International Development (Gender Equality) Bill
(10 years, 3 months ago)
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Lord McColl of Dulwich (Con)
My Lords, Mr William Cash MP deserves great credit for steering this Private Member’s Bill through another place, from its introduction on 19 June 2013 to its Third Reading on 17 January 2014. It is a modest Bill, intended to ensure that when the Government provide development or humanitarian assistance to countries outside the UK, they do so—wherever possible—in a way that promotes gender equality.
Water, sanitation and hygiene poverty disproportionately blights the lives of women and girls. Lack of water, sanitation and hygiene—WASH—can, first, prevent girls from attending primary school because they are too busy collecting water or caring for sick family members, and, secondly, expose them to sexual and physical violence while walking in isolated areas or seeking private places in which to urinate. Secondary education depends on water, sanitation and hygiene access because girls cannot attend school when they are sick with diarrhoea or when they have to collect water for the family. Those who are menstruating may choose to skip a week of school or drop out altogether if there are no private latrines or hygiene supplies at school.
Lack of education has an impact on the rest of girls’ lives, including their health, their freedom to plan their families and, ultimately, the cycle of poverty. Gender equality is not possible until everyone everywhere has access to safe water, sanitation and hygiene. The International Development (Gender Equality) Bill is essential if we are to stop discriminatory legal frameworks, policies, practices and beliefs that prevent some people accessing water, sanitation and hygiene services.
In sub-Saharan Africa, women and girls spend 40 billion working hours every year collecting water. With a safe supply of water and toilets, women are able to spend time engaging in income-generating activities or agriculture. Improving access to water, sanitation and hygiene and providing expectant mothers with basic services and accurate hygiene information are vital in order to reduce maternal mortality rates and meet global goals for ending preventable child deaths.
Caring for disabled, sick and older family members usually falls to women and girls, as it is considered to be domestic work. The tasks include washing, supporting persons going to the toilet and collecting water. Boys are often forced into the workforce rather than being able to stay at school, to compensate for the loss of income. During a visit to Nepal with WaterAid last year, I saw first-hand the problems that women experience when living without adequate sanitation. I saw how a simple latrine can really transform lives, impacting on health, safety, dignity and education.
In a small village called Thecho on the outskirts of Kathmandu, I met women who were part of a women’s co-operative that was set up to oversee the construction and maintenance of eco-friendly household latrines, vastly improving the quality of life in the community. The previous unsanitary environment had led to serious health concerns. More than this, it was evident that sanitation had a clear and significant impact on dignity, education and livelihoods. Before they had latrines, they had no choice but to defecate in the open. The women said that this put them at risk of harassment and even attack.
My most memorable experience on that visit was marching in my first ever street demonstration—it is never too late to learn. Kathmandu is quite used to strikes and demonstrations, but a street march of 1,000 Nepalis, mainly women, calling for clean water and sanitation for all by 2030 was one of the more unusual scenes it will have seen—perhaps even more unusual for having a Member of the House of Lords in attendance. Unusual or not, I hope that the dignity march helped to bring home the message.
Investment in WASH really is one of the most efficient and effective development interventions that can help efforts to bring about gender equity. Mr Cash’s hope is that this Bill will be a small contribution towards ending the marginalisation and abuse of women which is all too common in many developing countries. I believe the aims of the Bill to be uncontroversial and, since amendments can readily scupper a Private Member’s Bill such as this, I am sure that no one will think of opposing these important measures. I beg to move.
Baroness Hussein-Ece (LD)
My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord McColl, for introducing this Bill to your Lordships’ House. I welcome and support this Bill. It is a subject I have spoken about on numerous occasions, as have many other noble Lords.
I am very pleased that gender equality and the empowerment of women are seen as essential for both the elimination of world poverty and the upholding of human rights. Supporting all efforts to achieve gender equality must be at the centre of the United Kingdom’s international development programmes. I know how much is already being done, which is why I particularly welcome the Bill.
We know that violence against women and girls is endemic in conflict areas and that its consequences are devastating and long-lasting, for not just the individual but the entire community. Sexual violence is not just a by-product of war, it is often a strategy of combat used systematically to terrorise and humiliate. This is a key element that needs urgent attention and vigilance.
Women and girls must be supported in all key areas in creating a positive and enabling environment for them. This can happen in a range of areas, such as: giving them a voice and accountability in terms of maternal mortality; gender violence, as I have mentioned; education, which is so key; conflict and post-conflict reconstruction; HIV and AIDS; and, of course, migration.
Giving women a voice and supporting women’s participation in national and local decision-making in promoting leadership are also essential. Supporting women in this way ensures that not just the women and their families but whole villages and whole areas are empowered. Women are given a voice where they have not had one in the past and have been silenced in the most horrific way.
