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.

    37/128 page 11
    (Mrs Kingham Cont] and East Africa. There is a real sea change that is taking place that recognises this point. 28. The second part of my question; could I get that answered? (Rt Hon Clare Short) About the know-how fund? 29. ' Yes, I did not just mean about getting primary education or levels of literacy, I was talking about involving women in higher levels of development in terms of stable livelihoods, etcetera which is the good government side of the know-how funds. I would be interested to see how they bolt into empowering women in terms of development? (Rt Hon Clare Short) Yes, girls in education is just one of those key issues that is so clearly measurable and encapsulates the point, but it is not the only point and empowering and strengthening the position of women is also absolutely key and there is a growing movement for women’s political representation and representation throughout the world that is a very cheering, strong, international movement. It does not mean there are not some laggards, but we are in an era of progress in a consensus that there has to be further progress and that is at all levels in the institutions of a society in order to make advances. The know-how fund, that is the special know-how fund that is a British programme in relation to the transition countries in Central Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union? SO. . .¥ CS, (Rt Hon Clare Short) Ihave to say I do not know how or whether we measure commitments to women’s empowerment in our know-how fund work but if we do not know here, I will certainly get you the information. We have reviewed the operation of the know-how fund and we are basically going to move its centre eastwards and put more focus on the poor and people who are falling through the system and an horrendous growth of poverty and loss of life expectancy and so on and health problems that are quite worrying, but I am not conscious that we have any measures of impact on women of our know-how fund activity. I am grateful for the question. Can either of you answer it; if not I will make sure we write to you?! (Mr Manning) I think it is fair to say that the original focus of the know-how fund which is very much on sorting out capital markets and the financial aspects of the transition was not particularly gender sensitive in that sense. It was looking very much at financial systems, at privatisation and things of that kind. It is now moving into this new agenda which is referred to in the White Paper which the Secretary of State has outlined and then I think naturally we will find ourselves much more in the kind of areas that you are talking about and I would anticipate there will be a much greater focus on this as the know-how fund develops its new style. (Rt Hon Clare Short) 1 promise you we will take that question back and look at it because of course we have learned an awful lot about how not to privatise and the crucialness of good regulatory systems and ' See Evidence, p. 25. looking at impacts and it has not always been well done but we have learned a lot of very important lessons, so we will write on that point. Mr Grant 31. What about the role of women in DFID itself? You have been here on three occasions and you have had four white men with you. Now it does not make me feel comfortable because of course you are dealing with poverty, poor people, you are dealing with women, you are dealing with people of colour and you have well-to-do white men who are supposed to. be running these programmes, heading up _ these programmes. Are they sensitive enough to the sufferings of those people, in DFID? (Rt Hon Clare Short) Let me make a first answer. Mr Grant, I have tried to invite you before to love my staff and my officials as much as I do. They are particularly dedicated people, they chose to work in this area of policy through the years when it was not fashionable and applauded. Now that does not mean that the question you raise is not an important question, but we have some very dedicated people in my Department, I really do assure you, who care about these matters massively and have committed their life’s work to them and they do not all come from wealthy and privileged backgrounds. There are endeavours within the Department, as there are across the public services, to make sure more women are promoted and more black people are promoted and we have procedures within the Department to monitor progress. May I hand over to Mr Manning? (Mr Manning) I think like the rest of the public service we face the difficulty that it takes time for people to come through and the recruiting pattern over the years has meant that both women and ethnic minorities are under-represented in both the higher levels and the feeder levels within the Department and that can only turn round gradually over time. As the Secretary of State knows, we now have our first woman director of one of our _ geographical programmes just in the last few months and two out of our six chief advisers are women, but we are very conscious there is a gender imbalance at the top of the Department as there is in much of Whitehall and this is something that cannot be turned around too quickly, but it certainly should try and move it in the right direction. (Rt Hon Clare Short) Chair, we do want to make more progress and if at some point the Committee wants to look at this and give us any advice about how we could make faster progress we would welcome it. Ann Clwyd 32. May I ask about our support for countries in transition? It seems to me a particular irony that we used to criticise—and we still do criticise—third world countries for spending too much of their budgets on armaments and yet at this particular moment in time we are encouraging some of those former Eastern Bloc countries to join NATO and to join NATO they are going to have to spend a considerable amount of their budgets on buying new armaments in order to join the
    digitised image 1
    digitised image 2
    digitised image 3