Foreign Affairs Committee on May 14th, 2014

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

Pursuant to Standing Order 108(2), our study on the protection of children and youth in developing countries, we'll get started.

I welcome both of our witness organizations. We have Lorna Read, the chief operating officer for War Child Canada, and Samantha Nutt, the founder and executive director. Thank you for taking us up on our offer to be here today. From Right To Play, we have Evelyne Guindon, the vice-president of international programs. It's great to have you back with us as well.

Let's start with War Child Canada. We'll have 10 minutes for your opening testimony and then we'll move to Right To Play.

Samantha.

[Dr. Samantha Nutt, Founder and Executive Director, War Child Canada]

Thank you so much.

I am pleased to be with you this afternoon.

It's a real privilege for me to be here. I have spent the last 20 years as a medical doctor working for the UN, and then in my capacity as executive director and founder of War Child, working on the issue of children and women who are very much in need of our protection in war zones around the world.

My colleague Dr. Lorna Read also comes with about two decades of experience working on this issue. We're both about 68 years old. We're absolutely delighted that the standing committee has chosen to address it this afternoon.

I'll begin with a brief overview of the context in which War Child works because obviously the protection challenges in the environments in which we operate are among the most serious and challenging that exist in the world. We are in conflict and post-conflict states, and the ongoing risk of violence and abuse and threats to children, and in particular girls, in those contexts are extremely grave. Sexual violence and poverty and a lack of access to education, a lack of any kind of meaningful judicial infrastructure, a climate of impunity, the rabid proliferation of small arms—all of these represent very real threats to the safety and well-being of children, but especially of girls.

Still, what we have found over the course of our work internationally is that even in the midst of such complex circumstances, there are measures that are very well known, well established, especially when it comes to girls, to protect them and to reduce the risks they face over the medium and long term. I'll give you examples, and this is by no means an exhaustive list. First, there are the safe and protected spaces in communities as well as in internally displaced persons camps and refugee camps. There are the literacy initiatives and educational programs for children as well as their families and caregivers. That last part is very, very important. We often think of education for children without recognizing the importance of literacy and education for their caregivers as well in that process and the impact that has on child well-being. There is the access to justice in the form of fostering a culture, particularly at the community level, that respects and upholds the rights of children and youth. They can be both formal and informal mechanisms. By formal, we often think of the rule of law, training of members of the judicial system, police training, and upholding and strengthening those indigenous infrastructures. But the mechanisms can also be informal, and by this we refer to alternate dispute mechanisms that take place at the community level to resolve conflict and to strengthen and promote the rights of children. The access to income, particularly for mothers, is also another known factor that will make a tremendous difference in protecting children from harm and abuse.

Of these, the evidence really shows, if you look at the data that has come out over the past 30 years, that supporting education and increasing or improving income levels, in particular for women, correlates most strongly with all the protection concerns that are being discussed here today. By this I mean that education and income levels are known to reduce rates or prevalence of early and forced marriages. It reduces the likelihood of children and youth participating in the sex trade. It has a tremendous influence on shaping the views that communities hold when it comes to female genital mutilation. We know that girls and women who have attained at least a secondary education are much more likely to disapprove of the practice of female genital mutilation and to not further it.

We know that increasing education and income levels also have an important impact on reducing fertility rates around the world and improving the health and well-being of children, especially those under five. The single most important determinant of whether a child in the developing world will live to see his or her fifth birthday is without question a measure of that family's—the mother's in particular—access to education and to income.

To summarize the evidence, then, that has been collected over the past three decades when it comes to protection concerns, it is clear and it is uncontested that education and economic development are strongly, positively correlated with the protection of children and youth across the developing world without exception. I want to be clear on that: it is without exception.

However, to fully capitalize on these beneficial effects, Canada's strategy when it comes to emergency humanitarian assistance ought to evolve to reflect these realities by continuing to prioritize protection programming as part of our early intervention strategy.

Often we prioritize basic human needs, and these are extremely important. We prioritize food, water, shelter, blankets, and health care, and these are vital to ensuring the survival of children in acute situations, but we can do more here as well. Humanitarian assistance that includes direct support for education measures, such as accelerated learning and adult literacy for women, and economic development, which includes skills training for youth tied very directly to market needs and income-generating opportunities for families, is also critical, even when you're looking at the most emergent phase of a crisis.

