Foreign Affairs Committee on Feb. 25th, 2021

[The Chair, Liberal, Sven Spengemann]

Colleagues, welcome to meeting number 20 of the Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Development.

Pursuant to Standing Order 108(2) and the motion adopted by the committee on Thursday, October 22, 2020, the committee resumes its study of the vulnerabilities created and exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic.

To ensure an orderly meeting, as usual I encourage all participants to mute their microphones when they're not speaking and to direct their comments through the chair.

When you have 30 seconds left in your questioning or speaking time, I will signal with this piece of paper in a very analog fashion.

Interpretation services are available through the globe icon at the bottom of your screen.

I would like to welcome our witnesses from the Fondation Paul Gérin-Lajoie: Christian Champigny, acting manager for international programs, and Florence Massicotte-Banville, international project officer.

Also, I would like to welcome Scott Walter, executive director of CODE; Lorraine Swift, executive director of the Change for Children Association, or CFCA; and Chris Eaton, executive director of the World University Service of Canada.

I now give the floor to the representatives of the Fondation Paul Gérin-Lajoie for their five-minute presentation.

If it's possible to keep your remarks to four minutes, it will be even better for our time for questioning by members, but I will allow all witnesses up to five minutes of opening remarks.

The representatives of the Fondation Paul Gérin-Lajoie have the floor.

[Christian Champigny, Acting Manager for International Programs, Fondation Paul Gérin-Lajoie]

Thank you, Mr. Chair and members of the committee.

Education is a fundamental human right and a powerful agent of change essential to the achievement of each of the 17 sustainable development goals. Recognizing this transformative power of education, the international community has set itself the goal of ensuring quality, inclusive and equitable education and promoting lifelong learning opportunities for all by 2030. The Fondation Paul Gérin-Lajoie has made this goal the core of its mission.

It is important to remember that even before the COVID-19 pandemic, the world faced several challenges in the education sector. For example, 258 million children and young people of primary and secondary school age were out of school. Children living in vulnerable or conflict-affected countries were more than twice as likely to be out of school. Girls were one and a half times more likely than boys to be excluded from primary school.

Today, the pandemic is further jeopardizing the achievement of this goal. In fact, the COVID-19 pandemic has caused the greatest disruption to education in history since its emergence. Ninety-four per cent of the world's pupils and students were impacted by the pandemic through containment measures and school closures. That's 1.6 billion children and young people.

The crisis has highlighted the significant digital divide between countries. Learners, especially female learners, from low- and middle-income countries, and particularly displaced persons and refugees, have had very limited access to the distance learning measures that have been put in place. The closure of schools has led to an increase in unpaid domestic chores and caring activities for many girls, female adolescents and young women, limiting their access to education. The crisis has exposed girls, female adolescents and young women to a variety of protection risks, including depriving them of the structure and sense of trust that schools normally provide.

The negative effects of the pandemic will also worsen as a result of a possible global economic crisis. Here are some examples: the declining economic power of households, which will lead to higher school drop-out rates—it is estimated that some 24 million children, adolescents and young people may drop out or not have access to school this year simply because of the economic impact of the pandemic; school dropouts, which will be accompanied by a marked increase in child labour, sexual exploitation and early marriage; cuts in national education budgets, directly affecting schools and teachers; and a possible significant drop in official development assistance, which could result in a reduction in aid to education of $2 billion U.S. by 2022.

As part of its international projects, the Fondation Paul Gérin-Lajoie has been able to observe the impacts of the crisis in the field. For example, thanks to funding from Global Affairs Canada, the foundation is currently implementing, in conjunction with the Centre d'étude et de coopération internationale, a project for the education of refugee and displaced girls in Burundi, Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

More than 60,000 Burundian refugees were confined in the Mahama camp in Rwanda due to the pandemic, while for many, the only opportunities to earn an income were outside the camp. Schools had to close down. Based on our observations, we anticipate that a significant number of girls will not return to their educational path, particularly to support their families economically. We also note a sharp increase in early pregnancies, another important factor limiting the return to school. For many children in this camp, especially many girls and female adolescents, the pandemic will mean a loss or delay in learning, or the cessation of their schooling, and will leave a mark on the future of an entire generation.

