Lord Alton of Liverpool
Main Page: Lord Alton of Liverpool (Crossbench - Life peer)International Development Outcomes for Women and Girls
Lord Alton of Liverpool Excerpts
Lord Alton of Liverpool (CB)
My Lords, not for the first time the noble Baroness, Lady Sugg, deserves our gratitude for concentrating our minds on victims and survivors of international crimes, especially on women and girls in need of access to life-sustaining support. In my three minutes, I will focus on Sudan and Nigeria.
Sudan is facing a second genocide in two decades. This includes a war on women, which I referred to on Tuesday during Question Time and will do so again on Friday next week in my debate on the Genocide Determination Bill. Targeted, unspeakable violence, systemic use of rape as a weapon of war, extreme famine and catastrophic displacement mean that millions of Sudanese women and girls are plunged into peril. As the noble Baroness told us, 17 million women and girls in Sudan are now in need of assistance.
A truly shocking UN report on CRSV in Sudan reports that women whom it interviewed in West Darfur were being asked, before being raped, which tribe they belonged to. One replied, “Masalit”. The perpetrators said they would kill her. Another, before being subjected to gang rape, was told:
“‘If you are Masalit, we will slaughter you today’ … Others were told, ‘You will be our wives’, ‘You slave’, ‘You are our women,’ and ‘This year, all of you Masalit girls deliver our children’”.
If these women somehow survive, they will need sustained help but also justice, which has been absent since the first genocide in Darfur some 20 years ago.
Meanwhile, in Nigeria, whole communities have been targeted by Boko Haram, Islamic State West Africa Province and Fulani militia. They target girls, often abducting them from schools. The Minister knows and has responded to me about the case of Leah Sharibu, who, eight years ago, aged 14, was kidnapped, impregnated, raped, forcibly married and told to convert. She remains unrescued in captivity. Last November, more than 300 children, many of them girls, and staff, were kidnapped by gunmen from a Catholic school in central Nigeria in one of the worst mass abductions the country has seen. Such attacks are common, but they receive too little attention.
In this context, in 2024, UK officials considered increasing our ambition on support for the protection of civilians, including atrocity prevention. An internal options paper outlined four broad options for scaling up protections of civilians and establishing an international protection mechanism. Of the options, the FCDO opted to take the fourth and least-ambitious option.
The Minister of State, Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (Baroness Chapman of Darlington) (Lab)
My Lords, I am sorry—I know this is unconventional—but that is factually incorrect. That did not happen, and I want to make that clear to the Committee at this point.
Lord Alton of Liverpool (CB)
I am grateful to the Minister for her intervention, but what I said is based on information provided to me by officials who work in her department. It is said that the
“FCDO opted to take the fourth – and least ambitious – option … FCDO stakeholders … recognised the value of supporting locally led protection of civilians interventions, but stated that an already overstretched country team did not have the capacity to take on a complex new programming area. This has constrained the UK’s ability to support stronger protection results”,
inevitably.
Clearly, we owe it to girls like Leah and the women and girls of Sudan to be more ambitious. Given the Minister’s intervention just now, I hope that it will be possible to sit down with her and talk through those previous ambitions, which were rejected, and see what can be done for others in the future.
The Minister of State, Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (Baroness Chapman of Darlington) (Lab)
I am grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Sugg, for bringing us together to have this discussion. It is incredibly important that we do so, and it speaks to the level of interest and concern across our House that so many noble Lords have chosen to come and take part in this Committee this afternoon. I know personally how committed the noble Baroness is to improving the lives of women and girls around the world. This is not a new thing for her; she has spent many years doing this, and I value and respect her work. I know how much everybody here cares about this issue.
I have to respond to the noble Lord, Lord Alton. I understand where the noble Lord read what he spoke about; it was recently raised with me, too, at the International Development Committee. I have responded formally in writing to the committee specifically on the issues raised by the noble Lord. I can categorically assure him that no such proposal ever came to any Minister and that the least effective options were not selected. That did not happen. I am very happy to meet the noble Lord and whoever he wishes to bring along to discuss these matters in as much detail as he would like, because I know that his aim is true and that what he wants is the same as what I want, which is to see a resolution to this heinous conflict.
Lord Alton of Liverpool (CB)
I do not doubt the Minister’s sincerity at all—she knows that. I did not say that proposals had been sent to her. I said there had been four sets of proposals and stakeholders had been involved in them. What I said was that a particular, most ambitious proposal was put to one side and the least ambitious proposal was the one that was adopted. Which Ministers agreed to see those proposals in the first place, I do not know, but as she said, this was said at a Select Committee of the House of Commons, and it has been said in the national media. This was not something I pulled out of thin air. I am grateful to her as it would be good to have sight of the letter she has written. She knows that before the Genocide Determination Bill is considered next Friday, a request was made by her noble friend Lady Kennedy of The Shaws and me to see the Foreign Secretary. I hope the Minister will relay that request again.
Baroness Chapman of Darlington (Lab)
I would be very happy to do that. I know that the noble Lord does not pull these things out of thin air; I am familiar with where this has come from. I have said what I have said, we can get into it in more depth, and I would be very happy to do that.
The Government have put the safety and rights of women and girls at the heart of the UK’s development and international work more generally. We have done this because, as many noble Lords have said, advancing gender equality is the right thing to do, but it is also the best way to alleviate poverty, build economies and support women leaders, and countries need women leaders in order to thrive. I think everybody here understands and agrees with that. Women strengthen democracies, advance peace and security, and drive prosperity. That is why the Foreign Secretary made women and girls a stand-alone priority for the FCDO. It is also why I am a SheDecides champion, supporting sexual and reproductive health and rights, and women’s rights to choose.
