Grants and Contributions

March 2023 – Since early February 2023, Syria and Türkiye have been impacted by multiple severe earthquakes that have resulted in over 40,000 deaths and significant damage to infrastructure. An overall estimate puts the people directly affected by the earthquakes at 9.1 million in Syria and 8.8 million in Türkiye. Needs assessments have revealed vulnerable earthquake-affected populations require urgent access to shelter and food assistance, water, sanitation and hygiene services, and healthcare.

Global Affairs Canada launched an earthquake response Matching Fund in response to the elevated humanitarian needs in partnership with the Humanitarian Coalition and its members. Through this mechanism, the Government of Canada matches eligible donations made to the Humanitarian Coalition and its members for earthquake relief efforts up to a maximum of $10 million. Project activities include: (1) delivering emergency food assistance; (2) providing emergency shelter assistance; (3) rehabilitating water, sanitation and hygiene facilities; and (4) providing essential non-food items.

March 2023 – Humanitarian needs in Ukraine continue to be significant. The 2023 Global Humanitarian Overview (GHO) indicates 17.7 million people require humanitarian assistance in Ukraine this year. Priority needs result largely from attacks on energy and shelter infrastructure, which hampers access to water, food, health care, transportation, telecommunications, and other essential services. The war is impacting women and men in different ways and is exacerbating pre-existing inequalities.

With GAC’s support, HelpAge Canada is supporting the most at-risk older people at home and their caregivers, older people displaced, those staying with others and those residing in social care institutions, in conflict-affected communities in east Ukraine. Project activities include: (1) providing basic social care services for home bound older women and men, including non-food items such as hygiene kits; (2) providing mobile teams to support most at-risk older people in social care institutions with protection services; (3) providing referrals and case management for older people and caregivers requiring additional protection support; (4) providing community-based protection activities, including mental health and psychosocial support; (5) providing cash for protection; and (6) distributing winterisation items to selected social care institutions.

Improving health and wellbeing of 5,000 marginalized adolescent girls and women in tribal communities of Telangana, India, through menstrual health and hygiene management (MHM) and awareness on Sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR).

This project aims to increase the adaptation of young rural women and their communities to climate change in the Guéra province of Chad. The project also contributes to strengthening the skills and effectiveness of groups and cooperatives in developing climate-smart food systems with and for young women groundnut and sesame producers.

Project activities include: (1) training women in peanut and sesame production in soil restoration and conservation techniques adapted to water stress and based on improved local knowledge; (2 ) implementing community reforestation and restoration campaigns for strategic aquatic and wetland ecosystems. This is for adaptation to climate change based on nature-based solutions that meet the needs of young women groundnut and sesame producers and their communities; (3) supporting groups and cooperatives in developing high-value marketing channels for young women producers; and (4) setting up pilot leadership laboratories supporting innovative and non-traditional social, economic and environmental initiatives of young rural women in the field of Climate Change Adaptation.

The direct beneficiaries of the project are 5,000 people, mainly women peanut and sesame farmers, and their communities, including 3,500 women and young women and 1,500 men and young men. Indirect beneficiaries are estimated at more than 45,000 family members of the direct project beneficiaries.

This project will address key issues encountered with conventional electronic beamforming networks (BFN) used in space-based Radio-Frequency phased array antennas, popular in recent low cost, large, Low Earth Orbit (LEO) constellation projects. We will design and fabricate a photonic integrated circuit to implement an innovative BFN architecture. A higher level of integration in photonic circuits leads to smaller BFN dimensions and lower cost. It will implement also true time delay within the BFN, which eliminates frequency specific behavior of beam shaping. Large bandwidth performances will be much improved over wide scan angles for operations in LEO. The high-level of integration will be enabled by wavelength division multiplexing architectures.

Advances exploratory research under the New Beginnings Initiative

Advances exploratory research under the New Beginnings Initiative

Sources of single photons are key resources for future quantum sensors and quantum networks. The Project aims to optimise single photon source operation in quantum dot nanowire-based devices by merging the expertise of world-renowned researchers from the NRC in the fabrication of semiconductor nanostructures for quantum photonics and the expertise of the Dalhousie Ultrafast Quantum Control Group in the development of optimal quantum control strategies for the optical triggering of quantum emitters. The research program will work on both 950nm and 1310nm devices produced by the NRC, applying a newly developed pumping scheme, Notch-Filtered Adiabatic Rapid Passage (NARP), to simultaneously optimize photon indistinguishability, brightness and photon purity

The project team will develop a brain-inspired approach to quantum computing, quantum reservoir computing, which leverages the dynamics of a complex quantum system (the reservoir) to perform computations, and which promises to be well suited for near-term intermediate scale quantum (NISQ) devices. Two different approaches will be explored, one based on interacting spin networks and one based on dynamics generated by measurements. The team will systematically search for quantum advantage by quantifying ‘quantumness’ and by jointly optimizing tasks and readout approaches.

Advances exploratory research under the New Beginnings Initiative