In conclusion, the Fondation Paul Gérin-Lajoie wishes to add its voice to those of the hundred or so organizations advocating for the right to education that endorse the white paper produced by the "Save Our Future" campaign, which proposes a series of measures to be carried out in the medium and long term to avoid an educational disaster.

We would like to draw your attention to two key elements of this white paper which, in our view, deserve special consideration.

Firstly, in response to the crisis, there may be a temptation to focus everything on a catch-up logic by concentrating on children newly affected by the educational deficit and on an overuse of technology-assisted learning, thereby diverting attention from the fundamental pre-existing structural problems in learning. However, it is essential that education sector policies and reforms are not only reactive and short-term, but focus on proven interventions and particularly on strengthening the education workforce.

Secondly, it will be important to protect education funding. This means, among other things, advocating for the preservation of education budgets in developing countries and protecting official development assistance for education.

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

[The Chair, Liberal, Sven Spengemann]

Thank you very much, Mr. Champigny.

We will now move to our next set of opening remarks.

Mr. Scott Walter of CODE, please, the floor is yours.

[Scott Walter, Executive Director, CODE]

Good afternoon, and thank you for the opportunity to speak with you today.

My observations are based on the experiences of CODE, the Canadian NGO established 60 years ago to support development through education, and that of our partners and the programming that we jointly support in Africa.

Quality education is empowering, allowing the individual the chance to realize their full potential and contribute to the well-being of their family, their community and to the nation as a whole. This is the basis for a global framework such as Education For All.

Initially, there was consensus that Education For All meant prioritizing universal enrolment in primary school, but it was quickly realized that that only mattered if the students were actually gaining skills and learning. Without quality there's little return on investment. How do we measure that sought-after quality?

In that regard, there's no more foundational indicator than whether or not the child can read and write. It's the canary in the coal mine, the notification of problems to come. A child can't read and so falls further and further behind until they drop out as an illiterate. One learns to read in order to comprehend, and the failure to acquire the skills of literacy impacts the ability to move beyond basic learning and on to higher order thinking skills so needed in today's world, the skills of problem solving and critical thinking.

For those of us working in the sector, it has been clear for a great number of years that far too many students are not learning to read and write. The scenario is so dire across the developing world that the World Bank declared a learning crisis, one that threatens countries' efforts to build human capital and achieve the sustainable development goals.

Make no mistake about it. Human capital, which is basically a measure of productivity, is the most important component of wealth globally. In low-income countries, human capital makes up some 40% of wealth; in high-income countries, it makes up over 70%.

According to UNESCO, if all students in low-income countries left school with elementary reading skills, 171 million people could be lifted out of poverty, the equivalent of a 12% cut in global poverty. In other words, there's a huge cost to illiteracy and poor-quality education, so we welcome the call by the World Bank to cut by half the global rate of learning poverty, defined as the percentage of 10-year-old children who cannot read.

You may be thinking, wasn't he supposed to talk about the impact of COVID-19? Well, I am, in the sense that the evidence shows that school closures caused by the pandemic exacerbated all the previous existing inequalities, and that those children who are already most at risk of being excluded from a quality education—the poorest, the most marginalized—have been most affected.

Girls are particularly vulnerable. CODE, for example, is very active in Sierra Leone and Liberia, and we know from the Ebola school closures of a couple of years ago that girls were less likely to return once schools reopened. With lockdowns and restrictions, and the economy in freefall, it was the girls who took on greater responsibilities that kept them at home or even forced them into early marriage. We also saw that, with isolation, girls were at increased risk of sexual exploitation, and teenage pregnancy rates doubled.

