Evidence of meeting #58 for Public Accounts in the 44th Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was projects.
A video is available from Parliament.
4:40 p.m.
Conservative
Kelly McCauley Conservative Edmonton West, AB
Thanks. I'll be passing my time to Mr. Genuis—no, I'm just kidding.
AG Hogan, thanks again as usual for the report.
Mr. MacLennan, you spoke about KPIs. Who is developing those KPIs? Who's setting them?
4:40 p.m.
Deputy Minister, International Development, Department of Foreign Affairs, Trade and Development
There are numerous types of KPIs in the department—
4:40 p.m.
Deputy Minister, International Development, Department of Foreign Affairs, Trade and Development
Is it specifically the ones that the Auditor General referred to?
4:40 p.m.
Conservative
Kelly McCauley Conservative Edmonton West, AB
It's specifically the international aid and the issue at hand, which is the lack of recorded outcomes.
4:40 p.m.
Deputy Minister, International Development, Department of Foreign Affairs, Trade and Development
One set of KPIs, the one that the Auditor General looked at specifically, was a set of KPIs that exists at the corporate level in our department. They were designed immediately within about one year of the launch of the feminist international assistance policy. Their primary purpose was to ensure that the department was refocusing its development assistance programming to align with the new policy.
4:40 p.m.
Conservative
Kelly McCauley Conservative Edmonton West, AB
Is it fair to say they're very high-level ones and not...?
4:40 p.m.
Deputy Minister, International Development, Department of Foreign Affairs, Trade and Development
They're very high level. They are, to the Auditor General's point, focused more on outputs than on outcomes.
4:40 p.m.
Conservative
Kelly McCauley Conservative Edmonton West, AB
Okay. You mentioned 1,500 projects on the go. Who is developing those? Who is approving those? Is anyone setting targets and outcomes for those?
4:40 p.m.
Deputy Minister, International Development, Department of Foreign Affairs, Trade and Development
That varies quite significantly. For example, a significant portion of our development assistance spending goes to large multilateral organizations that we are supporting. When we work with something, and I'll use an example, the Global Fund to Fight Malaria, Tuberculosis and AIDS, they actually set their own results framework and we contribute to that framework. We know going in; they set it.
4:40 p.m.
Deputy Minister, International Development, Department of Foreign Affairs, Trade and Development
Absolutely, we have a seat on the board, as a matter of fact. We sit on the board—
4:40 p.m.
Conservative
4:40 p.m.
Deputy Minister, International Development, Department of Foreign Affairs, Trade and Development
Absolutely—and much more. We also use that seat on the board to hold the Global Fund to account on the effective spending of the Global Fund money at strategic levels and in the countries in which they work.
4:40 p.m.
Conservative
Kelly McCauley Conservative Edmonton West, AB
How long will it take us to get to a point where the AG and Parliament will be satisfied with what we're actually achieving with the money that taxpayers are contributing?
4:40 p.m.
Deputy Minister, International Development, Department of Foreign Affairs, Trade and Development
To that question, I really do hope to work very closely with the AG.
4:40 p.m.
Conservative
Kelly McCauley Conservative Edmonton West, AB
I don't want to be difficult here, but this is a project that Global Affairs has to develop and implement. I'm not sure if conversing with the AG is going to speed up the effort. It's pretty clear what we need to do.
You have a very large budget. We're not talking about a system that needs to do quantum physics. It's just tracking simple outcomes from a relatively small number of projects. It's 1,500 projects. We're not talking about a million different outcomes.
What is it going to take to get to simply tracking the outcomes?
4:45 p.m.
Deputy Minister, International Development, Department of Foreign Affairs, Trade and Development
I would like to agree with you that it's not a lot of projects and that it's not actually very difficult to do this. Nothing would make me happier than being able to say to the committee that this was a simple oversight and can be corrected really quickly and easily.
The reason I mentioned working with the Auditor General is that this is the type of thing around knowing whether you have it right or not.
4:45 p.m.
Conservative
Kelly McCauley Conservative Edmonton West, AB
What's the difficult part?
I'm looking at your departmental plans and you have here that 167,318,000 people got a double dosage of vitamin A. You have that exact amount. How difficult is it to measure the outcomes of 1,500 projects so that you can report to Parliament or the AG? If you have the detail of how many vitamin A pills you've given out, how difficult is it to measure an outcome like that?
Tim Hortons can have a franchise where they press a button and can see.... They have sales similar to the amount of money you're spending per year. They can measure exactly how much they're achieving.
Perhaps I'm oversimplifying, but why is it so difficult to track the outcomes of 1,500?
4:45 p.m.
