Millennium Development Goals

Lord Dholakia Excerpts

Wednesday 23rd October 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Dholakia (LD)]

My Lords, I add my thanks to the noble Baroness, Lady Jenkin, for securing this debate.

“Leave no one behind” has been the spirit of the millennium development goals since their inception. Yet the fact remains that, even after 15 years in which the proportion of people living in extreme poverty has been halved, 70 per cent of those not lifted out of poverty are women.

As the deadline of the millennium development goals hovers into view, it becomes clear that areas that require critical examination are those that affect women and girls most sharply. For example, only two countries out of 130 have achieved gender parity in education. Development is not always held back because of a lack of resources; sometimes it is held back because someone is holding it back. It is certainly crucial that women and girls are taken into proper account in every single one of the new goals. The lives of millions of girls are blighted by violence, whether that is armed conflict, domestic violence or the gender-based violence faced by girls in their own communities in the form of female genital mutilation. By categorising FGM as something done a long way away, in cultures we do not understand, we resist helping those who have suffered and those in danger of suffering.

The current generation of millennium development goals lets down girls and women. The omission of a goal to eliminate violence against women is a glaring one. This can be cultural violence, the abbreviating of the potential of girls who die when they become pregnant. It can certainly be physical violence, as with the example of FGM. Robbery is also violence; the refusal of some Chinese universities to allow girls to study engineering, as recently reported by the BBC, is to steal from them their potential earnings and status in society. Few of those goals, therefore, can be leapt towards by the simple act of changing one’s mind.

Ending gender inequality is the exception to that, and I call upon Ministers and leaders to seize goal 2 of the high-level panel’s report, hold it in both hands and commit to preventing and eliminating all forms of violence against girls and women.