I do not plan to speak for too long but I will turn to the women of Afghanistan, which is a subject that I have been particularly involved in and exercised about. We in the United Kingdom have a significant responsibility here. Afghanistan has been named the worst place in the world to be a woman, and it does not seem to be getting any better. Just a few days ago it was reported that a new Afghan law would allow men to attack their wives, daughters and sisters without fear of judicial punishment, undoing years of slow progress in tackling violence in a country that has been blighted by so-called honour killings, forced marriage and very vicious domestic abuse. The so-called honour killings by fathers and brothers who disapprove of women’s behaviour would be almost impossible to punish if this proposed law was enacted. This is shocking and unacceptable. It will make it impossible to prosecute cases of violence against women. The most vulnerable people will not get justice.
After all the years of conflict, war and the billions spent by the UK and other countries on this war, which was intended initially—if we cast our minds back—to free Afghan women from the violence meted out to them by the Taliban, it seems inconceivable that we can watch from the sidelines while this happens.
Countries that spent billions trying to improve justice and human rights are now focused largely on security and are retreating from Afghan politics. It is precisely for this reason that we need to commit that all future aid funds for these women are used to promote and protect women’s rights and education.
Human Rights Watch has said:
“Opponents of women's rights have been emboldened in the last year. They can see an opportunity right now to begin reversing women’s rights—no need to wait for 2015. The lack of response from donors has energised them further. Everyone has known since May that this law could be passed but we didn’t hear any donors speaking out about it publicly”.
This must not prevail. It would be a betrayal of these women.
Last year, I met a group of Afghan women MPs who were visiting our Parliament. I and others were struck by how brave these women were, facing threats daily just to be able to carry out their duties as Members of Parliament—threats that we could not possibly imagine here in the West. They were most concerned that once the troops withdrew this year they would be left even more vulnerable than they previously were. They were acutely aware of, and vocal on, how aid and progress made on, for example, girls’ education could so easily be dismantled. They all made a strong plea with us: that we ask the Government to ensure that funds for Afghan women be protected and be given specifically to the agencies which work with women, and not be allowed to be channelled through the Afghan Government, who we have seen are not reliable on these matters at the best of times.
I note the Secretary of State’s annual report on how effective aid has been in the pursuit of millennium development goal 3—to promote gender equality and empower women. The evidence for the need for this Bill is overwhelming. I again congratulate its initiator, Bill Cash MP, and we on these Benches fully support it.
Lord Quirk (CB)
My Lords, we must all be grateful to the noble Lord, Lord McColl, for his lead on this important Bill. We should be grateful to him but not surprised: he is known throughout Parliament and far beyond for his devotion to philanthropy, extending his work as a fine surgeon at Guy’s to deploying skills, gratis, on the mercy ships along the west African coast.
I enthusiastically support this present drive to tie overseas aid to the reduction not only of poverty but of gender inequality; that is, as a lever to improve the lives of girls and women. This is a huge area, extending to personal healthcare, to FGM, to marital law, to property rights and, not least, to the education that can enable women to work in areas far above the menial.
I do not have knowledge of west Africa remotely comparable to that of the noble Lord, Lord McColl, but, 40 years ago, I was charged by the British Council to assess some higher education projects that it was considering, first in Ghana and then, a year or so later, in Nigeria.
Well, you cannot report on universities without seeing something of the elementary and secondary education that their students had had. In Ghana, I noted that the schools were clearly progressive, with boys and girls keen to learn despite poorly trained teachers and grim classrooms. The same was true in some parts of Nigeria, especially in Yoruba-speaking Lagos and Ibadan. But in the vast stretches of northern Nigeria, in Hausa-speaking Kano, Zaria and Kaduna, it was a very different story. Girls in classrooms were vanishingly rare, and I raised this matter with the local authorities. I met with a range of reactions, from embarrassment to incomprehension, from puzzlement to outright hostility. One director of education told me that I should try to see the Emir of Zaria. To my great surprise, this emir agreed to speak to me and invited me to talks in his grand palace.
He was both gracious and frank. Girls did not need education; their fathers could barely afford schooling for their sons. What is more, the future husbands of these girls certainly did not want their girls to be educated. They did not want them to have been exposed—his word—to schooling; their mothers would teach them all they needed to know. By the way, when I reported this to the British Council, I was told, “Well, of course, we must never interfere with indigenous cultures”.
Things in west Africa are much better today, but recent horrific events in the north-east of the country are a warning of how easily the clock can be turned back, as it was when the Taliban took over again in Afghanistan—and as it may again turn back there when western troops pull out this year, their mission not so much completed as abandoned.
