Asked by: Fleur Anderson (Labour - Putney)
Question to the Department for International Development:
To ask the Secretary of State for International Development, how Overseas Development Assistance is helping communities manage social tensions that are being exacerbated by the covid-19 pandemic.
Answered by James Cleverly - Home Secretary
The UK is taking steps to ensure that both our immediate responses to COVID-19 and long-term recovery efforts do not exacerbate social tensions and instead help to build peace, improve governance and strengthen social cohesion. We are encouraging our implementing partners to demonstrate accountability, strengthen local ownership and leadership and adopt inclusive, conflict sensitive approaches. We are further working with partners, governments, media providers, civil society and local leaders to counter mis- and disinformation.
We particularly recognise the importance of working with local women’s rights and women-led organisations to deliver more effective and safer responses, and believe that greater engagement of local partners ensures continuity and builds social cohesion as efforts shift to the medium and longer term recovery.
Asked by: Fleur Anderson (Labour - Putney)
Question to the Department for International Development:
To ask the Secretary of State for International Development, what steps her Department is taking to tackle disparities of access to water, sanitation and hygiene facilities in developing countries among (a) women and girls and (b) marginalised people and groups.
Answered by Wendy Morton
Women and girls are particularly disadvantaged when adequate water, sanitation and hygiene facilities are not available, as women bear the primary burden for collecting water. The DFID approval process screens all programmes for compliance with the International Development (Gender Equality) Act at the point of approval to assess whether a programme is likely to reduce gender inequalities. DFID water and sanitation programmes are targeted to people without access to water and sanitation, which includes marginalised people and groups. Of the water and sanitation results that have been disaggregated by gender from 2015 to 2019, DFID programmes have reached 18.6 million women.
Asked by: Fleur Anderson (Labour - Putney)
Question to the Department for International Development:
To ask the Secretary of State for International Development, what steps her Department is taking to improve water and sanitation systems in developing countries.
Answered by Wendy Morton
DFID funds water and sanitation improvements in developing countries. In 2018, the last year for which spend data is published, DFID spent £204 million on water and sanitation bilaterally. In the same year, the UK also spent approximately?£275 million?on water and sanitation through multilateral organisations. DFID funding has led to over?51?million people gaining access to improved drinking water or a toilet since 2015.?This builds on our success in helping over 64 million gain access to water and sanitation services between 2011 and 2015.
Asked by: Fleur Anderson (Labour - Putney)
Question to the Department for International Development:
To ask the Secretary of State for International Development, what discussions she has had with non-governmental organisations on improving water, sanitation and hygiene access in the response to the covid-19 pandemic.
Answered by Wendy Morton
Non-governmental organisations (NGOs) are major partners for delivering DFID water and sanitation programmes and accounted for about a third of the results achieved over the last ten years. The UK has pledged new funding for civil society to support the international COVID-19 response, including £20 million for international NGOs. Since the onset of the pandemic DFID has increased our work with NGOs on water, sanitation and hygiene. Nine NGOs are now funded under a new partnership with Unilever on the COVID-19 response. I personally met NGO heads, including the WaterAid CEO, for discussions on the COVID-19 response last month.
Asked by: Fleur Anderson (Labour - Putney)
Question to the Department for International Development:
To ask the Secretary of State for International Development, what steps her Department is taking to raise the importance at multilateral level of water, sanitation and hygiene in responding to the covid-19 pandemic in developing countries.
Answered by Wendy Morton
Alongside our own bilateral programme funding, DFID seeks to influence multilateral organisations to improve the quality of water, sanitation and hygiene in the international COVID-19 response. We have funded a hub at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine to provide evidence and advice to all partners including multilateral organisations on hygiene elements of the COVID-19 response. DFID provides funding to the Public Health Department of the World Health Organisation to provide international technical leadership on the response. We announced funding to UNICEF’s COVID-19 appeal, and DFID is a founding member of the Sanitation and Water for All partnership, which convenes parties including multilaterals on COVID-19 action. I recently spoke on a panel with the World Bank, UNICEF and African Development Bank on the importance water, sanitation and hygiene in the international COVID-19 response.
Asked by: Fleur Anderson (Labour - Putney)
Question to the Department for International Development:
To ask the Secretary of State for International Development, how much of the funding that her Department has allocated to international development multilaterals has been passed through to frontline NGOs and local groups responding to the covid-19 pandemic.
Answered by Wendy Morton
NGOs are key partners for DFID in responding to the unprecedented challenges arising from COVID-19. We know that in many places NGOs will be best placed to meet the needs of those most at risk. About one quarter of our country programmes are delivered through CSOs.
The Secretary of State recently announced a further £200 million for charities and international organisations to tackle coronavirus in developing countries, which brings DFID’s total support to date to £744 million. This includes funding for NGOs, including UK charities.
