Now, I'm about to leave in a couple of months, and sadly, we have this more than two billion dollars in undisclosed debt. The whole donor community that provides direct budget support to the Mozambican government has just declared that they are suspending it, including Canada. The United States has also indicated that they're going to review their assistance.
What's really interesting about the United States' reviewing their assistance is that most of the individuals who are HIV-positive and who receive antiretroviral treatment do so because of PEPFAR, the President's emergency plan for AIDS relief. If the United States draws down some of those commitments.... The USAID does not provide direct support to the Mozambican government, but even drawing down some of the resources they provide to organizations that give HIV antiretroviral treatment is really worrisome.
In terms of Canada and our engagement in Mozambique, I think that in a way this can present an opportunity for us to engage in a more meaningful way with civil society organizations here. One of the pernicious consequences of direct budget support is that it's very time-consuming for development officials to implement. The Canadian development officials I know here in Mozambique really don't have the time to engage with civil society organizations in the manner that they would have 10 or 15 years ago when this kind of funding mechanism wasn't in place.
One suggestion I outlined concerning the Canada fund for local initiatives—which is operated out of this building, in fact—is that it could support women's organizations in a much more meaningful way.
One final point is that I also think that, with much of the money of Canada and other key donors going into direct budget support, civil society organizations have suffered here. There's a very strong organization called Women and Law in sub-Saharan Africa that has led advocacy on legislation on domestic violence, the penal code, etc. They're almost out of money. They're basically struggling to survive.
In every crisis there's an opportunity to re-shift and refocus and rethink how we engage. I think that in Mozambique this presents an interesting and important opportunity under difficult circumstances.