Pressure through aid conditionality may well be the best tool we can devise, so let us give this Bill, introduced by the noble Lord, Lord McColl, a fair wind. One powerful ally will surely be Christine Lagarde, head of the IMF. Earlier this very week, she delivered the Dimbleby Lecture right here in London and, significantly, she dwelt at some length on the issue of female oppression and neglect. Her concern was not merely for the sake of the girls and women in a range of countries across the world, not excluding our own of course, but for the sake of economic development itself. She noted the ILO estimates that nearly 1 billion women in the world are being held back, facing,
“discrimination at birth, on the school bench, in the board room … yet, the economic facts of life are crystal clear. By not letting women contribute, we end up with lower standards for everyone … We must let women succeed: for ourselves and for all the little girls—and boys—of the future. It will be their world—let us give it to them”.
To Madame Lagarde’s rousing words, we must surely say amen. This Bill would just as surely make a powerful contribution.
Baroness Jenkin of Kennington (Con)
My Lords, in the three years that I have been in this House, we have had the opportunity and the privilege to debate many of these issues on a number of occasions. It is, therefore, very tempting for me merely to say, “I support this Bill; it is the right thing to do”, and sit down, because we have already had the chance to make these points. However, they are such important points, and so many women across the world have such terrible lives, that I fear I am not going to let your Lordships off so lightly.
I start by echoing the praise of the noble Lord, Lord Quirk, for the noble Lord, Lord McColl. I am lucky enough to share a room with the noble Lord, Lord McColl; I can speak at first hand of his enormous support for many good causes, of his personal support for me, which I very much value, and of his extreme modesty in the wonderful causes that he supports. I quite often have come back after the recess and said, “Have you had a good time, Ian?” and he has said, “Oh yes, I was operating on the Mercy Ships all the way through”. His dedication to these causes is something to be applauded and something that we should all honour as well.
Considering that the International Development (Gender Equality) Bill was originally No. 18 on the Private Members’ Bills ballot, it is a significant achievement that we are having this debate at all. Without the support of my right honourable friend the Prime Minister and the dedication of Bill Cash in getting it through, as well as the support of the International Development Secretary, we would not have got this far. I would like to pay tribute to her and to her predecessor, Andrew Mitchell; they both focused particularly on policy work at DfID to support women and girls.
Women across the world, whether they live in Sweden or Sudan, are entitled to live their lives with dignity, free from fear and empowered to control their own futures. However, while we know that women are integral to the development agenda, it remains the case that in many parts of the world their contributions are neither valued nor encouraged, as the noble Lord, Lord Quirk, told us so eloquently. There have already been significant steps taken to challenge the status quo, but the pursuit of gender equality cannot be just an element of the international development agenda. It is true that one of the eight millennium development goals is focused on women and girls, but should this mean that they are excluded from the other seven? Of course not.
Nevertheless, for poor women in poor places, significant gender gaps remain in education enrolment, fertility, access to healthcare and access to the local economic market. Women produce 50% of the world’s food and yet they earn only 10% of its income and own only 1% of its property. Women do not participate in society on equal terms with men, meaning that they are largely ignored in the decision-making process. It is not a coincidence that women in wealthier sections of society have not only received an education, but are more prominent within their communities. Even where developing countries as a whole are getting richer, differences between men and women remain, entrenched in ideology, despite nearly a century of women’s activism.
The participation of women in their communities and wider society is invaluable. Government agendas which fail to address the representation of women may lead to free and fair elections initially, but a male-dominated parliament, as we know only too well, will never be able fully to tap into and harness the entire population’s potential and capacity. Furthermore, by considering the different needs of men and women in emergency aid situations, we can better target our aid at the vulnerable, helping those who need it most. Systemic shocks, such as famine, economic downturn and conflict, adversely affect males and females, and yet women often suffer disproportionately and have very little say in rebuilding their communities after such events. Fewer than 3% of signatories to peace agreements are female.
DfID’s record on assisting women has been really good. Due to the department’s focus on the women’s and girls’ agenda, more than 14 million women have gained access to financial services; almost 3 million girls are in primary education; and more than 4 million women are using modern methods of family planning. The Government should be commended on these successes. The value of these achievements should not be underestimated. By promoting equality between the sexes, we can ensure that women receive a full education, marry and have children later in life and fully participate in their communities.
Let us take a moment to look at the evidence. An extra year of secondary schooling for girls can increase their future wages by 10% to 20%. Putting resources in women’s hands results in more household spending that benefits children, and a recent study of 30 developing countries showed that women with no schooling had three more children on average than women who attended high school. The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that equalising access to productive resources between men and women could raise output in developing countries by as much as 4%. Estimates of the loss of growth owing to gender inequality in education range from 0.3% in sub-Saharan Africa to 0.81% in south Asia. It cannot be said often enough that when half the population is locked out of education and economic opportunity, there is no realistic path to sustainability. Without gender equality, economic prosperity will remain a dream.
