Foreign Affairs committee  Our operating budget is based on a number of factors. One, we're unique in federal departments because we're in 110 or 111 countries. We have 174 missions. You have, in that operating budget, a very significant percentage of operating costs that are very much fixed, and determined by leases, utility bills and all those things.

Foreign Affairs committee  In terms of an individual investment or an overall country—

Foreign Affairs committee  A specific investment has to be consistent with the country strategy. If we have x amount of dollars, if we're looking in Ethiopia, for example, we'll look at what their needs are, and what other donors do. Then we look at what investment will make the greatest impact. If it's in health and in a specific sector of health, we look at the results that we will achieve from this, and we work with our civil society partners or multilateral partners to determine what the impacts of those investments are.

Foreign Affairs committee  That efficiency measure, the input and output, is done as part of the financial analysis of a specific investment to see what the overhead is, the direct costs and what the end result is—

Foreign Affairs committee  Do you mean an overall result number or an overall financial number?

Foreign Affairs committee  Again, I'd have to go back to say that all of those project results will roll up into an overall result by area. Yes, you can compare them, provided they're similar enough projects, because an education project, for example, in Ethiopia will be completely different from an education project in Senegal.

Foreign Affairs committee  We report on that through the OECD report. That's where we break down all of the government's official development assistance spending by country.

Foreign Affairs committee  Afghanistan is the largest recipient. Ethiopia and Haiti would be second and third.

Foreign Affairs committee  As to the decision to even work with a country, there's an approach that analyzes the individual country context to determine what sectors we should be working with and what level of expenditure there should be, by country. We also look at what our colleagues in other donor countries are doing and what the local government is doing in those various sectors.

Foreign Affairs committee  For every country, as I said, there's analysis based on what the country's needs are, by looking at our entire development assistance budget and what we can allocate across the portfolio of countries that we're involved in, and where our official development assistance makes the most difference.

Foreign Affairs committee  The allocation of resources is really based on that individual country analysis and a country strategy.

Foreign Affairs committee  Yes.

Foreign Affairs committee  Quickly, yes, we do track. As part of our previous question on data, we do track the type of organizations that we work with in regard to partnering with them, be they multilateral or local. We are having an increase in the number of local partners that we use. Even through our normal, traditional humanitarian assistance, we often use large international NGOs, such as Oxfam, and we'll use a local implementing partner to deliver their assistance.

Foreign Affairs committee  One of the key pillars in the policy was to apply a gender lens and a gender-responsive approach to humanitarian assistance. The minister provided the example of what we were doing in Cox's Bazar, and that is one element of it. All through the policy in humanitarian actions, we will look at how women specifically are impacted, nutritional support for malnourished children and access to health services, including sexual health and reproductive services as well.

Foreign Affairs committee  With respect to humanitarian resources, all of our humanitarian action is responsive. When we allocate funding to a humanitarian initiative, that is the lens that we apply, so we don't say for all of the humanitarian resources, we'll allocate a specific amount.