Women and Girls: Impact of ODA Cuts

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. All that said, I am afraid that that is where the plaudits end and the questions begin. The Government have said that mainstreaming women and girls’ rights should be built into decisions across the entire portfolio, yet significant concerns remain around mainstreaming, given evidence of mixed results of mainstreaming across different contexts. As the Gender and Development Network warns, poorly executed mainstreaming can dilute efforts, divert resources or become a tick-box exercise. I hope that the Minister will consider the network’s clear and tangible recommendations for a more effective approach. In addition to mainstreaming, is the Minister able to provide reassurances that the Government still see value in dedicated, stand-alone programmes for women and girls? Will they protect at least the current 12% of ODA allocated to gender equality? When it comes to dedicated programmes that have been successful, there is no better example, in my mind, than that of the women’s integrated sexual health programme—WISH—which has transformed access to sexual and reproductive health and rights services for the poorest women and girls across 27 countries in Africa and Asia. Reaching over 6 million women and girls since 2018, it has averted nearly 37,000 maternal deaths, prevented 3.85 million unsafe abortions and helped 300,000 girls and young women stay in school. However, with centrally managed programmes expected to be cut by approximately 42% and to be replaced with “communities of expertise”, we need much greater clarity from the Government about what will happen to these programmes and how the women and equalities community of expertise will work. With funding cuts and life-saving SRHR service delivery being scaled down or closing, people in remote areas will have nowhere to access reproductive health services, women will be forced to continue pregnancies they were unable to avoid, teenage pregnancy will rise, girls will be denied an education, and death rates will rise. There are actions that the Government can take to improve their effectiveness and help mitigate the worst outcomes for women and girls. The first step is robust accountability. The new commitment to gender mainstreaming should be operationalised in a way that sets clear objectives through incentive structures, develops institutional capacity and resources, and creates feedback mechanisms with women’s organisations. The second step is to set well-defined levels of high ambition. The FCDO should set clear priorities for heads of mission on women and girls, backed by necessary political heft. This should go hand in hand with the UK maintaining a strategic approach across its diplomatic corps and Armed Forces to put gender equality on the front lines of crisis response. The UK should continue to support key multilateral bodies such as the UNFPA. In the context of a global rollback on reproductive rights, the UK must continue its important support and make its voice heard to protect the UNFPA’s mandate. But we must also ensure that our other significant multilateral contributions, to other UN institutions, to Gavi and the Global Fund, to the World Bank and regional development banks, are used as effectively as possible to benefit women and girls. As ODA shifts toward multilaterals, accountability for spending aligned with UK priorities becomes even more critical. The commitment to 90% relates only to the reducing bilateral portfolio; I would love to see this commitment extended to multilaterals. Finally, the UK has a unique opportunity next year with the presidency of the G20. I hope the Government seize this chance to embed gender equality as a central theme of the summit. Can the Minister outline how the Government will ensure that gender is effectively mainstreamed across the agenda, particularly on the finance track, given the evidence on the gendered effects of debt burdens, the wider rollback on rights internationally, and the sharp reduction in financing for gender equality work globally? I will end with an example of what the cuts to ODA mean in practice—not in the abstract, but in reality for women and children. Earlier this year, “Channel 4 News” broadcast a special report, “A Matter of Life or Death: Giving Birth in Sierra Leone”, filmed over one week inside the busiest maternity corridors in Freetown. It is challenging to watch but shows exactly what is now at stake for women and babies as UK aid funding recedes. I urge noble Lords and the Minister to watch it, if she has not already. The report focused on the saving lives programme, a health systems-strengthening initiative delivered in partnership with Concern Worldwide. Progress has been made in a country with one of the world’s highest maternal mortality rates, but that progress is now at risk. The cuts are having real consequences: fewer services, shortages of essential medicines and weaker emergency referral systems. At a time when postpartum haemorrhage remains a leading cause of maternal death, these changes will cost lives. This is what happens when funding is withdrawn from programmes that work. Women and babies are placed at greater risk from preventable causes because health systems are being weakened—and without time to put alternatives in place. I call on the Government to publish a full assessment of the impact of ODA reductions on maternal and newborn survival before any further cuts are made, not after the damage has been done. Investing in development outcomes for women and girls is the right thing to do. It is also the smartest and quickest route to economic growth, improved health outcomes and global stability. I hope the Government act with the urgency that this demands and do everything in their power to mitigate the impact of the cuts on the women and girls who face the greatest risk from them.

