Question to the Department for International Development:

To ask the Secretary of State for International Development, what steps she plans to take to ensure that adequate funding is allocated to the protection of women and girls and gender-based violence services, as part of her Department’s response to the covid-19 pandemic.

The UK is deeply concerned about the surge in violence against women and girls (VAWG) during the COVID-19 pandemic. We are using?significant investment?and influence within the?international system?to?ensure that women and girls have access to the vital services they need.

We have already provided £10 million of UK aid to the UN Population Fund and £20 million to UN Children’s Fund to scale up protection and support services for women and girls. We have contributed £20 million of UK aid to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees’s COVID-19 response for refugees and internally displaced people, which includes support for essential VAWG and child protection services. We launched a call for proposals under our Rapid Response Facility, which required all projects to mainstream gender, protection and safeguarding. This year we will also launch a new £67.5 million programme to scale up violence prevention, which is the largest investment by any donor government in programming and research to VAWG globally.

We are also urgently reorienting existing bilateral programmes to ensure that women and girls can continue to access support during the lockdown. For example, in Nepal, the UK is financing 14 Women’s and Children Service Centres across the country and 62 One Stop Crisis Centres.