Question to the Department for International Development:

To ask the Secretary of State for International Development, what funding her Department has allocated to the protection of children in emergencies in each of the last 10 years.

Protection of children in emergencies is a priority for DFID. Examples of our work include in the Syrian region DFID is helping to provide protection to children affected by armed conflict. We are providing more than £500 million in humanitarian aid to help people, including children, who have lost everything as a result of the violence. Of this the UK has dedicated £82 million specifically for the protection, trauma care and education of children affected by the crisis. In Eastern DRC, DFID is in close discussion with the international community and the government of DRC on Disarmament, Demobilisation and Reintegration (DDR) programming with a specific child soldier component.

Additionally the UK has supported child protection activities in emergencies through our work on Violence Against Women and Girls following Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines, in the recent Iraq crisis and through security sector reform programmes in Somalia. In Sierra Leone we are supporting UNICEF for child protection activities in the Ebola outbreak, where DFID deployed child protection advisers to jump start a focus on this important issue.

Child protection activities in emergencies are often part of wider projects and funding is not recorded separately. For example, education projects in emergencies will often provide protection and since 2009/10 DFID has more than doubled education spending in conflict and fragile states. From 2010 to 2015, the UK has supported 11 million children in primary and lower secondary school, and trained more than 190,000 teachers.