Mr. Ruairí de Búrca:

That technology is coming in. Anything that reduces the cost to farmers is very valuable. Clearly there is more we can do and we are open to this. We are in good conversations with a number of Irish agribusiness concerns. We are also very much involved in conversations with ministries of agriculture and others in the countries where we work to ensure that what we do meets their needs.

Another example from agriculture, which I know personally, is that Fyffes was giving free advice to the Government of Mozambique. Mozambique has a potential comparative advantage in banana production but does not have the logistics chain ready. Fyffes has been giving it advice on how to get the cold chain logistics up to scratch in order that its bananas can be sold on the international market. Fyffes is also advising on how to get the phytosanitary aspect correct so that Mozambique can avoid some of the banana diseases getting into the broader chain.

Some of this is also linked to the question of data, on which I touched briefly. There is an opportunity for countries that did not necessarily go through an analogue industrial revolution to leapfrog and move to digital, and we want to be part of this. We have taken a few initiatives so far. This is something on which we can build. The current Estonian Presidency of the European Union has been trying to drive its digital for development agenda, and this will also bring broader attention and resources to it.

From trying to get our children to programme our televisions, we all know that there is a youth dimension to the adoption of new technologies. It is very interesting to watch the widespread adoption of digital telephones, or smartphones, in Africa, which are transforming how people communicate. There is also quite an amount of app development in Africa. The Minister of State, Deputy Cannon, will go to Tanzania in ten days to attend the launch of Africa coding week. This is a partnership between Ireland and SAP that tries to get children in Africa to develop coding skills. It is interesting that it is in Tanzania this year. Last year, it was launched in Uganda, and both are Irish key partner countries. A few years ago we launched a young scientists competition in Tanzania, which has now gone to Kenya. It is not just about looking at digital in terms of developing an app but putting value on the STEM subjects, which are something we know here, and giving children in other parts of the world the same types of opportunities we have ourselves. This digital for development concept, which is about coding skills and giving children access to what could be used for small business, is being rolled out this year in some refugee camps in Jordan. It is not just children in somewhat settled environments but those who have gone through the trauma of moving, in a refugee context, who are being given access to this.

Irish Aid has supported pilots for mobile banking in Malawi and Ethiopia. We have also trialled information systems in Tanzania and Malawi to get market information to farmers. There is more we can do as the technology advances and as mobile phone telephony becomes more widespread. There is somewhat of a concern because some of data suggests that low-income families sometimes will put money into keeping the telephone fed rather than feeding the children, so we need to be careful to make sure that by putting an emphasis on development we do not actually lose some of the emphasis on some of the other stuff, such as nutrition, which are also important. Clearly, in places that are not necessarily well-connected as regards roads, it is important.

I mentioned education, and to pick up Deputy Maureen O'Sullivan's point on family planning and opportunities the data shows there is a clear correlation between access to education and the date of first birth. In many countries, girls give birth way too young. In many of our key partner countries, we work with education ministries to look at keeping girls in school for as long as possible and to ensure that when they leave school, there are economic opportunities available to them. This has to be a key part of any strategy.

We have done work with gender Ministries to identify the cultural drivers. Sometimes there are deep cultural drivers that differ in various parts of the country also. There is no one size fits all solution. It is not that we, as foreigners, come in and say, "Change your culture". When we work with local ministries, who work with local thought leaders and with traditional leaders, over time we can help to create a context where some of those cultural drivers can begin to change. We are sensitive to that but we have to do it in a way that respects the local cultural norms, etc.

There are elements around health system strengthening that are also important. Part of it is about making sure that there are attended births. There are still very high maternal death rates in many of the countries where we work. This is directly linked to a lack of access to trained birth attendants. There are often fears about going into the conventional medical systems because the learnt experience is that if a person is about to die, and if he or she goes there and dies there people think that scientific medicine kills. We need to think about innovative ways to encourage women to get into those systems. Ironically, some of the work we have done on HIV has been very important in health system strengthening and in getting young women who might be at risk to get into the conventional medicine system. Some of the logistic chains we have helped to build in order to get anti-retroviral drugs out - for example in Mozambique - are the same logistic chains that are used for the distribution of contraception and so on. This is not something we do on our own, we have to work with others in partnerships. In rolling out the programmes we work with UN partners, including the United Nations Population Fund, UNFPA, the UN Women and The Global Fund to fight AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria, as well as other bodies, health and education ministries and donors. In many ways this is a job of a generation. The statistics show that things are beginning to change and we can take some credit for that.

Deputy O'Sullivan spoke of trade and human rights. I am told that the Department's human rights and trade documents will be available in the next few weeks. I do not want to get ahead of these, but hopefully it will give some comfort in that regard. One of the consequences of having embassies on the ground in Africa is that is gives us an opportunity to perform an ethics check on what Irish business does. It also gives us an opportunity to advise on the local cultural context within which people work, to make sure that business in pursuit of its legitimate profit motivation does no harm or does least harm in that process. To be fair, most of the businesses that I have been engaged with are very responsible and try to build good corporate social responsibility elements in to their work in Africa. There are cases where businesses have come to embassies to look at who they might partner with to design the most culturally and geographically specific approaches to the process.

I am sure there is more that could be done but we are trying to do our best to provide a resource to that. This is where we, as an organisation, need to do more learning also. I would not say that we have this one sorted. We are up for it and we are trying, as are more Irish businesses, to look to a growing Continent as a source of trade and investment. Different responsibilities go with trade and investment, and in the kind of things people invest in.