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. I remind the Committee that these numbers are not hypothetical and have real-world impacts on women and girls around the world. The women’s integrated sexual health programme was described by the Government as “relatively protected”, yet its delivery partner, International Planned Parenthood Federation, now faces a 22% funding reduction for a programme that has helped to avert more than 1,000 maternal deaths. IPPF’s projection is that a cut of this size will put the lives of mothers and babies at risk. I hope that the Minister will say more about how the Government intend to prevent this pattern being repeated elsewhere. I welcome the commitment that 90% of the FCDO’s bilateral programmes will contribute to gender equality by 2023. As the new communities of expertise model is developed, I hope that women’s rights organisations, particularly those with direct experience in fragile and conflict-affected states, will be consulted as full partners, as we know that the inclusion of local women at every stage of the consulting process leads to a better outcome all round in their society.

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. In this context, in 2024, UK officials considered increasing our ambition on support for the protection of civilians, including atrocity prevention. An internal options paper outlined four broad options for scaling up protections of civilians and establishing an international protection mechanism. Of the options, the FCDO opted to take the fourth and least-ambitious option.

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. Will the Minister say what steps the FCDO is taking to remove barriers to funding for faith-based organisations working to prevent gender-based violence, and what engagement it has had with them on the impact of funding cuts? The measure of our development policy is not simply what we say about gender equality but what women and girls are unable to live—lives marked by greater safety, opportunity and dignity. At a time of significant reductions in aid spending, it is all the more important that we keep those women and girls at the heart of our decision-making and ask whether our choices are helping them to flourish.

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. I therefore welcome the Foreign Secretary’s decision to lead the new international coalition to end violence against women and girls, and the recent appointment of the new PSVI special envoy. However, I had hoped that the Foreign Secretary would personally take on this role—not because of the individual appointed, for whom I have the greatest respect, but because the authority of the office sends an unmistakable signal that this remains a foreign policy priority for the United Kingdom. No one disputes the pressures on the public finances, the threat from Russia, the challenges posed by China or the demands on our country at home and abroad, but preventing conflict-related sexual violence is not separate from our foreign policy but an integral part of it. The perpetrators of these crimes watch what we do. When they see retreat, they see opportunity. If we fail to confront this evil where it begins, we will confront its consequences later, with greater instability, displacement, migration and far greater cost. Prevention costs less than crisis management. More importantly, it is the right thing to do.

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. For women like Marie, gender equality is not an abstract policy objective. She experiences it when the caesarean section is free and accessible, when a clinic holds supplies for haemorrhage and infection, and when a skilled midwife or a doctor is available when every minute matters. It is hard to listen to these stories. We all know that—we have heard it from our colleagues. I would therefore be grateful if my noble friend the Minister would consider publishing a disaggregated annual report on sexual and reproductive health outcomes within the UK official development assistance, so that reproductive health for women and girls in conflict zones is treated as the emergency it is.

