This paper outlines DFID’s new strategic vision on alleviating poverty through empowering women and girls to fulfil their potential. Building on the commitments established by DFID’s Business Plan, it sets out four pillars for greater and more effective action. Its main aim is to significantly improve and sustainably transform the lives of women and girls.
The vision is intended to be an enabling framework which supports a wide range of interventions under each ‘pillar’. Decisions on how to strengthen results under each pillar will be taken across the organisation, reflecting the specific context. DFID wants to encourage innovative approaches to tackling these issues, working with partners in new and different ways to deliver transformational outcomes for girls and women.
Key Findings:
The four pillars of DFID’s new strategic vision are:
- Delay first pregnancy and support safe childbirth: Action that directly helps girls and women delay their first pregnancy and support safe childbirth includes: increasing access to better quality family planning, safe abortion and maternal health services, making sure that girls and women who need services most are not excluded (due to cost or discrimination). More than 17 DFID country offices are scaling up programming in this area, with a growing number focusing on girls, and on early marriage and pregnancy.
- Get economic assets directly to girls and women: Work to ensure that girls and women gain direct access to, and control over, economic assets could include: support for increased access to financial services and financial literacy training; increased incomes through more jobs and better working conditions for women; and programmes supporting land reform and inheritance rights to secure women’s rights to own and use property.
- Get girls through secondary school: DFID will increase the numbers of girls in primary and secondary school in all 23 country programmes where it gives support to education, and will assist girls to stay in school beyond primary level to ensure they get the full benefits from education. Draft country plans identify measures which include: stipends, vouchers, cash transfers and transport for girls; increasing numbers of female teachers; improving facilities for girls (e.g. toilets); and programmes to reduce violence against girls.
- Prevent violence against girls and women: DFID will support interventions to reform and strengthen security services, police, and policy and decision making bodies to improve women’s access to security and justice services. This will include supporting survivors of violence to seek legal redress, alongside resolving disputes over issues such as land and inheritance. Innovative approaches to creating safe spaces for girls and women will be explored, along with work to support behaviour change, by challenging social attitudes and perceptions.
Recommendations:
- To be most effective, DFID needs to link up actions across the pillars. Keeping girls in school is a crucial way to enable them to delay first pregnancy. Women with more years of schooling have better maternal health, fewer and healthier children and greater economic opportunities. Adolescent girls who are in school are less likely to have premarital sex and more likely, if they do have sex, to use contraception. Linking interventions across sectors will therefore accelerate our results and have greater impact.
- Achieving results across the 4 pillars depends upon continued improvements in the enabling environment. This requires action to understand and address attitudes, behaviours and social norms which constrain adolescent girls’ and women’s lives and which perpetuate exclusion and poverty. It requires increasing support for interventions that empower girls and women to make informed choices and to control decisions that affect them.
