Millennium Development Goals

Lord Shipley Excerpts

Thursday 7th October 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Shipley]

My Lords, we should be much reassured by the fact that, despite the difficult financial position faced by the Government, their commitment to raise spending on overseas aid from 0.5 per cent of our annual economic output to 0.7 per cent by 2013 has remained a firm promise—indeed, it is to be enshrined in law. That is welcome, and demonstrates that while charity may begin at home, it only begins there. However, this is not just about charity. A world divided between the wealthy and the very poor is inherently unstable, particularly as the world continues to shrink because of the speed and availability of communication.

I shall talk specifically about the role and importance of women in reaching the challenging millennium goals that world leaders have set. A few years ago, I visited a housing project in Khayelitsha, one of Cape Town's townships. There, I realised that if you wanted homes built, it was the women’s housing co-operative that would build them. If you wanted a crèche, it is women who would create it and run it. If you wanted bed-and-breakfasts, the businesses would be run by women; and if you wanted a self-help saving scheme to provide microfunding, it was women who would organise it.

That is why we need to concentrate far more on strategies which help the lives of women directly, particularly in health, maternity and schooling, which will in turn drive higher growth through greater equality. The millennium goal furthest away from being met relates to the mortality rates of women who die in pregnancy and childbirth. This impacts directly on the existing children of those mothers and their life chances. Half a million women die every year in this way, and half of them are in sub-Saharan Africa. The new strategies recently announced to increase substantially the number of lives saved are at the heart of what we need to do. For example, in under half of developing countries does a skilled health worker attend a birth. Addressing this specific issue could make such a difference. Two-thirds of the billion people who live on less than one dollar a day are women, and those women own only 1 per cent of the land they live on. Yet gender inequality discourages economic growth because when women earn money, they spend more of it on their families. Research by Goldman Sachs and by the World Bank has confirmed that if more women could earn their own income, the income per head in many developing countries could rise by a fifth.

I have two final points. Let us remember that economic growth requires clean water. As an example of what can be done if we concentrate aid, we should look to new technologies, such as encouraging the use of solar power to pump fresh water from deep underground wells. Finally, I congratulate the BBC World Service Trust on the excellence of its work in developing countries, to which it broadcasts information to help people in the face, for example, of natural disasters. I give a particular accolade to “Afghan Woman’s Hour” to which six million Afghan women tune in every week. These women say that the stories they hear inspire them to take action to improve their own living conditions. At New York, Ban Ki-Moon reminded us that:

“Meeting the goals is everyone’s business. Falling short would multiply the dangers of our world—from instability to epidemic diseases and environmental degradation”.

He said that,

“achieving the goals will put us on a fast track to a world that is more stable, more just and more secure”.

He is surely right.