As has already been mentioned, education is the solution. By integrating boys and girls in early childhood on an equal footing in an educational environment, entrenched sexism can be eradicated. We must ensure that this integration does not end at puberty. Equality for girls must continue into their teenage and adult years. Access to micro-finance initiatives and the ability to own their own land are as important for women as early-years education. Ultimately, women will escape poverty not, of course, through international aid but through business. They must be able to reap the benefits of their own hard work for themselves and their families.
While I recognise fully that households where women have a greater say tend to allocate a greater share of resources to education and health, these aspects of family life should not be entirely relegated to mothers and female family members. Programmes implemented in the developing world ensuring that children receive regular health checks and vaccinations are very often targeted at mothers, unintentionally reinforcing the stereotype that childcare is very much their remit only. By simply changing the word “mother” to “parent”, or including pictures of fathers and children in literature and posters, we can challenge the idea that a woman’s place is in the home. By doing this, we can begin to combat the exclusion of women from wider society.
My noble friend Lady Hussein-Ece focused her remarks on violence against women, and I will not repeat her arguments. Suffice it to say that one in three women worldwide will experience violence in their lifetime; by 2050, 50 million girls will have been forced into marriage before even reaching their 15th birthday. One woman from Tanzania recently reported:
“I see some women being beaten by their husband every day. When you talk to them, they say they are married and they cannot separate. These women will never climb the ladder: they will stay at the bottom”.
There you have it.
Another challenge to gender equality is access to contraception and choice over birth spacing. Traditional contraceptive methods are usually dependent on the co-operation of men, resulting in more than 200 million women who do not want to be pregnant but are not able to use contraceptives. This means that they cannot determine when to have their children and have a harder time feeding them, paying their medical bills and providing them with education. They are trapped in this vicious cycle of poverty, which could be broken simply by providing women with their own contraceptive methods. Again, this can be implemented through education.
I know that my honourable friend in the House of Commons has worked closely on his Bill with the Gender Rights & Equality Action Trust, otherwise known as the GREAT initiative. This organisation also deserves to be commended for its dedication to ensuring gender equality across the developing world. It runs a number of worthwhile projects, including the “Great Men Value Women” campaign, which works with teenage boys to give them a safe space to discuss their vision of masculinity and the tools they need to challenge the stereotypes to which they are often required to conform. Projects such as these are also vital to the gender equality agenda.
I applaud the Secretary of State’s commitment to this Bill and am grateful for the Opposition’s support as well. Who knows what might follow in the future without this Bill, which will enshrine in law Britain’s commitment to promoting gender equality around the world? It will also introduce a reporting duty on the Department for International Development, ensuring that all future Governments are held to account on this issue. It is only through passing the Bill that we can ensure the continuity of the equality agenda, not just for today’s Government but for all Governments.
Lord Loomba (LD)
My Lords, I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord McColl, and the Government on this important Bill, which recognises the importance of promoting gender equality in the assistance that our Government give to countries outside the United Kingdom. The Bill could not be more timely. On Wednesday, the Prime Minister spoke about getting more women into public life. He added,
“we will not represent or govern our country properly unless we have more women at every level in our public life and in our politics”.—[Official Report, Commons, 5/2/14; col. 264.]
That is relevant not only in the UK but across the whole world.
I have stated before that I am extremely proud that the UK Government have committed to spending 0.7% of income on aid to help the world’s poorest people. It is fantastic that the Bill is intended to focus further on reducing poverty in a way which is likely to contribute to reducing inequality. This builds on the excellent work which DfID is already doing in tackling FGM and focusing on education by improving learning, reaching more children than ever before and keeping girls in school for as long as their brothers.
Children are our future, and I hope that the Bill provides the world’s poorest children with more opportunities to improve their circumstances. As many noble Lords know, reducing the gender inequality gap is key to solving so many problems in developing countries, as we have heard from other speakers. I am also reassured that the Government recognise the importance of annual reporting to Parliament, which will help to provide an incentive for the department to deliver on the main purpose of the Bill.
I wish the Bill all success. I trust that the Government will recognise that gender equality provision should include a clear public statement that gender equality is at the heart of everything we do. Such a public statement should be publicised immediately as part of DfID policy. Gender equality has no meaning unless it is systematically monitored. There should also be periodic assessments to ensure that any shortcoming is addressed.
In this way, we will ensure that the objectives of this excellent Bill are met. I hope that the Bill is the first of many initiatives from the Government to promote gender equality, and I look forward to the later stages of the Bill.
Baroness Hodgson of Abinger (Con)
My Lords, I, too, thank my noble friend Lord McColl for having introduced the Bill. I pay tribute to him for all his work. Of course, we owe a debt of gratitude to Bill Cash, the honourable Member for Stone, who piloted this important Bill so ably through the House of Commons.
