International Development (Gender Equality) Bill

Lord Quirk Excerpts

Friday 7th February 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Quirk (CB)]

My Lords, we must all be grateful to the noble Lord, Lord McColl, for his lead on this important Bill. We should be grateful to him but not surprised: he is known throughout Parliament and far beyond for his devotion to philanthropy, extending his work as a fine surgeon at Guy’s to deploying skills, gratis, on the mercy ships along the west African coast.

I enthusiastically support this present drive to tie overseas aid to the reduction not only of poverty but of gender inequality; that is, as a lever to improve the lives of girls and women. This is a huge area, extending to personal healthcare, to FGM, to marital law, to property rights and, not least, to the education that can enable women to work in areas far above the menial.

I do not have knowledge of west Africa remotely comparable to that of the noble Lord, Lord McColl, but, 40 years ago, I was charged by the British Council to assess some higher education projects that it was considering, first in Ghana and then, a year or so later, in Nigeria.

Well, you cannot report on universities without seeing something of the elementary and secondary education that their students had had. In Ghana, I noted that the schools were clearly progressive, with boys and girls keen to learn despite poorly trained teachers and grim classrooms. The same was true in some parts of Nigeria, especially in Yoruba-speaking Lagos and Ibadan. But in the vast stretches of northern Nigeria, in Hausa-speaking Kano, Zaria and Kaduna, it was a very different story. Girls in classrooms were vanishingly rare, and I raised this matter with the local authorities. I met with a range of reactions, from embarrassment to incomprehension, from puzzlement to outright hostility. One director of education told me that I should try to see the Emir of Zaria. To my great surprise, this emir agreed to speak to me and invited me to talks in his grand palace.

He was both gracious and frank. Girls did not need education; their fathers could barely afford schooling for their sons. What is more, the future husbands of these girls certainly did not want their girls to be educated. They did not want them to have been exposed—his word—to schooling; their mothers would teach them all they needed to know. By the way, when I reported this to the British Council, I was told, “Well, of course, we must never interfere with indigenous cultures”.

Things in west Africa are much better today, but recent horrific events in the north-east of the country are a warning of how easily the clock can be turned back, as it was when the Taliban took over again in Afghanistan—and as it may again turn back there when western troops pull out this year, their mission not so much completed as abandoned.

Pressure through aid conditionality may well be the best tool we can devise, so let us give this Bill, introduced by the noble Lord, Lord McColl, a fair wind. One powerful ally will surely be Christine Lagarde, head of the IMF. Earlier this very week, she delivered the Dimbleby Lecture right here in London and, significantly, she dwelt at some length on the issue of female oppression and neglect. Her concern was not merely for the sake of the girls and women in a range of countries across the world, not excluding our own of course, but for the sake of economic development itself. She noted the ILO estimates that nearly 1 billion women in the world are being held back, facing,

“discrimination at birth, on the school bench, in the board room … yet, the economic facts of life are crystal clear. By not letting women contribute, we end up with lower standards for everyone … We must let women succeed: for ourselves and for all the little girls—and boys—of the future. It will be their world—let us give it to them”.

To Madame Lagarde’s rousing words, we must surely say amen. This Bill would just as surely make a powerful contribution.