United Nations International Widows’ Day

Baroness Nicholson of Winterbourne Excerpts

Monday 30th June 2014 Grand Committee

[Baroness Nicholson of Winterbourne (LD)]

I warmly thank my noble Friend, Lord Loomba for giving us the opportunity to discuss this incredibly important topic. I pay tribute particularly to my noble friend Lord Shipley for his speech, and I endorse the points that he made more fluently than perhaps I would be able to do myself.

I work a lot with widows. I have always seen economic freedom as the key to widows gaining a new foothold in life. Of course, the law is crucial—they must be allowed to work in order to be able to find a way of working—but custom and practice are also crucial in implementing the law. If custom and practice are dramatically against you, it is extremely difficult to work and earn a living. When one looks at work, one has to think what sort of work they can do, how and when they will do it and what their alternative employment might be, and whether the source of work that a widow is allowed to do will in fact bring such a stigma on her family that carrying out that work may be something that she cannot even bear to do.

I chair the AMAR International Charitable Foundation, and the women whom I work with are trapped in continuing complex emergencies. For them, very often the only possible work that is immediately open to them is to become prostitutes, and once you become a prostitute it is extremely difficult to shake off that stigma again. I therefore work with those who are doing all that they can to create different kinds of employment for widows that would give them not just an immediate leg-up but a future.

It will come as no surprise to noble Lords on all sides of the House that I intend to comment briefly on Iraq, where until last month there were 1 million widows and now, alas, there are considerably more, and there will be more next week and the week after. Human misery is rising as the result of the toll of 50 years or more of war, with the first tranche of widows coming as a result of the eight-year Iran-Iraq war, when 1 million people were killed and perhaps 250,000 were left widowed. I will also comment on the needs of the widows’ children. The figures in Iraq show that there are 4 million orphans. “Orphan” sometimes means the loss of both parents but in this context nearly always means the loss of the father, so I am going to comment on how that problem may be tackled as well.

The work that I believe is best for widows comes within a much wider programme. I would counsel against us picking out widows; we need to be helping the entire community so that our help for widows does not seem to stigmatise them by accident. Indeed, I think that work for widows should come from within the community itself because it must be permanent help; it cannot be a short-term thing. There will be more widows tomorrow, the day after and the day after that. There has to be not just a safety net but a continuing programme of personal growth and development that enables women who are widowed not only to have a life for themselves but to have a proper one and something for their children, their elderly and anyone else they may be looking after.

The AMAR foundation works throughout Iraq. It works in Syrian refugee camps in the north and has a vast programme in Iraq for the prevention of gender-based violence, which, incidentally, is critical for working with widows. It runs a large programme on gender violence awareness through the radio and the internet, which is crucial. It runs a very big programme with women health volunteers, as well as an educated child initiative. It has mobile health centres, health posts, health clinics and road safety training. It works on the empowerment of widows throughout the country. Indeed, it is working in 16 of Iraq’s 18 governorates and currently employs more than 2,000 local professionals on projects across the country. A very large proportion of this work is for women, and a large proportion is therefore for widows and their children. We work through the 23 primary health centres that we have created, the six mobile health centres and some health posts, with about 500,000 patients connected with the primary health centres and the mobile health centres. Last year there were between 250,000 and 300,000 health consultations.

Of course, if you look at that, women’s health is primarily the focus, as it is in all contexts everywhere. We take up about 80% of all health inputs and outputs in every society: pregnant women, pre- and post-pregnancy and so on, elderly women and, of course, the women at home. At the moment I think we visit 34,000 women at home every month; one-third of them are single parents, mainly widows. The mothers and children instructed during those visits number about 140,000 every month.

Turning to the widows and vulnerable women who receive skills training, in the past 12 months we have given 12,000 sessions of skills training, and 2,500 children have been enrolled in accelerated learning programmes through kindergartens and primary and secondary schools. We are teaching in 171 schools, seven kindergartens, three universities, 12 of our own training centres and, most importantly, five prisons, where you will find more women and more widows, because they are so vulnerable. The programme being run at the moment aims to integrate 1,000 widows and female heads of households into Iraq’s social and economic fabric by empowering them with skills, qualifications, social support and employment opportunities, and by increasing their rights—and their knowledge of their rights—as Iraqi citizens.

One of those important points is to help those women to find what is available to them from the Government; for example, there is a widow’s stipend. Only a small proportion of widows in Iraq get that stipend, because most widows there cannot read and write, so they do not know that it is available to them. A key thing is to teach widows literacy and numeracy. We have a very important programme that teaches adult literacy and numeracy to about 7,000 adults a week, of which a proportion are widows. I strongly highlight literacy and numeracy, which are absolutely crucial. That is one of the first steps to take when you think about widows.

On access to employment opportunities, my noble friends Lord Shipley and, I believe, Lord Loomba mentioned the Government and the international community. In order to get those widows known about, we create access to employment opportunities by involving businesses, government, parliamentary committees and academic institutions in the project itself. That means that bit by bit those ladies become known, and their opportunities emerge because of that.

We teach practical skills, assisting them to set up their own businesses. The practical skills, apart from literacy and numeracy, are sewing and design, food preparation, hairdressing, IT, English language for business, and human rights—the latter so that they know what is theirs by right. We teach English language because with that you have the globe, and IT because you can get into the internet. However, the practical skills are ones that they have confidence in themselves. They know that they can do hairdressing—they are taught how to do it so that it can become a business. They know that they can cook and do nursing.

Therefore, the programme does the full range of training courses, all integrated with the Ministry of Education’s own education opportunities, and it is seen as a highly successful programme. I also suggest that no programme can succeed for widows or for any other section of the community unless it is sustainable. As part of the programme, we have heavy-duty monitoring work, but on top of that we have a sustainability programme. So far, we have been steadily raising funds locally—not necessarily here, although we have done some here—to enable this project to continue in perpetuity.

That is a very small example of programmes globally that I know many other wonderful organisations are carrying out. However, I have put it in front of your Lordships in the hope that it may provide an example of a simple but highly effective way of working.