During COVID and beyond, we feel it's critically important to address the learning crisis by focusing on literacy. CODE believes this can best be accomplished by supporting sustained access to relevant quality reading and learning materials with a corresponding effort to ensure educators have the skills to use those materials effectively.

Access to technology is very limited where we work, and in many cases the solution is low tech. Support the local publishing industries, for example, to produce great learning materials through traditional print, or virtual classrooms with radio reading teachers. Digital learning, access to the Internet, the creation of interactive learning modules are probably best focused on the teachers rather than the students.

The loss of learning is real and severe, and the resulting impact of greater levels of learning poverty will be felt for years, but we're not without tools and we know more can be done to support the foundational skills of literacy. We need to support kids to become readers wherever they are.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Sven Spengemann]

Thank you so much.

We'll now turn to Lorraine Swift from the Change for Children Association.

The floor is yours for five minutes, please.

[Lorraine Swift, Executive Director, Change for Children Association (CFCA)]

Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for the opportunity to speak to this committee.

This year Change for Children is celebrating its 45th anniversary of support for rights-based development in the global south and an award-winning global education program in Canada. Based in western Canada, we do appreciate being included in this discussion. For me, it is an honour to be invited to testify here as I've worked in international development for the past 25 years.

Given that you've already heard testimony from many others in this field, my presentation will focus on our unique perspective as an Alberta-based NGO working with indigenous populations in the developing world that are already vulnerable, marginalized and hardest hit by the impacts of climate change.

Change for Children enjoys significant support for our work from Albertans and Canadians, including from Global Affairs Canada. Donor support for our climate change mitigation program and for our education and health projects in indigenous communities actually increased in 2020. Our brigade program, while not offered currently, obviously, allows Canadian medical, dental, optometry and teacher professionals to offer much-needed support and services to some of the world's most remote populations. Since 2000, our brigades have taken over 1,000 Canadians into the UNESCO biosphere reserve called Bosawas in Nicaragua, home to the Miskito and Mayangna indigenous peoples. Poverty and food insecurity have increased here because of climate change and because of COVID-19. This area was hit hard by the back-to-back hurricanes Eta and Iota that ravaged Central America last fall.

In some of the world's most remote indigenous communities we see families struggling to survive in the face of their existing vulnerabilities, now exacerbated by the pandemic. We also see that women and girls suffer the most. Persisting gender discrimination means that women and girls living in extreme poverty are the most vulnerable to some of the least visible impacts of COVID-19 and of climate change. We see girls suffering from disrupted education, time poverty and increased risks.

There is a solution. We know that quality education for girls is a public health and a climate change solution. Education empowers girls to take control over their own bodies, enabling them to determine when, and if, to bear children. Fewer children mean healthier populations and lower carbon emissions. Education tackles the underlying inequalities that increase girls' vulnerability to COVID-19 and to climate change.

In the Americas, the regions with the lowest levels of education for girls are indigenous. Realizing the rights for indigenous people is essential to recovery. Earlier this month, Elon Musk offered $100 million for the best carbon capture technology. His tweet was met with the response, "Congratulations to whoever invents forests." Forest preservation is our best defence against climate change and against COVID-19 and against future pandemics. While not the inventors of forests, indigenous peoples are indeed their stewards.

Indigenous people in all countries of the world fall into the most vulnerable health category. They have significantly higher rates of diseases, higher mortality rates and lower life expectancies than their non-indigenous counterparts. Change for Children works with indigenous communities in some of the most remote forest regions of the Americas. We work promoting climate change adaptation and mitigation. We work promoting technology-enabled indigenous language education. We work with indigenous populations marginalized from all services due to their remoteness and because of their ethnicity. There is a high likelihood that they will be marginalized from future access to COVID-19 vaccines as well.

