10. March4Women and Equality

Key points

• In almost every area of international development, women and girls are treated unequally and worse than men and boys. This includes health, education, job opportunities, violence, climate.
• While we have seen some progress, this is an area where much more progress is needed, much faster.?
• The recent UK aid cuts did not making programmes supporting women and girls a priority.?CARE analysis showed ￡1.9bn aid cuts were made to programmes focused on improving gender equality. ?These must be urgently reversed

In her 2018 book, Deeds not Words, Helen Pankhurst focusses on gender equality in the UK over the last 100 years, but she always has an eye on the bigger global picture. She says “women’s opportunities in the UK have improved dramatically… However – for every step forward there are forces pulling us back. Violence remains a real threat, women are still subordinated.”?Globally, the last 25 years are an equally mixed picture. Progress yes, but the World Economic Forum predicted in 2017 that on current trends “economic gender equality will not be achieved for another 170 years.”

I have had the privilege and fun of working with Helen since I joined CARE International in 2014.?She worked for CARE in Ethiopia as a water and sanitation adviser but for the last several years she has been CARE’s brilliant Ambassador on women’s rights and gender equality, following of course in the footsteps of her?great-grandmother,?Emmeline Pankhurst?and grandmother?Sylvia Pankhurst, who were both leaders in the?Suffragette?movement. ?

Gender equality is a focus for everything at CARE International and there has indeed been both progress and setbacks in the march for equality. ?In 2015, ?a few hundred of us followed Helen on CARE’s third annual International Women’s Day #WalkInHerShoes along the Thames, walking over the Millennium Bridge.?In 2018, there were 10,000 people on the #March4Women from Parliament, past Downing Street to Trafalgar Square to demand gender equality in the UK and globally.?

The main equality target under Millennium Development Goal 3 was to eliminate gender disparity in primary and secondary education.?As noted in article 6, this goal has still not been achieved.?A lot of progress has been made, on average. ?But there are still significant inequalities in some countries. In Niger, girls are more likely to miss school.?In Bangladesh, boys are more likely to be out of school. ?Overall, 10% more girls miss school than boys. CARE works in many countries, including with UK ODA funding, to reduce this inequality, and remove the barriers which prevent girls or boys from attending school. This can be anything from the cost of uniforms, to a bicycle to get 5 miles to school, to addressing harmful social norms in the community which keep girls out of school, or ensuring there are appropriate sanitation and hygiene facilities for adolescent girls in school. It also includes preventing sexual violence against adolescent girls and ensuring pregnancy or forced marriage does not take them out of school.

Millennium Development Goal 5 was to improve maternal health, without which we will not achieve gender equality. ?Target 5.A was to reduce death of pregnant mothers by three quarters, between 1990 and 2015.?In Bangladesh, GSK and CARE worked together to halve maternal deaths in the Sunamganj District in northern Bangladesh, in just ten years.?By providing community-based midwives and health entrepreneurs, ?the proportion of women receiving at least one ante-natal visit and having a skilled birth attendant almost doubled. ?

Globally, maternal deaths have also fallen by about half since 1990, saving 150,000 women’s lives each year. But there is still huge inequality between countries. ?As you can see above, Rwanda has made huge progress, but a woman is still 30 times more likely to die in pregnancy in Rwanda than in the UK.

Target 5B was universal access to reproductive health. By 2012, little progress was being made. Once again, the Gates Foundation and DFID worked together to speed up progress to ensure all women have access to modern contraception. This would save lives as well as give women the freedom and independence to plan their own lives. ?Melinda Gates and Andrew Mitchell spearheaded the effort this time. ?At the Gates Foundation we were well aware of the political opposition to this (by some people) in the USA and we were determined to give voice to the quieter majority. At a personal level, Melinda also confronted her own Catholic religious upbringing. ?

On 11 July 2012, less than three weeks before the Olympics Games opening ceremony (the Olympics that the UK had won on the eve of the G8 Gleneagles Summit in 2005)?70 governments, international organisations, civil society organizations including CARE, and private foundations came to London and made commitments. Two dozen countries in Africa and Asia announced ambitious pledges to expand their family planning programs, and international donors pledged US$2.6 billion.?Once again, some of those pledges came right down to the wire.?France were the final sticking point this time, arguing over whether to pledge funds for contraception only or wider reproductive health. We agreed of course that both mattered.

But there’s so much more to gender equality.?The new Global Goal 5 for gender equality has a much wider range of indicators, covering violence, forced marriage, genital mutilation, unpaid care work, political participation, economic rights, and even the digital divide. ?CARE works on many of these issues and it would be a long article to cover them all. ?But here are some.

As Helen Pankhurst said, violence is a real threat for women everywhere. This is why CARE’s work to engage men and boys is so important.?Many people assume that violence against women is deep seated and cultural and will take a long time to change.?No, it’s just wrong and it can be changed quickly. ?I have seen that myself in CARE programmes in Rwanda which, by addressing taboo subjects, change things quickly. CARE is part of a world-leading DFID funded research project called What Works to Prevent Violence which has studied multiple programmes by different NGOs in different countries to identify how we can prevent violence against women. ?

CARE has also partnered with Trade Unions, Companies, NGOs and Governments all over the world in the last five years to secure a new global law to stop sexual violence and harassment in any type of workplace. ?This will protect over 500 million women in over 50 countries that had no such protection for women at all in domestic legislation.

CARE has analysed how women and girls have been differently and disproportionately affected by the climate crisis, the Covid pandemic and the war in Ukraine.??

We were appalled to see assistance for women and girls not protected from the UK aid cuts in 2021.?

CARE’s analysis of estimated funding between 2019 and 2022 compared to 2015 to 2018, indicates that gender equality focused programming is being severely affected, and women and girls will suffer most from reductions in funding to critical sectors. This will result in an estimated 20 million women and girls who won’t be reached by programming.?This included cuts to programmes for girls’ education, contraception, and prevention of violence against adolescent schoolgirls. ?The FCDO refused to publish its equalities impact assessment on the cuts for almost a year.?It was finally leaked under Parliamentary privilege and said, “The proposed scale of reductions to specific gender interventions, including Violence Against Women and Girls (VAWG) and Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights (SRHR) will impact girls’ education and wider efforts to advance gender equality.” The cuts went ahead anyway.

The UK Government has now promised to reverse aid cuts to programmes for women and girls, but CARE’s analysis shows that the promised funding will only undo 40% of those cuts. And even that might be at risk again following the announcement of yet more cuts in 2023.? International Women's Day on 8 March and the new UK financial year on 1 April are close together and it will be interesting to compare the respective announcements on those two days by FCDO and HMT.

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