Thank you, Mr. Chair, and thank you, committee.
Kakivak Association is located in Iqaluit in Nunavut. We serve the Baffin region, the Qikiqtaaluk region of Nunavut, 13 fly-in communities, sparsely populated. Our smallest community is 138 people. Our largest community is 7,000 people, the capital Iqaluit. We are an ASETS holder. We are an AFI, an aboriginal financial institution, and the programs we deliver are very much dependent on federal program financing.
We deliver the YES program, the Youth Employment Services program, that prepares individuals, young individuals, to start thinking about continuing their education beyond school and high school into post-secondary for some type of career training, some type of employment. We deliver the FNICCI program, the first nations and Inuit child care initiative. That's very important for our clients in order to continue their studies. They need child care in order to enter the workforce, so that's a very important program.
As an ASETS holder we deliver employment training and wage subsidy-type programs. If you look at the statistics for Nunavut, of the 17- and 18-year-olds in our territory we have 50% attendance in grade 12. Obviously the graduate rate from my school is in the 40%. We are getting a group of people beyond high school who really need to be taken a long way in order to commence training for post-secondary education.
That puts a big strain on ASETS dollars, on training dollars, on resources in general. We'll get people out of high school who we will have to put into a pre-trades training program to elevate their math and science skills in order to go into welding or plumbing or carpentry or anything of that nature.
As an AFI, an aboriginal financial institution, we rely on the CEDP program, the community economic development program, that's administered up our way by CanNor. That allows us to work with businesses. We do three things with businesses. We do a lot of pre-work opportunity identification, assisting businesses with things like business plans, feasibility studies, and things of that nature.
Then when it comes to financing the business, we have resources that we can call into play to assist with the formation or purchase of the business. We have Inuit land claims dollars money, the Sivummut and Makigiaqvik funds. We have the aboriginal business development program-type funds. So we have assistance that we can leverage along with our own dollars to partner with other organizations, other agencies, in order to get a business started, or purchased, or expanded.
Then there's the aftercare of course. We work with a lot of businesses for aftercare. Our success rate with businesses in the last 10 years has been about 80%. So that's a significant success rate with respect to businesses.
With respect to our post-secondary education training, we believe that our measures and HRSDC's measures are not quite in sync because...basically you heard a little bit previously about the reporting burden. I don't wish to use the word “burden”, the reporting requirements I guess. It doesn't quite tell the story. With respect to post-secondary education for our folk, we have to bring them a long way as we're dealing with a multi-barrier. A lot of clients are multi-barriered. They don't have a lot of attachment to the workforce. They don't have high school graduation. So there are a lot of issues to deal with. We have to move them a long way.
The monitoring and reporting requirement is six months after their graduation. We would train individuals, for example, for the Baffinland mine, which I'm sure you've heard about. We might train heavy equipment operators in September and October, but they might not go to work there until the next August, so that's not captured.
Because we operate career centres, individuals walk in our door and we deal with clients, redirecting people. As the previous presentation indicated, they go where they know. The Kakivak Association has been a name in Nunavut in the Baffin-Qikiqtaaluk region for 20 years. People know our 800 number, 0911. Call 911 when you need help is our 800 number.
People come to us. They call our 800 number. We deal with our parent organizations that have a liaison officer in every community. We have a small resource centre in every single one of the 13 communities we serve. They're not connected by road. It's fly-in only. They go to them. They connect with us. People know where to go, and we assist them with their applications for post-secondary education. We assist them with their applications for the territorial financing called FANS, financial assistance for Nunavut students. We do a fair bit of work.
A lot of that is not captured, you know, the ticking of clients that we serve. It's the contacts we have, but people know where to find us and they know the programs. They know the youth employment strategy. They know where to come when they want summer employment program assistance. We have a program called the Inuit youth work experience program. We try to get high school and young adults into an Inuit youth work experience program, so they can see the opportunities out there and the requirements that they will have to fulfill to get a job in that field.
It's a considerable amount of work over a large geographical area with a small population that has multiple barriers in a lot of cases, that has limited opportunities in the community itself.
The question was asked in the previous presentation is budget the biggest impediment to our success in moving our success further along? The YES program, the youth employment strategy, was cut 18% this past year. That obviously didn't help. We have nearly 20% less for summer student employment, 20% less for the Inuit youth work experience program, and that certainly didn't help.
Money is not the total issue. We need employer partnerships and we work to build those. We rely on those. We need partnerships with other organizations similar to ours, with training institutions, and we work to build on those.
The biggest impediment is money, and it's certainly a concern. If we had more dollars we could hire more staff. If we had more dollars we could put more resources into programs, but the fact remains that we have a high school program that our premier, Peter Taptuna, realizes needs work. The new premier's emphasis is education. Kids need to get up in the morning and go to school and he recognizes that.
No matter how much money Kakivak would provide, we need a partnership with parents and with high schools and communities to get the kids into school. Less than 50% is unacceptable, so money is not the total problem. We need to overcome a lot of barriers.