UK foreign minister James Cleverly plans to launch new strategy that will tackle gender inequality across the globe behalf of world women’s day. Launching on International Women’s Day, the new strategy will set out how the UK will work to tackle global gender inequality at every opportunity, including combatting attempts to roll back women’s rights, and work with partners around the world to do the same. For the first time, this strategy commits the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office to more than 80% of its bilateral aid programmes including a focus on gender equality by 2030.
Women and girls will be put at the heart of the UK’s international work, with a new strategy that will tackle gender inequality across the globe. As Progress towards gender equality is increasingly under threat. Climate change and humanitarian crises continue to disproportionately affect women and girls, there are attempts to row back on women’s rights including in countries like Iran and Afghanistan, sexual violence is happening in conflicts in Ukraine and elsewhere and violence against women is growing online.
According to James Cleverley;
Advancing gender equality and challenging discrimination is obviously the right thing to do, but it also brings freedom, boosts prosperity and trade, and strengthens security – it is the fundamental building block of all healthy democracies.
Our investment to date has improved lives around the world, with more girls in school, fewer forced into early marriage and more women in top political and leadership roles.
But these hard-won gains are now under increasing threat. We’re ramping up our work to tackle the inequalities which remain, at every opportunity.
Foreign Secretary will launch the new strategy in Sierra Leone, where he is visiting a school and a hospital in his mother’s hometown of Bo, to see how UK-funded projects are having a positive impact on women and girls.
In the hospital, he will see how UK support is improving blood banks and equipment, increasing electricity access and saving the lives of pregnant women. In the school he will hear about girls’ aspirations for the future. The UK is supporting students there to talk about preventing violence.
The strategy puts a continued focus on educating girls, empowering women and girls, championing their health and rights and ending gender-based violence – the challenges the UK believes are most acute.
Alongside the strategy, the Foreign Secretary will announce a new women’s sexual and reproductive health and rights programme, focused on sub-Saharan Africa, which has some of the highest rates of child marriage and maternal mortality in the world.
Reaching up to 10.4 million women, the programme will receive up to £200 million and is expected to prevent up to 30,600 maternal deaths, 3.4 million unsafe abortions and 9.5 million unintended pregnancies.
Separately, the UK is also increasing support for women’s rights organizations and movements, recognizing their critical role in advancing gender equality and protecting rights, and amplifying grassroots women’s and girls’ voices. Most of this £38 million programme will be delivered through a new partnership with the Equality Fund.