Thank you, Mr. Chairman and committee members.
It is an honour for the UN Democracy Fund and for me as a Canadian to be here and to thank Canada for being a donor to UNDEF.
I will make my presentation in English, but I can answer questions in French also.
In the decade-plus since this committee's 2007 report, UNDEF has garnered rich experience relevant to the call for an arm's-length Canada foundation for international democratic development.
In order to keep this presentation brief, I am sacrificing details and examples, but we stand ready to provide further information during the questions session and subsequently.
UNDEF was privileged a few years back to assist the then-nascent European Instrument for Democracy and Human Rights. It would be an honour to be of similar service to Canada.
Over the past 12 years, UNDEF has helped to design, fund and generate more than 750 projects in more than 120 countries. Our two-year grants amount to between $100,000 and $300,000 U.S. each, and they support partners in countries at various stages of democratization.
UNDEF's work is funded entirely by voluntary contributions. In addition to Canada, we count 40-plus donor countries. Many of these are middle- and low-income countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America. Their support sustains a staff of seven people at UN headquarters. We're a team of seven people. That's it. We have no field offices of our own. We minimize our staff and operational budget by leveraging the extensive presence and infrastructure of the United Nations and other partners. We help with assessing the viability of applicants in some cases, or monitoring project milestones.
We often find ourselves at the forefront of grassroots struggles against rising authoritarianism and against the closing of space for civil society, yet our experience shows that even in challenging environments, entry points for democratic development can be found.
A government wary of outside involvement in areas deemed political will, nevertheless, consent to a capacity-building project in what is thought of as the social sphere, let's say a project aimed at improving access to local infrastructure and services for people with disabilities or those with HIV. Another example might be a project aimed at stimulating youth involvement in local environmental stewardship. I can give examples during the question period.
While the immediate aim, that is, to meet a community need, is politically neutral, participants come away with skills and capacities they can bring to bear in asserting other rights and in holding duty bearers to account, and therefore to help build a democratic culture.
This is why UNDEF's thematic areas range from more narrowly political ones, like support for electoral processes, the rule of law and human rights, to more foundational ones, like youth engagement, gender equality, community activism, and strengthening civil society interaction with government.
When I served in peacekeeping with the UN stabilization mission in Mali, I saw just how difficult—impossible, really—it was for vulnerable communities to assert their rights and interests where civil society is weak and disorganized. Drawing on those lessons, UNDEF has sought and supported projects that advance freedom of information and speech, and that enable Malian civil society to engage the defence and security sector.
In such challenging environments, and everywhere we work, local partnerships are absolutely critical. The vast majority of UNDEF funds go to local civil society organizations, small community groups often passed over by others in favour of larger, better-known entities practised in the administrative business of managing international projects.
By providing advice and mentoring, and by facilitating the exchange of lessons learned among grantees and partners, UNDEF strives to ensure that applicants will have the technical capacity to implement the project they are proposing. We do this because such organizations can make the most of relatively small sums of money, and because for change to be durable, it has to be locally driven. Put another way, we need to invest in the ability of local people to assert their rights and improve their well-being long after our involvement has ended.
I saw this for myself when serving with the UN Development Programme in Afghanistan, where many international actors merely subcontracted to intermediary NGOs rather than working with community groups and leaders who were addressing locally identified needs and priorities.
Of course, UNDEF also works with international NGOs, including Canada's own Journalists for Human Rights, which has done groundbreaking work in South Sudan and Syria and now is a partner in Mali, but UNDEF goes beyond operational collaboration with international civil society organizations. We include them in our governance structures where they serve alongside donor and recipient member states, eminent individuals and UN agencies. Because of this diversity of donors, advisers and governance partners, and because being a largely autonomous member of the UN family gives us multilateral bona fides, UNDEF often has an edge in situations where bilateral interests might be regarded with suspicion.
Mr. Chairman and members of the committee, much has been said about the difficult times in which we find ourselves and the challenges confronting the democratic experiment. I hope my remarks on behalf of the UN Democracy Fund will prove useful to you. I look forward to trying to answer your questions today, and we at UNDEF will be honoured to answer any questions you might have subsequently.
Thank you for this opportunity to be of service. Merci beaucoup.