Thank you for your presentation, and thanks for all the work that you do. It's really heroic. As someone who did a tiny bit of work in this field many, many years ago, I can say that none of the issues are new. I wish they were. It's only exacerbated because we have far more conflict now happening in the world.
In some of the work that I did, I felt we took one step forward and two steps back. I was doing some work with microcredit loans internationally and we were trying to help women get jobs, create a bit of income, and also improve their local education and health care, which was huge in terms of healthy communities and building up civic society. However, we found there was a lot of corruption, so the institutions in many of the places we worked couldn't sustain change and there was no foundation for a healthy civil society.
A country like Canada can step up to the plate and do all the things you've been advocating—supporting grassroots, women, human rights, dedicated funding to gender equality, more transparency, championing strong women—but my question is, is there some parallel work that we also need to do around helping to build some of that foundation in the countries we hope to influence?