Today we are facing overlapping global health emergencies: COVID-19 and climate change. Both exacerbate pre-existing inequalities and vulnerabilities. Both have the ability to bring health systems and economies to their knees. Both dial back progress on every human development indicator by at least 10 years. To build back better, we must design our COVID-19 recovery plans to facilitate collaboration amongst all actors. Small and medium-sized organizations—SMOs like Change for Children—working for decades with strong connections in some of the world's most remote communities are central and essential to this recovery.

We cannot design effective recovery plans if we have no funding to implement them. We cannot reach the most vulnerable and remote communities without means. Global Affairs Canada has not called for proposals from SMOs since early 2019.

COVID-19 has taught us that we are not safe in Canada until we are all safe globally. We must do more. We continue to need stable and consistent funding from the Government of Canada for SMOs to build back better from COVID-19 and to continue our vital and important work towards achieving the sustainable development goals by 2030.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Sven Spengemann]

Thank you so much.

For our final set of opening remarks, we will go to Chris Eaton of the World University Service of Canada.

The floor is yours for five minutes, sir.

[Chris Eaton, Executive Director, World University Service of Canada]

Thank you.

My organization, WUSC, works to expand education and employment opportunities for marginalized youth, and has a strong presence in Iraq, in Jordan, in the refugee camps and host communities of northern Kenya and northern Uganda, and in South Sudan. In all of these places, we have been working with local institutions to foster better quality education and employment outcomes for girls, young women and refugees. As in Canada, all of these young people have been affected by the pandemic with the closure of schools and a marked decrease in local economic activities and employment opportunities.

In these circumstances, refugee and out-of-school girls are particularly vulnerable to significant learning losses and to the lost social protection that schools often provide. Our current concern is that many of these young people will not return to class as schools open, and that those who do so will not receive the support they need to catch up and stay in school. This will result in higher dropout rates, lower graduation rates, early marriage and depressed future incomes.

Indeed, we are already seeing a significant decline in the return rates of girls to now-open schools in the Kakuma and Dadaab refugee camps in northern Kenya where we work.

Refugees and their host communities have not been passive in this context. Instead, they have been part of the response to the education crisis that COVID has caused and should form an important part of the longer-term solution. For example, we witnessed many instances of refugee and host communities undertaking door-to-door campaigns to identify vulnerable students and organizing peer support learning clubs and ed-tech sharing groups—all initiatives that have prevented some dropouts and learning losses, provided some ongoing social protection and, perhaps most importantly, helped to sustain a sense of hope amongst these vulnerable youth.

These efforts are unfortunately under-recognized, undervalued and under-supported by governments and the international development community. This is incredibly short-sighted, as these kinds of refugee-led initiatives are an essential complement to the other investments in teacher education, smaller classroom sizes and the integration of education technology in remote classrooms and communities, all of which need to happen.

In this context, the government's recently announced “together for learning” campaign, which seeks to mount an international effort to ensure that all refugee and displaced children and youth have access to the education they need and deserve is well-timed. However, to realize this campaign's potential and meet the increased needs of vulnerable youth and children caused by COVID, the government really needs to ensure sufficient and consistent funding, in part by investing in innovative approaches that support refugee-led responses to the education challenges that they face. Now really is the time to invest.

I will conclude my remarks with two recommendations.

First, the government has already committed to allocate no less than 10% of Canada's international assistance budget to education, but to education broadly. Now is the time to further focus these resources to direct a significant percentage of this commitment to the “together for learning” campaign, recognizing that refugee education has not received the level of support that it deserves in Canada's international development efforts.

Second, the government should create a fund directly to support refugee voices, leadership, organizations and responses in the education sector. This could be modelled on the equality fund, which the government helped to create in 2019 to permanently change the model of support to women's rights organizations. Similarly, a fund to permanently change the model of support to refugee-led organizations and responses would address a critical gap in the global refugee support architecture. It could form an important new instrument in Canada's international development tool kit and become a pillar of the “together for learning” campaign.

[The Chair, Liberal, Sven Spengemann]

Thank you so much.

I'd like to thank our witnesses again for their opening remarks.