I welcome the Bill enormously because, as the right honourable Alan Duncan, the Minister of State for International Development, said, the Bill can have a lasting impact on generations of girls and women around the world. Still today, in the 21st century, there is not one country where women have the same socio- economic and political opportunities as men. Still today, too many countries have a patriarchal culture and this, together with discriminatory practices, leads to the disempowerment of women and gender inequality.
The Bill addresses gender equality in the context of providing both development assistance and humanitarian assistance, resulting from both natural disasters and the terrible effects of conflict. Development assistance addresses reducing poverty. According to GADN’s recent report, it is estimated that women account for two-thirds of the 1.4 billion people currently living in extreme poverty. They also make up 60% of the 572 million working poor in the world. In reality, the situation for women is probably even worse, as there is likely to be a significant number living in poverty within households that are officially categorised as non-poor.
Women’s poverty is, in part, caused by gender inequality. According to the UN System Task Team on the Post-2015 UN Development Agenda, this discrimination impairs progress in all other areas of development. Unequal distribution of income, lack of control over resources, lack of decision-making power, unequal distribution of household tasks, the care-giving role assigned to women and gender-based violence all contribute to compounding women’s poverty.
As we have already heard from my noble friend Lady Hussein-Ece, violence affects women in every part of the world. Seven in 10 women report that they have experienced physical and/or sexual violence at some point in their lifetime. Although 125 countries have laws that penalise domestic violence, for 603 million women today domestic violence is still not a crime in their country.
A number of reviews of the MDGs over the past five years have noted that women are less likely to benefit from progress than men in some regions. For example, they may lack the resources, time and freedom of movement to travel to access health, legal or social services due to their enforced roles within the household, or they are restricted by partners, family or society. In times of humanitarian crisis, when natural disasters such as the earthquake in Haiti occur, state institutions collapse, law and order breaks down, food and medical care are scarce and violence prevails, thus making women particularly vulnerable.
Wars today have shifted from battlefields to communities, impacting on civilians, especially women and children, who make up 75% of all those killed in modern warfare. It is not just by the enemy that women will be attacked. We all know that where a conflict starts, levels of domestic violence escalate hugely, spiralling out of control. In war, women frequently become targets of sexual violence. Raping a woman in front of her family is one of the most effective ways of disarming the men, and sometimes this is used as a weapon of mass destruction.
Although women in conflict bear a disproportionate burden of suffering, and despite UN Resolution 1325 having been passed more than 10 years ago, they are usually absent from negotiations at the peace table and from decision-making in the aftermath of war. Over the past 25 years, only one in 40 peace treaty signatories has been a woman, and only 12 out of the 585 peace accords referred to women’s needs. Thus, women may continue to suffer violence and abuse because no one is listening to them or taking account of how really to protect them. I pay tribute to the Foreign Secretary, who spoke up to insist that women in Syria were at Geneva II.
In terror, women often flee to take their families to a safer place. Of the 42 million refugees and internally displaced people today, 80% are women and children. No accurate data exist on the millions of widows and “wives of the disappeared”, who often have no means of support and may be targeted within their families and the wider community. According to Widows for Peace through Democracy, there are more than 2 million widows in Iraq; more than 50% of all women in eastern Congo are widows; and there are 2.5 million widows in Afghanistan, with 80,000 in Kabul alone, who often have to resort to begging on the streets. I echo everything that my noble friend Lady Hussein-Ece said about the situation for women in Afghanistan and how we need to support them.
The Commonwealth is the world’s greatest pressure group for gender equality, and I welcome enormously the fact that Her Majesty’s Government recognise the injustices to women today, and are trying to address them and improve lives for women around the world in a number of ways, as we have heard from my noble friend Lady Jenkin.
Lord Howell of Guildford (Con)
Perhaps I may briefly reinforce the remarks that my noble friend has just made about the Commonwealth. It is indeed one of the world’s great pressure groups for gender equality. That fact is embedded in the new Commonwealth charter—the so-called maxima carta—which this House has approved and which commits 54 nations to driving a long way forward to beat gender inequality, although of course there is a long, long way to go.
Baroness Hodgson of Abinger
The Prime Minister has said that Britain will “absolutely lead the charge” to promote equality for women around the world during 2014 because, as Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, the new director of UN Women, said this week at the eighth open working session on sustainable development:
“A safe and sustainable world demands women’s rights, women’s empowerment and gender equality”.
The Bill contributes greatly to this agenda and thus is important legislation. I very much hope that noble Lords will resist tabling amendments to it, because if they do I understand that, due to time constraints, it may mean that the Bill will fall. I have great pleasure in supporting the Bill and very much hope that the House will give it its Second Reading.
