good morning welcome to changes the program on sustainability i'm susan gregory the coordinating producer of the show and once again marjorie stewart is here in the studio good morning margery good morning and you have a you posting to guyana on behalf of the canadian government welcome ali good morning marjorie morris i often call you mom yes but i expect to learn a lot more about this career by asking foreign affairs and the canadian government well i think the first interest i had in international affairs started as a teenager when i did some interesting particular kind of a model u n summit that was much more focused on developed development issues than that and geopolitical issues or other kinds of ways of looking at the world and  made a point of having different participants represent developing countries and learn a bit about those countries and that fascinated me a lot what was going on in some countries in the global south well would you like to tell us what your current role is with the department of foreign affairs trade what's it called this week department of foreign affairs trade and development canada and that is the canadian department responsible for development assistance as well as political and trade affairs overseas and i have just wrapped up in us a four year assignment in ga and i am west africa as a program analyst and will talk a bit more about what's behind that job but involves knowing as much as possible about what's going on in ghana to help us organize our development assistance and track tracking what kinds of things we're doing and what we're achieving and what we can do better and wrapped up that assignment now and pretty soon i'll be back in ottawa to start a new assignment still working on west africa and they got a program but based in canada and post of us new seed at the canadian international development agency the arm's length agency that was responsible for canada's foreign aid has been kind of folded into a foreign affairs so it'll be a slightly new experience for you in ottawa will it yes that's right it's changing it's an amalgamation of foreign affairs department of foreign affairs and international trade with so internally now we talk about exceeding next to fate but all together we are the fat d which is not a beautiful acronym but we live with it  foreign affairs and trade and development ok so let's let's go back and go chronologically through the different and geographically through the different places that to you you went along this career path because after your high school experience you became involved with canada world youth and we have a canada world youth leaving permanent imo this year too join with an in the indonesian group so tell us about your colombia experience that was the first big overseas experience that's right that was in i think it was in one thousand nine hundred seven and the canadian portion of the exchange was in manitoba and the overseas portion was in colombia so for those who know canada world youth a little bit we are paired up youth from a developing country and youth from canada and we spend part of the time in a canadian community and part of the time in the host the other countries community but unlike some exchange programs you don't go back to the homes of your counterpart you go to another community usually or a poor community to learn some development issues and get involved but i always liked about canada world youth was that it wasn't one person from sane and imo a middle class family parachuted into a middle class environment in a developing country but you're surrounded by your peers of both communities learning learning together and i imagine that was an interest that must have been twenty four of you to begin with yes that's right and it's a group experience now they break up the twenty four into three smaller groups so we were each of us one community but there's an emphasis on doing some community service while you're there and one of the interesting things is often the the participants from the developing country are learning as much about some of the poorer communities in their own country as the participants from canada and vice versa where i learn a lot about it for all manitoba that i wouldn't have known otherwise now what most of us immediately think about when we think about colombia's drugs so did you see any connections with the drug trade well there were there was there were some issues going on we were in the area of colombia that is a coffee producing area which the other thing people think of but we weren't very far from what's considered the drug capital but much more so we were aware of the political violence that was going on and the the rebel movement because for example on new year's eve we were instructed not to go into town because there was some concern about rebel activity and it was one of the last years that they sent canada world youth groups to colombia so we knew that the drug trade and the drug violence was there just as today it would be in mexico and other places it still is i'm guessing colombia but it was the political violence was even more of an issue where we were just something we had to be aware of and i think i remember you once mentioned thing that people who seem to be the owners of the home that you were living in or the state that you were living in and presumably your surrogate parents were sort of the employees the owners came in from the city one time and you found that quite interesting while they were carrying guns and certainly it was a sort of a cowboy culture but i had a sense i mean we didn't know very much but i had a sense they were probably linked into the the drug trade just because they are seem to be that it can counter to counter to law and order something is something there was something there in the guns made us a bit nervous so you were only there for it took say a year out of  your life it's more like a six or seven month programs but in the end adds up to a good portion of a year and then you