share risk, especially in places like Afghanistan and Haiti, in these particularly more difficult places that Canada has chosen as some of its areas of focus. I don't think you should be using it in Ukraine, which is one of your 20 countries of focus. They've got plenty of money.
I'll stop there.