Global Development Goals

Baroness Jenkin of Kennington Excerpts

Thursday 11th December 2014 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Jenkin of Kennington (Con)]

My Lords, I, too, am most grateful to the noble Lord, Lord McConnell, for securing this debate, and congratulate him on the timing, which comes just a few days after the UN Secretary-General’s much anticipated synthesis report. There can be no more consistent and committed friend of international development than the noble Lord.

The topic of today’s debate is very similar to that of one I initiated in October last year, and the intervening year has been both momentous and challenging for the world, with a number of highs and lows. In June, the UK hosted the Global Summit to End Sexual Violence in Conflict, and here I take the opportunity to pay tribute to my noble friend Lady Helic, who was the inspiration behind the event and who remains committed to driving the agenda forward. We look forward to hearing from her in this Chamber before long.

In July the UK hosted the first and very successful Girl Summit, aimed at mobilising domestic and international efforts to end female genital mutilation and child, early and forced marriage within a generation. UNICEF co-hosted the event, and I declare my interest and pride as a board member of UNICEF UK. The noble Lord, Lord Judd, has said much of what I had intended to say about the current UNICEF campaign on ending child violence. The emergence of the Ebola outbreak and the rising threat of extremism have demonstrated the need to continue with a sustainable development agenda to ensure that the risk of disease and terrorism are lessened through education and equality for both men and women.

I take this opportunity also to thank the many NGOs and their staff and partners who are working in the field to beat Ebola, and in particular to commend Restless Development, of whom I am proud to be a patron, whose efforts in Sierra Leone are growing day by day. Its 1,700 volunteer mobilisers have gone through extensive training, equipping them with vital skills to bring life-saving messages to more than 3 million people in the largest social mobilisation ever to take place in Sierra Leone.

To return the topic of the debate, no speech about the successor agenda can be delivered without referencing the historic impact of the MDGs. In 1990, a decade before they were launched, more than 12 million children died each year before reaching the age of five; in 2013, fewer than seven million did. As other noble Lords mentioned, maternal and child mortality has fallen by almost 50% since 1990, and 2.3 billion people have gained access to clean drinking water during that time.

The reason the MDGs have been so successful is that they served to focus world attention on a handful of goals: eight of them, to be precise, articulated in 374 words. They communicated to the world that these eight objectives would be the world’s priorities between 2000 and 2015, and as a result, billions of dollars in development funds flowed into efforts to tackle the challenges. That said, there is much more to do, and we should not be distracted from the need to finish the job.

International development combined with globalisation has opened up many doors into and out of the developing world, as other noble Lords have said, and significant progress has been made to reduce the number of people living in poverty. However, the opportunities have not always been equally shared. Many people are still locked out. Many women, children and disabled people, as the noble Lord, Lord Low, so eloquently said, and many others have been prevented from taking advantage of the progress that has been made.

I mentioned the Girl Summit and I pay tribute to the Secretary of State for her commitment to gender empowerment and to advancing the rights of girls and women as a top priority. I also welcome the fact that the UK is campaigning for a dedicated gender goal that addresses the causes of gender inequality and gender-sensitive targets integrated in that goal.

Earlier this year, in September, I was in a remote village in Zambia, where two young girls were reporting to the village elders what their hopes, worries and concerns were. They were the only girls in the room—and I was the only woman in the room. The chief and the other elders were, I thought, rather dismissive of what the girls wanted. I said to them, “I think that you should take these women, these young girls, on to your council in order to better reflect what girls really want in their community”. They said they would—and I hope they did.

Of 163 million illiterate young people in the world, 63% are female. Each year almost 5.5 million girls aged 16 to 19 give birth, effectively ending their chances of getting an education and earning a living. The World Bank study of 100 countries showed that every 1% increase in the proportion of women with secondary education boosts a country’s annual per capita income growth by about 0.3%.

As we know, DfID’s record on assisting women throughout the world has been exceptionally strong. Due to the department’s focus on the women and girls development agenda, more than 14 million women now have 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. As an officer of the APPG on Population, Development and Reproductive Health, I would be remiss not to focus a few remarks on sexual and reproductive health and rights and the significant economic and social gains for individuals and families.

There are 225 million women and young girls living in developing countries who want to avoid pregnancy but are not able to use modern contraception. The consequences are huge: 754 million unintended pregnancies, 28 million unplanned births and 20 million unsafe abortions every year. Investing in SRHR has one of the highest rates of return in international development. For every additional dollar invested in preventing an unintended pregnancy, nearly $1.50 is saved in pregnancy-related care. Additional savings accrue across all sectors, from healthcare to education and employment. As Governments and international agencies consider and negotiate the goals for 2015 and beyond, I urge them to prioritise universal access to SRHR.

To sum up, the UK objective for post-2015 is to agree a simple, inspiring, measurable set of goals centred on eradicating extreme poverty. The goals should have sustainable development integrated across the framework, and should include what is referred to as the golden thread—conflict and corruption, justice and the rule of law, property rights, and open and accountable government. These goals should be supported by a new global partnership that ensures that together we mobilise a range of actors with sufficient resources from both public and private organisations.

The 17 goals and 169 targets produced by the Open Working Group are too diffuse, and the UK’s priority should be to define a more concise and compelling goals framework. We should beware a kitchen-sink approach that seeks to appease all the interest groups. In a world of increasing resource constraints, such an approach would be a recipe for disaster. The danger that countries will cherry-pick, or be subsumed, or throw up their hands and do nothing at all, must be avoided. Never before has the world had to face such a complex agenda in a single year. This unique opportunity will not come again in our generation. It must not be wasted.