went off to toronto tell us a little bit but about the studies there because they sounded fascinating so at university of toronto they still have this garber college they have a cooperative program in international development studies it's one of several co op programs but it's the only one because their focus is on on o verseas development work where instead of doing short co op terms you do a full year co op in a developing country and that when i went to my as my co op assignment ended up being with care canada but it can the with any overseas development focused organization so it's not just about international affairs and international business or in any other aspect of the international relations for can specifically about development cooperation and because of the nature of the program usually the placements are with n g o s canadian n g o s so you were a year in guatemala what were you doing there guatemala so that was my work placement i was with care canada  there were they had a project in eastern guatemala was a microcredit project in a rural area with guatemalan women and that was unusual until that point a lot of microcredit was either being done as it still is in south asia where there's a very concentrated population or in latin america it was being done in cities that had been a lot of rural experiments and the micro loans were being used for things like starting small egg production operations or candle making or it was always products or small businesses that could be that were to serve the same community and where there are committees of the recipient that are supposed to monetary other and make sure that everybody does what they're supposed to yes as a self help group model so the the groups could take out a loan and the loan recipient would circulate within the group but be the model instead of collateral of a self help group is that that the next loan the next person's loan depends on the previous person's loan being repaid and the group in general being in good standing so that's kind of to some extent a peer pressure but you also see that in those kinds of peer groups sometimes if one gets into difficulty they'll all help each other out and help to pay back a loan to partly to help their friends or their their compassionate but also to keep t  there was there was a lot of interesting dynamics and divisions and who was who was the elite and who was who is excluded the people in the area where i was working were probably  hundred percent ethnically indigenous but they had become assimilated into latin culture so they were considered more part of the mainstream and not the indigenous community they didn't wear indigenous dress or speak an indigenous language but they were definitely they were definitely out of the mainstream they lived in quite a remote area but to some extent they wanted to take care of themselves and stay there and they called that region where they lived them live on tiny of the mountain and there was a place where we were when we drove up on to the mountain there was there was the gate posts where they could actually put up a gate to block the road and apparently they that blocked out the authorities from time to time when they decided that they didn't want to deal with the state too much anymore oh that's a thought for phone co where i learned isn't it the next well what was going on took you to bangladesh so i went back to toronto to finish my studies and then i got a very good opportunity with the aga khan foundation of canada to do a six month of reconstruction post war reconstruction of bangladesh after the one nine hundred seventy one in the war of independence and had a very interesting leader chief executive who had come out of the private sector as a business chief executive but he put his heart and soul into this organization so he knew how to grow things and organize things and he established he and his colleagues he wasn't he wasn't a prima donna he didn't want to be in the spotlight all the time but he with his with his colleagues had put together this very effective very large organization which is still working now and so what were you doing as an intern they didn't know quite what to do with me when i first got there because they were used to having visitors and from overseas for short terms or to do studies and things but they weren't quite sure what to do with a full time intern in the end i did do some research with they have their own research and evaluation division so i worked with them to think of a research project so that i could travel out into some of the committees in the villages i was trying to get a sense of how were the mainly women clients and members benefiting from their brac experience what was it bringing their men were there things that could do better so i would go into the communities with a counterpart who spoke bengali so we could talk to people and interview them about what their experience had been with the organisation with self help with raising a bit of funds to to manage on their own i think quite a lot of people don't realise is that bangladesh was originally part of india and they speak bengali as do the people of the northwest northeastern state west bengal west bend goal is a dish was east bengal there in the british india and it was part of than it was east pakistan after independence because it was majority muslim so it was part of that very sad and tragic period of independence history where the country was was split and but but the the way it played out was tragic but later on had its own war of independence against the west pakistanis because there was a big hierarchy divide between the two the two communities and the bengalis felt the bangladeshis felt that they had not been treated well at all and they were not being their language was the trigger they weren't being allowed to study and work in their own language yes yes so back home from bangladesh and then comes the seeder opportunity yes i well i went to at that point i went to carleton university