Question to the Department for International Development:

To ask the Secretary of State for International Development, how much and what proportion of Official Development Assistance has been spent on projects tackling gender inequality in each financial year since 2009-10.

All of DFID’s aid activities reported to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) are screened against the gender equality policy marker. This is a measurement of the proportion of aid that supports gender equality and women’s empowerment. An activity can be marked as ‘principal’ if gender equality is the main objective of the programme, or as a ‘significant’ if gender equality is an important and deliberate objective, but not the principal reason for undertaking the programme.

DFID’s spend on bilateral allocable activities targeting gender equality is made publicly available through the OECD statistics portal. For example, in 2018 £4.2 billion of DFID’s total bilateral spend was marked principal or significant (66%).

These world-leading investments are delivering results at scale. Between 2015 and 2019, DFID reached 50.6 million women of childbearing age, children under 5 and adolescent girls through our nutrition-relevant programmes and supported 5.8 million girls gain access to a decent education. Last year, UK aid helped 23.5 million of the world’s poorest women and girls access to vital, voluntary family planning.