Baroness Farrington of Ribbleton (Lab)
My Lords, with the leave of the House and an apology for standing up too soon, I will speak briefly in the gap. I echo the words of the noble Lord, Lord McColl, having been present when some women from Haiti came to talk about the danger to women and girls who have to go outside their living area because of the lack of facilities for them, particularly at night. It is extremely important that that is recognised.
We have changed some attitudes in Europe over my lifetime. I remember that it takes time. As chair of education in Lancashire, I heard that a girl who was very good at mathematics was told by the head of mathematics, “Once we get to the fourth year, you will of course decline in your ability because you are female”. That was said only 30 years ago.
I speak as a mother of three sons and a grandmother of three grandsons. Gender equality is not only about ensuring that girls get access, very important though that is in its own right. When I look at pictures—as a grandmother, I am drawn to pictures of small boys who remind me of my grandsons—and see the ones who are in poverty, distress or illness, it occurs to me that they, too, are suffering because of the lack of education for women and girls. That is because women and girls are needed to complement the skills of humanity and they must have the ability to develop not only their own skills but those of their families—boys and girls. It is too late in some ways to change male attitudes if the experience that boys have in growing up is one where most people seem to accept that a girl’s education is unimportant. The world needs all the skills that it can get. The lives of many women are tied up in circumstances where world development can only assist the whole of humanity in the future.
Many people have paid tribute to the noble Lord, Lord McColl, for his work and it is so important that we recognise his words of warning. Tempted though your Lordships may be to add amendments to strengthen or change the Bill, I am sure that the noble Lord’s record calls on us all to avoid that temptation to produce amendments. I wish the noble Lord’s Bill well.
Baroness Thornton (Lab)
My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord McColl, and add my voice to the tributes paid to him. He and I have been involved many times in debates about health, women’s health and Third World health over many years, and I was not surprised to see that he was sponsoring this Bill today in your Lordships’ House. As usual, we have had an informed and passionate debate because there is such expertise, experience and commitment in the House to these issues. I also pay tribute to William Cash MP for introducing the Bill in the Commons. It is a testament to his reputation that he managed to bring this Private Member’s Bill so far up the list. I also thank NGOs such as the GREAT Initiative, Plan and WaterAid for their briefings.
The aim of the Bill, as noble Lords have said, is to embed gender considerations into every aspect of the UK’s aid spending and to ensure consistent and long-term monitoring of how UK aid impacts gender inequality. I cannot resist a small and gentle aside to the Minister, in that I wish that some of this was embedded into the monitoring of our domestic policies and their gender impact. However, I leave that debate for another day. The Bill places a duty on the Secretary of State for International Development to consider gender in the disbursement of any development and humanitarian assistance and introduces an additional duty to report annually on the activities undertaken to tackle gender inequality. From the briefing that I have read, I understand that the Bill may be one of the first of its kind anywhere to enshrine a commitment to reducing gender inequality in development. I commend the Government on their support for that.
Importantly, the debate has shown that gender inequality holds back development. It is not enough to address democratic reform if the political representation of women is not also addressed—or, for example, to fund family planning initiatives that fail also to address men’s roles and responsibilities. That was mentioned by noble Baronesses earlier in the debate. As has also been mentioned, women around the world continue to face serious levels of violence, limited control over assets and property and unequal participation in private and public decision-making. All those issues are important and they all provide us with the backdrop and the reason why the Bill is important.
The previous Government and this Government have put improving the lives of women and girls as a policy priority for the work of the UK Department for International Development. They have seen it as,
“stopping poverty before it starts”.
I was very struck by the remarks made by my honourable friend Meg Hillier in Committee in the Commons. She said that she had visited Nigeria several times, and one of her points was that,
“we went to look at human rights”,
but,
“we quickly concluded that women’s rights, if tackled, would solve many of the wider problems, particularly with children’s rights. That underlines the importance of the first part of new clause 1”—
as it then was—
“which deals with development assistance. If people are aware of their rights, that can make a big difference”.—[Official Report, Commons, Gender Equality (International Development) Bill Committee, 11/12/13; col. 9.]
My honourable friend Gavin Shuker, who has responsibility for this issue on the Front Bench in the Commons, said:
“One of the challenges of gender equality is that all too often it is treated as a women’s issue, but in an international development context, holding back women in a society does not just hold back women; it holds back societies”.—[Official Report, Commons, Gender Equality (International Development) Bill Committee, 11/12/13; col. 6.]
That is absolutely right, so from these Benches we are very happy to give wholehearted support to the Bill. We will certainly do everything we can to make sure that it reaches the statute book.
