Millennium Development Goals

Lord Browne of Ladyton Excerpts

Thursday 7th November 2013 Grand Committee

[Lord Browne of Ladyton (Lab)]

My Lords, I, too, wish to congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Loomba, on securing this important debate and creating an opportunity for this issue to be brought to the attention of your Lordships’ House and to engage with the Government on it. It is an enormous privilege to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Chalker, and I commend the previous speeches for setting out the issues which need to be addressed. In the short time I have I intend to address just one discrete point.

Women and girls are marginalised enough but when multiple inequalities intersect, they are marginalised even more. More than one-third of the 57 million children who are not in school have a disability. There are very limited data on disability and they need to address this lacuna and make it one of the key messages of the global disability movement for the post-2015 framework to address. However, if there were statistics they would almost certainly show that girls are unequally represented among the children with disabilities who are out of school. There are a number of reasons for this and the noble Lord, Lord Loomba, enumerated some of them. They include broader gender inequality and entrenched cultural attitudes towards girls and women. Often girls and women in households are responsible for caring, cooking and cleaning or just working to support the family. There are often early and forced marriages of girls and a lack of female teachers or school managers or other female role models to encourage girls to participate. Unfortunately, gender-based violence and harassment, particularly on long journeys to school, make girls feel very unsafe. Among other things, poverty causes families to make choices about which children they should send to school and they often favour sending boys.

The MDGs 2 and 3 on universal primary education of girls have made considerable progress but, as the MDGs make no mention of disability, the harsh fact is that this progress has not reached girls with disabilities. The high-level panel’s shift on “leave no one behind” is to be welcomed. The UK Government have a special responsibility to ensure that this emphasis is not lost, as the discussions continue at UN level.

I am aware that girls’ education is a major priority for the Department for International Development. One of the headline goals is keeping girls, particularly the most marginalised, in school. A target for 2011-12 to 2014-15 to support 11 million girls and boys in school is a significant challenge and the sub-target of 1 million of the most marginalised girls is even more challenging. I welcome this focus and DfID’s flagship Girls’ Education Challenge, which is intended to deliver a step change in ensuring that the barriers that prevent girls from benefiting from education are removed.

I end with one simple but important question to the noble Lord, Lord Bates: how is DfID’s Girls’ Education Challenge fund reaching girls with disabilities?