For example, consider Syria. Lorna and I have just recently returned from Syria. There has been an extraordinary response that has been mounted to deal with the unfolding tragedy taking place in that part of the world. At the same time, that response has overwhelmingly focused on those short-term basic human needs.

As for what we are seeing in the camps, particularly in Jordan and Lebanon, and in the communities, you will see that even in those early stages, because families are unable to find work—and in some cases in Jordan they're not even allowed to work—that creates real protection gaps when it comes to children and puts them at increased risk. Families then send those children out to earn income. Sometimes that is an illicit means of earning income, such as prostitution, or other things such as begging in the streets or hard labour. We also see that families are more inclined to marry off their girls at younger ages, and we have seen some cases of the trafficking of children.

Again, education and economic development opportunities for families in those acute stages do have a very positive effect when it comes to protecting children and decreasing those risks, so it is also important for our approaches to be holistic in that regard. For education in and of itself, education that isn't backed up by employment opportunities and income-generating opportunities at the back end tends to have a much more muted effect than when you have young people who are provided with that kind of pillar-to-post programming. Then you have young people who are allowed to pursue an education and then marry that education with livelihoods and skills training. That allows them to earn an income, provides a much more comprehensive package, and protects them from further harm, even in conflict states.

Simply put, or at least to sum up, it is our position that Canada's humanitarian assistance strategy, to be successful, ought to always target children and youth who are at the highest risk. By “highest risk”, I mean those who are living in extreme poverty and those who are living with war. Also, we ought to give some very serious consideration to expanding our definitions of emergency relief to include these other important areas that go beyond basic human needs, to also include education, employment, and safe spaces and protection, recognizing that to truly have an impact in these areas, if we want to see our aid working to maximal effect, it needs to be more than just six-month and one-year funding increments. It takes a generation to see the effects of well-managed aid.

When you're talking about protection of children, funding cycles that are at a minimum of three to five years, even in those emergency phases, provide the kind of structure and the kind of continuity that allow families to actually have a more positive outlook, to not be fearful for their future, and to not engage in high-risk activities for themselves and for their children.

With that, I will hand it over to my colleague from Right To Play, who also has an opening statement.

I think we're doing questions after that?

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

Exactly. Thank you very much, Ms. Nutt.

Evelyne.

[Evelyne Guindon, Vice President, International Programs, Right To Play]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

My name is Evelyne Guindon. This time, I am going to give my presentation in English.

I'm the vice-president of international programs at Right To Play, and I'm very honoured to be with you today to speak to an issue that's core to my personal mission, as a committed development and humanitarian worker and as a child rights advocate for over 25 years now.

Right To Play, for those of you who might not be familiar with it, is a global organization, and what we do is we use the transformative power of play to educate and empower children facing adversity. By playing sports and games, Right To Play helps over one million children create better futures while driving lasting social change in more than 20 countries each week. We were founded in 2000 by four-time Olympic gold medallist Johann Olav Koss, and we're headquartered in Canada, in Toronto. Our programs are facilitated by more than 600 international staff and 16,400 local volunteer coaches in the communities where we work.

So we're committed to the holistic development of children and their communities. Child protection is at the very foundation of all of Right To Play's works. Our programs, which reach children in development and refugee settings and in conflict-afflicted areas, ensure that the children are safeguarded and also protected. Of note is that our child protection policy confirms our legal and moral commitment to child safety in all of our programs. We hold our staff, our partners, and our volunteers to the highest standards in child safeguarding and protection, but we also help governments, we work with civil society, and we work with the private sector to help them be accountable as well.

I want to start by commending the standing committee for prioritizing this issue. It's important that we actually begin talking about this issue, and I'm very pleased. It's also important that you all know that Canada does have a strong history, from the early 2000s, of having a good strong global voice on this issue. Most recently, in 2012, there was the national action plan to combat human trafficking. There was the introduction of the first-ever resolution to end child, early, and forced marriage at the UN General Assembly. That was just last year, in 2013. There was a $3-million commitment to implement the minimum standards for child protection in humanitarian action, and there's the newly formed DFATD child protection unit. So there's a lot for us to be proud of and a lot to inspire us.

I believe, based on this, we as Canadians have that credibility. We have the trust of our partners in the private sector, in governments, in UN agencies, and in civil society, and we're very well positioned at this time, I believe, to help lead global efforts in the protection of children and youth. So today I am going to highlight a bit of Right To Play's unique perspective on the complex issue and provide some very specific recommendations on what we feel the Government of Canada should focus on. We've built these recommendations based on our key learnings over 15 years in 20 countries, and that involved a lot of work in Africa and the Middle East and in Asia, and also recently here in Canada.

