Sierra Leone: Ebola

Baroness Tonge Excerpts

Monday 30th October 2017 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Tonge (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, first, I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, on securing this debate.

I declare an interest as chair of the APPG on Population, Development and Reproductive Health. Members of the group visited Sierra Leone this time last year with the assistance of the UNFPA, which does much work there. While we were there, we were fortunate in bumping into the new Secretary of State, Priti Patel, at the high commissioner’s residence, so we corralled her and did not let her escape for a while.

Another memory of that visit was the plaque in memory of Jo Cox MP which had been erected in the Parliament chamber. It was shown to us by the niece of the late Satta Amara, founder of the 50/50 Group of Sierra Leone, which promoted women’s empowerment in the country. I knew Satta, and we had done exchange visits between her country and my constituency in the years before the Ebola outbreak.

I have indulged in that preamble because the empowerment of women by giving them power over their own bodies and over the number of children they have is very important to a country’s development and economic success. That means improving maternal health before all else. I do not have time to list Sierra Leone’s statistics and shall not do so. Your Lordships all know how dire they are.

After the end of the civil war in Sierra Leone, DfID was a major donor, particularly to healthcare, and efforts were made to roll out treatments for individual diseases such as HIV/AIDS. Yet during our visit, post Ebola, there was still very little evidence of a health network countrywide. Such a network does not particularly need doctors and nurses but it needs workers to impart public health messages and distribute supplies such as contraceptives, which only 16% of women in Sierra Leone can access.

We visited two hospitals: a very overcrowded and struggling government-run one, and the exemplary charity-run Aberdeen Women’s Centre. There are only 40 hospitals in the whole of Sierra Leone and few health centres, which in my view are even more important, although people were trying to create “pop up” health centres—again, to deal with HIV screening.

A worrying fact was the lack of treatment available for cervical cancer, which affects thousands of women in Sierra Leone. They test these women but there is no treatment available. It is very cruel to tell someone they have a disease but cannot do anything about it.

Also, will the Minister tell us when there is to be a campaign to vaccinate women against the HPV virus, which causes cervical cancer? I hear that something may be being done on this front; perhaps the Minister could confirm.

We were told that Sierra Leone was trying to develop health networks, but could the Minister tell the House if DfID is encouraging this? It is so important. The lack of such a network was in my view a major contributor to the spread of the Ebola epidemic. Does the Minister agree?

I would have liked much more time to talk about this beautiful country which has suffered so many misfortunes, from the curse of the diamond trade, as mentioned by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Falconer, to the recent mudslide and floods near Freetown— another blow to the health services trying to grow there. I hope the Minister will assure us that the UK will continue to engage with Sierra Leone and support the people there.