to start my masters in international affairs with a focus on international development and as part of a research opportunity i applied to then cedar and got a small grant to go to south india and do some research on fair trade self help handicraft production i wonder why you've thought about well somebody i knew very well who is interviewing me right now had gone to india just a little bit before with a small grant through the global village connection to look at association and i spent quite a bit of time with them and did a lot of interviews with women again trying to get a sense of how this whole self help solidarity group was benefiting them it was an interesting one they had grown out of a kind of christian missionary model an organization that had been set up by some churches and started women doing handicrafts in a small way to earn a little bit of income but they had launched off as their own organization eventually not the whole of  was the particular subgroup that i was working with yes it's no wonder for how long years go by i just lost that thread that was a long time ago but anyway what i concluded in the end from spending a lot of time with the women and interviewing and learning about them was they had gained a lot from the self help group but there were also a lot of barriers still in place for them and some of the freedoms they gained from being part of the group and being a more community commercially active getting out and being having their own small collective business they would go be able to go to town for example and to transact business which previously they wouldn't have been encouraged to do but there was there was a sort of self censorship or self control aspect well we're allowed to go to town to transact business so we would have to be very careful not to go and see a movie or something bad like that there was there was still a sense that they had to behave a certain way they were working within certain limits so i remember that i label titled my thesis is limited empowerment and then you went to work for sita full time and the next thing was i remember being totally surprised because i'm very cynical about government and i thought oh probably send her to africa because she has all this knowledge about latin america and south asia and where did they send you india so i joined with a focus on south asia and i spent a few years in the headquarters and then went overseas to india to work there again always it's always a fascinating experience to work overseas and you learn a lot and you learn to be humble maybe not everybody learns to be humble but if you're paying attention i think you do so we had a fairly big government of canada program in india but while we were there while i was there it was  when the government of india and sensually invited the government of canada to stop giving them aid which was a very interesting moment it was partly a political partly standing up on their own and  showing indian pride but it was also partly a series of misunderstandings because the finance ministry of india i don't think quite realised that they didn't want to deal with the canadian money anymore because it was too small and just a nuisance but that the line departments the government of india departments that we worked with much more closely knew that what they were getting wasn't the money it was the it was the cooperation and the technical assistance and the canadian expertise and connections and special areas so a little bit later the government of india turned around and said oh well we don't need your financial aid but we wouldn't mind some technical assistance but sadly it was too late because by that time we had closed the program and that's what the something like the thing about communication is that we think it has happened something no i'm not getting that right sorry but i'm reminded of that and they write that you know we think we've communicated and we course wherever there's an internet connection at c h l y dot ca where we stream live and podcast and i hope to have the podcast of today's program up as soon as possible so that if you missed any part of it you'll be able to listen to the whole thing at your convenience the program that you are listening to on c h l why i want to one point seven f m is changes and today marjorie is talking with eileen stewart who is working in international development and that whole thing that you've ended the with before the break about india and the communication snafu is that it  miscommunication could happen between two governments but of course it was just about time that india and china were about to explode on our consciousness as to make a giant that's right and there's no question that  india because the misunderstanding was also even within departments of the government of india and the finance people not having a sense of what some of the technical programs did as well as between the two governments and what resonated with everybody and made it made the decision happen perhaps too fast was of course india didn't need our money i'm not quite right now there was lots and everybody immediately said that's right we shouldn't have an aid program in india and he won't need our money but some of the technical cooperation that was going on partly because in some cases can't canadians had different and really useful expertise but partly in some cases just bringing an opportunity for indians and canadians to come together and work on particular issues there was a wonderful environmental project that had many sub projects throughout the country it was called the india canada environment facility and it was much more of a partnership model that we lost those opportunities for technical collaboration and unfortunate there isn't really anything in between development assistance and a pure her political and trade relationship that allows you to fund kinds of those kinds of connections so looking back on the four years you were in india which projects really stand out for you