Thank you very much, Mr. Chair, and thank you to each of you for being here. Elly, it's nice to see you. Kevin, it's nice to see you. Mr. Fried, welcome. I don't know that we've had the opportunity to meet, but I'm delighted to have you here.
I'd like to do a little bit of math here first, just to help the opposition out. First of all, Mr. McCort, you said that about 2 % of $373 million has been received out of the call for funding. Mr. Fried, you said that the EU has just committed 20 million euros last week. If I do the math on the number of people who live in Europe and the fact that Canada has committed $13 million of new money—please opposition, hear that, it's new money—on a per capita basis, Canada is punching way above its weight on this.
One of the things that Canada has a history for under this government is that we pay what we pledge. When we have said that we are going to commit the money, we've given the money, and that's part of the problem that the international community has to come to grips with. When they say they're going to come to the table with money, they need to put the money on the table and not just sit there and spout off all kinds of dollars because that's not what really helps. It's getting the money in hand. We've put our money into the global fund. We've increased our contributions there. We gave to the GAVI Alliance. In fact, we increased our contributions to the GAVI Alliance.
All of this is real money that Canada has contributed, and the fact is that Canada is not new to the scene in Mali. We've been there with $110 million per year since 2009. That's money that your organizations have been using to put in place the kinds of programming that needed to be there to ensure safety for girls and women, to ensure opportunities for education, to ensure good governance, and to look at the food security issues.
On top of that, Canada came to the table before the Sahel problem became a global issue. We were there, and we put $56 million into the Sahel in order to ensure that food security would be available. I wonder, first of all, if you can talk about pro-active food security? What kinds of programs have been put in place to help? Nobody saw this conflict coming. This was not something that was on the radar because Mali has had a history for 20 years of good governance and stability. This is kind of out of the realm of what anybody anticipated happening.
Can you talk about proactive food security? What programs are you working on to ensure that Mali, given its history of recurring drought that's been ongoing for decades...? This is not new. What were your organizations doing to help with that? If you talk about the success of the Sahel contribution, what projects were undertaken? That was a specific initiative outside of the other projects that humanitarian agencies were undertaking.
I put that on the table.