The Auditor General has noticed a lack of interest among senior officials at Global Affairs Canada when it comes to measuring the results of the feminist policy that guides the country’s foreign aid.
“We found no evidence that senior managers regularly reviewed gender equality results or progress toward policy goals,” reads one of the reports. Auditor General Karen Hogan released Monday.
His office had great difficulty obtaining the necessary documents for its audit of the ministry responsible for international development assistance, Global Affairs Canada (GAC). Documents were lost from the computers of former employees, making it impossible to track some projects funded from the $3.5 billion in bilateral development assistance for poor countries.
The Auditor General mainly concludes that the federal government is not able to demonstrate how this aid has improved the results for women and girls.
“This means that senior management did not examine the full impact of the programs and was unable to do so,” says the report, which specifically blames AMC’s senior leaders.
For example, she notes that the Ministry has not evaluated the improvement in school attendance in countries where projects are financed which were intended to make schools more welcoming for young girls, such as the installation of toilets.
Nearly half of the 60 projects were not assessed with criteria from the government’s feminist policy, launched in 2017 and which must be an essential value for projects funded by Canada. The federal government narrowly missed two of the three objectives of the policy, namely to devote 15% of the funds to projects focusing on gender equality and to send 50% of the funds to sub-Saharan Africa.
According to Ms. Hogan, the department missed an opportunity to demonstrate the value of international aid. All of his recommendations were accepted by the administration.
The duty reported in 2020 that senior management at Global Affairs Canada has mostly been promoting its executives from the English-speaking majority since the dissolution of the reputable French-speaking foreign aid agency, the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA).
The Auditor General also released reports on other topics on Monday. She concludes, for example, that the federal government was unable to demonstrate that access to high-speed Internet had been sufficiently improved in the country. A “digital divide” still exists to the detriment of rural areas and indigenous communities, she notes.