Women and Girls: Employment Skills in the Developing World

Baroness Miller of Chilthorne Domer Excerpts

Thursday 26th January 2017 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Miller of Chilthorne Domer (LD)]

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Loomba, on securing this debate. I am particularly struck by how appropriate it is to be debating this issue following last Saturday’s worldwide women’s marches. Solidarity with the rights of women in particular and human rights in general was underlined by those marches. The achievement and realisation of those rights has been a struggle. For many women in the world, it is still a far off dream. After the march, I read some comments in the Guardian from a woman in the Central African Republic. She said that even to know about the marches was difficult for them, because they are not connected to the rest of the world.

Why the election of President Trump has been such a setback, beyond the man himself, is that it has unleashed a swathe of voices that feel able to be anti-choice and anti-equality, taking us to a nasty, supremacist world in which women are diminished—a world that we thought we had left behind to fade into history. Many of your Lordships will have seen the picture of all the men gathered round as Trump signed away aid for organisations involved in abortion work. That picture said it all. As somebody wryly wrote, “When did you last see a group of seven women writing into law what men can do with their reproductive organs?”. I ask the Minister whether the Government will consider supporting the initiative in the Netherlands to create a worldwide fund to fill the gap in reproductive health that will no longer be covered by contributions from the US. The strength of support for the marches worldwide showed that, for women in particular, the efforts to undo the progress in equality of the past two generations are simply not acceptable.

The noble Lord, Lord Loomba, underlined the importance of education. Providing girls with an education helps break the cycle of poverty. Educated women are less likely to marry early and against their will, less likely to die in childbirth, more likely to have healthy babies and more likely to send their children to school. As UNICEF underlined, an extra year of primary school for girls can increase their eventual adult wages by 10% to 20%, and an extra year of secondary school increases those wages by 15% to 25%. Education is absolutely vital. Will the Minister confirm that the UK Government will continue to fund the programme they announced in July 2016 to help 175,000—that was their aim at the time—of the world’s poorest, most marginalised girls to get a quality education? That programme, through the Girls’ Education Challenge, helps girls who have dropped out of or never attended school due to a whole number of pressures that have made life really difficult for them. I hope that DfID will continue to fund educational programmes in general, but that that programme will be especially protected.

I conclude with another question for the Minister. Do we actually know satisfactorily what is happening for girls and women in different countries? As far as I understand it, fewer than 50 countries can provide data disaggregated by sex from vital statistics and civil registration systems. If so few countries can produce gender statistics on, for example, informal employment, entrepreneurship and time use, it will be very difficult to measure progress. The Minister may have better statistics than that. It is very important that, in funding educational programmes, we can measure their results to be sure they are addressing some of the issues raised by the noble Baroness, Lady Hodgson, in her important contribution—for example, in the sectors of unpaid work and agriculture.