Baroness Northover (LD)
My Lords, I am pleased to speak in support of the Private Member’s Bill sponsored by my noble friend Lord McColl and introduced so effectively by him. My noble friend has such a formidable commitment to development through his Mercy Ships and so many other efforts, as my noble friend Lady Jenkin said, and I, too, pay tribute to him. I love the image of our noble friend Lord McColl marching in his first demonstration in Nepal. It shows his level of commitment that that was in a march for dignity for gender equality. Like my noble friend Lady Jenkin and others, I, too, pay tribute to my honourable friend Bill Cash for having the vision, grasp and commitment to introduce and pilot this vital Bill through the other place. I pay tribute to the other noble Lords who have contributed today for their long and considerable contribution to addressing gender inequality worldwide.
There is no doubt that over the past few decades the world has made significant progress on improving the lives and prospects for girls and women. More girls are now going to school. Women are living longer and having fewer children, and more are in productive employment. As the noble Baroness, Lady Farrington, has made clear, there has been much change but, as she and others have noted, we are nowhere near where we need to be. As the noble Lord, Lord Quirk, also made clear, there have been major improvements in the position of women and girls, especially in education, but there is still much more to do.
By 2020, unless attitudes change and without steps to address child marriage, 50 million girls will have been forced into marriage before they reach their 15th birthday. As we have heard, violence against women and girls is a global pandemic: one in three women has experienced violence in her lifetime, a terrible statistic. My noble friend Lord McColl mentioned the dangers even in carrying out simple tasks such as collecting water.
My noble friend Lady Hodgson spelt out the level of violence against women and its devastating effects. It was a milestone when rape was rightly recognised as a weapon of war. Now we must ensure, as she and other noble Lords have said, that women are at the table in peace negotiations. I, too, pay tribute to my right honourable friend William Hague for what he is doing to recognise and combat violence against women in conflict. His involvement is extremely welcome.
Ours is a changing world, and the challenges that girls and women face will become more pressing. More girls and women will live in urban areas and in areas of conflict. The impact of natural resource scarcity and climate change will be disproportionately hard on girls and women because they are so often at the margins. They are in real danger of being locked out of the economic progress that we see in some of the developing countries at the moment.
My noble friend Lady Hussein-Ece flags up the situation of women in Afghanistan. She knows that we are very actively engaged there. We are seeking to uphold women’s rights as an important element of DfID’s strategy in Afghanistan, so we provide grants for Afghan women’s organisations that emphasise the strengthening of civil society. They emphasise various areas, including strengthening women’s rights and access to justice, and we are providing £7.1 million to the Ministry of the Interior to help to improve the Afghan police’s role to protect and uphold women’s rights. My noble friend will also know how we are supporting girls’ education in Afghanistan. However, we are also keenly aware that things can go backwards as well as forwards. We assure her that we remain active and vigilant in this regard. We are looking into the recent reports that she flagged up, and I will provide noble Lords with more information on that as soon as we have it. I shall put it in a letter to my noble friend, copy it to other noble Lords who have participated in the debate and put a copy in the Library. We know the importance of ensuring that things go forwards, not backwards.
That is why action to improve the lives of girls and women is rightly front and centre in UK development. We need to turn the challenges of a changing world into opportunities. As we all know, gender equality is a critical building block for progress towards building prosperity. Time and again we see that investing in girls and women leads to incredible returns, not only for them but for their families and communities and for their economies and countries. When a woman generates her own income, she reinvests 90% of it in her family and community. Getting more girls into secondary education is shown to boost a country’s economic growth, a point that the noble Lord, Lord Quirk, picked up.
The UK is already helping to change the lives of millions of girls and women for the better. As noble Lords will know, DfID has put gender equality front and centre for the very reasons that noble Lords have laid out. Our strategic vision for girls and women, launched in March 2011, aims to unlock the potential of girls and women in order to stop poverty before it starts. Maintaining our important cross-party consensus, I, too, pay tribute to the previous Government’s recognition of this and to the remarkable vision of my right honourable friend Andrew Mitchell when he came into the department.
Supporting girls and women enables them to have a voice in decision-making in their household, community and country, and in politics and business. My noble friends Lady Hussein-Ece and Lady Jenkin and others have made the case for this very clearly. It gives women and girls the freedom to exercise choice in their lives: to be able to choose to complete education and to benefit from paid work and to choose whether, when and whom to marry. It recognises they should have control over their own bodies and be safe from violence; control over their own income and other resources such as food, water and energy; and equal legal rights and access to justice.
My noble friend Lady Jenkin has given figures for DfID’s work, some of which bear repeating here because they are very important. The UK aid programme has already helped 270,000 girls to go to secondary school. By 2015 we shall have saved the lives of at least 50,000 women during pregnancy and childbirth, enabled 10 million more women to use modern methods of family planning, improved access to financial services for more than 18 million women, secured access to land for 4.5 million women and helped 10 million women to access justice through the courts, police and legal assistance.
