International Women’s Day

Baroness Coussins Excerpts

Thursday 11th March 2021 Grand Committee

[Baroness Coussins (CB) [V]]

My Lords, I will focus on the international dimension of International Women’s Day and talk about the work of the UK development agency Voluntary Service Overseas—VSO—and its work with women and girls in the context of the Covid pandemic. I declare my interest as a former volunteer for VSO’s Parliamentary Volunteering programme, for which I completed a placement in Peru, working with women’s organisations on domestic and sexual violence.

VSO has been working throughout the pandemic to reach marginalised women and girls, ensuring that they are not doubly disadvantaged by the effects of the pandemic and that they are at the centre of Covid response and recovery work. The pandemic has seen an increase in gender-based violence around the world. VSO’s networks of community volunteers have been able to mobilise quickly to raise awareness of the rights of women and girls not to experience such violence, using social media platforms, which also help victims seek access to justice and support. This has led to increased rates of reporting, as well as helping to build their resilience so that they can contribute more broadly to post-Covid recovery.

But VSO faces an immediate, urgent problem, as its funding is now under threat from the aid cuts at the FCDO. Over the past four years, VSO has received a major volunteering for development grant to support work in global health, inclusive education and resilient livelihoods. The current phase ends on 31 March, so noble Lords will appreciate the urgency here. A renewed grant would allow VSO to continue and expand its work supporting girls’ education, sexual and reproductive health rights and building inclusive global health systems, but despite its A+ rating, confirmation from the FCDO on future funding has not yet been forthcoming. This does not seem aligned with the repeated statements we frequently hear from Ministers in the Chamber that girls’ education and combating gender-based violence are of the utmost priority in the FCDO.

VSO is a British institution, embodying the values of UK aid, and UK volunteers showcase the best of UK values. If the grant was not renewed it would mean in practice that the UK Government would, in effect, be closing down their support for international volunteering action, just at the time when volunteering has been shown to be an effective means of enabling highly contextualised local responses to complex global challenges, including the Covid-19 response and the delivery of the sustainable development goals. It would bring to a sudden and abrupt end a 60-year strategic partnership between VSO and the UK Government. Covid-19 response work in 18 countries would have to cease, closing up to 14 country programmes and making nearly 200 staff redundant.

Will the Minister undertake to look at the specific case of VSO’s grant? More broadly, will she set out how the Government intend to support the UK volunteering for development sector in its work to empower women and girls to be part of the Covid recovery and response around the world?