Deputy Minister, International Development, Department of Foreign Affairs, Trade and Development
Absolutely. The example you've used is actually a very good example. What you're referring to is something called Nutrition International, which is a Canadian organization. I'll use data from 2020. In 2020, it provided 98.9 million children with two doses of vitamin A. That's the output. In the Auditor General's language, that would be an output. That led to 78,000 child deaths averted in 61 countries. Now, that's the outcome.
The problem and the challenge that we have is that at the project level.... We have a project with Nutrition International with that framework that I mentioned. That's why I know that result immediately. The problem is that with 1,500 projects with multiple outcomes, you're looking at potentially thousands of outcomes. Some of those outcomes can be combined perhaps at higher orders. For example, reducing child mortality or reducing maternal mortality are relatively simple ones. We know how to measure those.
Improving governance, for example, is one of the other things we do. I think, as parliamentarians, you would understand this really well. We actually do parliamentarian training in countries. The outcome of that is much more difficult to nail down exactly, but we could figure it out at a project level. What it rolls up to and what it combines with, unless we're simply reproducing potentially 3,000 indicators in a report, is where it becomes more difficult.
It's not insurmountable. It's going to require a lot of hard work to get there, though. One thing that I am very confident about—for example, one of the more significant commitments that the government has made on global health and sexual reproductive health and rights is a commitment of $1.4 billion in annual spending—is that we've learned a great deal from Muskoka, Muskoka 2.0 and the work we did on SRHR from 2017 to 2020 about finding better ways to create a report that will speak to Canadians at the outcome level.
Now that's within one portion—
4:45 p.m.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative John Williamson
Thank you. We'll have to come back after this next portion.
Mrs. Shanahan, you have the floor for five minutes please.
4:45 p.m.
Liberal
Brenda Shanahan Liberal Châteauguay—Lacolle, QC
Thank you, Chair.
I've been listening with great interest to Mr. MacLennan.
I always appreciate and thank you, Auditor General, for the work you do, because I really feel that this is an evolving area of practice, measurement, output and outcomes. We've had previous audits regarding organizations here in Canada. During the pandemic, for example, that was one of the issues that was brought up. This is really an executive MBA or public administration course, sitting here, to understand better how we can...and I get it.
This is my first question. If the outcomes are measured on an individual project basis, are you able to show us that? I believe one of the comments the Auditor General made was that GAC was just not able to show those outcomes at the aggregate level. Are you able to show those outcomes to us at a project level?
4:50 p.m.
Deputy Minister, International Development, Department of Foreign Affairs, Trade and Development
The short answer to that is yes. Where there were challenges...and I think the Auditor General pointed to one of those. In the projects that were looked at—all projects approved basically between 2017 and 2020—very few of those projects were actually completed yet at the time the audit was done. Some projects can demonstrate interim results, but results at the project level usually require the full completion of the project before you get the final report with the results rolled up according to the results framework developed for each and every project. Even then....
Maybe you'd like to hear from Patricia, if you're getting tired of my voice. She has a great example of a project that is completed and the types of results we're seeing. Normally, you don't see results even sometimes after the project is completed—for example, sometimes when you're dealing with issues that require cultural change. In the gender equality feminist approaches, a key thing that we're trying to accomplish is an actual change in culture. That doesn't happen in three years. You don't change a culture in three years, but you can start to turn the ship on the culture there, as an example.
4:50 p.m.
Liberal
Brenda Shanahan Liberal Châteauguay—Lacolle, QC
I would like to hear further examples. You mentioned Nutrition International. I had a chance to see one of their projects when I was in Senegal recently with the Canada-Africa Parliamentary Association. I know that all my colleagues have travelled as well, and we've had a chance to visit projects. You realize that you're in a very different world as well when you're visiting. It's so moving and impactful to see what people are doing on the ground.
Yes, I would like to hear some more examples. I think that will help us in our work.
4:50 p.m.
Patricia Peña Assistant Deputy Minister, Partnerships for Development Innovation, Department of Foreign Affairs, Trade and Development
Thank you.
Maybe I'll refer to one that's not health-related, because we've had a few examples of that. In the area of economic empowerment, one area that we've been working on in Bolivia is aquaculture, helping women fishers to feed their communities and to build some capabilities in small business by essentially growing fish. This has a lot of different dimensions to it.
First of all, we've established specific people who are going to benefit, targeting women but benefiting all their communities. We know that the indirect benefit is huge. They've increased their food security. We give them training. We give them some skills. We give them resources to build this capacity, and then that multiplies. They have better nutrition, because they're eating more fish. They're starting small businesses. They are hiring other people, because as businesses grow they create businesses along the value chain. A restaurant now sells some of those products. They participate in local value chains. They sell their fish to markets. They're better educated. They're then able to keep their children in schools, keep them healthier and use that income.
It creates that long-term tail. What's really exciting about projects like this is that our involvement has a particular time frame, but we're actually able to know that three, four and five years later the benefits of those early interventions are really delivering for those communities long after we're gone.