We are supporting the efforts to end female genital mutilation worldwide through a £35 million programme, the first time that a programme like that has been put in place. Noble Lords will know that yesterday was the international day to end FGM, the first such day, and I was struck and impressed by the level of social media involvement in that by institutions from all over the world, organisations from Africa, Australia, the United States and the EU and many organisations within the UK, as well as the accounts in the Times and the campaign by the Guardian. I pay tribute to those who have brought it to this point and I hope that we will indeed end this within a generation or, hopefully, before.
We are determined to do more to end violence against women and girls. Last November the Secretary of State for International Development, who has been a strong supporter of the Bill, launched an international call to action on violence against women and girls in humanitarian emergencies. The result was Governments and aid agencies from around the world signing up to a groundbreaking commitment to make the safety of girls and women a life-saving priority in our response to emergencies.
I attended that conference and was very struck by the commitments that were made and that we must hold countries and institutions to. Like my noble friend Lord Howell, I welcome the new Commonwealth charter with its commitments in this area. Drafting things is the first stage, signing up is the second and implementing is the third. We need everyone’s efforts to ensure that that third stage is in fact reached. In June this year the UK will host an international summit where we will challenge the culture of impunity that exists for sexual violence in conflict, and work to ensure that more perpetrators are held to account through improved international collaboration.
So the Bill comes at a critical point in development. Although we have come so far in improving the lives of girls and women, there is much further to go. There are still too many girls and women whose potential is wasted. As my noble friend Lady Hodgson said, holding back women impairs all development. It will not be easy to reach these women as we are talking about some of the poorest and most vulnerable people in the world, so we must keep up the pressure, the resources and the visibility and lead by example.
I am the first to recognise, as did my noble friends Lady Jenkin and Lord Loomba and others, that in this country we have a way to go in terms of gender equality in Parliament, in business and in society.
If the Bill is passed, it will mean that the Secretary of State for International Development must have regard to reducing gender inequality before making decisions to provide development assistance under the International Development Act 2002. It will give our commitment to addressing gender inequality in countries where we provide development assistance a statutory footing, enshrined in law. It will raise the bar on the way that gender equality is considered, crystallising it in the early stages of the programme development.
Gender is not something that can be tacked on to our development and humanitarian assistance programmes for the very reasons that noble Lords have laid out. The Bill will introduce an annual reporting duty in respect of gender through an amendment to the International Development (Reporting and Transparency) Act. My noble friend Lord Loomba cogently argued that it is by this kind of monitoring and transparency that we ensure the action and commitment that we need.
I note that the Bill will not introduce any significant costs in implementation—not that any noble Lord flagged that up—or impose additional bureaucracy in decision-making or slow processes down—not that any noble Lord flagged that up. It is about ensuring that Ministers and officials fully take into account the interests of girls and women as well as those of others in determining the UK’s bilateral aid programme.
I welcome the debate today and especially the cross-party support we have heard for gender equality. It is heartening to hear so many positive views on the important role that girls and women should have in the world and on their right to a better life. This Bill will help keep girls and women at the forefront in the delivery of development assistance and in the planning that goes into it. The path to sustainable development cannot be achieved where half the population is locked out. Improving the lives of women and girls is already a top priority in our international development work, but this Bill is another important step forward enshrining our commitment to gender equality in law, and the Government are proud to support it.
Lord McColl of Dulwich
My Lords, I thank all noble Lords for their splendid contribution to this very important debate. I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Hussein-Ece, for drawing attention to the proposed new law in Afghanistan which could increase the violence against women, and to their bravery. The noble Lord, Lord Quirk, was a distinguished vice-chancellor of London University 30 years ago. I expect we all hope that when we reach his age we will still be able to speak so lucidly and with such courage on so many different topics. He reminds me of the time when I had to give a speech to several hundred people. I went in, and in the front row, there was a man who had just celebrated his 100th birthday, so I took the microphone down and I said to him, “Congratulations on your 100th birthday. I expect they’d much rather listen to you than to me”, and he took the microphone and made a speech. How right he was! He said that he was interviewed in the village in Kent where he lived, and the BBC interviewer asked, “Have you lived the whole of your life in this village?”. “Not yet”, he said. I hope we will be that bright when we are that age.
I thank my noble friend Lady Jenkin for her contribution and especially for mentioning what a great contribution Andrew Mitchell made in DfID. The noble Lord, Lord Loomba, drew attention again to the fact that the Government are maintaining their 0.7% help to developing countries and how important that is. I was amazed when my noble friend Lady Hodgson arrived and gave such a splendid speech because only three hours ago, she had an operation. These ladies are tough. The noble Baroness, Lady Farrington, emphasised that the attitude of males must be changed, not before time. The noble Baroness, Lady Thornton, mentioned the help she had from WaterAid. I should point out that it was WaterAid that had me marching around the streets of Kathmandu.
I thank the Minister for the promise of government support, and finally I thank all noble Lords for their contributions.