DfID Projects: Women and Girls

Lord McConnell of Glenscorrodale Excerpts

Thursday 22nd February 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord McConnell of Glenscorrodale (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Loomba, for facilitating this opportunity for us to address the issue of the priority given to women and girls by the Department for International Development. His record, particularly on the issue of support and recognition for widows, is exemplary, and his dogged determination to raise the issue of widows internationally has seen great results. It is a pleasure to follow him here today.

Like many other noble Lords, I find that my head is filled with images that I am unable to forget after meeting young women and others in difficult circumstances over the years. There was a young mother who I met in Liberia; she had been sold by her family to the “soldiers” who were active in the civil war there. She was subsequently raped and had a baby at the age of 15. She was being supported I think by Save the Children. On my visit the person with me asked her what was good about having a baby, in an attempt to lighten the conversation. The mother told us with blank eyes that there was nothing good about having the baby in her life, because of the circumstances.

I met a young woman in Iraq three years ago in a refugee camp just outside Erbil. She had come from Syria aged 11. She spoke confidently about how her family was surviving the trauma of leaving Syria and living in the refugee camp, and all the other things that had happened to them. Yet when she was asked by me about her school results in the refugee camp, she started crying because the one thing that gave her dignity and hope for the future—her education—was the thing that was suffering the most. I also met young women in the Philippines who lived in Muslim Mindanao, where the civil war is hopefully now coming towards an end, having raged since the 1960s. They were three times more likely to leave school before the end of primary schooling than children even in other poor parts of the Philippines because they lived in a conflict-affected area.

All over the world, women and girls suffer the most from conflict and underdevelopment. They suffer from FGM and child marriage, which is effectively the sexual abuse of minors by another name. They suffer from a lack of maternity care; from lacking access to those drugs that can help protect mothers and their children from HIV/AIDS; from not having access to primary schools; or from having to leave school before they get into higher education. Girls all over the world feel the rough end of underdevelopment, and specifically of conflict.

I have chosen to speak today in part because I was inspired by a visit last week to the Gambia, where I spent the February Recess. While I was there, I spent a day visiting three projects which reminded me that in the midst of all that misery, despair and violence, there is hope as well when the right circumstances are generated. I visited one project, Women’s Initiative Gambia, led by an inspirational director, Isatou Ceesay. She is not only encouraging young girls across the Gambia to have more confidence, skills and opportunities but, on the day I was there, had a workshop for women who spend their lives trying to get round the rough streets of the town in their second-hand wheelchairs. In this country, those wheelchairs would be discarded—but they discarded them for another purpose. They were having a workshop on profit and loss accounting, because the project was setting them up in business on their own, to give them an independent life and an income in the future. In order to make sure that those businesses were successful and that the women did not just come back to the project a few years later, they were getting taught accounting to make sure that their businesses made a profit and were able to take them forward. None of the women in the room had any formal education, but they were learning profit and loss accounting through symbols and pictures. It was inspirational to see the independence of the individual put at the heart of a development project. I thought that absolutely correct.

Further down the road in Siffoe I visited another project, Young People Without Borders, and was shown around by another Isatou, who is the vice-president of the local youth Parliament in that area. That initiative was started to encourage young people from the Gambia to stay there, rather than take the back way to the Mediterranean and go across it in a boat in which they might well sink and die before they get to Europe. They stay in the Gambia, feel some empowerment locally and make a contribution to their local community. The community garden was providing healthier food for local children and business opportunities for women in the area. Again, it had the right approach, with a two-year limit on the participation of local mothers in the project, on the basis that they would leave at the end of the two years and take the savings they had made from selling the food and vegetables with them. They would then use the money to establish a business and create a more independent life.

In relation to the sustainable development goals, those projects really brought home to me the fact that when we talk about women and girls, we tend to think of SDG 5 in relation to gender equality. But the importance of support for women and girls, particularly support that leads to independent living, real choices and opportunities, should run through every one of the sustainable development goals—in particular SDG 8 on sustainable development and economic empowerment, with real opportunities to make a living, look after your family and have some choices. It should also run through SDG 16 because, as the noble Lord, Lord Smith, has just said, it is women who bear the brunt of conflict but who make the best peacebuilders. That is why under SDG 16 we should have a constant focus on getting women to the negotiating table and involved in post-conflict reconstruction, and in ensuring that the violence women experience in conflicts around the world is minimised and, if possible, brought to an end.

I make a plea to the Government to have, as I have said before in your Lordships’ Chamber, a clearer strategy to ensure that the sustainable development goals run through all our development priorities in the Department for International Development and other departments. They should also ensure that the priority given to women and girls runs through every one of the SDGs.