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?