Baroness Northover – 2016 Parliamentary Question to the Department for International Development
The below Parliamentary question was asked by Baroness Northover on 2016-10-18.
To ask Her Majesty’s Government to what extent ageing and older people in developing countries remain an issue of concern for the Department for International Development, why this matter no longer forms part of the Department’s ministerial portfolios, and whether ageing still forms part of the Department’s Inclusive Societies work.
Lord Bates
The Department for International Development’s (DFID) Inclusive Societies department leads the Department’s work on ageing. The Minister of State, Rory Stewart, has responsibility for Inclusive Societies department’s work.
Many DFID programmes reach and include older people, for example on health systems strengthening and eye care, or specific programmes for the poorest including supporting slum dwellers in Tanzania or supporting widows resulting from the Genocide in Rwanda.
Ageing also features in DFID country level poverty analyses as a key factor in understanding poverty. In addition to this DFID is taking a global leadership role to push for better quality and use of age disaggregated data to ensure that the Sustainable Development Goals leave no one behind. DFID hosted a series of high profile events on this subject in May and is working towards the publication of an action plan detailing next steps early in 2017.