Before I move to those specific recommendations, I want to underscore that protecting children from trafficking, from female genital mutilation, from exploitation of all kinds, is incredibly complex. And I want to start off by giving you a little bit of an example that is top of mind, something that happened to us recently in Mali.

We had been working with the government on the development of laws, and this has been through Canadian government-funded programs, but we also recently began working with a series of clubs. We're building these child protection clubs. One of the goals of these clubs has been to try to identify and report cases of child abuse. As a result of the training and the sensitization activities on child rights and child abuse in a particular community called Bougouni, all of a sudden we started seeing the number of child abuse cases reported increase. These laws, again, these systems, had been in place, but the difference was the child protection clubs, and one of the things we saw was that this led recently to the first arrest and conviction of the first child trafficker in Mali. So these are things that we know are important to weave together. It's about the systems, but it's also about those community-based mechanisms.

I'm going to get to some recommendations based on these types of examples, and we have many of them.

The first thing I want to say is that we feel it's critical that on issues of child protection and issues that affect children broadly, but especially on this issue, we must put children's voices first. Children must be provided with meaningful and inclusive opportunities to express their views and to engage in mutually respectful dialogue with adults, and they must take action in order for child protection to work.

We must equip children to become active agents in their own safety and ensure that they have a seat at the table. By investing in those participatory approaches such as sport and play and these child protection clubs, we can reinforce positive behaviour and build children's life skills and knowledge to protect themselves and their peers and to create lasting change as they grow and build their own communities.

Children's summits and children's parliaments can be very effective mechanisms among others. Right To Play has helped the most forgotten and silenced children find their voice and make changes within their communities and their nations. However, we do feel that we need to learn more about these mechanisms. There is a critical need right now for research to identify which best practices are working and which ones can be developed. We need to develop assessment tools to ensure authenticity and the right level of representation and engagement of children. This is a very important need for us and one of the reasons we put it first and foremost.

Second, to produce real results, we must integrate child protection into all interventions. To address the full range of factors that contribute to the violation of children's rights, child protection must be integrated into other interventions. For example, work in maternal newborn child health dovetails with work in birth registration. That's very critical. Education is an area we can speak to with our extensive experience. We must invest in building the skills and engaging educators and youth leaders, and we must leverage the types of investment that Canada is making in pre-primary, primary, and secondary education, and integrate child-centred methodology. This is something that we as Canadians take for granted. It's seen in the way a Canadian classroom looks, but it wasn't that long ago that we were sitting in rows ourselves and also getting a bit of a beating from our teachers.

These child-centred methodologies are critically important, and this is what we can use to help not only reduce corporal punishment but provide that safe and child-friendly learning environment. It's still appalling to me that we walk into so many classrooms in developing countries where we see classrooms of 80 or 100 students, and corporal punishment is still seen as accepted. In over 78 countries, corporal punishment in classrooms is still legal. This is one of the things we have to look at.

The other thing that is core to this is making child protection a cross-cutting developing issue. I'm old enough to remember when gender was new. Now gender is a cross-cutting normative part of how we do development work. I hope for the day when child protection is also integrated into all of the different initiatives that we fund, invest in, and engage in within Canada.

The third recommendation would be to build community capacity and mechanisms. This must be at the core of any meaningful intervention. As I mentioned before, systems and laws can't in and of themselves protect children. Building community capacity is critical to preventing and responding to child protection risks. We've seen first-hand how strong and equipped communities can be a driving force to raise awareness of, prevent, monitor, and respond to child protection issues.

One recent example was what happened in Benin, where Right To Play works with something called “child saviour committees”, as the kids in the communities call them. They're comprised of children, community members, and a village chief. They prevent and help respond to child rights and protection issues. We're working in communities that have very serious violations.

Recently, in one particular community, a 16-year-old girl was sexually abused by her brother. Culturally, she would have been forced to marry him as a sacrifice to the rain gods. The committee reported the case to the social promotion centre, which worked with the king to make an alternative sacrifice. The committee in this case, in collaboration with civil society and with the government-supported programs, supported the young girl in accessing the child protection services. She was able to access legal, health, physical, and psychosocial support. This example shows how these systems need to work together with community-based systems.

