Question to the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Affairs, with reference to the UK Government's Strategy for International Development, published on 16 May 2022, what steps her Department is taking to help address unintended pregnancy as a barrier to girls’ education.

The UK is committed to standing up for the right of every girl to 12 years of quality education, which will have positive impacts on a wide range of development indicators, including reducing child marriage, adolescent pregnancy, and exposure to gender-based violence. The children of educated women are also less likely to marry early and have children during adolescence.

The UK is clear that girls who are pregnant or are already mothers have the same rights to education as all children. We work proactively with governments to support these girls to remain in and re-enter school. In recent years the UK played a central role in the removal of policies that banned pregnant girls from attending school in Sierra Leone and Tanzania. In Sierra Leone we are supporting roll out of the Government's Radical Inclusion Policy which, among other goals, aims to support pregnant girls and mothers to remain in education. Supporting teenage mothers to return to school is also part of our education work in Zambia and I personally raised this issue during my recent visit to Uganda, where I stressed the importance of enabling teenage mothers to return to school.

We also work across a range of programme and diplomatic channels to secure access to comprehensive sexual and reproductive health services for adolescent girls and women and support efforts to enhance access to quality comprehensive sexuality education. This includes our renewed support to the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) Supplies programme to advance the availability of modern contraception in the world's poorest countries and continued leadership through the global family planning partnership, FP2030. The UK funds the UNFPA-UNICEF Global Programme to End Child Marriage, which delivers comprehensive sexuality education for adolescent girls at risk of child marriage, those who are already married or pregnant, to build knowledge of their rights and connect them to services.