Speech by Douglas Alexander, Secretary of State for International Development, to the Gender and Development Network
Thank you. I’d like to begin by saying what an honour it is to share a platform with Professor Gita Sen. I’m sure I speak on behalf of everyone in the room in saying that your passion for women’s rights and social justice is an inspiration to us all.
And it is a particular privilege to be here as a guest of the Gender and Development Network – the organisations you represent do important, indeed great work to support the rights of women.
Just over seven years ago, world leaders came together to pledge that they would, and I quote directly, ‘spare no effort’ to free men, women and children from extreme poverty.
Today, with seven years remaining to achieve the Millennium Development Goals, many lives have changed for the better. Indeed, the proportion of the world’s population living in extreme poverty has fallen from almost a third in 1990 to a fifth today.
But we all know that the international community is failing to meet the targets that were set in 2000. And we know that above all, the world is failing women and girls.
Ten million more girls than boys are still denied the chance to a primary education.
In Pakistan and India, girls are up to 50% more likely to die before their fifth birthday than boys.
And as we’ve just heard from our Prime Minister, Gordon Brown – but it bears repeating – every minute, a woman dies in pregnancy or childbirth.
Everyone in this room will be familiar with these statistics. Many of you will know some of the personal stories that lie behind the grinding poverty I’ve just described. Ten days ago I visited a community health centre near the town of Makeni in Sierra Leone. I met a woman there called Teneh. She was not only caring for her own eight children, but also her sister’s two children. Why was she also caring for those children? Because her sister had died two weeks after child-birth – simply because she didn’t get the basic post-natal care that she required.
I believe we have a moral duty to help women break free from discrimination and lift themselves out of poverty. Indeed, we know that if we succeed, the benefits will not only be felt by women, but also their families and their communities.
To do so we must help women to realise their political, social and economic rights, indeed to take control of their lives.
And we are taking action to do exactly that.
My department, the Department for International Development, has supported work to promote improved participation and representation of women in parliamentary and local elections. In Sierra Leone we have supported an Oxfam ‘Women in leadership’ project which resulted in 58 women being elected as local councillors.
And we are providing voter education and leadership training for women’s groups in Nepal as they prepare for the Constituent Assembly elections. The result? More women represented in political parties, and the creation of women’s inter-party alliances.
My department is also supporting women to gain access to their social rights. For women and girls have the right to an education, to health care and, above all, to freedom from violence.
Just this afternoon, the Prime Minister confirmed that the United Kingdom will provide up to £150 million for India’s national programme for elementary education. This will enable the training of up to 300,000 more teachers, the building of 300,000 more classrooms, and give 4 million girls and boys the opportunity to go to school by 2011.
Yet in too many countries, rape and forced pregnancy have become weapons of war. In Rwanda and estimated 5,000 ‘children of bad memories’ were born as a result of rape during that genocidal conflict.
That is one of the reasons DFID provided £3.2 million to the United Nations last year to encourage women’s involvement in peace keeping and prevent sexual violence in Rwanda, Afghanistan and a number of other countries affected by conflict.
Women have the right to access contraception services and decent healthcare, and that’s why, this last October, the UK Government pledged to provide an additional £100 million over the next five years to the United Nations Population Fund. We know that £1 million invested in this way could save the lives of 1600 mothers and 22,000 infants. I want our investment of £100 million to have an impact on hundreds of thousands more lives.
Yet too often, women are not only denied their political and social rights, but also their right to economic participation – a point emphasised by the Prime Minister.
Many of you will have seen the report last week by Womankind that showed the terrible abuse of women that continues in Afghanistan. My department is working with Womankind to support the political rights of Afghan women. We’ve also supported improved access to antenatal care in rural areas, and helped to get more than two million girls into school since the fall of the Taliban back in 2001.
Our Afghanistan programme also supports women’s efforts to improve their economic prospects.
Indeed I can announce to you this evening that my department will provide an extra £5 million over the next two years to the Government of Afghanistan’s microfinance scheme. Added to the £10 million that our Prime Minister announced in December last year, this brings our total investment in the microfinancing scheme to £35 million.
This national programme has provided small loans to over 400,000 people so far – 280,000 of them are women. By the end of next year, as many as 400,000 women will have benefited.
These loans are, on a daily basis, giving women the chance to start or expand small businesses, engage in the economy, and gain a degree of financial independence that would otherwise simply be out of reach.
One woman, Zubaida, used a loan of just £70 to help expand her tailoring business and start a grocery. Now her business is flourishing and her income has risen from $40 a month three years ago to $200 a month today. That means she can now afford for her children to go to school rather than work.
We know what we need to do. And we know progress can be made. Therefore, how do we now, together go further, faster?
We need an international system that delivers on development, and that means delivering primarily for women. Two weeks ago I met with Bob Zoellick, the President of the World Bank. We agreed upon the importance of supporting women’s rights and he assured me that this is one of his express priorities for the Bank’s future.
We also need a step change in the United Nations delivery of gender equality and women’s empowerment, as called for by the UN High Level Panel on system-wide coherence, of which our own Prime Minister was a member.
Since then we have not seen the progress that we hoped for. But I believe that the opportunity is now better than ever to create a UN that works for women, championing and supporting their rights. The United Kingdom will support Deputy Secretary General Asha-Rose Migiro’s efforts this year to broker agreement for a single, stronger gender agency within the United Nations.
But of course the UK Government and multilateral institutions cannot alone deliver the change that is needed to give women access to their rights.
That is why, as the Prime Minister made clear, we have joined UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon in calling for a ‘global partnership for development’ that stretches beyond governments and multilaterals alone, to harness the talents of NGOs, businesses, faith groups and citizens right around the world.
This is a call to action to recognise that if the world is to keep the promise we made in 2000, we need a concerted effort this year to accelerate progress to the Millennium Development Goals
And because we know that women’s rights and gender equality are central to achieving the MDGs, the UK will join with the Danish Government to co-sponsor a high-level meeting in April on how better to release the tremendous potential of women in this development area.
International Women’s Day is a celebration of the progress that women have achieved around the world, and is a moment of hope for the future.
And it is in this spirit of celebration and hope that I am pleased to announce today that the my department and the Gender and Development Network will hold a series of roundtable events during 2008. I want those events to help us work more closely and better share our expertise in future efforts to help women realise their rights.
Because I know that in this room, there is that determination, that creativity and that expertise that we will need to help women around the world lift themselves out of poverty. Together, that is our challenge. But I believe that working together, it can be our achievement.
http://www.dfid.gov.uk/news/files/Speeches/alexander-womens-rights.asp
