International Development (Gender Equality) Bill

Baroness Northover Excerpts

Friday 7th February 2014 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Northover (LD)]

My Lords, I am pleased to speak in support of the Private Member’s Bill sponsored by my noble friend Lord McColl and introduced so effectively by him. My noble friend has such a formidable commitment to development through his Mercy Ships and so many other efforts, as my noble friend Lady Jenkin said, and I, too, pay tribute to him. I love the image of our noble friend Lord McColl marching in his first demonstration in Nepal. It shows his level of commitment that that was in a march for dignity for gender equality. Like my noble friend Lady Jenkin and others, I, too, pay tribute to my honourable friend Bill Cash for having the vision, grasp and commitment to introduce and pilot this vital Bill through the other place. I pay tribute to the other noble Lords who have contributed today for their long and considerable contribution to addressing gender inequality worldwide.

There is no doubt that over the past few decades the world has made significant progress on improving the lives and prospects for girls and women. More girls are now going to school. Women are living longer and having fewer children, and more are in productive employment. As the noble Baroness, Lady Farrington, has made clear, there has been much change but, as she and others have noted, we are nowhere near where we need to be. As the noble Lord, Lord Quirk, also made clear, there have been major improvements in the position of women and girls, especially in education, but there is still much more to do.

By 2020, unless attitudes change and without steps to address child marriage, 50 million girls will have been forced into marriage before they reach their 15th birthday. As we have heard, violence against women and girls is a global pandemic: one in three women has experienced violence in her lifetime, a terrible statistic. My noble friend Lord McColl mentioned the dangers even in carrying out simple tasks such as collecting water.

My noble friend Lady Hodgson spelt out the level of violence against women and its devastating effects. It was a milestone when rape was rightly recognised as a weapon of war. Now we must ensure, as she and other noble Lords have said, that women are at the table in peace negotiations. I, too, pay tribute to my right honourable friend William Hague for what he is doing to recognise and combat violence against women in conflict. His involvement is extremely welcome.

Ours is a changing world, and the challenges that girls and women face will become more pressing. More girls and women will live in urban areas and in areas of conflict. The impact of natural resource scarcity and climate change will be disproportionately hard on girls and women because they are so often at the margins. They are in real danger of being locked out of the economic progress that we see in some of the developing countries at the moment.

My noble friend Lady Hussein-Ece flags up the situation of women in Afghanistan. She knows that we are very actively engaged there. We are seeking to uphold women’s rights as an important element of DfID’s strategy in Afghanistan, so we provide grants for Afghan women’s organisations that emphasise the strengthening of civil society. They emphasise various areas, including strengthening women’s rights and access to justice, and we are providing £7.1 million to the Ministry of the Interior to help to improve the Afghan police’s role to protect and uphold women’s rights. My noble friend will also know how we are supporting girls’ education in Afghanistan. However, we are also keenly aware that things can go backwards as well as forwards. We assure her that we remain active and vigilant in this regard. We are looking into the recent reports that she flagged up, and I will provide noble Lords with more information on that as soon as we have it. I shall put it in a letter to my noble friend, copy it to other noble Lords who have participated in the debate and put a copy in the Library. We know the importance of ensuring that things go forwards, not backwards.

That is why action to improve the lives of girls and women is rightly front and centre in UK development. We need to turn the challenges of a changing world into opportunities. As we all know, gender equality is a critical building block for progress towards building prosperity. Time and again we see that investing in girls and women leads to incredible returns, not only for them but for their families and communities and for their economies and countries. When a woman generates her own income, she reinvests 90% of it in her family and community. Getting more girls into secondary education is shown to boost a country’s economic growth, a point that the noble Lord, Lord Quirk, picked up.

The UK is already helping to change the lives of millions of girls and women for the better. As noble Lords will know, DfID has put gender equality front and centre for the very reasons that noble Lords have laid out. Our strategic vision for girls and women, launched in March 2011, aims to unlock the potential of girls and women in order to stop poverty before it starts. Maintaining our important cross-party consensus, I, too, pay tribute to the previous Government’s recognition of this and to the remarkable vision of my right honourable friend Andrew Mitchell when he came into the department.

