Dr Sam Rushworth

I thank the hon. Gentleman for that example. Another example comes not from my own life but from Liberia, where women became so fed up of conflict that women on all sides decided to unite behind a woman—Ellen Johnson Sirleaf—for the presidency, while many men in the country voted along factional lines. The experience I had with the women I mentioned will never leave me. I confess that I did not understand the currency I was using. I asked them whether they needed some lunch; I felt that we had been talking for a long time. I gave them what actually amounted to about $100, thinking that I was giving them about $10. They looked a bit overwhelmed. Afterwards, when they went off, my translator told me that they did not buy lunch; they came back hungry, because they said they could use that money better to benefit their community. When I asked those women what would make the biggest difference for them, I was expecting them to make quite big financial demands. Instead, they said, “Could we have some sewing machines?” That was because, for many of them, their husbands had been killed, they had been raped, their homes had been burned and looted, and they no longer had sewing machines to make a living. For the sake of a few thousand dollars to provide sewing machines for those women, we could give them a livelihood, and that sum, frankly, is probably what we would spend on having a 4x4 on the road for a day in one of those countries. To echo the point that the hon. Member for North Herefordshire (Ellie Chowns) made about cash transfers, nothing is more important than getting cash to the women on the ground who know how to spend it to make a real difference in people’s lives. In conclusion, several Members have made outstanding recommendations, so I will not repeat them all, but I will emphasise the point about upstream prevention. The previous Government rightly established that there needs to be an atrocity prevention strategy within aid spending, but now we need to take that idea forward. Part of that process must involve looking at civil society and upstream funding, and the long-term support for the women’s and young people’s organisations that are doing such vital work in peacebuilding. We need to look at the quality of aid, not just the quantity. I will close my remarks, because I am really conscious of time. Again, I simply make an appeal that we do not just hear words here today, but that words lead to action.