Thank you.
Good morning, members of Parliament. Thank you for inviting us to present to the Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Development.
My name is Janine Maxwell, and I am here with my husband, Ian Maxwell. We are the co-founders of an NGO called Heart for Africa. While I grew up in Matheson, Ontario, which is between Kirkland Lake and Timmins, and my husband grew up in Crystal Beach, just down the road, we now live in Swaziland, Africa, on a sustainable farm that we call “Project Canaan”.
Swaziland is a small, landlocked country that borders on South Africa and Mozambique, with King Mswati III as the last absolute monarch on the continent of Africa. Swaziland has the highest HIV rate in the world. While statistics vary, we believe that the HIV rate is 46%. The average life expectancy is 29 years, and more than half the total population is orphaned and vulnerable children. Swaziland also has the fifth-highest infant mortality rate in the world.
Food insecurity is one of Swaziland’s largest problems, with 95% of all food consumed in the country being imported. Sixty-five per cent of all Swazi people depend on international food aid to receive one meal a day.
Furthermore, there are an estimated 15,000 households headed by orphans, where the eldest person at home is 15 years old or younger. The majority of children are severely malnourished because they do not have parents or adults to provide for them. Most of these children eat only one meal a day from Monday to Thursday, which is provided through the government-sponsored, internationally funded food program that I just mentioned. Friday through Sunday, there is often no food for these children.
To help this chronic and severe situation, Project Canaan was born. It is a large-scale farming initiative that focuses on hunger, orphans, poverty, and education—an acronym that spells HOPE. The land was purchased by the Heart for Africa charity in 2009, and it is title deed land. Our hunger initiative feeds 3,500 orphans and vulnerable children more than 74,000 hot meals every month through our network of 27 partners in the most rural communities of Swaziland.
Our orphan initiative works directly with the deputy prime minister's office, which has given us legal guardianship over 90 orphaned or abandoned children. They are all under the age of four. These children live at the children’s campus on Project Canaan and will stay with us until they complete their high school education.
Hopelessness drives women to dump newborn babies in pit latrines or place them in plastic bags and leave them on the side of the river to be eaten by river crabs. These are the children who now live at Project Canaan and are being cared for and raised in a loving community where they will grow and be educated. These children are the hope for the future of Swaziland.
Our poverty initiative is focused on employment and training. We employ more than 250 people on Project Canaan, each of them providing for an average of 13 people back at home. This means that 3,250 people directly benefit from our employment. We also train people in carpentry, jewellery-making, mechanics, child care, and agricultural practices.
Our education initiative includes the Project Canaan Academy, which was created to provide an excellent education for the children living on Project Canaan. We currently have a preschool and kindergarten, and will build a primary school and high school as the children grow up. Our medical clinic also provides education on HIV/AIDS, maternal health, and general health issues.
The Swazi government places a new baby with us every 12 days on average, so by the year 2020 Project Canaan will be home to 260-plus children. Our goal is to become self-sustainable by 2020. All of our initiatives are working towards that goal by either generating income or reducing our overall operating costs by producing food for consumption for our children, such as vegetables, dairy products, and, of course, eggs.
Food security is of utmost importance to us as an organization, and that is why the partnership with the Egg Farmers of Canada is so critical to our achieving our goals. On that note, I would like to introduce Mr. Tim Lambert, the CEO of Egg Farmers of Canada, to share more details about their involvement in our initiative.
Thank you.