We now have the framework in place to turn our ambitions into reality. I would like more money for this agenda, and I think that contributions that highlight the ODA budget cuts are absolutely legitimate and fair. What is less fair, I think, is any suggestion that we have somehow not understood the impact that this could have, that we have not been open and transparent about the decisions that we have made, or that we have not consciously and deliberately amended those choices in order to, as far as we possibly can, within the budget that we have, make sure that women and girls, within the constraints that exist, remain central to everything we do. At the end of the day, development is all about women and girls. They benefit from every penny that we spend, and we have to make sure that that continues.
In May, we launched the UK’s international strategic framework on women and girls. This sets out how we will advance the safety, prosperity, voice—that is vital—and choice of women and girls, bringing together our diplomatic, development and multilateral efforts behind a clear set of priorities.
I was asked about mainstreaming. I completely understand the misgivings that were raised by the noble Baroness, Lady Sugg, about this. I agree with her—we have to be alert to that—but we have committed that by 2030, at least 90% of the UK’s bilateral ODA programmes will contribute to gender equality, ensuring that women and girls remain central to our work even as our budget is reduced. We are making progress. In 2024, 81% of FCDO bilateral ODA projects were marked as making a principal or significant contribution to gender equality. That is up from 58% in 2022. This means that we are designing programmes that better address the barriers faced by women and girls across our portfolio while continuing targeted action where that is needed. I will say a little bit about that as well.
A number of contributions raised concerns about the impact of the reduction in spending. These cuts are a reality. They were significant, which is why—I think this is the first time this has been done—we took the decision to publish the equalities impact assessments for our allocations for the next three years. They tell us that there is no disproportionate negative impact on women and girls across our multilateral and central spending.
I will be honest about how this came about. We made a set of decisions and commissioned the equalities impact assessment. It came back and I did not like what I was reading, so we changed some decisions as a consequence and published the assessment. That is why noble Lords will see some programmes protected, even though in their essence they go against some of the changes and modernisation moves that we wanted to make in our development spend, because they are centrally managed programmes. They are run in a way which is about service provision. They could be accused—it seems an odd thing to say—of generating dependency or being duplicate systems. But if we were not looking at giving out contraception in areas of the Sahel, then the idea that you could strengthen a government system that would be willing to do that work is, I think, just not realistic or practical at this stage, so those things continue.
We have protected central programme spending both on violence against women and girls and on women, peace and security, where our work continues to support women peacebuilders and women’s rights organisations in some of the world’s most dangerous and fragile places. We have protected funding for Education Cannot Wait, ensuring that girls continue to get an education in even the most difficult conditions, and we have increased the proportion of country and regional spending in fragile and conflict-affected states, where women and girls are often at the most risk. This will rise to over 70% of our portfolio by 2028-29.
Like noble Lords, including—I am so sorry, I want to call her Lynne, which I know is highly inappropriate—the noble Baroness, Lady Featherstone, I have had the privilege to serve as a Development Minister, as others have too. I have been there in makeshift shelters listening to women who have endured the worst experiences that most of us could ever imagine: in Chad, with women fleeing the war in Sudan; with Rohingya women in Bangladesh; and with those escaping hideous conflict in DRC. I have heard their stories, held their children and their hands, and I know, as many have rightly said, that they are not numbers or names on a list. In the words that we have heard this afternoon and which were said to me by women on these occasions, they are our sisters. We support these women, though not just with aid. We must do more. We have to make ourselves really focus on the outcomes that we achieve, not just what we put into the system. We have to be responsible for the outcome of everything that we spend.
As the UK shifts from being a donor to a long-term partner and investor, we have got to focus on strengthening the systems that countries rely on, so that they can thrive even when aid is cut. The modern partnerships we are seeking to build will use investment and economic growth to expand opportunity for women and girls. That is one reason why British International Investment’s new strategy will increase investments supporting women’s economic empowerment from 25% to 30% of its core portfolio. This investment will support more women for longer, and in a more sustainable way, than traditional programming ever could.
We must have some humility about the limit of what our traditional aid spending could ever achieve. The world spends around $70 billion ODA in Africa; the development gap is $1.3 trillion, so there is a lot more that needs to be done. There is money in markets in Europe and North America that never goes anywhere near Africa. Part of our role, the leadership that the UK can provide, is about making sure that that money can get into those developing economies and do real good in the longer term.
As noble Lords have said, we must not just contend with cuts in ODA. There was a real issue with rollback and political hostility to this agenda. Our commitment to this agenda is reflected not just in the choices we have made here but in our wider diplomatic work. In May, the Foreign Secretary announced a new international coalition to end violence against women and girls, to prevent violence, protect women and girls, and hold perpetrators to account. Next year, the UK will convene a major summit on tackling violence against women and girls, providing a platform for countries to set out further commitments and report on progress so that we can learn from each other.
As noble Baronesses—mostly—have said, we want the multilateral system to raise its standards and build coalitions, defending the global consensus on women’s rights in international conventions and agreements, and in our partnerships with multilateral institutions. I could go on a lot more about our commitment to Gavi and the Global Fund and how we are now the biggest contributor to UNFPA, but we are probably short of time.
Women and girls’ rights are fundamental to global stability, prosperity and sustainable development. That is why we have taken decisions on where we spend our ODA mindfully. While budgets have changed, our commitment absolutely has not, and we will continue to champion the safety and rights of women and girls around the world because it is the right thing to do and is fundamental to the prosperity, security and stability that we seek for every woman and every girl everywhere.