Thank you, Ben Marc.
Our international assistance in Africa funds social programs and productive programs, if I could separate them into those two buckets. For the last 10 years, the predominant amount of that funding has gone into social programs, so supporting health and education initiatives where we'd be funding Canadian partners or international partners to help local and national-level health or education systems. In those cases, there are extremely limited chances of that displacing any sort of private investment. In fact, anywhere that we could find ways to mobilize investment in health or education sectors using our international assistance, we attempt to do so as part of our project design.
On the productive side of things, which we're starting to do a bit more as part of this strategy, looking to see where and how we can better use our international assistance to spur economic growth and to mobilize investment and partnership, including with Canadian entities, we've had some successes in the agricultural sector. We've also had some success in energy transition using things like sovereign loans, for example. In South Africa, we've lent money where we're trying to work with the South African government to get them off coal while creating clean tech opportunities, hopefully for Canadian companies, for example. A lot of times we're trying to use more of what's called blended finance where we take a little bit of public finance, in this case our international assistance, and try to partner with private capital to spur job growth or spur investments in different markets.
One of the core components of the strategy is to try to do more of this. But in those cases, we're not looking to supplant private investment. We're looking to enhance it or the word that we use is to “mobilize” it. So it's not really supplanting. In some cases, what's needed is international assistance to incentivize or to help to buy down some of the risk that many private companies may see, whether it's perceived or actual in these markets. There are lots of proven examples of how international assistance can help in those types of circumstances.