well why one in particular was an aids prevention project that i worked on fairly intensively with the university of manitoba as and implementing agency and they have some world leading expertise and they came in to help in a particular area of india both understand what with the dynamics of hiv transmission because aids at that time was aids and hiv at that time were very under poorly understood in india and hadn't been looked at very closely so they were looking at some of the transmission dynamics and then trying to see what could be done to put in place better services for people who who are hiv positive but also prevention in terms of access to condoms but also  working with sex workers on empowerment projects that would give them more opportunity to demand use of condoms those kinds of things that was that was a really interesting project and i remember going to visit in south india one of the projects sites and the town that we went to stay in the only real hotel in the town had also been mapped by the project as one of the sex were hot spots and we understood although i didn't try to investigate and i don't know if they would have wanted to share with me but i understood if you were the right gender go down to the to the lobby and asked for their their women book you could get a binder with pictures of women that could be called into your room but there was also a whole traditional sex work you know about it you can decide whether you think it's ethical or not but it had turned into prostitution certain avenue into prostitution that brought a lot of women from the same community so women and aunties would introduce their set their own daughters into this for the women serving in the temple but it turned into a much more exploitive situation i know that because when and i were in india and we met with a very very to gifted and committed  family who were a social justice organization in their own marched one of the women said i have twenty thousand children and she meant the children of the temple prostitutes right so twenty thousand  so the i mean the the institutionalized prostitution that had come out of a cultural system and i don't even understand all of the antecedents but it's a very interesting one to study had become of course concerned in terms of aids transmission and that to me was very enlightening trying to understand aids prevention work by necessity you have to work a lot with people in sex work as well as with usually with transport truck or anybody who's in a high risk group which includes almost anybody who works away from home at least yes in most places and you have to accept people where they are and try to work with them so what was perplexing and sort of puzzling and troubling to me and still is is the objective of the project was was right it was to protect people's health and human services armored action but certainly wasn't to change the system because that was something that would have to happen from within so there was an it there was certainly an attempt to give people some better knowledge and power which might eventually end in changes but that wasn't the objective the objective was just to reach them with services and that was to me it's always a bit disturbing that you look at a situation like that where something something is not right maybe not everyone  d not everybody will agree but looking at that situation i would say something is not right but you're not trying to change it you're just trying to at least get people the services they need to make their own changes well let's let's move from india the next thing that happened after you came home from india was you were posted to ethiopia but you had a lot of responsibilities and were traveling in and out of ethiopia you were at they say the ethiopia desk that's right for a long time what did you learn from that ethiopia is a politically fascinating country it's modeled itself i would say to some degree on china although it doesn't have all the resources and and  the the base of the economic base that china has but what was interesting about ethiopians was they they were certainly not going to put up with the western powers telling them what to do they were willing to take a fair amount of assistance and there was a negotiation of you know what are we going to agree on what will you support and will take your resources to work on those things but it was it was well known that you could only push the ethiopians so far and if they made a clear decision that they didn't want to do something that they weren't going to do it and equally if they made a clear decision that they were going to do something they were going to do it and so we had to find the places where we had a meeting of a shared vision and work in those areas and a lot of people listening may not know that as far as i recall there's a group called the dirk there was who were the first sort of communist government communist i mean i first of all get it wrong but i don't want to try to go into the history of any in any great detail partly because i make a mistake but after haile selassie the people that when haile selassie was thrown out it was by the derg which means committee which was he brought some positive reforms too but he was not by any means democratic a democratic governor entirely benevolent ruler he was ousted by the group that was called the dark which meant the committee  many of whom were very idealistic young students but quickly the movement was taken over by of with the leadership being from both eritrea and to gray her chair now an independent country which had been searching for its own independence for decades before anyway and to gray now integral to ethiopia were able to use the dark but without trying to go into all the dynamics of that modern ethiopia today there is still a sense that there there is a real iron fisted control even though it's democratic in the sense that they do have elections but there's a lot of manipulation political manipulation to you know he opened