I'd be happy to speak to your two questions as well.
It was really great to hear my good friend Harold Calla speak about the balance that has to be played between the government's fiduciary responsibility and the fact that there's a lot of risk aversion. One of the things that I feel can help to address that is the path to supporting the development of indigenous institutions. We need to be responsible for our own activity and our own actions.
I really feel strongly that the supports need to be there, as I mentioned in one of our recommendations, to support indigenous-led institutions and centres of excellence. I think those are really critical ways to help remove the issues around the government being worried about the risk of some of the decisions they make. I think our own people are prepared and we have the capacity now to address areas and make those decisions ourselves. I would strongly support that devolution of programs and services and the resources, the full amount of resources necessary, to support indigenous institutions.
I spoke about, and we heard earlier about, the idea of an indigenous infrastructure institute. I think that's really critical as well to addressing the areas of our needs.
In respect to access to capital, I think a couple of things need to be understood. We have a really great success story in Canada that other countries don't have, and that's the aboriginal financial institutions. Those institutions should be supported. No other country has the types of institutions that we have, but they're limited in their capacity. Most of them can provide loans of only up to $300,000 for one project. Well, one piece of equipment costs that. You can't even build a decent building for that amount of money anymore.
So additional capital is really important. We know the success of these aboriginal financial institutions, which have been able to invest $3.3 billion into the Canadian economy through investing in indigenous businesses and helping with the start-up of new indigenous businesses. We have capacity. We'll need that to address the whole procurement issue and to address the contracts we're talking about to reach that 5% procurement target. We need more indigenous businesses and to help build them up so they can compete effectively for a lot of those contracts.
Plus, we need—