Conflict-affected Countries: Adolescent Girls

Baroness Goudie Excerpts

Tuesday 8th January 2019 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Goudie (Lab)]

I thank my good friend, the noble Baroness, Lady Hodgson, for enabling us to have this debate this evening. I declare my interests as in the register: I am a member of the Advisory Board of the Centre for Women, Peace and Security at the LSE, and I am on the board of the Institute for Women, Peace and Security at Georgetown.

I welcome this debate this evening. The Government have been a leader on this issue and I hope very much that they will continue to do so but will also put pressure on other countries, foundations and global institutes to increase their budgets and follow Britain’s lead.

Why should we be concerned about supporting adolescent girls in fragile and conflict-affected countries? Today, 62 million girls around the world are not in school, and at least 20 million of them live in conflict-affected and fragile settings as refugees or displaced people, or are otherwise vulnerable to human trafficking, rape and other things that we have never even thought about. So many lives are being wasted. These girls sometimes become pregnant at eight or nine and have babies. Their babies cannot become full adults because they are not fully formed. This is the battle we have to continually fight to have all girls in education.

Educating girls is the smart and the right thing to do and is the world’s best development investment. We have to persuade the British Government, and other Governments who have cut their budgets, in particular Australia and America, and persuade Japan and other countries to do more. But it is not just about the funding and commitments; we should be ensuring access to quality. We should not have teachers who we know have had just a few days’ training—we want the best and must pay the best to work in these difficult areas, to have consistent education for girls in these settings.

Why does this matter? If girls are educated, in the long term we prevent forced marriage; lower maternal and neonatal mortality; spur on women’s financial independence; reduce fertility rates; create smaller, more sustainable families; improve health and nutrition outcomes for families; shrink the rates of HIV/AIDS and malaria; and open opportunities for women’s political leadership. If more women are not educated, we will never get more women in political leadership at every level, and as we know, Britain has agreed not to go to peace talks without local women and other women at the peace table. How can we get local women if they are not being educated? Educating girls also increases children’s educational attainment levels, builds familial resilience to natural disasters and climate change, and boosts national economic growth.

To access education, displaced adolescent girls must overcome several challenges, such as transition and disruption, and problems with host countries and camps. We must have better support for them, not just using regular military people but trained military people, working with NGOs on the ground and trying to persuade people from those countries.

Four of the five countries that currently have the largest gender gaps in education also experience high levels of conflict. This is where we must start to put pressure at the highest level. We cannot just come in low down—we have to ensure that commitments materialise on the ground. However, the challenges to providing quality educational opportunities remain significant. Within this context, educating displaced adolescent girls is particularly challenging, but it is imperative for the long-term stability and prosperity of not only their countries—their GDP—but the world.

Since the adoption of the millennium development goals in 2000, significant progress has been made in increasing girls’ primary school enrolment, but secondary school enrolment remains limited. We know why that is: girls are either sold off or their parents get them married off because they think, “I’ve got rid of another problem in my life”. Fewer than one in three girls in sub-Saharan Africa and less than half of girls in south Asia are currently enrolled in secondary education. Of at least 14 million refugee and internally displaced children between three and 15, only one in two attends any form of school at all, and for how many hours? When crises strike, adolescent girls are acutely vulnerable. In these settings, girls are two and a half times more likely to be out of school as compared to their male peers. What a world we are living in. That is why I hope that we can have a more joined-up approach from the FCO, DfID and the Ministry of Defence. I know that they work together, but we need to look towards a future in which we all work together, pool the money, and get more support from organisations that have funding.