My Lords, I begin by declaring my interests: I co-chair and run the APPG on Women, Peace and Security, I am on the steering board of the PSVI, I run the Afghan Women’s Support Forum and I am an honorary colonel in CIMIC. I too thank my noble friend Lady Sugg for introducing this important debate today. As we have heard, in the poorest countries women are always the poorest of the poor. The Red Cross reports over 130 active conflicts in the world today, with women disproportionately affected. Estimates by the WHO indicate that one in three women globally have been subjected to physical or sexual violence. The international development budget is being cut to less than half of the pre-Covid amount—a political choice—causing much of Britain’s soft power to be abandoned by pitching defence against development. France, Germany and the USA, who, together with the UK, presented two-thirds of global aid spending, are also slashing development spend. Who will fill the gap? Perhaps it will be nations which do not share our idea of democracy. The UN now estimates that 239 million people will need humanitarian support in 2026. Women and girls in conflict zones, refugee camps and disaster-hit regions are, as ever, among the most exposed when the safety net thins. The FCDO’s own equalities impact assessment found that reductions in bilateral aid will have a negative impact on equalities—in short, the Government already admit that the cuts will hurt women and girls. The Foreign Secretary’s decision to “make support for women and girls … a priority for development” is most welcome, along with the commitment that at least 90% of FCDO bilateral aid programmes will contribute to gender by 2030. However, bilateral aid has been more heavily cut, with multilateral spend being prioritised. This means the UK cannot guarantee how the money will be spent. This all feels like a broken promise; for years we have called ourselves a global leader on gender equality. Ensuring more women in the workplace helps lift countries out of poverty. Educating girls lowers infant mortality rates and reduces early marriages, but the UK is abandoning the funding of education. It is estimated that globally, 130 million girls are out of school, four times more than boys. The UK has also reduced its contributions to UNFPA by 85%, risking additional maternal and child deaths and stopping the ability to prevent approximately 14.6 million unintended pregnancies. With education, gender and equality programming spending having fallen by about 42%, Bond, the umbrella organisation for UK development organisations, has said that women and girls will pay the highest price for this Government’s spending choices. As Sarah Champion, chair of the International Development Committee, put it when the Government confirmed their multi-year allocations, “there will be no winners from unrelenting aid cuts, just different degrees of losers”. Melinda Gates famously stated that supporting women and girls in international development is essential because they are highly effective catalysts for global change. Britain built its reputation as a global leader on this work over decades. It is being undone in a few budget cycles. The choice of whether that happens is still, in part, ours to make.

My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Sugg, for initiating this important debate today. I declare my interest as founder, chairman and trustee of the Loomba Foundation and vice-chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on the United Nations Global Goals. For nearly three decades, the Loomba Foundation has worked to improve the lives of widows and their children, especially girls, through education, skills training, economic empowerment and international advocacy. There are almost 300 million widows worldwide, which is confirmed by UN Women. Many millions live in extreme poverty and face discrimination, dispossession and harmful traditional practices simply because they have lost their husbands. The consequences extend far beyond the widows themselves, disproportionately affecting their children, especially girls, through lost education, reduced opportunity and entrenched poverty. If we are serious about achieving the sustainable development goals on ending poverty and hunger, ensuring good health, quality education, gender equality, decent work, reduced inequalities and peace and justice, we cannot ignore the plight of widows. I warmly acknowledge the long-standing support that successive UK Governments have given to the Loomba Foundation, including during the successful campaign that led to the United Nations unanimously adopting 23 June as International Widows Day. However, there is no doubt that reductions in overseas development aid have made the task significantly harder at a time of increasing global instability and humanitarian need. Will the Government work with international NGOs, including the Loomba Foundation, to mitigate the impact of reduced funding through greater collaboration, improved data collection and stronger evidence-based policy? On International Widows Day this year, we adopted the Universal Declaration of Widows’ Rights, founded on a simple principle: widowhood is the loss of a spouse; it must not become the loss of rights. I hope the Government will support that principle in both policy and practice.

My Lords, I thank my noble friend Lady Sugg for this debate and join her in expressing my concern about the impact that reductions in the UK’s ODA will have on women and girls around the world. When aid budgets are reduced, the consequences are not felt equally. Women and girls are almost always the first to lose access to education, healthcare, sexual and reproductive health services, protection from violence and economic opportunities. These are not abstract budget lines; they are the foundations of dignity, security and opportunity. For decades, the UK has been recognised as a global leader in championing girls’ education, maternal health, ending gender-based violence and supporting women’s rights organisations. That leadership has saved lives, expanded opportunity and strengthened our standing as a trusted international partner. We should be proud of that record. Yet reductions in ODA invariably force difficult choices. Programmes supporting survivors of conflict-related sexual violence, preventing child marriage, improving maternal healthcare and enabling girls to stay in school are often among those scaled back or closed altogether. Support matters not only because it is the right thing to do, but because investing in women and girls is one of the smartest investments any country can make. When girls complete their education, child marriage declines, maternal and infant mortality falls, household incomes rise and communities become more resilient. When women participate fully in economic and political life, societies are more stable, prosperous and secure. In 2014, Parliament passed the International Development (Gender Equality) Act, introduced by Sir William Cash as a Private Member’s Bill with cross-party support. That Act requires Ministers, when providing development assistance, to have regard to the desirability of reducing gender inequality and addressing the particular needs of women and girls. That legislation is relevant to today’s debate about whether significant reductions in ODA can be reconciled with the spirit and the purpose of the legislation. Can the Minister therefore explain what assessment has been made of the impact of recent ODA reductions on the Government’s ability to meet the duties and objectives set out in the International Development (Gender Equality) Act 2014? Our values are measured by not only what we say but where we choose to invest. Supporting women and girls is not an optional extra or a peripheral concern. It is central to poverty reduction, global stability and sustainable development. Even in challenging fiscal circumstances, we must not lose sight of that fundamental truth. I hope the Minister will reaffirm the UK’s commitment to ensuring that women and girls remain at the heart of our international development policy.

