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DERMOT MURNAGHAN: Now millions of women around the world have been left facing poverty, discrimination and in some cases sexual violence, after the death of their husbands. The statistics are being highlighted as part of International Widows Day and Cherie Blair is the President of the Loomba Foundation which offers support to widows and their children and she joins me now. A very good morning to you, and you’re highlighting an incredibly important issue and this is discrimination and abuse on a massive scale. Just give us a sense of what’s going on globally.

CHERIE BLAIR: Well I’ve just come from Hyde Park where we’ve been doing a fun run to highlight this issue. 245 million widows around the world, 115 million of them live in poverty, 80 million of them will have suffered direct physical abuse and 1.5 million children of widows will die before the age of five. It is a big problem.

DM: A lot of this is to do with cultures around the world, the idea that widows are unlucky, that they may have killed their husbands or somehow brought bad luck upon the family so they are ostracised.

CB: Very much so, there is a lot of social stigma involved here with traditional cultures seeing widows as a threat to society and of course these days widows are created by three things – war, HIV AIDS and just poverty, men, poor men are in dangerous industries, they get killed and their poor wives and children are made even poorer.

DM: It’s the children as well and I wanted to ask you about the name of the Foundation, the Loomba Foundation, this refers to Lord Loomba and his story is fascinating because his mother was widowed when he was a very young boy and his experience of growing up and pulling himself up by his boot laces so to speak is a fascinating one isn’t it?

CB: Raj’s mother became a widow on 23^rd June in 1954 and Raj was only 10 then and she, on that day she had to forever more only wear white, all her jewellery was taken away from her and when Raj was married she was asked to stay away from the wedding ceremony, she was there but not to come to the centre of the ceremony in case she brought bad luck on the couple and Raj always felt that was a terrible thing and when he managed to be fortunate in life and make some money he decided he wanted to highlight the plight of these women.

DM: It is changing perceptions but it is also practical help to many of the children involved after a father dies.

CB: Well we do two things, one is that we help support the children of widows and get them an education but the other thing we do is we are a great believer in helping the widows help themselves so a lot of it is about giving women training and assistance so the woman can do work themselves. So for example we have a big project at the moment where 10,000 widows in India are being given a sewing machine and basic training in how to use that sewing machine so that they can actually make an income out of that. We have just announced a partnership with UN Woman where we are working Guatemala, in Malawi, in India again, helping women set up small businesses, getting training so that they can support themselves because the danger is of course that if they can’t support themselves they are either forced into marriages with relatives of their husbands so that the family can keep the income, or worse than that, sometimes they are forced into prostitution or again it is their children who have to give up school and the young boys and girls, either girls are sent as child brides somewhere or the boys have to leave school and go out to work and this is a spiral of decline.

DM: It is on such an enormous scale, I mean some of the countries we’re discussing, and this is an issue of inheritance and sometimes they lose all their property, are expelled from the family and whatever wealth they may have had goes to other family members. Some of these countries do have inheritance laws but with your legal background, it is interesting isn’t it that some of the women involved are not aware of them and don’t have access to legal advice.

CB: It is very true and I’ve seen schemes where lawyers, there is an International Federation of Women Lawyers working in places like Nigeria and other parts of Africa, where they actually go round and help husbands make wills so that their wives property is protected because too often if there is no formal declaration they don’t get the property and even if there is, if you don’t know your rights then the relatives just come and take the property and throw you out. This is particularly the case if, as often happens, you are a young bride of an older man and the first family may well just drive you out afterwards and then you have got a young woman with young children, very much vulnerable to all sorts of horrific abuse.

DM: I mean it is such an important issue concerning women’s rights and beyond that of course, given the families involved. How seriously do our world organisations take this? What about the United Nations here and I’ve never heard any world leader speak out about this?

CB: Well, interestingly, when we did the Millennium Development goals, widows were not featured very much in the goals and that is one of the things that we highlighted when we started our campaign to get International Widow’s Day recognised and of course the UN has put that right by recognising International Woman’s Day which they did in 2010 and we’re looking now at the post-2015 Millennium Goals and making sure that widows are part of that. A good sign about that of course is how the latest proposals are to make sure that the economic empowerment of women is itself a separate goal for post-2015 and obviously part of that will be widows.

DM: It keys into that of course. How well supported is it by the way, I didn’t ask you, how was the fun run, how did you do? Did you run it all?

CB: I started off the three races, I managed to do a tiny bit but then I had to come here to see you, so the biggest run was probably running here to Sky.

DM: Always glad to hear that! I just wanted to ask you, the issue of women’s rights, we’ve seen in this country an important issue of domestic abuse being considered after what happened with Nigella Lawson and her husband, do you think it was important that that was highlighted and Mr Saatchi took his caution and said we are all now discussing this issue?

CB: I’ve been involved in the question of violence against women for years, when I started as a young barrister those were the very first cases I did. I am patron of Refuge which is a domestic violence charity and of course I sit as a part time judge and when I started as a young lawyer in 1976, 1977, there was a lot of the police not intervening, people not taking this issue seriously, that this was just something that was between husband and wife. Today we’re told as judges that if we sentence someone for domestic violence we take that as an aggravating factor and not a mitigating factor because a woman should be safe in her home and it is no answer to any marital problems to use violence against each other, whether it is man against woman or woman against man. I know myself with my own experience as a barrister there are some cases where actually the violence goes the other way but the vast majority of domestic violence are men against woman.

DM: Well Cherie Blair, thank you very much indeed for coming to telling us all about the Loomba Foundation.

CB: My pleasure.

DM: You can run back!

CB: I will!

DM: Very good to see you, thank you very much indeed.