International Development Outcomes for Women and Girls

Question for Short Debate

Asked by

To ask His Majesty’s Government what assessment they have made of the impact of cuts to Official Development Assistance on international development outcomes for women and girls.

My Lords, I am pleased to bring forward this debate and I thank all noble Lords who will speak. Although speaking time is unfortunately short, I hope that today’s interest leads to further opportunities to examine the impact of cuts to official development assistance. I declare my interests, as set out on the register, of support from the Coalition for Global Prosperity, and my position as chair of Plan International UK.

Since the Government announced ODA cuts, many in this House have challenged the logic: defence and development are not competing priorities but mutually reinforcing. This is a political choice, with devastating consequences, which undermines the UK’s ambitions and commitments. The cuts are not felt on paper or in government strategy documents; they are felt in the daily lives of millions among the most fragile communities globally, especially women and girls, who disproportionately bear the consequences.

Despite progress, and thanks in no small part to the work of UK development, the scale of the challenge globally remains staggering: 840 million women have been victims of physical or sexual violence; every two minutes, a woman dies from pregnancy or childbirth complications; and 133 million girls are not in school. Crises, be they conflict, climate or health, hit women and girls hardest. Violence increases, including sexual violence as a weapon of war, trafficking and early and forced marriage. In Sudan alone, 17.1 million women and girls now need humanitarian assistance, and 4.3 million have been displaced. According to ICAI, at the current pace, ending gender-based violence and achieving equality for women and girls will take another 100 years, so for the UK to be stepping back is deeply regrettable.

I welcome the Government’s new international strategic framework on women and girls, particularly its focus on SRHR and integration across health, education and survivor support. I also welcome the inclusion of women and girls as one of the FCDO’s six refreshed priorities. I am grateful to the Foreign Secretary and the Minister for their efforts in international fora and in the difficult—if regrettable—decisions around ODA allocations. As we face another change in No. 10 in the coming weeks, I hope that they can both continue this important work. The Government deserve credit for their target of 90% of bilateral ODA programmes contributing to gender equality by 2030. This is a significant commitment that builds on our positive track record on gender equality reporting. I hope that when the bilateral allocations are published shortly, the Government will have a clear assessment of progress towards that commitment.

My Lords, I thank my friend the noble Baroness, Lady Sugg, for arranging this debate today. I also thank Concern Worldwide, Planned Parenthood, CAFOD, Action Aid and many other organisations which were kind enough to get in touch with me, as with others, about this debate.

The scale of the reduction in official development assistance that we debate here is significant and will drop to the lowest share since 1999. Most of our overseas gender focus will be affected if sitting within our bilateral programmes, which are being reduced significantly by 37%. The Government’s own equalities impact assessment recognises that this will fall disproportionately on programmes supporting equality for women and girls. I make no apology for talking about women and girls; they are the future of the world, not just here but everywhere.

Regarding women, peace and security, an area which I have worked on for many years and will continue to do so as an adviser to the Georgetown Institute for Women, Peace and Security, I welcome the Government’s decision to protect central funding for the WPS agenda, and for preventing sexual violence in conflict, at 2025-26 levels. However, I note that a planned increase to the women, peace and security programme has itself been cut by 25%, at a time when the Commons International Development Committee has found that:

“The Government’s commitment to … the WPS National Action Plan … appears to be waning”.

Producing a budget at last year’s level, while welcome in the current climate, is not the same as the funding on it. I hope the Minister will confirm that this is a momentary pause.

I also hope that when we are leading the G20, we will continue at its meetings to be powerful on the importance of women being at the peace table, when we can ensure that this will happen. At present, that is not happening anywhere around the world, and we have to take that leadership.

My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Sugg, for bringing this important debate. During my years as International Development Minister and as the Government’s champion for tackling violence against women and girls overseas, people often asked me what I would remember the most. It is not meetings or briefing papers but faces. One face that has never left me still comes back to me whenever we have debates like this. I was visiting a Marie Stopes outreach clinic in Uganda for women who had suffered sexual and domestic violence that we were supporting. It provided family planning and reproductive healthcare, but it was also a place of refuge. Since all the officials and dignitaries who surrounded me were men, I asked them to leave so that I could sit in a circle with the women alone. One woman arrived late carrying her baby. I say “carrying”, but both her arms had been cut off by her husband with a machete, one below the elbow, one above, and she cradled her child with what remained. For that woman, British development assistance was not an abstract policy; it was the difference between hope and despair—the difference between finding help and finding none.

