International Women's Day

Baroness Brinton Excerpts

Thursday 3rd March 2011 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Brinton]

My Lords, I rise to speak for the first time in some trepidation and in awe of the excellence of the debate and the many unwritten conventions by which this House regulates itself. The welcome I have received from noble Lords and from the attendants, doorkeepers, officers and staff of this House has been generous and supportive, and I thank those who helped my family on the day of my introduction. I particularly want to thank everyone involved in the briefing and induction process for new Peers. It makes this new girl feel that any ignorance is hers alone.

I have a particular interest in education through my time as a Cambridgeshire county councillor with the education portfolio, then as the skills champion and deputy chair at the East of England Development Agency, and my 20 years working in higher education, including as senior bursar of Lucy Cavendish College under the presidency of my noble friend Lady Perry, who was referred to by my noble friend Lady Trumpington.

This debate honours the centenary of International Women's Day, and I start by marking the contribution of my cousin, the late Lady Stocks of Kensington and Chelsea. I remember from the early 1960s this doughty—and, to be frank, to an 8 year-old, scary—lady whose debates at Sunday lunch were always impressive. At an early age, she showed me that women could do anything they set their mind to. Unusually for a primary school girl, I understood the importance of Cross-Benchers and the role of Life Peers.

I was later shocked to discover—children often fail to understand that their elders were once young—that this eminent Peer of the realm had started her own career as a rebel. One hundred years ago she was a suffragette marching to Parliament to demand that women should be given the vote. She dedicated her life to the education of women and she showed me, in the words of John Stuart Mill, that women must,

“stir up the zeal of women themselves”.

I suspect that she also helped to create the rebel in me, occasionally to the amusement of my much-loved late father, Tim Brinton, formerly of another place.

Globally, women still bear a disproportionate burden of the world’s poverty. A UNIFEM report last year said:

“Statistics indicate that women are more likely than men to be poor and at risk of hunger because of the systematic discrimination they face in education, health care, employment and … control of assets”.

I would like to focus on a smaller group of women. Those with disability are known to be further stigmatised and experience even greater poverty, less education and worse health than their non-disabled peers. I will give just one example. In rural Tanzania, as many as one in 10 pregnant women develop obstetric fistula after an extended labour. Tragically, 90 per cent of these women lose their babies and are then confined to home with the debilitating results—uncontrolled leaks and resulting health and hygiene problems. Women find themselves outcasts in their own community. Obstetric fistula can be treated by a simple, free hospital operation and rehabilitation in Tanzania, but it was difficult for the health professionals to identify women who needed help because they were invisible. Without treatment, the women became disabled and unable to take any part in their society, all for the want of transport to hospital.

As a result of lateral thinking and using modern technology, Comprehensive Community Based Rehabilitation Tanzania, an NGO that works with CBM UK, the disability charity of which I am a trustee, developed a scheme called M-PESA with the phone company Vodacom. Regional representatives locate women with obstetric fistula and alert the NGO, which transfers money via a text message on a mobile phone to pay for a woman’s bus fare to the hospital. This really is a case of “for the want of a nail the kingdom was lost”, or, to turn it positive for this project in Tanzania, “for the want of a bus fare, a woman’s life is returned to her, and her family”. Projects such this, funded either by private or public funding, lie at the heart of the best in world development, and I am encouraged that maternal health is one of the key objectives of this week’s DfID review. However, I hope that the guidance is not drawn so tightly that low-cost projects like this, which are truly life changing, are excluded in future because a bus fare might not count as maternal health.

I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Gould of Potternewton, for instigating this debate, and I look forward to many more. I am humbled that I am able to play a small part as a servant of this House and look forward to contributing in future.