every very tightly tied to the ruling party and ethiopia came to our attention in the mid eight because that was the first real global outpouring of concern about a major famine yes and i remember her blew by mind that ethiopia was exporting food at the same time that we were watching pictures on television of people dying of starvation you know the regime at the time which was the main gets to regime my understanding is they were they were using the simple way of putting it is they were using food as a weapon and the current holding it yes and the current government people will argue that they have done the same to a lesser degree at different times and the u s once threatened to do their twin there was going to be a world food conference in rome they said well if you don't do things the way we like them will hold our food aid which is some other sort of food as a weapon policy it's not it could be depending on who needed the food who was going to get it whether the food was going to be sold or directly go to hungry people and maybe that's the this is the good entry point for me to ask you the question that a lot of people ask and it is how can we be sure that the aid we give is getting to the people who really need it well that's a big part of the job that i do when i said that my job as a development program analyst is to get to know as possible as much as possible about the country we're working with develop networks and together with my colleagues who might be working on specific projects to develop monitoring strategies and plans so that we go to visit places where the aid and up where it's supposed to end up and see if we can see that the things that are supposed to happen are happening tell us about an ethiopian project that comes to mind so one of the most important projects we've had in ethiopia and i think it's probably still going is the productive safety nets project that actually is a food aid project although over time it also experiment has used food for work methodology and it's also experimented with  cash transfer methodology which we know is one of the ways to get resources directly to poor people it's a big government of ethiopia run program with the number of donors involved too  reach areas where people are fairly desperately poor and food insecure especially during their lean season when there's no production of food so they will have a harvest season and then they will have a lean season while waiting for the next crops to grow with an employment option it's a little bit i think it's a little bit comparable to some of the new deal work that was done in the united states at the end of the great depression to give people an option to work and get at least some basic resource back and the work is oriented to building community assets and productive assets that should protect and improve the local agriculture so the work will involve systems to prevent soil erosion like small small ditches and and dikes around and around hillsides ethiopia's a very mountainous country careful management style to ocean will evolve check dams little little little temporary reservoirs so a lot of the work is oriented to things that should allow the community to be a little more resilient and bit by bit not need the b s it's essentially a federal form of welfare not need the welfare assistance over time did you get any idea at that time of climate change affecting ethiopia malaria because you're high enough up the mountains that the that mosquito doesn't breed but there's a concern that it's on its way up the mountain with the warmth ethiopia already has a tremendous land degradation problem that is not created by climate change so the concern is that climate change will add to that so they have a land degradation problem based on a large peasant society living in a mountainous difficult environment trying to scratch out a living land that can only perhaps support a certain number of people so there's a sustainability issue and that predates the climate change climate change we assume will probably exacerbate that what we think is happening in ethiopia and began when we talk about ghana is rains are becoming less predictable and it's more climate variability is often the first impact of climate change in ghana i think we're seeing some issues with the steady warming but in ethiopia it was more a case of we have a such cycle of droughts and floods and that seem to be getting worse maybe more severe and less predictable i'm getting a picture of ho working with governments you are dealing  larger scale than we usually think of when we think of development projects we think of many small direct development projects that have just grown like topsy here and there with people traveling more and starting country to country direct helping groups but let's let's make the transition to ghana because that's where you've been for the last four years and ghana of course is a fascinating place i was a teenager  suess but got out was the first to become independent nine hundred fifty seven under kwame no croma who had a beautiful pan african vision and wanted to see an african community come together and become essentially a world power a little bit the way the european union has developed more recently of course a lot of problems have been encountered over the years and going to has had its years of military dictatorship but it's had very some blood soaked history since independence but what god has known for now especially within the development community it's often referred to as a development poster child as they are now up to about two decades of peaceful democratic stability successive multi party elections peaceful transfer of power and ongoing economic progress they are lucky they have some good struck good mineral resources which brings in a lot of money in the current  caravans and chocolate and they have cocoa which wasn't they didn't have in the ancient days because it comes from me that comes from the new world but they have they are a big producer of