My Lords, I declare that I am the co-chair of the APPG on Global Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights. I, too, thank my friend, the noble Baroness, Lady Sugg, for securing this important and timely debate. It has truly been a sobering debate with so much expertise around this table. Wars waged by men are often a death sentence for women and girls. Yet despite carrying much of the burden during war, women remain excluded from peace negotiations and political decision-making. The UN reports that women make up only 7% of negotiators and 14% of mediators in formal peace processes. The dial has hardly moved on those statistics in years. As we have heard, more than 4.3 million women and girls in Sudan are now displaced. The suffering is horrifying. We have heard that in Congo, Afghanistan, Gaza and other places, suffering is equally off the scale. The reduction in FCDO health spending in 2025-26, including cuts to the women’s integrated sexual health programme, has been described as a cruel proposal at a time of acute crisis for women and girls. For the UNFPA programmes, although core funding has been welcome, 2025 funding cuts from multiple donors have severely disrupted sexual and reproductive health. Even with existing funding, 1,100 health facilities and mobile clinics were forced to close. In many places, the maternal health clinic may still stand, but the midwife is gone. There is no emergency obstetric equipment, no post-rape kits and no contraceptives left on the shelves. Across conflict settings, we are not witnessing temporary service disruptions, we are watching decades of investment in women’s health being rolled back. The impact cannot be measured simply in budgets; it is measured in lives, as we have heard from some harrowing personal stories here today. The truth in this crisis goes deeper than aid cuts. As the noble Baroness said, we need an impact assessment on the full extent of these cuts. It was reported recently in the British Medical Journal that as conflicts increase, the UK, the United States and other countries are pulling back support that communities rely on. At its core is a global financial system that starves health services of the funding they need. Until that system is reformed and more women are at the table where these decisions are being taken, women, children and vulnerable people will keep paying with their health and their lives. The UK must use its influential role globally to champion women’s economic alternatives through the G7, the G20 and the UN, including debt relief. Many countries are paying so much in debt repayment rather than investing in services for their communities. To enable Governments to invest in these gender-responsive services, education and long-term resilience, what is needed, as has been mentioned already, is political leadership, which is vital. I hope that in the coming changes in the Government, this will be on the agenda and considered.

My Lords, I thank my noble friend Lady Sugg for bringing this debate forward. Her long-standing commitment to international development is respected across the House, and I pay tribute to her for her continued work. Before I address the issue of overseas development assistance, I hope that the Committee will forgive me if I reflect on the increasingly unstable world in which we live. We know that instability and conflict have unique effects on women and girls. Last month, I asked the Minister about the appalling sexual violence against women in Sudan; this was highlighted by my noble friend and the noble Lord, Lord Alton. We have seen cases of sexual violence being used as a weapon of war in Ukraine and against Israeli hostages, as well as on 7 October 2023. We have a powerful role to play as a voice against atrocities and war crimes, as well as in holding perpetrators to account. Can the Minister expand on the Government’s broader approach to conflict in the world today, the effect that it is having on women and girls—especially in respect of sexual violence—and how we are responding to it? I turn to the overseas development assistance budget. As has been mentioned by most noble Lords, in the face of growing fiscal and defence challenges, our spending has reduced significantly as a percentage of gross national income. Given the challenges that we face today, the Official Opposition understand and support that. I appreciate that there are a range of views on funding in this Committee, of course, but the Government’s work on supporting the rights of women and girls across the world need not be constrained by our redefined ODA budget. We can also continue to use our reputation as a respected nation on the international stage to promote that progress. That is, I think, what the Government have sought to do in appointing the noble Baroness, Lady Harman, as the UK Special Envoy for Women and Girls. Can the Minister update the Committee on the progress made during those visits? Can she also say whether championing the contribution that women and girls can make internationally has been discussed at the UK Soft Power Council? If not, will it be discussed at its next meeting? In closing, although there are a range of views on our spending on overseas development assistance, I hope that we can all be united in our ambition to see an end to violence against women and girls, equality before the law and freedom for all, as well as recognition of the value of the contribution that women can make in every society across the world. I look forward to the Minister’s response.

