Absolutely. As African diasporan women, first, we know, of course, that there are limitations, with family issues and so on, for women in trade. However, because they also have connections in not only the diasporan community but also their home country as immigrants, they are able to easily connect with the groups back in their home countries to facilitate that, just as every woman can. The cultural part of it is actually what comes to play here. It's a cultural thing for Africans generally that people have a responsibility to send funds back home. Wherever you are, you must pull funds together and send them back to your community to make sure that businesses are initiated. That's a cultural thing. I'm not sure about other cultures.
A country like Canada could leverage that. Instead of just sending a pool of funds left, right and centre, with no formalized structure where you can actually capture the amount of funds being shipped out of our country on a daily basis, we could actually turn this into a pool of funds, maybe matched by the government. We could formalize and put some specific governance structure around monies being shipped out for business purposes.
That's how people initiate their trading activities. You find a partner, whether it be from your homeland or your community or people you did business with before in your profession. Keep in mind that a lot of professional people are here. They did business before coming into Canada. Those types of communities are the ones that I believe we can leverage extensively.
I can cite a quick example from an architectural firm. My husband is an architect, for instance. He trained 30 years before coming to Canada. He had his own firm. He traded for a solid 30 years. He came into Canada, tried to do business and get his certification and all of those things, but remember, he had connections back home in building homes and designing buildings. He certifies homes. He continues to do business, although he's here. Because this is a design job, he gets to do that, but it's across continents. He continues to do that. They are able to earn some fees to send to him to keep up. That's business for us. Whatever funds they make, they bring into Canada. I reckon that there's a host of several other businesses in similar activities.
We talk about 1.2 million people in Canada. I'm an investment banker myself, so I understand exactly the nuances of venture capital and so on. That's exactly how we raised our first funding for the entrepreneurship hub we started before we got our later funding. All of this can be replicated in different parts of Africa.