cocoa and apparently their cocoa is very fine quality and it's mostly produced on small holder farming techniques there's a lot of government investment in cocoa and it certainly a form of commercial agriculture but it's still primarily family farms was child slaves doing that there has been an issue in the cocoa industry a lot with child slavery my understanding is god has been able to clean that up quite a bit in cocoa where it hasn't done as well is something we don't import which is their own local fisheries that's still a real concern for child slavery so they do have still that issue but i'm not i don't really know the dynamics of how the child slavery was happening in guyana because i do think it's a family farming system but maybe some of them are big family farms and they didn't have as many children that they wanted to put to work as within the family i actually don't know a lot about their history but my understanding is they've they've they've done a lot of work on it together with some of the big companies who have been  by their clients have their cadbury has a big project and in ghana and certainly is vigilant i think to ensure that there is no child slave labor because they don't want their clients to accuse them of that and there has been some the surrounding countries it's more family farm based there are but there's farmers associations rather than cooperative spurs say they talk about farmer based organizations tell us about the bulk of baskets or bulk is a town near coastal tropical it's humid and very hot and it's great for cocoa although climate change is threatening that a bit now the north is arid and quite difficult and it's such a hell and so it's the pre it's between the sahara and the it's it's a particular type of environment that where at the moment there are major crops or grains millet is one of their traditional crops but the growing a lot of maize now they have much more issues so more similar to ethiopian situation with droughts and floods they do have some food insecurity but one region in the upper east very lovely region of ghana with beautiful traditional round mud houses that are common all houses so there's a whole compound of of houses be joined together they weave a particular kind of absolutely gorgeous basket that can be used as a shopping basket or any other and in ghana they're they're very much appreciated unused there is an issue with the grass that they need to produce the baskets and i've just recently learned and i don't know the details i think the grass doesn't actually grow in the boulder area it has to come from another area and one of gun is biggest problems at the moment in terms of people's incomes is very poor infrastructure especially for a country that's otherwise been quite successful and is starting to get marginally wealthier they have terrible roads and that means in a simplest sense that if you're a farmer or a basket producer getting your your inputs to where you do your job and your products to market is difficult and expensive so that's a big issue for god i know they're for the bulger basket makers they're having some issues just getting their their production supply but i don't know why it's vulgar baskets of the grass comes from somewhere else but the ladies from  some men but i think mainly ladies who don't these absolutely wonderful baskets it's often a question about fair trade for instance there's a connection and guatemala know where some of the greatest weavers in the world  is doesn't have to be a negative thing can be a positive thing but you just have to always keep an eye on supply chains and how is there somebody along the chain who's being exploited well we've talked a bit about good good projects where there are any that were spectacular failures that you could see coming and could avoid at another time spectacular failure failures i wouldn't put my finger on but  we always learn something in every project cycle and and do you i think with every project that is developed whether it's a big government to government project or a small community project we're almost always overoptimistic at the beginning of and we think we can fix everything and sometimes we think we found a magic bullet and somewhere in the middle of the project usually realize that it's all go on you feel that it's all gone completely off track and nothing's working and usually by the end of the project you realize you've been able to achieve something but it wasn't what you expected it wasn't quite what you expected so there i can't put my finger on a particular example just now but there's lots of examples of projects where along the way you feel that you're going just off track and you have to figure out how to fix it and if you're going to really fix you have to figure it out with the all the people who are involved in the project i think this is a generic example of a type of a type of problem of  projects that we're all struggling with how to deal with in that sustainability so some of the best projects and i'm a huge supporter of small n g o s community to community projects but it's very hard to know how to create a model that will really sustain itself when the project is over and certainly the community that that is benefiting being fully engaged and learning things and taking leadership through the project makes the prospects for sustainability quite good but it is usually not the full model but the projects trying to instill that sustains but some aspects of it go back after ten years to where there's been even a really good project you find some things are still there and other things will have gone off the rails are gonna direction you don't you were expecting well this probe this program is called changes and we've often discussed what our goals are for the program but what we're interested in is changes for the better because the status quo is definitely not perfect but looking back over all of your experiences what sort of changes would you like to see well one thing that i think is