I am grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Sugg, for bringing us together to have this discussion. It is incredibly important that we do so, and it speaks to the level of interest and concern across our House that so many noble Lords have chosen to come and take part in this Committee this afternoon. I know personally how committed the noble Baroness is to improving the lives of women and girls around the world. This is not a new thing for her; she has spent many years doing this, and I value and respect her work. I know how much everybody here cares about this issue. I have to respond to the noble Lord, Lord Alton. I understand where the noble Lord read what he spoke about; it was recently raised with me, too, at the International Development Committee. I have responded formally in writing to the committee specifically on the issues raised by the noble Lord. I can categorically assure him that no such proposal ever came to any Minister and that the least effective options were not selected. That did not happen. I am very happy to meet the noble Lord and whoever he wishes to bring along to discuss these matters in as much detail as he would like, because I know that his aim is true and that what he wants is the same as what I want, which is to see a resolution to this heinous conflict.

I do not doubt the Minister’s sincerity at all—she knows that. I did not say that proposals had been sent to her. I said there had been four sets of proposals and stakeholders had been involved in them. What I said was that a particular, most ambitious proposal was put to one side and the least ambitious proposal was the one that was adopted. Which Ministers agreed to see those proposals in the first place, I do not know, but as she said, this was said at a Select Committee of the House of Commons, and it has been said in the national media. This was not something I pulled out of thin air. I am grateful to her as it would be good to have sight of the letter she has written. She knows that before the Genocide Determination Bill is considered next Friday, a request was made by her noble friend Lady Kennedy of The Shaws and me to see the Foreign Secretary. I hope the Minister will relay that request again.

