I think that opportunity is greater now than it ever has been. Fifty years ago, if you left home and came to Canada, it would be very difficult to have an ongoing relationship with people in your home village or home country. That is so much easier today, in part because of social media, the Internet, ICTs, and also the availability of cellphones, which are ubiquitous across Africa, including in rural areas.
One of the things we need to look at is the tremendous remittances that are now going back to many of the countries from which people have come. One of the programs we have is a student refugee program. That's brought over 1,200 people over the last 20 years, mainly from southern Sudan and Somalia, and integrated them into Canadian society through post-secondary education.
What we're now seeing, in the southern Sudan context, is that these Sudanese Canadians with excellent educations are now contributing back to their own societies. They're going back and either forming either part of the government or the business community, but they're also sending huge remittances back home.
There are mechanisms we could use to develop that. I don't know if you have examples of chambers of commerce that link countries together, for example, or trade associations or informal groupings of people that help to foster this kind of work.