The UK Foreign Secretary James Cleverly has visited his mother’s home town in Sierra Leone on International Women’s Day, launching a new strategy to help women and girls around the world.
Cleverly visit Bo in the West African country on Wednesday, where he attended a school and a hospital to see how UK-funded projects are offering targeted assistance to women and girls.
It was a moment of fun when Cleverly arrived at the Islamic Secondary School to interact with an ecstatic students who shared their future ambition with foreign the British born African.
In short videos posted on his official twitter page, Mr Cleverly shared his great moment with the children in Bo as he also spoke about his mother, whom he described as an ”extraordinary woman”.
Mr Cleverly has previously described himself as the first British MP from a Sierra Leonean background and spoken of being proud of his heritage.
His mother moved from Sierra Leone to south-east London in the 1960s, working in Lewisham Hospital as a midwife and marrying Mr Cleverly’s British father.
The visit on Wednesday saw the cabinet minister unveil a strategy aimed at tackling increasing threats to gender equality.
Officials said those threats come from climate change, humanitarian crises, conflicts such as the war in Ukraine, and recent attempts to roll back women’s rights in countries such as Iran and Afghanistan.
“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”, Mr Cleverly had said prior to his visit.
“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.”
While at a hospital in Bo, Mr Cleverly supervised how UK support is improving blood banks and equipment, increasing electricity access and saving the lives of pregnant women.
The Foreign Secretary also announce a new emphasis on supporting grassroots women’s rights organisations, and funding for a sexual and reproductive health and rights programme that will support an estimated 10 million women.
According to the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO), the freshly-announced strategy will put a continued focus on educating girls, empowering women and girls, championing their health and rights, and ending gender-based violence.
The department said the strategy will commit to at least 80 per cent of its bilateral Official Development Assistance programmes targeting gender equality as a policy objective by 2030.
The FCDO said the work will focus on sub-Saharan Africa, which has some of the highest rates of child marriage and maternal mortality in the world.
The programme is expected to receive up to £200 million in funding ($237 million) and is predicted to prevent up to 30,600 maternal deaths, 3.4 million unsafe abortions and 9.5 million unintended pregnancies, according to officials.
