Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
Good afternoon, everyone.
I would like to thank the committee for inviting us to appear before you today.
World Vision is a child-focused, Christian relief, development and advocacy organization, working in nearly 100 countries around the world.
We work in the world's toughest places, actively supporting and empowering communities to take control of their own futures by overcoming poverty, injustice, and fragility.
We're pleased to share our thoughts on the committee's study on countries of focus for Canada's bilateral development assistance. We understand that the committee is looking to address a number of issues during the course of this study. For our time this afternoon, we'd like to focus on how Canada's international assistance framework can effectively address the circumstances facing the least developed countries.
Let me start with an evident acknowledgement: the world is rapidly changing. Conflict, violence, inequalities, climate change, and the mass displacement of people have changed the way we look at poverty and development and challenge us to find new ways of working.
The UN refugee agency states that globally, one in every 122 humans is now either a refugee, internally displaced, or seeking asylum. If this were the population of a country, it would be the world's 24th largest. It's realities like this that strengthen our resolve to collectively envision and work with urgency toward a new reality, one in which poverty, hunger, and preventable deaths are eradicated, a world in which no one is left behind.
What will it take to get there? We must adapt our approaches and make them fit for purpose. World Vision itself is in the process of evolving its own efforts and its own approaches. We are increasingly working in fragile contexts—building resilience and sustainability, empowering citizens to hold their governments accountable, and investing in innovative partnerships. We know that there is immense opportunity before us.
In order to take advantage of these opportunities, we believe Canada can review its international assistance and design a framework that is focused on the poorest and most vulnerable in the world's toughest places, one that responds to evolving context by defining adaptable approaches. These principles have implications regarding both where and how we must focus our efforts, which I would like to unpack for you this afternoon.
Canada is a country known for upholding human rights and empowering the most disadvantaged around the world. While we've seen tremendous progress with the millennium development goals, the impact has been uneven among countries, and even within them. We need, then, to ask, who has been left behind, where they are, and how we reach them.
Let's start first with who has been left behind. They are the unregistered—children who are not officially acknowledged at birth; the missed—mothers and newborns who die in childbirth; the isolated—indigenous children and ethnic minorities living in remote rural areas and urban slums. They are the untraced—child labourers and trafficked children; the neglected—orphaned and homeless ones; the unclaimed—refugees, the stateless, and the internally displaced. Most fundamentally, they are women and girls. It is critical that we identify these individuals and keep them front and centre as we walk through these specific considerations.
Now that we've identified who these individuals are, let's focus on where we might find them.
The majority of these individuals are in places where the burden of instability, poverty, hunger and mortality are the highest, yet where the biggest gains are to be made: in fragile contexts and where pockets of fragility exist. These are the places where there is conflict and violence, widespread violations of human rights, limited access to justice and rule of law, where there is economic instability and a lower capacity to adapt to shocks and stress, and where the government may be unwilling or unable to meet the needs of all or some of its residents.
In the next decade, some of the world's most acutely vulnerable people will be living in fragile and conflict-afflicted cities and states. While we may think of traditional places like Afghanistan, South Sudan, and Somalia, they also include places like Mali, Honduras, and Nepal. For example, while Honduras and El Salvador are not traditionally known as fragile, violence in urban settings has had an adverse affect on society and its development, including things such as youth employment.
In World Vision's community development program, we're addressing the root causes of violence through investing in rehabilitation, diversion, and skills training initiatives with youth in or affected by gang violence.
Our experience in such a fragile context has shown us that significant progress is possible, so our focus should be where the risks are higher but the potential gains greater.
This brings us to recommendations about how Canada's international assistance should be designed to best reach the regions of the poorest and most vulnerable in these contexts.
In order to effectively undertake the exercise of country prioritization, we recommend that Canada not only look at countries as a whole but also recognize that pockets of vulnerability exist within countries and across regions. This should be done in coordination, of course, with the international donor community.
Let's illustrate with the examples of Jordan and Lebanon.
Jordan has been prioritized for development and humanitarian support largely as a result of its alignment to donor values, legitimacy of government, and relative stability as compared with others in the region. Canada's bilateral support to Jordan has been highly influential in ensuring effective policy development to support the growing number of refugees, including supporting refugees' ability to enter the labour market and the education sector's ability to accommodate Syrian children.
Lebanon, on the other hand, is potentially on the brink of significant escalation of conflict that will destabilize the entire region even further. In part because of poor governance and limited bilateral investment, Lebanon has been unable to effectively manage the significant influx of refugees.
While priority countries have allowed for predictability of support and reduced aid fragmentation, there needs to be a mechanism in place that allows for the nimble shifting of resources regionally, as the burden of other countries can often overwhelm priority countries.
Additionally, we recommend that once the country prioritization has been determined, an adaptive approach to bilateral development assistance be put in place. This is to ensure that country strategies and programs are responsive to who the most vulnerable populations are, wherever they may be, recognizing the kaleidoscopic, evolving context that we've described here today.
One of the challenges with the current approach to funding of the government's bilateral development programs is that it does not enable partners to use funding to adapt to changes in rapidly evolving contexts. For example, the way World Vision's own community development program model addresses this challenge is to immediately allocate 20% of private development funding to prevention and response. Repurposing such funds allows us to address emerging situations, as was the case with an unfolding food crisis in the Sahel in 2012, or currently in southern Africa with the impact of El Niño.
What would be most effective at an institutional level is an approach that sees improved cross-departmental collaboration and analysis, working together with national governments, regional bodies, and Canadian civil society to effectively respond to and prioritize these changing situations, ombined with multi-year strategic efforts, such as block grants that allow for community-led response to fluid contexts.
Such measures allow us to protect development gains, bridge the relief development divide, and transition emergency responses to recovery as soon as appropriate and possible.
In closing, we see a clear opportunity for the government to direct its focus, based on these principles, towards ensuring that we reach the unregistered, the missed, the isolated, the untraced, the neglected, the unclaimed, especially women and girls—those who are the poorest and most vulnerable in the world's toughest places.
Thank you for inviting us to be here today and for including our field-informed perspective in this important study. We look forward to your questions.