International Women’s Day

Lord Oates Excerpts

Friday 8th March 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Oates (LD)]

My Lords, it is a privilege to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Anderson, and I fully associate myself with her comments on the horrors inflicted on women by Hamas and the suffering of women in Gaza and in conflicts around the world. I declare my interests as chief executive of United Against Malnutrition and Hunger and as a trustee of the Royal African Society. I am reluctant to add to the pressure of expectations on the noble Baroness, Lady Casey, but I cannot help the fact that I too am looking forward to her speech. Her contribution to public policy improvements has been extraordinary.

It is a privilege to take part in this debate, which marks the 123rd International Women’s Day, I believe. It is a particularly poignant day for me, as it was on International Women’s Day six years ago that my mother died from pancreatic cancer. Many in your Lordships’ House will know Jenny Joseph’s poem which starts:

“When I am an old woman I shall wear purple”.


My mother embodied the spirit and fun of that poem and, although she was a conservative dresser for most of her life, in her 80th year she added a purple streak to her hair and took to wearing purple outfits. However, her purple phase was not, in fact, a homage to the poem but because, as president of the Richmond upon Thames branch of Rotary International, she was a passionate advocate of its campaign for the eradication of polio worldwide, symbolised by a purple ribbon. The unlikely streak of purple in her hair was designed to lure people into a conversation in which she could then advocate forcefully for them to support polio eradication. Possibly, the purple streak was also designed to provoke eye-rolling bemusement from my father, which my mum naturally delighted in. My mother was, as so many mothers are, an inspiration and an anchor all my life, but her contribution went far beyond her family, although she did the bulk of the caring there. She was a schoolteacher, an inveterate organiser and a charity fundraiser.

Today, 123 years after the first International Women’s Day was celebrated in 1911, while there has been much progress towards greater economic inclusion of women, there is still a long way to go, both at home and abroad. In many parts of the world, women continue to face overt persecution and exclusion from the economy, from education and from wide aspects of society. Discrimination in access to health services and basic resources such as food remains commonplace, and the burden of disease falls most heavily on women in many countries.

As the APPG on Malaria and Neglected Tropical Diseases has noted, women and girls are disproportionately affected by malaria and NTDs, due to social, economic, biological and cultural factors. These affect women and girls both as patients and caregivers, disrupting their health and keeping them out of school and work, exacerbating existing gender inequalities. Girls are often more likely to be taken out of school to take care of children and family members. Lack of access to clean water and sanitation increases exposure and the risk of developing NTDs for women who bear responsibility for water collection, home and family care. Limited financial resources, time constraints, diminished autonomy, stigma and discrimination create barriers that prevent women accessing timely healthcare, education and employment opportunities.

Through close contact with children, women are two to four times more likely to develop trachoma and are blinded up to four times more often than men. Since women and girls perform two-thirds of water collection globally, they have a higher risk of developing schistosomiasis in endemic areas, an NTD caused by freshwater parasitic worms. Certain NTDs, such as schistosomiasis and soil-transmitted helminths, can directly affect women’s reproductive health and increase the risk of adverse outcomes during pregnancy, including anaemia, premature birth, increased blood loss during childbirth, infertility and a significantly higher risk of HIV. One in three pregnant women in sub-Saharan Africa is infected with hookworm, which, in some settings, is responsible for 54% of anaemia cases during pregnancy. Anaemia accounts for at least 20% of maternal deaths.

The economic impacts of NTDs are devastating, constraining productivity and prosperity in so many countries. A recent study by Deloitte showed that if Nigeria met its NTD elimination targets by 2030, it could add $19 billion to its economy. Modelling from the Economist Intelligence Unit showed that by eliminating two NTDs—soil-transmitted helminths and schistosomiasis—Ethiopia, Kenya, Rwanda and Zimbabwe would collectively add over $5.1 billion to their GDPs by 2040.

It is not just disease that holds back women’s economic inclusion; there is a huge gender gap in access to food. Some years ago, when I was working on a project in Sudan, we heard repeatedly from women demanding a new dispensation that would end the reality that women and girls frequently ate last and least, and that was before the horrific civil war which has plunged so many further into misery and starvation. As my noble friend Lady Northover said in her excellent speech, we have to return to the previous cross-party commitment to spend 0.7% of GNI on international aid, and we should ensure that we spend the aid budget to maximum effect by investing in the foundation stones of women’s economic inclusion: access to good-quality education, access to the nutrition needed to develop healthy and productive lives, and access to health services that can treat and prevent disease.