Conflict-affected Countries: Adolescent Girls

Baroness Featherstone Excerpts

Tuesday 8th January 2019 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Featherstone (LD)]

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Baroness on securing this important debate, and I acknowledge the work that she has been doing on this over many years. I first met her when I was DfID Minister for two years; I was also the ministerial champion for tackling violence against women and girls overseas for all five years of the coalition Government.

I was also the Minister responsible for Africa. During that time, I do not think there was a country I went to in Africa where girls, particularly adolescent girls, were not oppressed, suppressed and violated. I will give just a few examples. In Kinshasa, in the DRC, I visited a refuge for young girls which DfID was supporting. Most of them had been thrown out of their homes and villages, often because they had been believed to be witches. With nowhere to go and no one to go to, they end up on the streets of Kinshasa, where they are often beaten or raped and end up pregnant.

I acknowledge what was said by the noble Baroness, Lady Anelay, about South Sudan; it was the first country I ever visited as a Minister. For the most part, girls there are considered property to be sold. Virtually no ante or post-natal healthcare is available. As the noble Baroness said, the result is that a 15 year-old South Sudanese girl is far more likely to die in childbirth than complete any stage of secondary education.

A couple of noble Lords mentioned justice. A lot of the young girls I met in these countries said that if they went to the police to report a rape or violence, they were just as likely to be raped by the police as they were to be listened to by them.

Perhaps the most striking memory for me was going to the refugee camps on the borders of the states of South Kordofan and Blue Nile, where there was no protection at all. At the time I left DfID, one of our missions was to ensure that the protection of women and girls in refugee camps was made a first-order priority, alongside food, shelter and water; an adolescent girl may never recover from the damage done to her by the violence she may encounter in such a situation. The need is desperate. Many girls are traumatised by what has happened to them. They have no stability. They are taken from their communities, families and homes. They are alone and vulnerable to violence, rape, HIV and pregnancy when they are children themselves. Is violence against women and girls now a first-order priority in refugee camps? What is DfID doing about that? Are aid agencies being encouraged to move forward on that front?

I am often angry with the Daily Mail but I was particularly angry about its attack under its previous editor on Yegna, an Ethiopian acting and five-piece girl group. The group was belittled, trashed and ridiculed but in Ethiopia, Rwanda and other places, it was a brilliant way of reaching young girls via videos and radio performances in a weekly drama and talk show because radio is one of the great forms of communication in Africa— people listen to it. The show addressed all sorts of issues and gave girls information on forced marriage, isolation and teen pregnancies. However, scared by the headlines, the then Secretary of State for International Development announced in January 2017 that DfID would no longer fund this work.

How do you reach girls? How do you show them a different world in places where being a girl means that you have no rights, no back-up and no power. Justine Greening—my Secretary of State when I was at DfID—had the right idea. She coined the phrase “giving girls voice, choice and control over their lives” and fully supported my work on FGM. When I arrived in DfID, the first thing I said was that we were going to address FGM; it takes a long time for a Lib Dem to get into power so I was not going to lose the opportunity. There is no clearer example than FGM of violence against girls and child abuse. I was able to announce the biggest-ever funding commitment to tackling FGM in the world: £35 million. I am delighted to say that Penny Mordaunt has now topped that with a new announcement of £50 million, which is fantastically welcome.

As many noble Lords have said, at the heart of all this is education for girls because no education means not only lesser salaries and other such problems, but a generation or more in conflict-affected and fragile states lacking the skills for rebuilding their country for the future. The education of girls is fundamental to change and progress. How many girls are we now educating in fragile and conflict-affected states? We should be proud of what we have done so far but there is a hell of a lot more to do.