Women and Girls: Employment Skills in the Developing World

Baroness Manzoor Excerpts

Thursday 26th January 2017 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Manzoor (Con)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Loomba, for securing this important debate. It is important that economic and social empowerment and labour rights, which are critical if women are ever to play as full a role in the labour force as men, are addressed.

Today I will talk about women’s and girls’ access to education and nutrition as the foundation from which they can develop crucial skills and knowledge for success in the workplace. The day a girl is born, she is already placed at a competitive disadvantage as regards her male counterparts. Discrimination and socially defined gender roles will narrow a girl’s opportunities from infancy, creating a knock-on effect throughout her life.

When a family living in poverty is faced with school fees, parents are far more likely to send their sons to school over their daughters. Daughters will also face a much higher burden of domestic chores. At present, some 31 million girls worldwide do not attend primary school. We all know that there is a strong link between early child development and success in later life. The rate of return on school fees for earning per additional year of schooling is 9.7%. Those girls may never even learn how to read or write—a huge lost potential.

I commend DfID’s considerable support for helping girls, and particularly marginalised girls, access education. Between 2010 and 2015, the department supported 5.3 million girls, but there is still a significant financing gap in education and it is often the girls who miss out. If we are to widen the employment opportunities available to women, DfID needs to focus on supporting the delivery of free, quality and inclusive education systems that address gender inequalities and do not leave children behind. Even if a girl manages to complete primary school, the barriers to accessing secondary education will multiply. As other noble Lords have mentioned, an adolescent girl’s education is too often cut short by forced marriage and early pregnancy.

The parallel problem of undernutrition, which hampers the physical and cognitive development of so many teenage girls, cannot be ignored. Good nutrition is essential for improving school retention and academic achievement. I visited India in a delegation with RESULTS UK last year. It is a country where more than half of all adolescent girls are anaemic and just under half are underweight. I saw at first hand how a lack of basic nutrition can undermine a girl’s chances of staying in education and developing skills for the future. An undernourished girl is more likely to experience pregnancy-related complications, causing serious health issues or even death. At the same time, early and frequent pregnancy will stunt and slow her growth and harm the health of the infant once born. Too many girls are trapped in a vicious cycle and locked out of the labour market before they even reach adulthood.

I understand that the department recognises the intersecting obstacles that girls face, but this needs to be reflected in the design and delivery of all its programmes if we are to address gender inequality. Although I am pleased with DfID’s commitment to improve the nutrition of 50 million people by 2020, I must emphasise the importance of integrating nutrition into health interventions—particularly sexual and reproductive health interventions. This would present a unique opportunity to reach the most marginalised girls and deliver a number of vital interventions that would significantly improve their health and development.

As I said, good nutrition and education set the stage for women’s economic and social empowerment. Girls who have access to school and healthcare will have more choices: the choice to complete education, the choice to have fewer children and the choice to pursue a wider range of employment opportunities.

But we are falling short. In most countries around the world, women earn between 60% and 75% less than men. Women are more likely to work in low-skilled, unpaid or informal employment. If we want to give women and girls the right employment skills, we need to address the gender disparities that affect a girl’s life from day one and aim to rectify them at every stage of her development. I would welcome the Minister saying how this is being achieved throughout our aid budget.

HIV Global Epidemic: Young People

Baroness Manzoor Excerpts

Thursday 1st December 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bates]

We must give credit to PEPFAR, and to George W Bush, who set it up, for the work it has done around the world in tackling this disease. Certainly, that would be our expectation. We have a very close working relationship with USAID in this area and we fully expect that it will continue, into the future, to tackle and achieve the global goal of eradicating HIV as a public health threat by 2030.

[Baroness Manzoor (Con)]

My Lords, good nutrition is important for all of us, but it is particularly important for those living with HIV or AIDS. Can my noble friend say what is being done to ensure that there are proper trigger points when DfID is providing aid so that nutrition is taken as a key point, particularly when treatments cause wastage, lipid malabsorption and other issues to do with dietary needs?

[Lord Bates]

My noble friend is right to point to this. When we look at HIV strategies and DfID’s work around the world and with our partners in the World Health Organization, it is very dangerous to see them siloed. Strategies must be cross-cutting, across all the interventions and all the humanitarian responses which we have to this disease, to bring hope and prevention in the attempt to eradicate AIDS by 2030.

Gender Equality: Developing Nations

Baroness Manzoor Excerpts

Thursday 5th March 2015 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Northover]

I fully agree.

[Baroness Manzoor (LD)]

My Lords, the law is unequally applied in Bahrain between Sunni women and Shia women in areas such as inheritance, divorce, child custody and domestic disputes. What are the Government doing to address these issues with the Bahraini Government, and if they have had any discussions, what are the timescales for addressing these terrible injustices and inequalities?

[Baroness Northover]

There is inequality for women everywhere. The Foreign Office, as part of its work particularly on International Women’s Day, is engaging with those countries where these problems are particularly acute. In the case of Bahrain, the ambassador is holding a round table with a number of Bahraini women from all walks of life to discuss these issues.

International Development (Official Development Assistance Target) Bill

Baroness Manzoor Excerpts

Friday 6th February 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lawson of Blaby]

I am speaking to the amendment. It is a very modest amendment: it just introduces the word “a”. The purpose of the amendment is to give the Secretary of State slightly greater flexibility which can be used in the light of changing circumstances as they evolve in the future. That is clearly desirable.