Canada needs to invest in these community-based mechanisms that build on existing community strengths and to strengthen the relationship between community-based networks and local and national efforts.

The fourth recommendation would be around collaboration and coordination, something that we as Canadians do very well. We know that the global community is increasingly recognizing that the exploitation of and violence towards children remains a major barrier to broader development goals, and it's undermining the very important gains we're having in health, education, and economic growth. Concerted efforts to firmly situate child protection in global dialogues and coordinate and focus efforts globally are required.

Forming alliances that engage bilateral and multilateral partners, political leaders, civil society, private sector, and children and youth themselves at all levels—at the local level, national level, and international level—is critical. We've seen the effectiveness of this approach first-hand.

I want to give a couple of examples where this notion of collaboration has been very effective. One of them, we know, is maternal, newborn, and child health, the Muskoka initiative. It's very much about collaboration and bringing initiatives together. Canada has played a leadership role in acting as a convenor. Another area was Scaling Up Nutrition, a little known but high-impact initiative where Canada championed and brought together the nutrition community to see investments now in multiple countries by other governments, by other private sector donors. Collaboration is very critical.

Fifth and last, I want to echo what was said by my colleagues at War Child, and that is to prioritize child protection as not only essential in the development sector but also in the humanitarian sector. At Right To Play, we've also seen first-hand how developing protective environments contribute to the safety and the well-being of children before, during, and after emergency.

In closing, as Canada looks to the role it can play in the protection of children and youth, with a focus on the prevention of human trafficking, early forced marriages, sex trade, FGM, and online abuse of children, focused efforts to support meaningful child participation, robust coordination and collaboration across sectors and stakeholders, multi-sectoral approaches to remove barriers and risks to children's protection are what will ensure that children not only survive but thrive.

As we mark the 25th anniversary of the Convention on the Rights of the Child—in Canada, the 10th anniversary of A Canada Fit For Children—it's a pivotal moment to take strong leadership in child protection globally.

With strong Canadian networks such as the International Child Protection Network of Canada, leading international NGOs such as Right To Play and War Child, both globally recognized, built in Canada by Canadians, headquartered in Canada, in collaboration with the Government of Canada, we have the solutions collectively in hand. Together we can create real impact and help ensure that every child is safe and equipped to reach her or his full potential.

Thank you very much.

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

Thank you very much.

We'll start our first round of questions.

Mr. Dewar, seven minutes, please.

[Paul Dewar, NDP, Ottawa Centre, ON]

Thank you, Chair.

Thank you to our guests. Both of the presentations were very concise and very helpful for our work. You're our first witnesses as we do this study, so thank you.

I'll start with War Child. The recent events in Nigeria and in CAR, Central African Republic, give us a couple of good examples of how to deal with the issue of child protection and maybe how to innovate and improve the approach. I think in the case of Nigeria, there's a state there; it has problems in the north, as we know. It's the fastest-growing economy, yet there are ten million children who are not in school, six million who are girls. Of course, the recent events have grabbed the attention of the world. In that case, it seems we have a government that seems unwilling at times to actually fulfill their responsibilities under some of these international conventions.

In the case of CAR, it seems that we have a state...well, there isn't a state, in essence, as we would normally design a state or reference a state. It seems unable to fulfill the requirements of protecting children. So in the one case they're unwilling and in the other case unable.

I was struck with your points, Dr. Nutt, around building the right kind of capacity—in other words, the right kind of response—and that it has to be tailored to the different situations. I've given two recent conditions that we've been seized with. You mentioned Syria, which our committee just finished a study on.

The question is, how do we build that into the response? I agree with you in terms of going beyond just the shelter, water, and basic needs that we normally associate with child protection. But in the case of Nigeria, for example, there's seemingly an unwillingness to act from the state—or, in the case of CAR, an inability to.

When you're enumerating these issues around child protection you note that we need to expand and provide the safer spaces, and education, and employment—I couldn't agree with you more—cash for work programs, for instance, as well as setting up schools that function as soon as possible. But how do you do that in those two scenarios?

[Dr. Samantha Nutt]

Thank you. That's a very thoughtful question.

Lorna, do you want to handle that question, or do you want me to go ahead?

[Dr. Lorna Read, Chief Operating Officer, War Child Canada]

I'll start with a couple of points, and then I'll turn it back over to you, Sam.

