Thank you.
When you look at the situation in Somalia, you see it's quite a bit different from the situations of some of our African brothers and sisters, and it is the same when it comes to challenges.
We have a culture of bringing up and nurturing and supporting our girls and women, but because of the situation on the ground, because of what happened in the civil war and the civil conflict, the biggest impact was on women and girls. Now we have dedicated an entire pillar in our national development plan for women, gender and human rights, because we realize some of the basics are not met when we look at their representation in the schools, in the marketplace and in politics. Although we tried recently to implement a quota of 30% of women members of Parliament, we achieved around 25%, which is 5% short. We aim to reach 30% or more in the next election.
When you consider empowering women in their level of education or in other areas, because of our culture, which empowers women despite the challenges we have, hopefully in the next few years we will be able to achieve great success, but we cannot do it alone. We don't have the resources to do everything we have put together in the plans. We don't have the resources in place to achieve the goals and priorities we set out, so we are looking at places like Canada and other friendly countries to help us realize those plans, to realize implementation of those policies and help us to move Somalia forward.
If we empower and invest in our girls and our women in every sector, actually it is a no-brainer that the country will go further and will achieve success.