Women: Developing Countries

Baroness Hayman Excerpts

Thursday 27th June 2013 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Hayman]

My Lords, in joining the congratulation of the noble Lord, Lord Loomba, not only on this debate but his tireless commitment to the plight in particular of widows across the world, I congratulate him too on provoking a debate that has had some extraordinarily good speeches in the mould of his own. I had not intended to say anything about women in this country, but the noble Baronesses, Lady Jenkin and Lady Hamwee, have provoked me to do so. There is also, not least, my noble friend Lord Crisp, whose question has been concerning me during the debate.

One of the few advantages of getting into one’s anecdotage is that you have a perspective over decades. I share the concern about 22% of parliamentarians in this country being women, but I experienced being one of 4%—that is 27 out of 635—and I know the progress that can been made. At that time I also experienced having to come into the House of Commons two days after leaving hospital after the birth of my first child. Maternity leave was not considered relevant. It is an enormous joy when I now see the Prime Minister and the Deputy Prime Minister taking paternity leave. Things have improved since the days when there were seven of us women among 200 studying law at Cambridge. It no longer means that you have to be one of one rather than one of 10 who had access to that university education. I never had daughters and now I have a granddaughter, so I have been worrying away at my noble friend Lord Crisp’s question. I am optimistic as well as joyful when I hold my granddaughter.

The only thing I worry about is something we have discussed in this House before, which is the level of pornography and sexualisation and the diminution of women, in ways which are different from how women were diminished in my experience, by a wave of easily accessible material that is bad for boys, bad for girls and bad for society overall. That is an issue to which we need to turn our attention.

I want to talk today, quite differently, about women in the developing world and to echo some of the things that have already been said about the crucial role—the Kofi Annan line—of women in development overall. It is important to recognise that what we consider as women’s rights—access to education, freedom from violence and forced and early marriage, the right to participate in political and civic life, economic empowerment and the provision of health services for women in the developing world—are not just matters of individual women’s rights. Those rights are also the key to development in the families, communities and countries in which those women live. If those women are not empowered, if they are not allowed to thrive, the countries in which they live will not develop and flourish either. Like others, I was enormously heartened by the work that has been done by the Secretary of State and by the Prime Minister in his role as co-chair of the high level panel on ensuring that a stand-alone goal on gender equality will be taken into account in the post-millennium development goals framework.

Today, I want to address particularly one of the goals in the MDGs up to 2015 that will not be reached, which is reduction in maternal mortality. Before I do so, I should declare my non-financial interests as a trustee of the Sabin Vaccine Institute and the Malaria Consortium and as chair of the advisory group for the Maternal and Newborn Health Unit at the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine, which has already been mentioned.

The noble Lord, Lord Loomba, quoted the chilling statistic that a girl in South Africa is more likely to be raped than to learn to read. I want to quote an equally chilling statistic: a girl born today in South Sudan—a country to which reference has already been made—is statistically more likely to die in childbirth than to complete her primary school education. I read “education” as meaning secondary school education, but it is her primary school education. That is a terrible statistic, and we have heard about the hundreds of thousands of women who die in childbirth, the widowers who are created by that, the children who are left motherless and the tremendous disease that follows from the morbidity that comes from inadequate care in childbirth.

The most awful thing is that the majority of those deaths are preventable. Some of them are preventable by changes in major structural issues which have already been referred to. We know the effects of early marriage, and we know the effects of excluding girls from education and basic healthcare. In development, I normally speak about neglected tropical diseases. Those diseases in themselves create a high risk of death and morbidity in pregnancy and childbirth. The anaemia that comes with malaria means that women are more prone to die. Access to fundamental healthcare is tremendously important as is, as has been said over and again today, access to family planning and the ability to choose when and whether to have children.

There are specific issues, measures and interventions that we know can be made in antenatal and obstetric care. I want to highlight the work of Professor Van den Broek, who has already been referred to by the noble Lord, Lord Jones. I think that the Making It Happen programme that DfID has supported through the Liverpool school is a wonderful example of doing what the World Bank described as,

“closing the deadly gap between what we know and what we do”.

The programme concentrates on looking at the five complications that are well understood and can be readily treated in obstetric care and that account for some 80% of maternal deaths: haemorrhage, sepsis, eclampsia, complications of obstructed labour and abortion. They have devised a programme that is cheap to deliver and sustainable as it involves training trainers within the countries concerned. They are currently working in 11 countries across sub-Saharan Africa and Asia and are achieving tremendous results. Those results are important not only in preventing deaths but also in preventing those terrible conditions, such as prolapse and fistula, that lead to women being not only disabled but also often excluded from their communities.

I think that we know what can be done. We have access to well researched and proven interventions. DfID has been tremendously helpful in supporting that in the past. I hope that the Minister will be able to give some indication that it will continue to be so in the future.