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Queen’s Speech

My Lords, I was listening so carefully to the noble Lord, Lord Naseby, talking about Sri Lanka that I forgot that it was my turn to speak. Please forgive me. I listened carefully to the opening speeches. There was little in them about development, although the subjects that we are discussing today are vast and, clearly, more important and pressing things were being spoken about. However, we heard that 10 million children die before they attain their sixth birthday. My figure is 9 million, although it is possible that it has gone up to 10 million, and it will keep going up. We heard that many millions of children do not go to school. It is important to speak about children, but we do not speak about their mothers and, if we do not speak about and help their mothers, the children will not achieve life and education. There is an old and well known cliché that when you help a woman you help a family, but when you help a man you help one person. Unfortunately, in developing countries this is one of the truest clichés. Not only do you help the family when you help a woman, you help the whole community. If you help six women, they change a village. I have seen the results of helping women in poor countries and in villages. It is important for us now to start thinking about how change can be brought about. I believe that change can be brought about only by helping women to become part of the mainstream. In Africa and on the Indian subcontinent, women are not part of the mainstream; they are not perceived as wage earners and part of the workforce. In the Far Eastern countries that have made such huge economic strides, all the women are in the workforce. I have spoken to many people from Singapore and Malaysia. They say that having women in the workforce doubles it, so they can make much quicker economic gains. I am a firm believer in that. Recently, the APPG on Population, Development and Reproductive Health launched a booklet called Euromapping. It is a useful little booklet that sets out which countries in Europe give how much aid and for what. I am pleased to say that we come out well. The noble Lord, Lord Howell, said—I think that I heard him right—that he was sorry that more money was being spent on aid than on the Foreign Office. However, that is one of the good things that we do and I hope that we will keep doing it even if there is a change of Government. It is very sad to think that it might change. Such aid is needed and is important. Whatever aid is going to developing countries, aid from European Union countries is dropping per head of population. Very sadly, it has dropped by 5 per cent in the past year. There are 200 million women who cannot access family planning; tackling that is one of the most basic things that we can do to change women’s lives. One woman dies from childbirth every minute of every day and each year more than 66,000 die from unsafe abortions. Thinking that we cannot do much about that should make us feel very contrite, but the fact is that we can. I quote the famous statement from Professor Fathalla: ""Women are not dying because of diseases we cannot treat ... they are dying because societies have yet to make the decision that their lives are worth saving"." That is a very important statement for all of us who consider these issues. I have just come back from Addis Ababa, where I attended an international parliamentarians’ conference on population and development. When we produced the communiqué at the end, the Saudis and Sudanese made us take out the words "sexual" and "reproductive" from the phrases "women’s sexual health" and "women’s reproductive health". They would accept only the term "women’s health". One wonders what would have happened if the rulers of the universe had to go through what women go through. Would they have said, "Take out the words ‘sexual’ and ‘reproductive’ from ‘men’s sexual and reproductive health’"? We have to think about what women aged between 15 and 45 go through in this world. If men had to put up with that, the situation would be very different. Most of the parliamentarians also complained that the Catholic churches were a great hindrance to family planning, with some Latin American countries being very specific about the problems that they were facing. Yet the Pope goes to southern Africa and says, "Don’t use condoms". We are not living in year zero; we are living in the 21st century. Perhaps we should ask our former Prime Minister, who is a very important man, to have a word with the Pope. This is just not on. There is a lot of talk about climate change. In 1950, there were 2.6 billion people on this planet. Today, there are 6.8 billion and there are likely to be 3 billion more by 2050. If that does not cause climate change, I do not know what will. I think that it is a question not just of emissions but of people’s bodies. Furthermore, with so many poor people in the world—we must remember that it always comes down to the poor countries—environmental degradation with the cutting down of trees and the use of wood for cooking goes on all the time. We cannot keep talking about climate change only in terms of emissions and saying, "You must do this and you must do that"; we have to think about helping certain countries to stop the increase in their populations. I am not talking about the way in which China has done it, although such a move would be good. We cannot do that, so we have to make family planning available to women and help them to learn how to use the system. That would make a difference for all of us. In Addis Ababa, I also went to a hospital which deals with fistula. The cruelties perpetrated on women are unbelievable. I do not have time to tell the House about them and your Lordships would probably not want to hear about them as that might make them unhappy. A woman or girl may develop fistula if she cannot give birth and needs a caesarean or other help, but she then leaks urine and faeces and is thrown out. Some women just lie on the streets, as is certainly the case in northern Nigeria. However, this hospital takes everyone who comes to it; sometimes women walk for two or three days to get there. It is time that we focused on women. In order for the MDGs to be successful, we have to focus on women. If we want the rate of climate change to slow down, we have to think about population and, again, focus on women. If we focus our aid on women, we will make far greater gains than in any other way.