Official Development Assistance: Bilateral Allocations

Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon Excerpts

Tuesday 16th June 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Chapman of Darlington (Lab)]

It is absolutely a serious challenge. While we see medical advances that enable us to make progress, we see problems emerge in other areas. We see prevalence among young girls, in particular, increasing to a worrying extent. This is one of the reasons that we decided to maintain a very strong commitment to the Global Fund, which as noble Lords will know, fights three diseases, one of which is HIV. We work closely with the Global Fund and our country partners in order to keep going on this battle, which we are making progress with, but there is still an awful lot more to do.

[Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon (Con)]

My Lords, I appreciate the challenge the Minister is facing with the cuts, and I agree with my noble friend about the protection of certain ring-fenced things, including the priority on the WPS agenda. Will the Minister leverage that more extensively, working together with colleagues in the Ministry of Defence? I seek her reassurance that 12 years of quality education for every girl in the world and of course—this is personal for me—preventing sexual violence in conflict remain key priorities for the Government.

[Baroness Chapman of Darlington (Lab)]

I think that is right. I think we need to work more closely with our colleagues in the MoD because there is clearly a high degree of complementarity between our development investments and the work that we need to do to keep our country safe in the field of defence. On quality education, it is one of the next challenges that the world needs to lean into. We have made improvements in getting children into school, and there is a protective quality to that, but what they are coming out with, the skills and the education that they are attaining during that period in school, is not good enough. We need to address that globally so that it is good quality as well as getting attendance up.