Thank you very much.
When this policy was instituted in 2017, it was quite honestly a radical shift for the department. Not only is it about what we focus our projects on but also about the way we undertake the complete undertaking of the international development assistance responsibilities that we have.
Since 2017, we have, over the course of the first five years of the policy...and I should note that this is the first audit of the policy we've had. The projects that are associated with this policy are only now starting to produce the results after five years. As everybody is aware, producing results in international development does not take place in two years. It has very long-term investments, which are required to achieve lasting sustainable results.
What the department has done is that it has adjusted completely its approach, with a clear focus on gender equality and a clear focus on helping the most vulnerable in the countries in which we are active. I can give you one example of what that means. It means two things.
The first one is that we specifically address some areas where we have inequalities between men and women, and we attack those problems directly. As people would have seen in the report, that's the 15% target we were trying to achieve, which means projects whose purpose ultimately is to address inequalities. That's a very sharp tool to go after only those elements in international development assistance.
With the other 80% of our programming, it means that in all types of programming we undertake we ensure there are gender equality elements to everything we do, in everything from the distribution of food aid, which takes into consideration the needs of women and girls.... A really simple example is that, if you are distributing food in a food aid situation and the sacks of millet or the sacks of grain you're distributing are in 50-pound bags, it's more likely that women will not be able to carry them. That is the type of analysis we apply to ensure we distribute that food in an effective way to women, who are the leaders of households and the ones who make sure the families eat.
That goes beyond the dollars we would spend. It goes to our efforts to work with organizations—with the WFP, the World Food Programme, and with other UN agencies such as the UNFPA, the fund for population, and other partners—to ensure that in everything they do, even if it's not specifically focused on gender equality, all of their development programming is delivering in a feminist way across all gender equality results.