The development white paper : second report report, together with the proceedings of the Committee, minutes of evidence and appendices / International Development Committee.

  • Great Britain. Parliament. House of Commons. International Development Committee
Date:
[1997]
Catalogue details

Licence: Open Government Licence

Credit: The development white paper : second report report, together with the proceedings of the Committee, minutes of evidence and appendices / International Development Committee. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    35/128 page 9
    11 November 1997] [Continued [Ann Clwyd Cont] have everything to gain from being as up front with the public in general as we can be. Chairman 23. Secretary of State, I think we would like to take advantage of your offer and also to be assured that we will receive these published reports by the evaluators as they come forward? (Rt Hon Clare Short) I have to say I am not particularly au fait with the evaluation procedure, but if we can do what I promised and write to you saying what we have and you look at it and, if necessary, have informal discussions and make sure that we are as open as we possibly can be, both with your Committee and with the wider public. Chairman: Thank you. We will come to these as we look at the estimates each year and therefore be able to find out what lessons you have learned and what you are projecting therefore into the future. May I ask Miss King to continue our questioning? Ms King 24. The Committee would very much like to welcome the emphasis placed on women in the White Paper which obviously ties in with the refocusing on the poorest women and 70 percent of those poorest people are women. What I wondered is how DFID will be able to ensure that the impact of Government policy on the status and quality of life for women in developing countries will be taken into account, not just by DFID but by other Government departments and perhaps crucially by these other Government departments as much as your Department where we would expect your iron fist to make sure that none of those mistakes in the past continue in the present? (Rt Hon Clare Short) May I say on this, obviously someone like me and you indeed may say that would want there to be an emphasis on equality for women anyway as of right because it is morally right and it is right that people should have equal opportunities in their life, but beyond that it is absolutely clear that you cannot achieve the development of which we talk without educating girls and empowering women so that people who might not be particularly enthusiastic about increasing the position of women, if they want development have to go down this road. The evidence of what succeeds in development is now so absolutely clear, and in that sense the argument is won. Of course ensuring it is done on the ground is another question. In terms of universal primary education and getting girls into primary education this is absolutely key as I keep saying and the universal aspiration is crucial because in very poor countries poor children are excluded and, most of all, poor girls. Therefore the universal aspiration is particularly ensuring that girls and poor girls get into education and there is no doubt that every year of education that they get transforms their lives as adults, as mothers, as earners and therefore transforms their countries. In terms of getting basic education to adult women and empowering them, this is also key, because as you say 70 percent of the poor are women and children and lots of the micro-finance type projects are highly beneficial to women and highly targeted at women, but I have to say—lI have said this before and I should share it with the Committee—I think the Department knows a lot about basic healthcare, basic education, clean water and sanitation, the kind of macro-economic conditions and regulatory systems that can promote economic growth and attract inward investment and we want to do more on that. The action to improve the livelihoods of the rural poor or the urban poor I think although we have done a lot of work needs more endeavour on our part and some of that will particularly focus on poor women. We have monetary and evaluation systems again that take account’ of what is happening to the progress of women and women’s livelihoods, which I do not know if. 25. Presumably at the moment there is no way for you to monitor or have any impact on government policies and other British Government departments and their impact on women? (Rt Hon Clare Short) Well, | am a Member of the Cabinet Committee on women in general which of course goes beyond development and is_ the endeavours of our Department and we now have a cross-departmental committee on development and we have the capacity to monitor progress and, as I have said, you cannot have progress without women making progress. It is absolutely key to getting the change and the advance and we do monitor the impact of the progress of our Own programmes on women and I want to bring Richard Manning in on that. Some of the targets that we are working to include improving the status of women and that implies a further commitment internationally to measure progress. I am not saying necessarily that we have it perfect, but I am clear—well, I think I am clear, my view at this moment rather is that it would not be the best way to set aside part of the budget for women because it is so important that it is applied through everything that we do and that they benefit from advances in healthcare, education, livelihoods and so on rather than have some women’s projects that we can measure the amount we gave out to, but that would not achieve as much. Do you want to add anything? (Mr Manning) That is certainly very much the approach that perhaps Britain has adopted perhaps more than some other countries. A number of donor countries have women’s units within their aid agencies who tend to look for women’s projects. What we have tried to do so far as possible is to mainstream the gender issue around all our programmes. We have found occasionally of course that it is a question of looking at the disadvantage of boys in education as well as girls; it is not always one way. But we have tried to build that in so that all projects have to assess how far they are contributing to a gender objective and this is—coming back to our evaluation—something we always look at when we evaluate when we look at a report afterwards as to whether they have had any effect. If it is a project where the gender thing is critical—there is a good example with our work in primary education in India—we go to quite a lot of trouble to collect statistics to see the differential effects on girls and boys of improving education standards and the like. It is always very difficult to aggregate
    digitised image 1
    digitised image 2
    digitised image 3