UK launches global strategy to tackle gender inequality

The UK government has launched a new strategy to tackle gender inequality around the world.

The global strategy, launched by the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO), will set out how the UK will work to tackle global gender inequality and combat attempts to roll back women’s rights.

Climate change and humanitarian crises continue to disproportionately affect women and girls, the government has said, and there are attempts to row back on women’s rights including in countries like Iran and Afghanistan.

Sexual violence affect women across Ukraine while elsewhere violence against women is growing online.

“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,” said foreign secretary, James Cleverly.

“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.”

The foreign secretary will launch the new plan in Sierra Leone, where he is visiting a school and a hospital to see how UK-funded projects are having a positive impact on women and girls, though improved healthcare access, increased electricity access and better support for pregnant women.

He will also 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 £200m 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 organisations and movements, amplifying grassroots women’s and girls’ voices.

Most of this £38m programme will be delivered through a new partnership with the Equality Fund.

However, some have criticised the strategy. Stephanie Siddall, the director of global policy and advocacy at Women for Women International, said the amount was a “drop in the ocean” without a return to the UK spending 0.7 per cent of national income on aid.

“It’s all very well having a strategy but the government needs to put its money where its mouth is,” she told the Guardian.

“It’s almost meaningless unless you’re going to have an appropriate budget.”