DFID is also adapting its programmes across our country network to respond to COVID-19 and we have committed significant new funding through the multilateral system. NGOs are also receiving significant extra funding through the DFID COVID-19 Hygiene and Behaviour Change Coalition. We will continue to keep our humanitarian investments under review.
DFID has been engaging regularly with the NGO sector to understand the challenges they are facing in tackling the COVID-19 pandemic, including regular virtual meetings with Baroness Sugg and our Permanent Secretary, Nick Dyer. There will also be a roundtable on 21 May with the Secretary of State.
Asked by: Fleur Anderson (Labour - Putney)
Question to the Department for International Development:
To ask the Secretary of State for International Development, what steps her Department is taking to adapt existing programmes to respond to the covid-19 pandemic in developing countries.
Answered by Wendy Morton
We have focused our portfolios to respond to COVID-19 to ensure we are operating as flexibly and quickly as possible, responsive to need and context – and linking the health response with the economic response and social protection. This includes focusing over one hundred existing bilateral health and humanitarian programmes relevant to the COVID-19 response across 35 countries and regions to support developing countries and provide a safety net for the most vulnerable.
The UK is also at the forefront of the multilateral response and we are actively working with international partners to better track, monitor and respond to the impact of COVID-19.
Asked by: Fleur Anderson (Labour - Putney)
Question to the Department for International Development:
To ask the Secretary of State for International Development, what steps her Department is taking to ensure that data collated by international development agencies is disaggregated by (a) age, (b) gender and (c) ethnicity to inform responses to support women and girls in vulnerable communities facing a heightened risk of gender-based violence.
Answered by Wendy Morton
DFID’s Inclusive Data Charter Action Plan sets out our ambitions to increase the collection and use of disaggregated data, and to work with the United Nations and others to improve disaggregation at a global level. This is critical to understand who is being left behind, why, and how to reach them. Our focus is on disaggregation by sex, age, disability status and geography in the first instance, whilst we work with others in the international system to develop tools to disaggregate by other variables. In the longer term, we will move towards additional disaggregation variables; we expect this to include income, race and ethnicity.
DFID is investing £6 million to support the UN Women-led flagship programme initiative on gender data – Making Every Woman and Girl Count – and the joint UN Programme on Violence Against Women and Girls data. These programmes are working with developing country governments to improve the production, availability, accessibility and use of quality data and statistics on gender equality and gender-based violence. This includes developing new global standards for measuring violence against older women. The programme is currently supporting rapid assessment surveys focused on understanding gendered impacts of COVID-19 across a number of countries.
Asked by: Fleur Anderson (Labour - Putney)
Question to the Department for International Development:
To ask the Secretary of State for International Development, what steps her Department is taking to co-ordinate its response to covid-19 in developing countries with local community groups.
Answered by Wendy Morton
We are playing a leading role in the global response to COVID-19. The UK has, to date, pledged up to £744 million of UK aid to mitigate the health, humanitarian, and economic risks and impacts of COVID-19 in support of the poorest and most vulnerable.
We are working hard to ensure that our help reaches those most in need through close collaboration with our partners. Civil society plays a particularly important role in ensuring UK aid reaches the most vulnerable communities. Much of our work is delivered through our extensive country office network. We are currently reviewing our programme portfolio to be more responsive to COVID-19. For example, we are working with groups in Bangladesh to support and help mobilise a nationwide network of 50,000 Community Health Workers and volunteers to raise awareness of COVID-19 in their communities.
The UK is also providing £55 million to the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies. They play a unique role in slowing the spread of this virus at the community level, by supporting local preparations and public communication on how to reduce risk.
Asked by: Fleur Anderson (Labour - Putney)
Question to the Department for International Development:
To ask the Secretary of State for International Development, how much funding her Department has allocated to support international health NGOs to continue pre-existing immunisation programmes in developing countries during the covid-19 pandemic.
Answered by Wendy Morton
It is vital that routine immunisation programmes continue throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. If immunisation coverage is not maintained, we will face far worse public health emergencies around the world if measles, polio, yellow fever, cholera, and other deadly diseases spread in the absence of routine immunisation. That is why the UK’s commitment of the equivalent of £330 million per year for the next five years to fund Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance’s work is so critical. This will help fund the immunisation of up to 75 million children in the world’s poorest countries. Gavi is an alliance, working hand in glove with international health organisations such as the World Health Organization and UNICEF. The UK’s commitment of £400 million to polio for the next four years will support not only the vaccination of over 450 million children every year against polio, but also broader health systems that are currently proving essential to the COVID-19 response in many countries. Polio vaccinations will continue to be delivered where possible during the pandemic.