That visit reinforced what I came to believe as a Minister: that women and girls are not a peripheral part of development but its foundation. I learned that, when women and girls thrive, whole communities thrive. Educate a girl and she is more likely to earn, to marry later, to have healthier children and to lift her family out of poverty. Protect a woman from violence, and you do more than change one life; you strengthen a family, a community and ultimately a nation. That is why investing in women and girls has never been an optional extra. It is one of the smartest investments that any country could ever make. That is why today’s debate matters.

The Government’s assessment recognises that reducing official development assistance will have negative effects for women and girls. My concern is that those impacts are not simply figures in a report; they are people. They mean that fewer girls will complete their education, fewer women will access maternal and reproductive health care, fewer survivors of violence will find safety and support, and fewer local women’s organisations will be able to keep their doors open for those with nowhere else to turn. The Government say that women and girls remain a priority, and I welcome that commitment, but I have to say that priorities are measured not only by what we say but by what we sustain. When the Government assess the impact of these reductions, how will they measure the women and girls who will no longer receive the opportunities, protection and support that Britain once helped to provide? Behind every programme we reduce, there is a woman or girl we may never meet whose life will be changed by our decision.

My Lords, not for the first time the noble Baroness, Lady Sugg, deserves our gratitude for concentrating our minds on victims and survivors of international crimes, especially on women and girls in need of access to life-sustaining support. In my three minutes, I will focus on Sudan and Nigeria.

Sudan is facing a second genocide in two decades. This includes a war on women, which I referred to on Tuesday during Question Time and will do so again on Friday next week in my debate on the Genocide Determination Bill. Targeted, unspeakable violence, systemic use of rape as a weapon of war, extreme famine and catastrophic displacement mean that millions of Sudanese women and girls are plunged into peril. As the noble Baroness told us, 17 million women and girls in Sudan are now in need of assistance.

A truly shocking UN report on CRSV in Sudan reports that women whom it interviewed in West Darfur were being asked, before being raped, which tribe they belonged to. One replied, “Masalit”. The perpetrators said they would kill her. Another, before being subjected to gang rape, was told:

“‘If you are Masalit, we will slaughter you today’ … Others were told, ‘You will be our wives’, ‘You slave’, ‘You are our women,’ and ‘This year, all of you Masalit girls deliver our children’”.

If these women somehow survive, they will need sustained help but also justice, which has been absent since the first genocide in Darfur some 20 years ago.

Meanwhile, in Nigeria, whole communities have been targeted by Boko Haram, Islamic State West Africa Province and Fulani militia. They target girls, often abducting them from schools. The Minister knows and has responded to me about the case of Leah Sharibu, who, eight years ago, aged 14, was kidnapped, impregnated, raped, forcibly married and told to convert. She remains unrescued in captivity. Last November, more than 300 children, many of them girls, and staff, were kidnapped by gunmen from a Catholic school in central Nigeria in one of the worst mass abductions the country has seen. Such attacks are common, but they receive too little attention.

My Lords, I am sorry—I know this is unconventional—but that is factually incorrect. That did not happen, and I want to make that clear to the Committee at this point.

I am grateful to the Minister for her intervention, but what I said is based on information provided to me by officials who work in her department. It is said that the

“FCDO opted to take the fourth – and least ambitious – option … FCDO stakeholders … recognised the value of supporting locally led protection of civilians interventions, but stated that an already overstretched country team did not have the capacity to take on a complex new programming area. This has constrained the UK’s ability to support stronger protection results”,

inevitably.

Clearly, we owe it to girls like Leah and the women and girls of Sudan to be more ambitious. Given the Minister’s intervention just now, I hope that it will be possible to sit down with her and talk through those previous ambitions, which were rejected, and see what can be done for others in the future.

My Lords, I, too, am grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Sugg, for bringing this debate. I will focus on violence against women and girls. As we have heard, the fundamental concern here is whether the reduction in UK ODA can be achieved without significant consequences for women and girls. The Government’s own equality impact assessment acknowledges that the reduction in ODA

“will inevitably have negative impacts for many programme beneficiaries”.