We'll now go into our first round of questions. These are six-minute segments.

Leading us off will be Mr. Diotte.

[Kerry Diotte, Conservative, Edmonton Griesbach, AB]

Thank you very much.

Thanks to all the witnesses especially for all the good work that they do.

I'm going to ask a very general question. We've certainly heard from every witness who's come before this committee about how important it is that children get to school and get educated in person. Of course, we've seen throughout the world a big push, especially by teachers and even teacher's unions, saying, “No, we can't send kids back. It's too dangerous; COVID infections are going to go through the roof, etc.”

First of all, I'm wondering if we've seen a trend in underdeveloped countries where there is a push to keep kids out of school because of COVID fears. Second, how can we fight against that so that teachers will feel comfortable going back to the classroom, encouraging their students to come back to get an education, which we all agree is absolutely vital, especially in underdeveloped countries?

I'll just throw that open to each one of you to comment on.

[Scott Walter]

I guess I'll jump in.

I think, in part, to say.... In Africa anyway, which is where we work and what I'm familiar with, there hasn't been that same reluctance to send their kids to school or to get them back into school. Now that differs across the board, of course, but there's not much in the way of an alternative. Online learning technology is simply not available. Kids do not have access to the Internet. They don't have access to broadband. They don't have access to the devices that are needed. It's not really like there's an alternative.

Now in some families, they've made a choice already about how many of their children can go to school, because there's a cost even if there are no fees. It does tend to be the boys who are prioritized over the girls, so we definitely need campaigns at the national level from the government and from NGOs to encourage kids to go back to school. For the most part, schools have reopened in Africa. From my knowledge, kids are back in school and are ready to go. However, as everybody said, for example, the most marginalized, girls, the most vulnerable, are not returning in the same numbers.

I guess that would be my comment, that there's just no alternative to a face-to-face classroom.

[Kerry Diotte, Conservative, Edmonton Griesbach, AB]

Would others have opinions on that?

[Christian Champigny]

I would add to this that school as a physical space has also its advantages, not only for education but also as a sort of not necessarily safe space but a point of reference and a place where, in some instances, kids go to school and have one complete meal a day. In some areas, that is provided, and it's the only full meal that, in some instances, they will have. There's also protection for girls. That is one major advantage of the physical presence at school.

There are certain elements that go beyond the education aspect that advocate for physical presence in school.

[Kerry Diotte, Conservative, Edmonton Griesbach, AB]

Do any others have something to weigh in with?

[Chris Eaton]

Yes.

Similarly, we haven't experienced the same reticence of teachers to return to the classroom or of parents in general to send their kids back. We are witnessing a situation in which girls in particular are not returning in the same numbers as boys. We also have a situation in East Africa where schools were closed for a much longer period of time than they were here in Canada, and nothing was happening during that time period.

In some respects, there was a real pent-up demand to get back to school but, on the other hand, I think, tougher choices in families about who to send back because of some of the barriers that the families face or some of the choices that they make. Unfortunately, that disadvantages the people that we're most concerned about: the most vulnerable, refugees themselves, and girls.

[Lorraine Swift]

I will just add to this that in so many places—and as we all testified to already existing vulnerabilities that exist for so many kids and also teachers in places where we work—they have no personal protective equipment. There's no way for them to protect themselves against.... They have super-overcrowded classrooms. Really, there are so many other places where we need to invest in order to be able to confront the dangers of COVID. There are just so many things that require our attention as well as COVID recovery funds.

[Kerry Diotte, Conservative, Edmonton Griesbach, AB]

I'll end it there because I see that we're ticking down the seconds.

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Sven Spengemann]

Thank you. That's appreciated, Mr. Diotte. That may allow us to go to a brief second round.

Our next six-minute round goes to Ms. Saks.

Please go ahead.

[Ya'ara Saks, Liberal, York Centre, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you to all of our witnesses for the wonderful, amazing work they do for so many communities across the world, for the time and effort that's put in, and also particularly for their time with us today.