I would be very happy to do that. I know that the noble Lord does not pull these things out of thin air; I am familiar with where this has come from. I have said what I have said, we can get into it in more depth, and I would be very happy to do that. The Government have put the safety and rights of women and girls at the heart of the UK’s development and international work more generally. We have done this because, as many noble Lords have said, advancing gender equality is the right thing to do, but it is also the best way to alleviate poverty, build economies and support women leaders, and countries need women leaders in order to thrive. I think everybody here understands and agrees with that. Women strengthen democracies, advance peace and security, and drive prosperity. That is why the Foreign Secretary made women and girls a stand-alone priority for the FCDO. It is also why I am a SheDecides champion, supporting sexual and reproductive health and rights, and women’s rights to choose. We now have the framework in place to turn our ambitions into reality. I would like more money for this agenda, and I think that contributions that highlight the ODA budget cuts are absolutely legitimate and fair. What is less fair, I think, is any suggestion that we have somehow not understood the impact that this could have, that we have not been open and transparent about the decisions that we have made, or that we have not consciously and deliberately amended those choices in order to, as far as we possibly can, within the budget that we have, make sure that women and girls, within the constraints that exist, remain central to everything we do. At the end of the day, development is all about women and girls. They benefit from every penny that we spend, and we have to make sure that that continues. In May, we launched the UK’s international strategic framework on women and girls. This sets out how we will advance the safety, prosperity, voice—that is vital—and choice of women and girls, bringing together our diplomatic, development and multilateral efforts behind a clear set of priorities. I was asked about mainstreaming. I completely understand the misgivings that were raised by the noble Baroness, Lady Sugg, about this. I agree with her—we have to be alert to that—but we have committed that by 2030, at least 90% of the UK’s bilateral ODA programmes will contribute to gender equality, ensuring that women and girls remain central to our work even as our budget is reduced. We are making progress. In 2024, 81% of FCDO bilateral ODA projects were marked as making a principal or significant contribution to gender equality. That is up from 58% in 2022. This means that we are designing programmes that better address the barriers faced by women and girls across our portfolio while continuing targeted action where that is needed. I will say a little bit about that as well. A number of contributions raised concerns about the impact of the reduction in spending. These cuts are a reality. They were significant, which is why—I think this is the first time this has been done—we took the decision to publish the equalities impact assessments for our allocations for the next three years. They tell us that there is no disproportionate negative impact on women and girls across our multilateral and central spending. I will be honest about how this came about. We made a set of decisions and commissioned the equalities impact assessment. It came back and I did not like what I was reading, so we changed some decisions as a consequence and published the assessment. That is why noble Lords will see some programmes protected, even though in their essence they go against some of the changes and modernisation moves that we wanted to make in our development spend, because they are centrally managed programmes. They are run in a way which is about service provision. They could be accused—it seems an odd thing to say—of generating dependency or being duplicate systems. But if we were not looking at giving out contraception in areas of the Sahel, then the idea that you could strengthen a government system that would be willing to do that work is, I think, just not realistic or practical at this stage, so those things continue. We have protected central programme spending both on violence against women and girls and on women, peace and security, where our work continues to support women peacebuilders and women’s rights organisations in some of the world’s most dangerous and fragile places. We have protected funding for Education Cannot Wait, ensuring that girls continue to get an education in even the most difficult conditions, and we have increased the proportion of country and regional spending in fragile and conflict-affected states, where women and girls are often at the most risk. This will rise to over 70% of our portfolio by 2028-29. Like noble Lords, including—I am so sorry, I want to call her Lynne, which I know is highly inappropriate—the noble Baroness, Lady Featherstone, I have had the privilege to serve as a Development Minister, as others have too. I have been there in makeshift shelters listening to women who have endured the worst experiences that most of us could ever imagine: in Chad, with women fleeing the war in Sudan; with Rohingya women in Bangladesh; and with those escaping hideous conflict in DRC. I have heard their stories, held their children and their hands, and I know, as many have rightly said, that they are not numbers or names on a list. In the words that we have heard this afternoon and which were said to me by women on these occasions, they are our sisters. We support these women, though not just with aid. We must do more. We have to make ourselves really focus on the outcomes that we achieve, not just what we put into the system. We have to be responsible for the outcome of everything that we spend. As the UK shifts from being a donor to a long-term partner and investor, we have got to focus on strengthening the systems that countries rely on, so that they can thrive even when aid is cut. The modern partnerships we are seeking to build will use investment and economic growth to expand opportunity for women and girls. That is one reason why British International Investment’s new strategy will increase investments supporting women’s economic empowerment from 25% to 30% of its core portfolio. This investment will support more women for longer, and in a more sustainable way, than traditional programming ever could. We must have some humility about the limit of what our traditional aid spending could ever achieve. The world spends around $70 billion ODA in Africa; the development gap is $1.3 trillion, so there is a lot more that needs to be done. There is money in markets in Europe and North America that never goes anywhere near Africa. Part of our role, the leadership that the UK can provide, is about making sure that that money can get into those developing economies and do real good in the longer term. As noble Lords have said, we must not just contend with cuts in ODA. There was a real issue with rollback and political hostility to this agenda. Our commitment to this agenda is reflected not just in the choices we have made here but in our wider diplomatic work. In May, the Foreign Secretary announced a new international coalition to end violence against women and girls, to prevent violence, protect women and girls, and hold perpetrators to account. Next year, the UK will convene a major summit on tackling violence against women and girls, providing a platform for countries to set out further commitments and report on progress so that we can learn from each other. As noble Baronesses—mostly—have said, we want the multilateral system to raise its standards and build coalitions, defending the global consensus on women’s rights in international conventions and agreements, and in our partnerships with multilateral institutions. I could go on a lot more about our commitment to Gavi and the Global Fund and how we are now the biggest contributor to UNFPA, but we are probably short of time. Women and girls’ rights are fundamental to global stability, prosperity and sustainable development. That is why we have taken decisions on where we spend our ODA mindfully. While budgets have changed, our commitment absolutely has not, and we will continue to champion the safety and rights of women and girls around the world because it is the right thing to do and is fundamental to the prosperity, security and stability that we seek for every woman and every girl everywhere.