Thank you, Chair.
Thank you very much to our witnesses for being here. Mark, very nice to see you again. Thanks for the tour that I had of your facility in Markham. Thanks to all of you for the good work that you do.
All of you know that Canada has three priorities with our development dollars. One is food security, the second is children and youth, and the third is sustainable economic development. All of those have to work in tandem, I believe, in order for anything to be accomplished on any particular issue. Obviously this issue of child protection is one that we take very seriously.
Mark, you talked a little bit about some of the initiatives that we have championed. It was our former minister of foreign affairs who raised the issue of early and forced marriage a year ago. In fact, in 2013 we raised that issue at the United Nations General Assembly and continue to advocate to make sure that these things are addressed from the position of the United Nations.
We've said over and over again, in this next tranche of money that Canada has put forward for maternal, newborn, and child health, out of the $3.5 billion, how important it is that we see civil registrations as part of what happens in MNCH, because without legitimizing the existence of a child we have no way of protecting that child for the future.
With that as my lead-up, I do have a couple of questions that I'd like to pose. First of all, to our ladies from the YMCA, you talked about youth empowerment and about giving young people the tools for sustainable employment and being able to create a life for themselves. I wonder if you could just tell the committee a little bit about that education process that you have. What are the tools? Do you have any private sector engagement? We have a very robust program with WUSC, for instance. I met some of the interns in Malawi just a month ago. They are young Canadians who are working over there. But we also have programs with Barrick Gold in Burkina Faso, where young people are getting real employment tools that they can take into the workplace. Do you have any private sector engagement? Could you talk a little bit about those programs and how the kids are doing who are coming out of them?