My name is Evelyne Guindon.
First of all, I would like to wish everyone good afternoon.
Thank you for inviting us to appear before the committee.
I'm going do my presentation in English, but please don't hesitate at any point to ask me questions in either language.
I've had 25 years of experience as a development worker. I started off my career working in sexual and reproductive health. I've worked in environmental sectors. I started off in the volunteer sector. Working for Cuso has been a very meaningful part of my career. What's also very important is that my practice throughout my career has been framed by my steadfast belief in the power of partnership. I've worked in all sectors that are working at the forefront of development. Over the years, I've learned how important as well as how complex partnership and dialogue are, and how key and critical they are to addressing poverty and inequality. You'll hear that reflected in my presentation today.
Cuso International, for those of you who don't know it well, is a long-standing Canadian international development organization working to eradicate poverty and reduce inequality around the world. Since our inception in 1961, we've mobilized more than 16,000 highly skilled volunteers to build the capacity of local partners, governments, civil society, and private sector partners. We've done so in over 80 countries.
We're currently working in 19 countries in Asia, Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean, and now here in Canada in partnership with indigenous communities. We welcome the current government's commitment to review and refine bilateral development assistance so that it reaches those who need it most.
Today we have six key points in response to the pertinent questions that you presented for our consideration.
First, we believe that bilateral development assistance should focus on supporting poor and marginalized people and communities rather than just poor countries. We believe that the current country-of-focus model offers both advantages and limitations. Focusing narrowly on certain countries means that programming is confined by geography and is less responsive in times of crisis or in times of opportunity. Middle-income countries are home to five billion of the world's seven billion people and 73% of the world's poorest people.
I'll give you an example. Colombia is considered an upper-middle country, but it's also one of the most unequal countries in the world. More than 13 million Colombians live in poverty, and more than six million are internally displaced people. Colombia is second in the world after Syria in terms of displaced people. Therefore, we believe that poverty, inequality, and exclusion are the factors that should guide our efforts and should be considered outside the overly simplistic categorization of poor countries, which ignores the existence of pockets of extreme poverty and exclusion.
Second, effective development programming requires long-term vision and commitment. Meaningful and successful initiatives do take time. Our most successful partnerships with local stakeholders took years to develop and to yield results. The support we provided through technical assistance and volunteers allowed partners to become self-sufficient and to deliver on their mission and projects—which is what my colleague was talking about—rather than simply being beneficiaries.
Our recommendation to the committee is to make as few changes as possible to existing priority countries in the short term, thereby ensuring the stability of programs and partnerships in the countries where we collectively work.
Linked to this, we encourage funding opportunities and mechanisms that promote long-term accompaniment. Achieving sustainable results through international assistance requires a long-term approach, and it is important that funding cycles reflect this reality. This means honouring five-year predictable funding cycles, providing opportunities to access funding for subsequent phases of successful scalable programs, and, ideally, providing longer-term funding beyond the five-year cycle.
We must build synergies between aid, diplomacy, and trade, but we must avoid models in which trade defines aid priorities. As well, we must build synergies between multilateral, bilateral, and other funding tracks, such as the partnerships for development innovation branch.
Third, the Government of Canada should align its development agenda with the SDGs, the sustainable development goals, building on the previous thematic focus areas of food security, sustainable economic growth, and children and youth, but with a wider and more holistic approach to development programming.
Cuso's approach has been to build its expertise and programming in particular thematic areas where we feel we can be most effective, where we can create a robust body of knowledge and expertise, and where there are strong returns on investment. Today we focus on inclusive and sustainable economic growth, access to quality health services, gender equality, and social inclusion.
Putting women and girls at the centre of Canada's development agenda is critical. The promotion and protection of women's and girls' rights and gender equality is our priority. As an organization leading innovative programming in mental health, reproductive health, and midwifery and capitalizing on Canadian expertise to deliver that impact, we would really like to see the Government of Canada move beyond maternal, newborn, and child health programming to support women's and girls' rights for a more holistic approach.
