Gender Equality & Inclusion

Girl goals: What has changed for girls? Adolescent girls’ rights over 30 years

In 1995, more than 30,000 women from 200 countries gathered in Beijing for the World Conference on Women to declare that women’s and girls’ rights are human rights. To mark 30 years since this landmark set of commitments for women’s and girls’ rights, this report, published jointly by Plan International, UNICEF, and UN Women, focuses on this period of intense change, risk and opportunity. This report highlights key areas such as child protection, education and health, and examines what has changed over the past three decades for adolescent girls.

Without Borders, Lives that Inspire

This is a collection of incredible life stories of 15 adolescents and youth from Colombia, Ecuador and Peru who participated in our ELLA project. Since March 2022, with funding from the Government of Canada, Plan International has implemented the Empowerment, Local Leadership, and Accountability for Venezuelan and Host Community Adolescent Girls and Young Women (ELLA) project. This project helps adolescent girls and young women find their voice, exercise their power and know and access their right to protection from violence and to essential health information and care.

Adolescent Girls' consulation toolkit

The Adolescent Girls Consultations Toolkit aims to providing practical tools and tips for consulting with diverse adolescent girls, their families and their communities, for any type of programming. It is intended to lay a foundation to build a common understanding and coordinated approach to creating a participatory space to engage adolescents and adults in all their diversity and other key stakeholders on the aspirations, challenges, needs and priorities of Adolescent Girls and Young Women.

It includes three main components covering the entire consultations process:
i) general tips and techniques for preparing for consultations with adolescent girls, including adapting tools
ii) guidance on managing the consultation process, including managing inputs and facilitating team de-briefs
iii) a general overview of the data processing and analysis phase, as well as an initial community share-back process.

The toolkit is primarily intended to support development practitioners and government, civil-society and technical staff (focused on equality, education, health, protection, economic empowerment, monitoring and evaluation) as well as program and business-development managers responsible for or supporting primary data collection and analysis exercises. The toolkit can be adapted for use in different contexts and during different processes, including program design, assessments, implementation, monitoring, evaluation and research processes.

Effectively Achieving Equality and Global Transformation

As an organization dedicated to children's rights and equality for girls, Plan International Canada is committed to ensuring that all of our programs acknowledge or fully address the specific needs of women and girls and that this helps create meaningful and lasting community advancements for everyone – making positive global transformation possible.

Achieving equality, promoting justice and fostering a society where all people can access basic life needs like food and clean water and take part in life-changing opportunities like livelihood trainings are core objectives of our work. Our programming and measurement framework provides a consistent and measurable approach across multiple areas of focus (such as in education, health, climate change and economic empowerment) to ensure our programs are factoring in and working toward equality for girls and women.

This programming and measurement framework forms the basis of our gender transformative programming to ensure shared ownership and understanding across programming staff and to provide a consistent and measurable approach across sectoral programs such as in education, health, climate change, economic empowerment etc.

The case for holistic investment in girls

Emerging economies that achieve 100% secondary school completion rates for girls by 2030 could see their GDP being boosted by an average of 10%. This new report by Citi Global Insights and Plan International reveals that investment of CA $2 per day per girl in emerging economies can have a huge impact on countries’ overall economic potential.

Promoting Men’s Engagement Globally

While men’s engagement in early childhood development is gaining policy momentum, operationalization of these objectives will require consideration of the various barriers and obstacles that exist to men’s engagement in the care and development of young children, in different contexts.

This paper presents Plan International Canada and Promundo’s collective programmatic reflections and recommendations on promoting men’s engagement as equitable, nonviolent fathers and caregivers in children’s early lives.

“Focus on Equality” Newsletters

Plan International sends a biannual newsletter highlighting global projects that advance equality for girls. These inspiring editions share insights from our global team's community-based work through images, stories, impact data and more.

2020 – March, April

2019 – March, October

2018 – April, July, October

2017 – March, June, December

Equitable Pedagogy and Teacher Training

This comprehensive teacher-training pack was developed by Plan Canada as an introduction to education that meets the needs of girls, boys and all children. It highlights key methods for inclusion and accessibility in teaching skills, including child-centred instruction, classroom management, lesson planning, positive discipline, evaluation and assessment, and reflective practices.

SHOW: A guide to equality for women, men, girls and boys

The Strengthening Health of Women and Children (SHOW) project developed several guides to help move equality forward among adolescent girls, women, men, religious leaders and health professionals. These guides were jointly developed by Plan International and Promundo and tackle several topics focused on improving health and well-being for all, including:

• Women and girls’ empowerment
• Maternal Newborn and Child Health (MNCH) Services to Meet Everyone's Needs
• Adolescent Friendly MNCH/SRH Service Delivery
• Equality in MNCH Education: A Guide for Community Health Workers
• How Village Savings and Loan Associations (VSLAs) Help Women, Men, Adolescent Girls and Boys Achieve Equality and Better Health for All
• Guidance Note: Involving Men in Maternal, Newborn and Child Health Improvements
• Advocacy Guidance Note: Involving Men in MNCH and Achieving Comprehensive Health Services for Girls and Women
• Communications Guidance Note: Involving Men in MNCH and Promoting Comprehensive Health Services for All
• Guidance Note: Working with Religious and Traditional Leaders to Promote Men's Involvement in MNCH and Comprehensive Health Services for All
• Fathers Club Manual: Involving Men in MNCH and Ensuring Comprehensive Health Services Within the SHOW Program
• Leadership Training for Community Health Committee Members