Millennium Development Goals

Baroness Chalker of Wallasey Excerpts

Thursday 7th November 2013 Grand Committee

[Baroness Chalker of Wallasey (Con)]

My Lords, I congratulate my noble friend Lord Loomba on raising this issue because now is certainly the time to put pressure not only on our own departments but on all the international organisations in which we work. While girls’ education is becoming accepted in some countries, I am afraid the vast majority of girls in the developing world probably have the opportunity of education only in the primary stage and not beyond. Should they marry early or fall pregnant, that opportunity is frequently removed from them by one means or another.

I have been looking at what the United Nations Girls’ Education Initiative has been doing across many countries and, while it is laudable, it is very patchy. It does not extend and I have tried to find examples. Most of my mine come from Africa but there are others. I want to highlight a couple that are indicative of what can be done in other places and are known to have worked. In Rwanda, the United Nations Girls’ Education Initiative has functioned as a multistakeholder partnership and if that were extended to other countries, it would work very well. It is not just a question of getting parents to send their girls to school; there is also the problem of getting educationalists in national government departments to realise the importance of girls going to school. So you have to work from both ends of the problem—through the individual departments of education and through the families. You also have to work through the churches and the mosques. With the mosques we have a problem, which I am not qualified to talk about, in the sense that so many do not think girls’ education is valuable. But I firmly believe that there is much more that can be done by setting an example in government departments, in districts of countries and through the various institutions.

Certainly, the revised education sector strategic plan that came into effect in July this year in Rwanda was easier to enact there because it is a small country. In a huge country like Ethiopia which is difficult to get around and where communications are not yet of a nature where you can rely on the internet, it is notable that since a gender budgeting guideline was developed there some five years ago, there has been much better debate on capacity building and gender mainstreaming. This is an interesting area which I hope to follow up in December when I am there. There are also new measures in Zambia, helped by the influence of UNICEF, which has some very good ideas, such as its re-entry policy guidelines for teenage mothers, the finalisation of the child protection policy for schools and its gender review of HIV and AIDS policy.

I could quote many other examples, such as in Tanzania and other African countries, but what I note above all else is the fact that there are so many gaps between what is accepted in international forums and what happens in Governments and, based on an understanding of the problems, we have to bring pressure to bear on those national Governments as well as encouraging families to keep girl children in education.