There is quite a bit of evidence in terms of the impact of microenterprise with women, that by giving them the power and giving them the opportunity, they are able to improve their lot, and therefore improve their access to other services, and therefore improve their health. You can look at it in different ways.
In the health area we say all these things determine whether you get up in the morning and go to work. If you are healthy, if you're not sick and you have food in your belly, you can learn, and you can get up and go to work. You become a productive person. If you're not having babies every 14 months, then you have energy and you can get up and work and be productive.
Looking at that whole infrastructure is really important. Just as roads are important for transporting agricultural goods, they're also important for transporting a woman from A to B. But they're also vectors too. As the trucking routes increased in Africa, they became the routes for the spread of HIV/AIDS; so it's not always good and it's not always bad. We have to look at it in a very broad and very intersectoral way.
On the lack of statistics, you're correct, but in terms of health, the health statistics are probably better than many of the other statistics because we're really good at doing that. If you die or if you live, it's pretty easy—although not always are you counted—and those statistics are gathered up at the smallest little health centres on little scraps of paper and put into a binder and sent up to the minister of health. What is done with them is the issue. They are not analyzed well, they are not interpreted well, and they're not fed back down to the district level where the planning takes place, and that's a huge issue. So the health information piece is huge.
I think CIDA has only funded four health information systems projects in the last 10 or 15 years, and that kind of shows where you need to be integrating it within all of the health projects.