Speech
Supporting women’s rights: A call to action
Speech by Douglas Alexander, Secretary of State for International Development, to the Gender and Development Network
4 March 2008
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.
Millennium Development Goals
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.
Political rights
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.
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Social rights
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.
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Economic rights
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.
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Delivering better for women
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.
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Together – Call to Action
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.
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Future hopes
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.
Links
- Press release: UK announces £5 million in support of Afghan women
- How we fight poverty: Women's rights
