Good afternoon everyone. I would like to thank the committee for inviting Save the Children to appear today.
My name is Marlen Mondaca, and I am the director of international programs at Save the Children. Save the Children is an organization that places children, boys and girls, and their rights at the centre of our actions. Children and their best interests are the central guiding principle of our work. Indeed, our founder Eglantyne Jebb was integral to the development of the 1923 declaration on children's rights that promoted the concept that children have individual rights. This declaration was adopted by the League of Nations in 1924 and then became the basis for the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, adopted by the UN in 1989.
Our history therefore as an organization working for and with children both on humanitarian and development programming, extends back almost 100 years and is guided by the principles of the convention. Given our history and long experience, I am therefore grateful for the opportunity to spend the next few minutes with you to share some of our thoughts as well as to put forward some key principles that can help inform the criteria that you set out when making decisions on the future of Canada's bilateral development assistance.
The first principle that I would like to put forward for your consideration is the importance of having our Canadian international assistance take a rights-based approach, putting people, especially girls and boys, at the centre of our investments and strategy. The global community has made progress over the last 25 years in moving away from a one-size-fits-all approach to a more rights-based one, which strengthens local governance and empowers citizens, including children. If we are to succeed in our efforts to reach the 2030 sustainable development goals, we will have to ensure that international assistance and development reflect rights-based principles including universality, equity, participation, interdependence, interrelatedness, and accountability.
When thinking about girls and boys, we often only view them through the lens of protection. We are conscious of our roles as adults and as parents to protect and provide for them. Children, however, are not mini-people with mini-rights. Children, like adults, have full individual human rights that must be respected. Girls and boys have agency and can, as their personal development permits, communicate their needs, shape their communities and institutions, and be agents of change for their present and future.
Children and youth have a right to participate in the decisions that affect their lives, and they must play a pivotal role in developing and implementing solutions to the challenges they face. From our programming experience, we know that when children and youth's voices are heard and taken into account, there are tremendous benefits for all stakeholders. Institutions, including schools and local and national governments, become more inclusive and accountable, and children's sense of belonging in their community grows. Through their active engagement, girls and boys experience citizenship-building, and they are able to develop skills for creating peaceful, democratic solutions to the issues they face. We are therefore very pleased to see child and youth participation as a continuing development priority.
At the heart of the sustainable development goals, or the SDGs, as they are called, is the principle that no one is left behind and that no goal is met unless it is met for everyone. This is the second principle I would like to put forward for your consideration.
Although the millennium development goals helped us to make great strides, we were not able to meet all of our goals, in part because of inequality due to gender but also due to race, ethnicity, or geography, simply where you live.
Let me first tackle gender inequality. Girls are still too often denied a voice in the decisions at household, community, and national levels. While progress has been made, gender inequality still permeates all aspects of societies and is a root cause of many barriers to sustainable development around the world.
Save the Children believes that it is critical to identify and work to transform the root causes of gender inequality. This requires addressing social norms and institutions that reinforce gender inequity.
Working with women, men, girls and boys, community and religious leaders, as well as advocating for and fostering legislation and policies that promote gender equality, is central to the work of addressing gender inequality.
Tackling gender alone is not sufficient. Race, ethnicity and geography must also be considered. We know, for example, that two-thirds of families who experience health, nutrition, and education poverty, in low and lower-middle income countries, are headed by a person from a racial or ethnic minority group.
Save the Children has in fact recently released new research that shows that inequities in life chances among excluded racial and ethnic groups are worsening in the majority of countries for which data is available. As an example, indigenous groups make up 5% of the global population, but 15% of people living in poverty globally.
In Peru, a middle-income country, indigenous Quechua children have life chances equivalent to the average for girls and boys in Gambia, one of the poorest countries in the world. In fact, a Quechua child is 1.6 times more likely to die before their fifth birthday, and more than twice as likely to be stunted, as are children from a Spanish-speaking background.
The third principle that I would like to propose for your consideration is that Canada's approach must ensure we focus on the most excluded girls and boys wherever they live. When speaking of fragility in the context of international development, we must acknowledge that it is neither static, nor is it defined by borders. Fragility is dynamic. Stable states can become fragile due to conflict or climate crisis. In stable states, there are fragile communities because of structural inequality, most often based on race, ethnicity, gender or geographic remoteness.
While a focus on least developed and fragile states is necessary, Canada's development assistance strategy must also be able to address poor and marginalized populations within countries, and fragile contexts within states. This will ensure Canada meets its primary development objectives and those of the sustainable development goals.
As previous presenters to this committee have undoubtedly outlined, and as members of this committee know, the geography of poverty has shifted. Poverty is pervasive not just in low-income countries, but also in middle-income countries. According to the World Bank, more than 70% of the world's poor now live in countries that are middle-income. Thus, to reduce poverty and inequality in the world, and help the poorest and most vulnerable, in line with Minister Bibeau's mandate, our efforts must now focus not only on poor countries, as units of dedicated development intervention, but on people who are marginalized and living in poverty, regardless of where they live.
This important shift in analysis would see us focusing on where the poorest and most marginalized are, and ensuring that our international development approach is fit for purpose. It must have flexibility in design, and mechanisms to reach the very people who are most in need and ensure they are not left behind. Sound development must be based on need.
There is no question that fragile states and least-developed countries should receive the majority of Canada's development assistance, but it should also be noted that in 2013 the OECD reported that almost half of all fragile states were middle income. Flexibility will be important for Canadian development assistance to have the most impact.
Finally, in closing I would like to end with a quote from our founder Eglantyne Jebb, who said, “Humanity owes the child the best it has to give.”
The Canadian Government has an opportunity through this consultation process to invest in development programming that places children and youth, especially the most marginalized, at the centre of its interventions, both as key actors and as an affected group. It also has an opportunity to understand that children and youth's lives, and the issues that affect them, must be understood as multidimensional.
Children living in poverty rarely experience stand-alone deprivation. Poor health and nutrition, poor quality educational opportunities, early marriage, and few work opportunities, usually go hand in hand. Therefore, while funding streams and projects can be siloed and focused on specific thematic areas, the deprivations experienced by girls and boys are overlapping and reinforcing.
Integrated programming that seeks to address multiple areas of deprivation can lead to stronger sustainable results in programming. Therefore, we recommend that Canada continue to develop greater flexibility in funding mechanisms for programs that are designed to address the multiple and unique deprivations that girls and boys face.
Thank you.