I state the obvious here that women and girls constitute at least 50% of the world’s population. When we talk about these issues, I often feel as though we are talking about something that affects a minority group, which would still not be acceptable, but sometimes we need to state the obvious.

I warmly welcome the Government’s commitment to maintain central spending on preventing violence against women and girls, the Preventing Sexual Violence in Conflict Initiative and women, peace and security programmes. However, UN Women reports that global aid cuts totalling an estimated $78 billion are severely impacting efforts to end violence against women and girls, with around one-third of organisations suspending programmes and over 40% reducing vital services such as shelters, legal aid and psychological support. This is tragic.

From a faith perspective, ending gender-based violence is a priority across the Anglican Communion, and many churches and communities are being trained to respond to abuse, support survivors and change harmful social norms. There is much more we can and should do. I pay tribute to the Mothers’ Union, an Anglican, women-led movement of around 4 million members in 83 countries that works at grass-roots level to tackle violence, poverty and injustice. For many vulnerable women, particularly in remote communities, Mothers’ Union branches provide practical support, literacy training, economic empowerment and protection from abuse. Indeed, faith-based organisations are often among the few institutions that are present in fragile and conflict-affected settings. Where age reduction leads to fewer partnerships with trusted local organisations, women and girls may lose access to critical support networks.

My Lords, I too thank my noble friend Lady Sugg for securing this debate and for her steadfast commitment to women and girls affected by conflict. Conscious of the time limit, I will focus on one issue: conflict-related sexual violence. For survivors, the reduction in official development assistance is not merely an accounting exercise; it determines whether a woman who has been raped receives life-saving medical treatment, protection and a chance of justice. The evidence is clear: we are going backwards.

Physicians for Human Rights has documented the consequences of abrupt reductions in international assistance. Across Ethiopia, DRC, Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda, clinicians report shortages of post-exposure prophylaxis following rape, interruptions to post-rape care, the closure of one-stop centres and the collapse of referral pathways. Survivors are being denied emergency treatment when they need it most. These are not marginal reductions; they are dismantling the system on which survivors depend, leaving women who have been raped searching in vain for life-saving medicines. As a result, they are becoming victims twice over—first at the hands of those who committed these crimes and then through the withdrawal of the assistance on which their recovery entirely depends.

Political leadership matters too. When my noble friend Lord Hague founded the Preventing Sexual Violence in Conflict Initiative, he understood that this was not only a humanitarian issue but a strategic one. I had the privilege, as his special adviser, of accompanying him to meetings with Heads of States, Foreign Ministers and other senior leaders. Whatever the purpose of the meeting, he raised this issue. It had an impact, because when a Foreign Secretary speaks, counterparts listen. It becomes a matter of foreign policy and national security. That access to the highest level of government, combined with the authority of the office, gave Britain influence far beyond the resources we committed. It demonstrated that these crimes mattered to our country and that we would work to hold perpetrators to account.

My Lords, I too congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Sugg, on securing this important debate and for ensuring that the well-being of vulnerable women and girls remains firmly on our agenda. In my role as a former vice-chair and trustee of the British Red Cross, I was closely involved in programmes supporting mothers and babies affected by conflict.

I begin with the story of Marie, shared in evidence to the International Development Committee on the conflict in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Marie, a mother of four and heavily pregnant, was displaced by conflict and separated from her husband. She was told she needed a caesarean section but could not afford the $70 fee at her local clinic. Unable even to feed her family, she walked for days to reach a hospital where the operation would be free, risking both childbirth and armed violence along the way. Marie’s story is not an isolated tragedy; it is what happens when maternal and reproductive healthcare is out of reach.

I recognise the difficult fiscal choices facing the Government. I welcome their commitment to return to spending 0.7% of gross national income on official development assistance when fiscal conditions allow, and their ambition for 90% of bilateral aid programmes to advance gender equality by 2030. The Government deserve credit for holding to that under pressure, yet the need has never been greater. Between 2019 and 2022, women’s rights stagnated or declined in 40% of countries, affecting around 1 billion women and girls. In 2023, around 260,000 women died from complications of pregnancy and childbirth—almost all from preventable causes, with the overwhelming majority occurring in sub-Saharan Africa. In 2024, 92% of verified victims of conflict-related sexual violence were women and girls.