I think one thing we've certainly learned from our experience is that we need the ability to act in a timely fashion. We need the ability to be on the ground and to have a response mechanism that is not necessarily only, as Samantha said, primarily just looking at the basic needs but is a response mechanism that from the get-go engages local community, local partners, and those on the ground—who are on the ground, who are going to be on the ground, regardless of the situation and the scenarios—and to engage them in a kind of dialogue around what we look at as response and prevention.

So we need response mechanisms vis-à-vis the issues that might be of immediate concern for children and for the communities, but we also need to build in right away a dialogue around prevention in the long-term strategy. I think in both situations, this is where you see the urgency of a situation that's unfolding. There are not necessarily those mechanisms in place that allow an organization—I mean, we feel it for War Child—to be able to get in in such a timely way and to start the kind of dialogue that we know will be productive over a longer term.

[Paul Dewar, NDP, Ottawa Centre, ON]

What are the barriers on that? Sorry to interrupt, but I'm very interested in this.

[Dr. Lorna Read]

Security is a primary barrier, and the resources that are required to be able to be as secure as possible in that environment. Also, I think, what we're all immersed in now is the debate around what is a humanitarian situation and at what point is there a response mechanism and what does that look like. Our experience is that these—in both situations that you mention also—will be protracted, will be long term, and there's a long-term investment that's needed as soon as possible. And that's the most efficient intervention.

Local communities see the spurts of money in other situations and they're not sure of longevity of it; they're not sure, if they get it now, there will be a commitment for it six months or a year out. So the ability to have those kind of dialogues up front builds the trust and the infrastructure that you need locally to be effective and to be effective over a long term.

[Dr. Samantha Nutt]

I would echo that: it's the capacity to be able to deploy quickly and to know that those resources are there for a longer period of time. But I'm going to be honest with you, because I think....

This is a challenge that we face all around the world. We are in Darfur in Sudan, dealing with the regime of Omar al-Bashir; we are in South Sudan in Malakal, which just imploded, doing protection initiatives with children; and we are in eastern Congo. Dealing with governments that are either unwilling or unable to respond to the protection needs of their own population is, unfortunately, par for the course in our line of work. The real answer to your question is that NGOs in and of themselves are not the solution, but they are part of a solution if it's handled correctly and if it's handled swiftly and efficiently.

Within that, I would say that if you look at the example of CAR, or at the example of Nigeria, even in those contexts where governments are unable or unwilling, with the right kinds of linkages that Lorna has already discussed, with the right kind of programming model that actually meaningfully engages those local actors, that immediately identifies those protection gaps and needs, that identifies those local actors—not international actors, but local actors—that are immediately able to respond and have legitimacy and the support of that local community, if you can actually work with Canadian organizations to build the capacity to respond much more effectively and efficiently and if they know that there is a longer more meaningful relationship and investment that's taking place, then you certainly can offset some of that tide.

It doesn't mean that you'll be able to prevent it in every instance, but it does mean that you have a strong enough presence and a greater degree of resiliency within the population to be able to at least address these issues meaningfully as they come up.

[Paul Dewar, NDP, Ottawa Centre, ON]

Thank you, Chair.

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

Thank you very much.

Ms. Brown, please, for seven minutes.

[Lois Brown, Conservative, Newmarket—Aurora, ON]

I hope I have lots of time, Chair, as I have lots of questions.

Dr. Nutt, at what point do you insert yourself into a situation? What are the signs that you're looking for? Are there things that you can do proactively if you see conflict starting to emerge? Do you go in at that point, or are you not allowed in until such time as it's a full-blown conflict?

As well, we were talking about collaboration. Are there other partners with whom you are able to work? In Syria, for instance, we know that the Red Cross/Red Crescent are on the ground. Do you collaborate with those organizations?

[Dr. Samantha Nutt]

Thank you.

Yes, we do. Our entire programming model is based on collaborating with local community-based organizations, or CBOs, as we often call them, local non-governmental organizations, and local communities. We also collaborate quite extensively with a number of other international organizations on the ground. For example, we have strong relationships with UNICEF, UNDP, UNHCR, and other organizations, partly because we're such a specialized agency.

In terms of how we decide where we're going to be, and the mechanisms that exist for us to identify what those needs are, that's an iterative process that our office is engaged in all the time, in the countries in which we're working, and the countries in which we believe we ought to be working. Most often what constrains that decision-making process is resources, it's nothing more than that. However, security is something we take very, very seriously, and we look at that too.

