Ebola: Sierra Leone

Baroness Jenkin of Kennington Excerpts

Tuesday 19th January 2016 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Verma]

My Lords, as the noble Baroness knows well from the work that she did in her former role as a DfID Minister, part of our wider strategy is to ensure that we build resilience, first and foremost, into the health systems. She touches on a very important issue about FGM: ensuring that those practices do not recur once the recovery is in place. We will work very closely with the president on his plan, but also through the wider work that we are going to do through the community-led organisations on the ground to ensure that the work that we did from the Girl Summit going forward does not get lost in the rebuilding of Sierra Leone. As always, with all these issues, it is really about continuing our dialogue with the Government of Sierra Leone to see how we can help them in strengthening their health systems first of all, but also ensuring that we assist them in tackling issues such as FGM at community level.

[Baroness Jenkin of Kennington (Con)]

My Lords, as I think everyone now recognises, mobilisation of communities, as the Minister recognised in her Statement, was and is the most effective and powerful tool to bring Ebola down to zero and eradicate it. Will she confirm that the Government will continue their commendable level of investment in the excellent work of British civil society organisations, which are working with locals on the ground at the heart of communities? I declare my interest as a patron of Restless Development, which does a lot of work in this area.

[Baroness Verma]

My noble friend is absolutely right. Having community organisations on the ground was key in enabling us to try to restrain as much of the disease as we possibly could. I can reassure my noble friend that that commitment remains and we will continue to work on the ground with community groups, on a programme of intensive community engagement that began in October 2014. As my noble friend knows, we were among the first to be on the ground to respond to the crisis.