We would also encourage increased resources and programming directed towards young people. Many of the world's 1.8 billion young people are concentrated in the countries in which Cuso International works. This creates both demand and opportunity for working with them to improve education, health, and employment opportunities and can constitute a dynamic force of political change and social transformation.
While Canada may not focus on all 17 SDGs, we encourage the committee to consider key thematic priorities that work together to reduce poverty, inequality, and exclusion, all with gender and social inclusion lenses.
Fourth, as an organization that focuses on capacity-building, we believe that strengthening and building on existing country capacity is key to supporting an enabling environment for development aid to be effective. Enhancing local partners' capacity and fostering local ownership are good practices and reduce the risk of dependency on foreign aid. Even in cases of humanitarian crises and long-term, protracted emergencies, building the capacity of local partners, including civil society, to address long-term development needs has to be included in the plans, or else we see only short-term needs addressed while poverty, instability, and fragility continue.
Cuso International has a successful track record in building meaningful partnerships and mobilizing highly skilled Canadian volunteers from our rich mosaic. This includes diaspora volunteers and e-volunteers, people who sit in the comfort of their homes and volunteer by using electronic means. We encourage the prioritizing of initiatives that focus on building the capacity of local agents of change to design and deliver effective and innovative solutions to development problems within their own contexts and needs.
We also encourage the Government of Canada to complement humanitarian interventions with long-term initiatives that focus on building resilience and local capacity through strategic partnerships between organizations with different but complementary types of expertise.
Fifth is promoting stable, flexible, and innovative programming that recognizes the transaction cost and benefit of partnerships. Moving from supporting initiatives based on fixed models or program parameters towards funding mechanisms that are flexible and that promote piloting, testing, and scaling up of innovative cross-sectoral initiatives gives Canadian organizations like ours the space to collaborate, think, and innovate inside project life cycles. The Government of Canada should consider facilitating partnerships to ensure cross-sectoral innovation and contributions.
Canada's NGOs need funding to engage meaningfully in these types of collaborative efforts. My experience has shown that the impact is greatest when collaboration between sectors is intrinsic to the program, but it takes time and effort and funding to do it right. We can no longer collaborate from the side of our desk, which is what we do, and we’ve been doing it through organizations like the Devonshire Initiative and other wonderful initiatives that you might have heard of already today, but it must be central to our approach to delivering aid effectively.
Sixth, we encourage continued support to international volunteering as an effective tool to eradicate poverty, inequality, and exclusion. Volunteering is a primary and integral cultural value and is recognized as central to the fabric of a healthy and democratic civil society. It is a primary means of expressing local, national, and global citizenship. Canada is recognized the world over as having developed the most extensive and innovative models of volunteering in international development. We are two examples here with our organizations, and it's a reflection on the role played by Cuso International and many others.
Volunteers can contribute to the transformational delivery of the SDGs across all thematic areas, but I want to bring your attention to goal 17, which explicitly highlights that volunteer groups are critical for implementation of all the goals. Volunteering is an effective and cost-effective way to mobilize Canadian expertise and, as stated by Robert Greenhill, Canada's excellence to build the capacity of those local partners and obtain results.
Highly skilled volunteers embody Canadian values of global citizenship, openness, diversity, and respect. We recommend the volunteer co-operation program be central to Canada's international development programming. International volunteerism should not be restricted to north-south interventions, but it should encourage national volunteerism, south-south volunteerism, south-north volunteerism, as a means of maximizing the human resources available all around the world.
In summary, we recommend a focus on poor people and communities; a long-term vision and commitment to build sustainable partnerships for development; building on previous thematic areas and aligning with selected SDGs but with a more holistic approach and a focus on women and youth; supporting initiatives that build local capacity; prioritizing stable, flexible, and innovative programming; and continued support for Canada's leadership in international volunteering to eradicate poverty, inequality, and exclusion.
Thank you so much.
Thank you very much for your invitation