2019-20 DRR Gender-based analysis plus
Institutional GBA+ Capacity
The Agency’s core responsibility is to support Atlantic Canada’s economic growth, wealth creation and economic prosperity through inclusive and clean growth. This is why the Agency integrated GBA+ into its various activities as part of its implementation strategy. To ensure accountability, the Agency used a GBA+ responsibility centre and working groups led by an executive-level GBA+ Champion to support and monitor the implementation of GBA+ throughout the Agency, and liaise with the broader Government of Canada GBA+ network.
In line with its mandate and core responsibility, ACOA engaged in initiatives that can be mainly linked to the Government of Canada Gender Results Framework key area entitled “Economic Participation and Prosperity” and objectives such as “Increased labour market opportunities for women, especially women in underrepresented groups.” Below are a few examples.
Diversity and Inclusion in ACOA’s workforce
The Agency drafted a new Employment Equity, Diversity and Inclusion Action Plan 2020-2022 that aims to increase representativeness and foster an inclusive workplace by focusing on recruitment, governance, talent management, and diversity and inclusion competencies and training. New in-house training was developed and piloted with a first session being offered to over 20 participants as part of this plan. This inaugural class included all employment equity groups and the four Atlantic Canada regional offices. The Agency also incorporated Insights Discovery to support an inclusive workforce aware of individual differences.
GBA+ analysis in support of inclusive programming for Canadians
Through Budget 2019, ACOA was a delivery partner for a number of national and regional initiatives. For those initiatives, ACOA conducted GBA+ analyses for various Treasury Board submissions and internal documents. For example, the Canadian Experiences Fund was created to help increase tourism activities in the off-season and provisions were made to support rural and remote, Indigenous and LBGTQ2 tourism activities. The Agency also ensured that GBA+ aspects were part of the performance measurement strategy.
GBA+ analysis in ACOA program evaluations
ACOA has been piloting a framework for including GBA+ in all program evaluations, including questions on how the design and delivery of the programming contributed to inclusive growth for two evaluations in 2019-20. The national, horizontal Community Futures Program evaluation found that while considerations for inclusiveness have not been formally integrated into the programming, a variety of approaches were being used to consider the needs of different identity groups. ACOA worked with other regional development agencies to develop a strategic approach to collect disaggregated data. The Innovation programming evaluation found that the Agency is making some efforts towards inclusive growth (e.g., immigration, Indigenous, women) and that there is growing internal recognition of the need to better support underrepresented groups and to better address labour and skills shortages in the region considering demographic pressures.
Awareness strategy
ACOA continued to build GBA+ capacity within the Agency by encouraging employees to take GBA+ training and delivering awareness building sessions with senior management to highlight the value of GBA+ for economic development and to ensure that GBA+ is part of programs, planning and decision-making discussions.
To celebrate and raise awareness of women, Indigenous, visible minorities and newcomer entrepreneurs,ACOA continues to publish success stories on its website. The stories feature exemplary business owners and focus on women in leadership positions who can inspire others to consider entrepreneurship as a career path.
Systems update
In 2019-20, ACOA updated its internal system to capture microdata on GBA+ elements in order to facilitate monitoring and reporting. This will enable ACOA to carry out analyses on its programs using new and existing administrative data available. This will help the Agency take stock of the GBA+ elements of ACOA’s programs, look at trends, and provide insight into areas that may be improved upon to strengthen inclusivity.
Highlights of GBA+ Results by Program
All ACOA programs were delivered with an inclusive lens to support groups that are underrepresented in Atlantic Canada’s economy and among its entrepreneurs, including immigrants, Indigenous people and women. The Agency also continued its efforts to support remote and rural regions, as well as official language minority communities. As part of its Departmental Results Framework, the Agency ensured that it could report on its departmental result “Communities are economically diversified in Atlantic Canada” by adopting several GBA+ related indicators that were made public in GC InfoBase and its Departmental Plan for 2019-20 and 2020-21, as well as part of its performance inventory profiles. Examples of the tags used are: women-led and women-owned businesses, people living with disabilities, Indigenous groups, recent immigrants, visible minorities, official language minority communities, and people in rural or remote regions. This was done in accordance with Treasury Board Secretariat’s guidelines on Sex and Gender Information.
In addition to these tags, ACOA also added GBA+ indicators from its Performance Information Profiles (PIPs) to its reporting system to facilitate reporting. This now allows ACOA to collect microdata on GBA+ related to its programs. The Agency also purchases custom data analyses from Statistics Canada to report on indicators such as the “percentage of ACOA-assisted firms that are majority owned by women.” ACOA requested that Statistics Canada provide further disaggregated data on its clients, where available. These additional data were further analyzed to help strengthen analysis and decision making within the Agency.
ACOA has seven Program Inventory programs and three of them have indicators directly related to GBA+ . For programs without specific GBA+ indicators, ACOA still has the ability to report disaggregated data using tags from its administrative data system.
All programs support the indicator tracking the percentage of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in Atlantic Canada that are majority-owned by women (17.1%), Indigenous people (1.1%), youth (10.6%), visible minorities (4.5%) and persons with disabilities (0.3%). Tracking this helps ACOA to identify whether interventions are helping to increase business ownership among groups that are frequently economically disadvantaged.
The Inclusive Communities program tracks two additional indicators on ownership specific to ACOA. The first is the percentage of ACOA-assisted firms that are majority owned by women, 12.4% in 2016. Tracking the proportion of SMEs that are majority-owned by women supported by ACOA enables ACOA to identify the intensity of its interventions in supporting business ownership among groups that are frequently economically disadvantaged. The second is percentage points by which the business survival rate of Community Business Development Corporation (CBDC)-assisted clients exceeds that of comparable firms not assisted by CBDCs, which was 19 percentage points. CBDCs support businesses in rural and remote communities typically underserved by traditional financial institutions. By tracking the survival rate of CBDC-assisted clients in comparison with firms not supported by CBDCs, ACOA can determine that its support of CBDCs is helping start-ups in rural and remote areas grow and become sustainable, which translates into a sustainable community.
A notable example of programming is the Women Entrepreneurship Strategy (WES). It was announced in Budget 2018 to help women entrepreneurs grow their businesses in order to advance objectives of Canada’s new Gender Results Framework. The Agency approved nearly $1 million in 2019-20 to help women entrepreneurs grow their business and help non-profit, third party organizations deliver support through the WES.
Page details
- Date modified: