Impact of Conflict on Women and Girls

Laura Kyrke-Smith Excerpts

Thursday 9th January 2025 Westminster Hall

[Laura Kyrke-Smith (Aylesbury) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Sir Jeremy. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Norwich North (Alice Macdonald) for securing today’s important debate. Before I go further, I declare an interest, having previously been executive director of the International Rescue Committee in the UK, which is part of a global humanitarian agency that supports women in conflict and crisis around the world.

As we heard from my hon. Friend, women and girls are suffering disproportionately from rising conflict around the world. The number of women living in conflict zones has surged: in 2022 around 600 million women—that is more than one in seven of the world’s women—lived in, or in close proximity to, an armed conflict. That is double the figure it was in the 1990s. As we have also heard, conflict impacts women in many specific ways, including increased sexual violence, the loss of livelihoods and worsening healthcare, resulting in higher death rates even from preventable causes. I want to share some examples from two particularly brutal ongoing conflicts in Gaza and Sudan, and then move on to solutions.

In Gaza, women are being impacted in so many ways, but let me talk about reproductive health in particular, having heard some very powerful testimony at the International Development Committee. Pregnant women living through that conflict are three times more likely to miscarry, and if they do carry their babies to full term, they are three times more likely to die in childbirth due to lack of access to appropriate antenatal and post-natal medical care, and lack of access to basic medicine, safe shelter and adequate nutrition.

Nebal Farsakh from the Palestine Red Crescent told us at the Committee evidence session:

“Almost 60,000 pregnant women in Gaza are lacking everything. They are malnourished, not able to receive the food they need and not even receiving the proper healthcare service they deserve. They are living in shelters, thousands of people are sharing one toilet and you cannot even imagine…how a pregnant woman has to endure such inhuman conditions”.

As well as that,

“because of the collapsing healthcare system, as a pregnant woman, you barely have the luxury of delivering your baby in a hospital.”

If pregnant women are “lucky enough” to, they cannot stay and

“many women have had c-sections without anaesthesia because it had run out.”

That is one of many “continuous struggles”, with

“hospitals lacking anaesthesia, painkillers and other basic medications and medical supplies.”

Israeli authorities have denied entry to many of those critical supplies, including anaesthesia supplies, oxygen cylinders, ventilators and other medicines. According to UNRWA, of the total—extremely limited—humanitarian supplies that have entered Gaza since October 2023, just 2% were medical supplies. On 4 November last year, the United Nations Population Fund announced that attacks on hospitals have forced the only functioning neonatal intensive care unit in northern Gaza to close. The denial of access to newborn and maternal healthcare and the removal of the conditions necessary to give birth safely represent a grave threat to the survival of pregnant women, and Palestinians more widely, in Gaza.

Let me also touch on the impact of the conflict in Sudan—mentioned by my hon. Friend the Member for Norwich North—which is having similarly grave consequences for women and girls. For example, reports of gender-based violence in Sudan have drastically surged, encompassing alarming incidents such as kidnapping, forced marriage, intimate partner violence, conflict-related sexual violence and child marriage. The UN has witnessed a staggering 288% increase in the number of survivors seeking case-management services for gender-based violence, and at least 6.7 million people in Sudan are at risk of gender-based violence. There are also cases of sexual exploitation driven by food insecurity and water scarcity, and there is severely limited access to essential post-rape care and support services for survivors, who are in desperate need of medical, psychological and mental health support.

Despite the horrific impacts of conflict on women that we have heard about, often it is women in conflict zones who lead the response. Women are often the first responders. In Gaza, women make up 70% of frontline healthcare workers and 60% of caregivers. We know that that can lead to improved healthcare outcomes. For example, in Niger and Burkina Faso local organisations are nearly twice as likely as international organisations to report increased GBV caseloads, which suggests that women are more likely to report violence to those local women’s organisations. Women are also some of the chief advocates. For example, in Niger, when groups of women who were IDPs—internally displaced people—were excluded from receiving humanitarian aid, they lobbied district authorities to officially recognise their community, and in doing so secured services for people with disabilities and cash assistance for their community.

When I spent time with Syrian refugees in Jordan in my previous role at IRC, I met incredible Syrian refugee women who were there without partners, or had lost their partners in the war, and who had set up their own businesses on top of caring for their families; and not only doing that but pushing donors to change their approach to better support women refugees to be entrepreneurial and to earn a living alongside looking after their families. Women, showing such great leadership, are proving absolutely critical to building lasting peace in places where conflict is being brought to an end.

There is strong evidence to demonstrate that the involvement of women and girls in peacebuilding is key to achieving successful outcomes. Research shows that where women lead and participate in conflict prevention, response, recovery and peacebuilding, societies are more stable and peace is more durable. Women’s participation in peace negotiations results in peace agreements being 35% more likely to last at least 15 years, while the participation of civil society, including women’s organisations, in peace processes makes them 64% less likely to fail. Yet despite the huge volume of evidence showing that women are best placed to understand and meet the needs of their communities before, during and after conflicts, too often their voices are still ignored.

I will highlight two key solutions. I have been pleased to hear the Minister speak passionately about her commitment to gender equality and I know that she has hit the ground running to make that commitment and ambition a reality. I also welcome the Prime Minister’s appointment of Lord Collins as the special representative on preventing sexual violence in conflict. I pay tribute to the many brilliant NGOs that are delivering important support for women in conflict and championing the rights of those women, including with funding from our Government. They are not only international NGOs such as IRC, Co-operative for Assistance and Relief Everywhere, Plan and Save the Children but, most importantly, women-led local groups like the International Committee for the Development of Peoples in Somalia and Right To Play in Pakistan and elsewhere. They are doing fantastic work, but there are two particular ways in which we can do more.

The first is funding. Of course, we must recognise that all Government budgets are limited, and that there are many competing priorities for those budgets, including for the global humanitarian and development budgets—that is just the reality that we are living in—but we can get our limited budgets working harder. We can expand the amount of multi-year funding available to organisations that support women and girls in conflict—that makes a real difference to their ability to plan and deliver their work effectively. We can ensure that funding is flexible to adapt to the evolving needs of women and girls at different stages of conflict and crisis. We can introduce measurable targets to increase the amount and quality of funding that goes to women-led organisations within a particular humanitarian budget. We can use our influence within the UN to reform the multilateral funding mechanisms that are absolutely crucial in some contexts where funding is otherwise very difficult to get in—such as the UN Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs’ country-based pooled funds. That would make it easier for women-led organisations to apply and succeed in receiving funding.

The second point I want to touch on is how we think about and categorise the issue of women and conflict in the first place. We must start thinking about women in conflict as central, not just to our development work but to our foreign policy. We have such a great track record and reputation to build on, and real, live opportunities to make progress, for example, through our work through as penholder on women, peace and security at the UN Security Council.

But it means much more if we encourage countries to adopt and adhere to international human rights treaties that cover the rights of women in conflict; it means increasing pressure on perpetrators of sexual violence in conflict and external parties that back those perpetrators through sanctions, where appropriate. It means using the UK’s voice at the UN Security Council to continue shining a light on this issue and calling for accountability. It means fully supporting UN fact-finding missions so that evidence is compiled and perpetrators are deterred through monitoring. Another example is to facilitate meaningful participation of diverse groups of survivor-led organisations and women’s rights organisations in conflict prevention and peacebuilding processes.

I look forward to our Government’s continued progress on this important matter. I believe those two things—reforming the way we think about funding for women in conflict, and elevating women in conflict—are not just a development priority but a diplomatic one, and are the right places to start.