Thank you. It's certainly an area of focus, but looking at IFC's portfolio, I can't imagine it's an enormous part of the portfolio. It's certainly gotten a lot of attention in the last 10 years. I think we need to operate with our eyes open. While it's something that should get a lot of attention, there are a number of ways in which IFC, for example, has worked on this. For example, it has provided lines of credit and guarantees and training to local banks in developing countries, to identify and to work with small businesses that happen to be owned by women. That's one area.
Another area would be to provide either technical assistance, which is grant-based money, perhaps in conjunction with a loan for women-owned companies that are going to provide services to oil, gas, and mining companies that happen to be Canadian. It could be a way to leverage Canadian mining investment in developing countries. There's a big push for what's called “localization”, under which many governments are asking that the supply chains for extractive activities be run by local firms. There's no reason some of that couldn't be done in support of women-owned businesses.
There's another component that IFC has often done in conjunction with the World Bank Group. This may be something that could be done in conjunction with, say, some of the Canadian research institutions, universities, or think tanks. Analysis has been done on countries that have been shown that if they change specific laws around inheritance or other rules that hold back women's ownership or women's economic activity, they could increase their GNP growth by 1% a year. If you ask countries whether they want to do that, most say they are very interested in doing that. There's an analytics component as well.
There's a TA component, a lending component, and a policy analysis component. Let's just be clear: I understand the sentiment and I share it, but I think we should go in with our eyes open about this. I can't imagine this being 50% of the portfolio in the first five years. Even if they say this is going to be their top priority [Technical difficulty—Editor]