A number of different early warning mechanisms exist. Certainly, it was no surprise to us and to our team that South Sudan imploded the way it did. The timing of the implosion was a surprise to all of us, but the fact that it was heading in a certain direction...there was a lot of evidence to suggest that this was what was going to happen.

What I would say to you is that it is imperfect, but what we have found is that, over time, if you are able to withstand those ups and downs and that inevitable ebb and flow that is a conflict or post-conflict civil war environment, it is rarely intense forever, and nor is it peaceful forever, if you are in those in-between phases. But if you're an organization that is prepared to stick it out, if you have the resiliency and the determination, when those local partners and local communities recognize that you're invested for a longer period of time, that also contributes to the success of that program.

We have seen that in Afghanistan, where we've been on the ground for more than 12 year now, with funding from CIDA and other partners, now DFATD. We've seen that in eastern Congo and elsewhere. It's this sense that international organizations land, they set up, they put their banners everywhere, they're running around doing high-profile, high-visibility things, and as soon as the cameras begin to go home and public interest begins to wane and donors develop fatigue, all of those gains that were made begin to evaporate. That's when you also see higher levels of local corruption and various other things, because people are actually only trying to get what they can get for as long as they can get it. Until we break that kind of model, until we break the attitudes around that and begin to make longer-term investments, that's always going to be a risk.

For us, it's a constant process to identify where we can have an impact, what the security risk will be to our staff, and who is on the ground that we can invest in. We don't go in with a prescribed version of what we think we should be doing. We go in and we ask questions, we conduct comprehensive needs assessments, we talk to local experts, international experts, we identify the gaps and we focus on the protection strategies—access to justice, education, including accelerated learning, safe and protected spaces for kids, and livelihoods and economic development—for children and youth.

Did you want to add to that?

[Dr. Lorna Read]

No, that's fine.

[Lois Brown, Conservative, Newmarket—Aurora, ON]

Hopefully what you're doing, Ms. Guindon, is part of the set-up to ensure that some of those building blocks are in place. You and I were talking a little bit earlier about some of the work you're doing in China. Could you tell the committee about those initiatives?

[Evelyne Guindon]

China is a country that was developed with Right To Play China as a legacy of the Chinese games. The area of focus in China has been primarily research. It is the academic community that is really interested in looking at these issues, particularly as it relates to child labour issues. What it has elicited there is an academic community that is interested in researching this.

Various development settings are unique in their own ways. Again, as I mentioned, the community-based approach is incredibly important. It's incredibly important with regard to preparedness. We work in many countries where conflict can erupt, violence is prone to erupting, and I think the preparedness is critical.

What is also very, very important is aligning with UN partners—UNHCR and UNICEF are some of the key partners we work with, as well as War Child, I'm sure—and working with the cluster system; that's one of the areas that make an awful lot of sense. But working at the community level, and building that trust at the community, is really critical.

[Lois Brown, Conservative, Newmarket—Aurora, ON]

Do I have any time left, Chair?

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

Yes, you have a minute and a half.

[Lois Brown, Conservative, Newmarket—Aurora, ON]

Oh, my word.

You spoke about the discipline used in schools. My daughter is currently teaching in west Africa. She's teaching grade 4 and 5 English in a basic school in Tarkwa, Ghana. When she was first signing her papers with the headmaster, he handed her a cane and said, “This is what we use for discipline.” My daughter said, “Well, I won't manage my classroom that way.” He told her, “The kids expect it. This is what we do.” My daughter said, “I won't manage my class that way.” It's created some other challenges, because the kids know that she won't use the cane in the classroom, and she has had to develop other mechanisms to class-manage. But it was just the way it is.

Do you ever interface with ministers of education in developing countries in order to help them understand that children live what they learn?

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

If you could answer that question in five seconds, we'd really appreciate it.

[Voices]

Oh, oh!

[Evelyne Guindon]

I can answer that by saying there's an awful lot of evidence that shows that children benefit academically and want to come to school when they can be in a safe environment. There are plenty of governments that we can showcase and highlight that are taking that step.

The key is that we've been investing in getting children in school—a big push to get children in school—and we need to be making more investments in what actually happens inside those classrooms and looking at quality education and safety.

[The Chair, Conservative, Dean Allison]

Thank you.