Thank you. My challenge is to be succinct as well.
Thank you very much for being here today and thank you very much for the work you're doing.
I don't know whether you were all downstairs this morning at the event on international leadership and Canada's role on the promotion of gender equality and women's rights. If you were, I'd ask you to comment on it. I would ask you to particularly comment on some of the funding challenges we heard about.
I want to just comment briefly on the fact that at the G-8 meeting last year in July, the G-8, including our government, committed to accelerating the progress on maternal health, “including sexual and reproductive health care and services and voluntary family planning”. I just wanted to get that on the record.
You referenced the economic cost of the death of so many women around the world. Last week the Minister of International Cooperation said:
It's our responsibility to our taxpayers and our peoples to ensure that we are getting the biggest bang for the buck.... We spent a lot of attention on how we are going to measure outcomes, how we are going to ensure that our investments are actually going to pay off and make a difference.
I wonder if any of you have had any experience in measuring outcomes in terms of what it means in a country when a mother of four, five, or six children dies and is no longer able to create economic viability for her family. Is there a way of measuring those kinds of outcomes?
My other question is talking about the funding of the work that needs to be done and some of what we heard this morning.
I don't know who wants to go first.