Don Cayo, Vancouver Sun
Published: Friday, June 13, 2008
When critics like me sound off about shortcomings in Canada’s delivery of foreign aid, it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that, problems aside, some very good things are still accomplished by Canadian people in Canadian agencies with Canadian dollars.
So it was refreshing to even curmudgeonly me to listen to Khalil Shariff, CEO of the Aga Khan Foundation Canada, expound this week on some of the same themes he wrote about in an op-ed published Thursday in the Vancouver Sun.
Shariff, a Richmond boy now based in Ottawa, is back in town this week for an inherently upbeat purpose — the Vancouver launch of an exhibit called Bridges that Unite. This collection of text, photos and videos seeks to show Canadians what successful development should look like, and it celebrates a 25-year partnership between the Aga Khan agency and CIDA, the federal government’s development arm. Its aim to provoke a thoughtful discussion of what Canada’s role in the fight against mass poverty could and should be.
In discussions of this sort, I tend to hone in on what has gone wrong with development attempts of the past, and why we need to learn lessons from those policies and projects that have gone right. Shariff focuses instead on what has gone right, and how the lessons from successful policies and projects can be applied more broadly.
Complete at the source: Vancouver Sun
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