Grants and Contributions

Canada's Fisheries Fund will transform and drive innovation in the fish and seafood sector in Canada with a focus on developing the sector to better meet growing market demands for sustainably sourced, high-quality fish and seafood products.

The purpose of this CanExport Innovation agreement is to support Canadian organizations to carry out activities related to pursuing opportunities that would lead to establishing new collaborative Research and Development (R&D) partnerships between the Recipient and foreign organizations in order to support R&D on the Recipient’s technology and advance its commercialization.

We will develop automatic systems to evaluate the proficiency of non-native learners of French, considering primarily the acoustic-phonetic aspects of speech, rather than the lexical content. We will focus on measures such as fluency (measured by speaking rate), quality of pronunciation, and intelligibility. Higher-level measures of proficiency such as vocabulary sophistication, grammar and topic development will be left to NRC researchers.To evaluate our chosen measures, we will build our own systems for automatic speech recognition (ASR) for French speech, building in the capability to work well on non-native accents. Using our own system will allow us to access to the internal properties of the system, necessary to determine information such as word-level timings, word-level confidence measures, and the deviation of the user from standard pronunciations at the phonetic level, as well as detecting when the user is speaking.Using the extracted measures as input features, we will train downstream classifiers – such as deep neural networks – to predict human judgments of spoken language proficiency on a collection of recordings from language learners. We will further explore whether these classifiers can be trained in a language-independent way, using a collection from learners of English, for example.

This project aims to improve the sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR) of adolescent girls in Kenya, Uganda, and Zambia, particularly girls who have dropped out of school. Project activities include: (1) providing training and support on SRHR and life skills to adolescent girls; (2) providing training and support on financial literacy and entrepreneurship to adolescent girls; (3) building understanding and support for adolescent girls’ rights among parents, community leaders, men and boys; (4) building the capacity of health care providers and health care managers to deliver appropriate and respectful sexual and reproductive health care to adolescent girls and boys; and (5) building the capacity of youth groups and women’s rights groups to advocate for improved laws, policies and services concerning adolescent SRHR. The project expects to benefit over 200,000 girls and young women between the ages of 10 and 19. CARE is implementing this project in partnership with the Centre for Reproductive Rights, Youth Coalition for Sexual and Reproductive Rights, and Restless Development.

Strengthening the democratic participation of women in Kenya through training, experience sharing and the development of a campaign action plan for 20 female aspirants for elective leadership during Kenya’s 2022 general election

Improving access to HIV prevention and treatment for Intersex, Transgender and Gender Non-Conforming (ITGNC) persons in Nairobi, Mombasa, Eldoret and Kisumu, Kenya through targeted stakeholder engagement in line with the newly developed Transgender Guidelines

Increased access to quality education for returnee children through remedial classes in the Giteranyi community, in Burundi’s Muyinga Province

Enhancing the protection, prevention and response to Sexual and Gender-Based Violence (SGBV) in Barawe, Lower Shabelle, Somalia through essential service delivery, advocacy and capacity building

Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights Based on Non-Binary Gender Education in Rural Communities of El Salvador

The Power of Red Butterflies: SRHR and menstrual hygiene to address teen pregnancy