it's starting to happen and i think it needs to have more is finding ways to think about development assistance really as as a temporary fix and something that we don't intend to keep doing forever there should be a flow of rich countries to poor countries forever we don't want that to be the way the world is so how do we work with the countries that are poor and we do have the resource and there's it's good for a country like canada to be helping but how do we think about a transition where over time we will be partner countries and if we have projects they should be together rather than just one  make one one partner has the money it's very hard to get back to a fully shared model but i would like to see a change where over time a country like guyana particularly that's done quite well economically is putting much more of its own resource and it is but let's say to a specific project of canada is putting in some funds that going i would be putting in something commensurate and that that's already starting to happen but also that the decision making would change to be fully shared we've that's something that's that's already been tried and we've worked in the development the official development community has been working for some years under the mantra of aid effectiveness and definitely it's supposed to be based on country ownership and country leadership and that means the recipient country but that power dynamic where one partner has most of the money has never made that quite well so how do we get closer to that country's leadership at the same time because in big bilateral projects tends to be government to government and we know no government is perfect certainly not ours and certainly not our partner governments how do one change i'd like to c n a again it's something that's starting to happen depending on the country is will use the example of going to hands putting a lot of demands on the development projects as well as everything else that government is doing and being the ones that hold us accountable sometimes as a donor partner in a country like god on specific issues will feel like we are the ones who have to step up and hold the government accountable but it should begin hands who are holding the government accountable their own government and some some groups are on the ground are already doing that but i'd like to see more of that more of going and citizens in small communities who at the moment have sadly been taught to expect external assistance demanding that their own local governments provide water and power and not just giving in when that doesn't happen easily because there's a lot of barriers to getting the services they need and quite often th solution will be disabled i'll just go talk to the development ngo down the world down the road but i'd like to see more and more people holding their own their own elected officials to account and it's like welfare you hand and say it's new you have to provide the solutions would it work then well that's a discussion for another time but let me just ask you about the comments that peter buffett son of warren buffett who has come into his trust fund money and has taken it very seriously although i'm pleased to announce that he has a perfect successful career in his own right that he worked for and gained his comments have been what bothers him is not trying to do the right thing with money well bothers him is how did some people such as himself have so much extra money in the first place can you see any way that government policies could could respond to that kind of concern from an individual who has thought very carefully about the issue of how to target charitable giving well one thing which may sound counter intuitive but we do need to think about allowing private sector small businesses to flourish in countries where we're working and not only focus on social services because people need ways to make living incomes not big whacking incomes but you know i don't know the answer to that particular kid under i think it's something people have to figure out over time probably all in their own way i think governments have a role to play in redistribution and most governments do that and governments in developing countries have to make a transition from not doing much of that doing more of it at the beginning they don't do much of it because there is nobody sitting on a whole lot of money and then there's a transitional point where maybe there are but there isn't a lot of way to to distribute it so maybe there would be some kind of program that could build that concern into their project delivery i mean in the most simple technocratic way some of the things we did in india and some of the things we've done in other countries involve working on tax administration that's not a bad thing to do is but there will always be there will always be politics involved when you're working with government so there will always be disputes about whether we're taking the right path or the countries we're working guest today she is development program analyst with foreign affairs trade and development canada i got that right q thanks so much to margery stewart for bringing i lean in today that's that's fantastic actually is there a place where we can learn more i mean there must be many places really where we can find out more about what n g o s are doing and so on but is there a site that you would like to recommand in terms of the department of foreign affairs trade and development canada people can go to international dot  a look for information and you'll get links there you'll get information on all the development projects you have to go to the development section of the site you won't get details but you you can find out what partners are working and what countries and then follow that  through ok thank you so much and that's our show changes is heard every tuesday morning at eleven here and see it usually live check us out of facebook and on behalf of our production team thank you so much for