I'd like to start with Mr. Walter in relation to CODE and the transforming girls' education program in Sierra Leone, which the Government of Canada, I understand, is helping to support.

I am struck by the group's finding that, for the girls in Sierra Leone, as the girls reached puberty, enrolment, retention and completion rates declined, and there was an increasing learning gap between girls and boys over time as they transitioned into secondary school.

We've heard there has been a heightened reduction, obviously, in education during this time due to COVID. We keep hearing that same statistic of the gap with girls, but we haven't homed in on why there is that gender gap and what its impact is. I'd really appreciate some insight on that.

[Scott Walter]

I'll try to respond to a couple of things.

One, I think, is that in Sierra Leone, for example, which is somewhat unique with its post-conflict scenario, there are much fewer female teachers in the classrooms. The girls don't have those mentors, those role models to look up to. One of the things that the TGEP is doing is paying for scholarships for young women to go to teachers' college to increase the number of women who are in teaching and in the classroom.

Another thing is that girls are starting later than boys. One of the things we know for sure is that if they don't catch up, if they don't advance, they will drop out. That's in part because of the pressure from their families. If they're not achieving, really the families would just as soon quite often have them at home doing domestic work or working in the market. There are also the pressures of early marriage. Girls in Sierra Leone are getting married at 13, 14 or 15 years of age, and that's often an economic reality. In some countries, the ages are, in fact, quite a bit younger where you first start seeing early marriage.

I think there is also still a gender imbalance in the sense of the quality of the materials. I've spoken about literacy and the importance of getting kids to be reading and writing, because that's the gate that opens up the rest of the learning to them. If they aren't able to read and write, they can't then progress in science, math, history or whatever the other subjects might be.

Often the learning materials, if available, put forward stereotypes of girls, stereotypes that they should really be looking to other, more domestic realities for themselves.

I think that gap is one that's based on a number of things: on the quality of teaching, on the quality of the resources available, on the fact that they're starting late, on the fact that there is often more pressure for them to leave in the first place, and on the fact that there is a lack of role models.

I am probably not doing a great job of expressing them, but these are the main points that are impacting young girls.

[Ya'ara Saks, Liberal, York Centre, ON]

Thank you very much.

Do any of the other witnesses want to weigh in on this in relation to other countries and their experiences in education?

Mr. Eaton.

[Chris Eaton]

We've seen the gap actually close in a lot of countries in Africa, in a lot of the places in which we work, and particularly close at a primary level. In some respects, in a place like Kenya, girls are actually better off than boys in many of the districts of the country. That gap is starting to close also at a secondary level. Where it's not closing are in those particularly fragile places, like the remote parts of Kenya or Sierra Leone, the remote parts of northern Uganda or South Sudan, or among protracted refugee situations.

I think there is an intuition there about where to focus our energy and resources, because those are the people who are particularly vulnerable.

Girls, in general, are doing better in education across the continent, except in a number of really significant pockets where we need to attend our attention.

[Ya'ara Saks, Liberal, York Centre, ON]

Thank you. That leads me into my next question.

In February of this year, Minister Gould announced the launch of “together for learning”, which is a three-year campaign to promote quality education and lifelong learning for refugees and vulnerable displaced people, especially children and youth.

With what you've just mentioned, Mr. Eaton, and with that commitment in place, I'd like to know how you see our role playing out over that three-year commitment. You touched on this in your opening statement, and I'd like to unpack it a bit more, since our government has made this commitment to education for vulnerable communities where there is conflict.

[The Chair, Liberal, Sven Spengemann]

Mr. Eaton, give a very brief answer, please.

[Chris Eaton]

We don't know the details of the campaign yet, because they are still being worked out. We also don't know the financial commitment behind the campaign. The campaign and the focus are well justified, but now we need to make sure they're backed up by the resources necessary to have an impact.