Report to Parliament on the Government of Canada’s Official Development Assistance 2017-2018

Sabrina Matina Brempong is the proud owner of Sabs Dayspring Community School, located in the town of Ahodwo, Kumasi, Ghana. She opened the school in 2015 with two children enrolled. In 2017, thanks to the Financial Inclusion for Enterprise Development project, Sabrina took out her first loan of 50,000 Ghanaian cedis (Can$14,000). In 2018, 117 children are enrolled in Sabrina’s school. As a result, not only do 117 children have access to quality, affordable education, but valuable jobs have also been created for the school’s teachers and other employees. By helping to provide online and at home services, Canada is playing a leadership role. It is increasing the access of Ghanaian women entrepreneurs such as Sabrina to financial products tailored to their needs.

In Bolivia, the Government of Canada, in partnership with SOCODEVI, helped establish a new value chain in the spice industry. This permitted families to earn three times as much and rely on a much more stable year-round income—winning factors that helped slow the rural exodus. The project also urged families to use special plant varieties that offer greater resilience against climate change. The project helped improve the financial security of 13,626 people from rural Indigenous communities in 2017-2018. More than half of these people (7,075) were women.

Bano Bibi is 73 and is raising her young granddaughters alone. Every day is a struggle to make ends meet, and she resorts to begging along the roadsides of Islamabad to bring food or money home for the girls. One day, a car struck Bibi and sped off. She was brought to the hospital with a leg fractured at the hip, and lay there in agony for 15 days because she couldn’t afford surgery. Her situation seemed hopeless, until doctors alerted her to Heartfile. Heartfile is a health financing model developed in Pakistan through support from Canada’s IDRC. The model enrols public sector health facilities to provide catastrophic health coverage to the poorest. It does this using a mobile phone-driven process that assesses patients’ poverty status and verifies requests for assistance through a national database. Bibi credits the model for her ability to walk, and even for saving her life.

The rise in violence in Myanmar since August 25, 2017, has severely limited humanitarian access. It restricts the delivery of essential food, medication and other basic commodities for all people living in northern Rakhine State, particularly the Rohingya population. The mass exodus of more than 725,000 Rohingya to Bangladesh—the majority women and children—adds to the existing caseload of refugees in Bangladesh. The massive displacement of the Rohingya triggered a large-scale humanitarian crisis. From the beginning of 2017 to March 2018, Canada channelled $45.9 million in humanitarian assistance funding to Myanmar and Bangladesh to meet the needs of crisis-affected populations. This money includes funding to UNFPA and CARE to help them provide information and services for Rohingya refugees in 22 women-friendly spaces in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh. Over 300,000 women received information on gender-based violence and sexual and reproductive health services.