The issue of early and forced marriage is not exclusively a women's issue. It's a human rights issue. It's increasingly a development issue. I think it's something that frankly has gone on for many centuries without being brought up and discussed.
For the last two years I have made this an issue. There is an excellent group called Girls Not Brides, which operates in Europe out of the United Kingdom. Princess Mabel of the Netherlands is the chair. There is also a group of elders including Mary Robinson and Desmond Tutu, who have advocated against this.
Every week tens of thousands of these young girls are forced into early marriage and are never able to finish their education. By extension their children also never get an education. So it becomes a cycle of dependency. They are never able to fully realize their potential, and the huge challenge this presents to the economic development of their country is profound.
We are working with other countries to begin to have this conversation internationally. We are putting some resources into this. I raised this at the Commonwealth in 2011 in Perth and it was sort of suggested to me that as this is an uncomfortable issue for some countries, that perhaps Canada wouldn't mind not pressing it so hard. If a country like Canada doesn't raise these issues, who is going to? We have tried to reach out and bring other people into a leadership role. The foreign minister of Ghana has started to work with us as have the development minister of the Netherlands and the new foreign minister of Italy. There is even some work being done in the United Arab Emirates by one of the sheikas.
This is an issue we want to introduce into the discussion at international fora. We had the first stand-alone resolution at the United Nations. We will never see Africa or South Asia reach their full potential until we grapple with this significant problem. We're in the early stages of putting it on the global map. We have put some financial resources into it, such as grants and contributions, and we're open to doing more work in this regard and encouraging other countries to join us.
This is along with the issue of rape as a weapon of war, on which Canada has worked with the United Kingdom, putting financial resources into that and joining the effort on that.
There is the early maternal health initiative that the Prime Minister has led, particularly with the accountability initiative on which he and the President of Tanzania have taken action. These are not women's issues; these are human rights issues. These are expressions of Canadian values, ones we would like to see.
It's interesting that when Minister Yelich took over her position as Minister of State for Foreign Affairs, in one of our first discussions I said we were not going to compartmentalize these types of issues as women's issues and put them on a different tier. These are fundamental priorities for Canada. They are not just human rights issues but development issues and economic issues, because if these young women don't reach their full potential, how are Ethiopia, Sudan, or India ever going to realize their full economic potential?