It is one of a number of amendments and I must explain to the noble Countess why it is necessary to look more broadly. A large number of amendments are down on the Marshalled List, which noble Lords will have recognised. None of them is a wrecking amendment. They are all designed to make the Bill somewhat less bad. I hope that that is a proper exercise for this Committee to be engaged in.

Noble Lords will have noticed that pretty much all the signatories to the amendments on the Marshalled List were members of the Economic Affairs Committee of this House under the excellent chairmanship of my noble friend Lord MacGregor when we produced our report in 2012 on the economic effectiveness of development aid. We produced a unanimous, all-party report based entirely on the evidence, which was overwhelming. I reassure the noble Countess that I am not going to make this speech on each of the amendments, but this is the first one and it is necessary to explain why we have put down all these different amendments to try to make the Bill slightly less bad.

The Economic Affairs Committee report had a number of findings. First, it found that the 0.7% target should not be a plank, let alone the main plank, of British aid policy. Secondly, it found that the,

“Government should therefore drop its commitment”,

to establish in law the requirement to spend 0.7% of GNI on aid. Thirdly, it found that,

“the evidence that aid makes a contribution to growth in recipient countries is inconclusive”.

But aid certainly makes a great contribution to corruption in recipient countries. This is a major problem which comes up time and again and was most recently identified in the report of the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee earlier this week.

Since this is a Liberal Democrat Bill, if the Committee will allow me, I will quote from a letter written to me by—

[Baroness Manzoor (LD)]

My Lords, this Bill has cross-party support.

[Lord Lawson of Blaby]

We will see about the support. I am sure my noble friend is right that there different views in different parts of the Committee, but it is significant—and I repeat this since perhaps she did not hear—that the Economic Affairs Committee of this House, which took extensive evidence on this, produced a unanimous all-party report with the conclusions that I summarised a moment ago.

International Development (Official Development Assistance Target) Bill

Baroness Manzoor Excerpts

Friday 23rd January 2015 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Manzoor (LD)]

My Lords, I am delighted that Michael Moore MP instigated this Private Member’s Bill in the other place—otherwise, it would not be before us today—and that my noble friend Lord Purvis is seeing its passage through this House. I concur with everything he said in his excellent opening speech. I start by accepting that there are competing demands on all Governments and that most noble Lords are committed to some form of humanitarian aid. After all, what differentiates us as humans is what we do for humanity.

In 2013, the UK was the first G8 country to achieve the 0.7% GNI target and, in doing so, met the 1970 UN resolution. We are one of the richest countries in the world and, like the rest of the western world, have faced hardships resulting from problems in our economy. However, these hardships are relative to the huge poverty, misery, pain, and death seen by millions in many parts of the developing world.

In 2010 the World Bank estimated that 1.2 billion people across the world were living in extreme poverty, on just under £1—around 83p—a day. There are also estimates that between 2008 and 2012, 143 million people were displaced because of disasters and 33 million people were displaced within their countries as a result of war and conflict. Some 870 million people suffer from under-nutrition and around 3 million children die each year as a result. Under-nutrition falls the hardest on the very poor, mainly women and children, and pushes them even further into a continuous cycle of infections such as TB and further poverty. Nearly 22 million children from the poorest families and the most marginalised groups do not have even basic vaccines. It is estimated that only 5% of the world’s children receive all 11 of the vaccines recommended by the World Health Organization. This is a disgrace.

Aid, used wisely, creates the right conditions for economic growth, because the most powerful tool to take people out of poverty is to give them the means to look after themselves. I was part of the delegation with my noble friend the Minister that visited India last year. We saw at first hand the excellent work being undertaken by DfID; for example, community-led infrastructure projects such as building classrooms, improving sanitation and providing vaccines to eradicate polio. We also witnessed the emphasis that DfID was placing in its work on educating girls. As has already been said, it is well known that getting girls into schools begins a chain of further benefits. Educated women have better maternal health, fewer and healthier children and increased economic opportunities, thus improving the quality of life for their families and lifting their communities out of poverty.

As has already been said, and I make no apology for repeating it, in 2013-14 alone DfID supported 4.9 million girls to go to primary and lower secondary schools, ensured that 3.6 million births took place safely, and provided 26.9 million women with access to financial services to help them work their way out of poverty. We saw an example of this during our visit to India, where local women with seedling money started tiny fish farms. The women took great pleasure in telling us that, previously, the banks would not lend them any money but that now the men were borrowing from them.

Enshrining the 0.7% of GNI in law shows how serious our commitment to humanity is. It demonstrates our leadership in this vital area to the world. It will enable proper planning and resourcing of the valuable and excellent work that DfID and other organisations do on our behalf.

We must not forget that some of our most important trading partners are countries on which we have spent development aid previously—countries such as India and China. In today’s turbulent world, when it seems that a day does not go by where some heinous crime is not committed, one thinks of the words of Nelson Mandela, who said that the greatest threat to peace was international poverty. Clearly, where there is little or no hope, there is no future. Tackling global issues such as economic development, supporting conflict, supporting fragile countries and communities, ensuring effective governance and working together in areas of climate change are in all our interests. I support this Bill wholeheartedly.