Supporting girls and women enables them to have a voice in decision-making in their household, community and country, and in politics and business. My noble friends Lady Hussein-Ece and Lady Jenkin and others have made the case for this very clearly. It gives women and girls the freedom to exercise choice in their lives: to be able to choose to complete education and to benefit from paid work and to choose whether, when and whom to marry. It recognises they should have control over their own bodies and be safe from violence; control over their own income and other resources such as food, water and energy; and equal legal rights and access to justice.

My noble friend Lady Jenkin has given figures for DfID’s work, some of which bear repeating here because they are very important. The UK aid programme has already helped 270,000 girls to go to secondary school. By 2015 we shall have saved the lives of at least 50,000 women during pregnancy and childbirth, enabled 10 million more women to use modern methods of family planning, improved access to financial services for more than 18 million women, secured access to land for 4.5 million women and helped 10 million women to access justice through the courts, police and legal assistance.

We are supporting the efforts to end female genital mutilation worldwide through a £35 million programme, the first time that a programme like that has been put in place. Noble Lords will know that yesterday was the international day to end FGM, the first such day, and I was struck and impressed by the level of social media involvement in that by institutions from all over the world, organisations from Africa, Australia, the United States and the EU and many organisations within the UK, as well as the accounts in the Times and the campaign by the Guardian. I pay tribute to those who have brought it to this point and I hope that we will indeed end this within a generation or, hopefully, before.

We are determined to do more to end violence against women and girls. Last November the Secretary of State for International Development, who has been a strong supporter of the Bill, launched an international call to action on violence against women and girls in humanitarian emergencies. The result was Governments and aid agencies from around the world signing up to a groundbreaking commitment to make the safety of girls and women a life-saving priority in our response to emergencies.

I attended that conference and was very struck by the commitments that were made and that we must hold countries and institutions to. Like my noble friend Lord Howell, I welcome the new Commonwealth charter with its commitments in this area. Drafting things is the first stage, signing up is the second and implementing is the third. We need everyone’s efforts to ensure that that third stage is in fact reached. In June this year the UK will host an international summit where we will challenge the culture of impunity that exists for sexual violence in conflict, and work to ensure that more perpetrators are held to account through improved international collaboration.

So the Bill comes at a critical point in development. Although we have come so far in improving the lives of girls and women, there is much further to go. There are still too many girls and women whose potential is wasted. As my noble friend Lady Hodgson said, holding back women impairs all development. It will not be easy to reach these women as we are talking about some of the poorest and most vulnerable people in the world, so we must keep up the pressure, the resources and the visibility and lead by example.

I am the first to recognise, as did my noble friends Lady Jenkin and Lord Loomba and others, that in this country we have a way to go in terms of gender equality in Parliament, in business and in society.

If the Bill is passed, it will mean that the Secretary of State for International Development must have regard to reducing gender inequality before making decisions to provide development assistance under the International Development Act 2002. It will give our commitment to addressing gender inequality in countries where we provide development assistance a statutory footing, enshrined in law. It will raise the bar on the way that gender equality is considered, crystallising it in the early stages of the programme development.

Gender is not something that can be tacked on to our development and humanitarian assistance programmes for the very reasons that noble Lords have laid out. The Bill will introduce an annual reporting duty in respect of gender through an amendment to the International Development (Reporting and Transparency) Act. My noble friend Lord Loomba cogently argued that it is by this kind of monitoring and transparency that we ensure the action and commitment that we need.

I note that the Bill will not introduce any significant costs in implementation—not that any noble Lord flagged that up—or impose additional bureaucracy in decision-making or slow processes down—not that any noble Lord flagged that up. It is about ensuring that Ministers and officials fully take into account the interests of girls and women as well as those of others in determining the UK’s bilateral aid programme.

I welcome the debate today and especially the cross-party support we have heard for gender equality. It is heartening to hear so many positive views on the important role that girls and women should have in the world and on their right to a better life. This Bill will help keep girls and women at the forefront in the delivery of development assistance and in the planning that goes into it. The path to sustainable development cannot be achieved where half the population is locked out. Improving the lives of women and girls is already a top priority in our international development work, but this Bill is another important step forward enshrining our commitment to gender equality in law, and the Government are proud to support it.