Asked by: Anthony Mangnall (Conservative - Totnes)
Question to the Department for International Development:
To ask the Secretary of State for International Development, what plans the Government has to raise the matter of gender-based violence at the next meeting of the G7.
Answered by Wendy Morton
COVID-19 has reinforced the urgency of the need to tackle the pervasive and endemic “shadow pandemic” of violence against women and girls, including conflict-related sexual violence. We have been working closely with our G7 partners on this important agenda and will continue to do so.
Asked by: Anthony Mangnall (Conservative - Totnes)
Question to the Department for International Development:
To ask the Secretary of State for International Development, what assessment her Department has made of the effect of the covid-19 pandemic on girls’ education in developing countries.
Answered by Wendy Morton
The COVID-19 crisis has removed 1.3 billion children - 650 million girls - from primary and secondary education, putting the most disadvantaged girls at risk of dropping out of school permanently. As the effects of the COVID-19 crisis play out, the socio-economic impact on girls’ education in developing countries is becoming increasingly clear. From a learning perspective, closures – even with mitigating actions - will significantly reduce learning hours. School closures in Sierra Leone during the Ebola crisis resulted in the loss of roughly 780 hours per pupil. We also understand that the effects of school closures in developing countries are much wider than reduced learning. For many disadvantaged children in developing countries, school closures expose them to increased hunger and malnutrition as well as increased risk of violence against women and girls.
The UK’s response to the pandemic is two-fold, firstly to ensure preventative measures are taken to keep girls learning and returning to education, mitigating short term risks by focussing on safety, nutrition, wellbeing and the continuity of learning whilst schools are closed. Secondly, by supporting countries to protect and maintain their education budgets and ensuring that we build back better. DFID is adapting its bilateral education programmes in 18 countries. The Global Partnership for Education, to which the UK is the largest donor, is flexing over £200 million to support education sector stability in response to the pandemic. The UK has also announced £20 million for UNICEF’s crisis appeal, which includes education, and a further £5 million to the Education Cannot Wait fund to support emergency education in fragile contexts.
Asked by: Anthony Mangnall (Conservative - Totnes)
Question to the Department for International Development:
To ask the Secretary of State for International Development, what steps her Department is taking to prevent female genital mutilation in countries overseas.
Answered by Wendy Morton
The UK leads the world in our support to the Africa-led movement to end FGM. In 2018 we announced a £50 million UK aid package – the biggest single donor investment worldwide to date – to tackle this issue across the most-affected countries in Africa.
UK aid is continuing to support efforts to tackle FGM during the COVID-19 pandemic, including through increased remote working and using media platforms. For example, our £15 million programme in Sudan continues to support advocacy and in April we saw a significant step towards the outlawing of FGM in Sudan.
Asked by: Anthony Mangnall (Conservative - Totnes)
Question to the Department for International Development:
To ask the Secretary of State for International Development, how much and what proportion of the UK’s Official Development Assistance was spent on projects tackling gender-based violence in each financial year since 2009-10.
Answered by Wendy Morton
The UK Official Development Assistance (ODA) data is collected and reported in line with internationally agreed OECD Development Assistance Committee (DAC) definitions and standards. These standards include sector codes that are allocated to programmes.
In 2015, following lobbying by the UK and others, the DAC introduced a new sector code to improve the tracking of ODA that contributes to ending of violence against women and girls (VAWG). The UK started reporting on the new code for 2016 ODA spend. Before changes were made to our aid management platform in 2018, however, there were several technological barriers which meant that it was very difficult to track spend accurately.
Our Statistics on International Development: Final Aid Spend 2018 publication shows that we tracked £32.6 million bilateral aid on ending VAWG for 2018. We also estimated a further £12.4 million UK ODA was spent on ending VAWG through our partnerships with multilaterals. This amounts to 0.31% of UK ODA for that year.
We are doing more to improve the quality and transparency of our data on VAWG spend. For example, we are working to improve the way we track the impact of other sectoral programming, such as humanitarian, health, economic or education programmes that also contribute to ending VAWG, and which may not yet be fully captured as part of our published data.
We are also continuing to scale up our investment in tackling VAWG, for example our new £67.5 million programme What Works to Prevent Violence: Impact at Scale, is the largest investment by any donor government in programming and research to prevent VAWG globally.
Note: Imputed Multilateral Shares are estimates of how multilaterals spent the UK’s core contributions to multilaterals. For more detail on these estimates please see the ‘Statistics at DFID’ gov.uk page
Asked by: Anthony Mangnall (Conservative - Totnes)
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.
Answered by Wendy Morton
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.