No 10 launches gender equality plan but critics call it a ‘drop in the ocean’

theguardian.com:

The UK government has launched a new strategy to advance gender equality around the world on the same day that MPs announced plans to investigate the impact of UK aid cuts on women and girls.

The global strategy, launched by the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) on International Women’s Day today will, it says, put more focus on gender equality in its work, while also supporting sexual and reproductive health programmes and funding grassroots women’s rights groups.

“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 while visiting schools and hospitals in Bo, his mother’s home town in Sierra Leone.

“Hard-won gains” in advancing gender equality – by getting more girls into school, reducing child marriage and increasing representation of women at the highest levels of politics – have come under threat, he said, from the climate crisis, conflict and policies by some governments in the world.

But the strategy announcement, the first since the FCDO was created in 2020, came as the International Development Committee (IDC) launched a parliamentary inquiry into the impact of the government’s own funding cuts on women and girls in low-income countries.

In 2021, the FCDO confirmed that £4bn would be cut from the aid budget. Last year, the government was accused of “betraying” women and girls after the harmful impacts of the cuts were made known.

The IDC said it had received evidence that cuts significantly affected the FCDO’s work with women and girls.

“The impact of cutting access to sexual