Plan International

Kathleen Sherwin, Chief Strategy and Engagement Officer

SRHR is a core area of work for Plan International. We work with children and girls in over 80 countries to help create a world where we are all equal. And we aim to partner and support 200 million girls over the next five years. As a SheDecides Champion, I strongly believe that young people, including children, adolescents, and girls, in all their diversity must have control of their lives and bodies, to make decisions about their sexuality, free from discrimination, coercion or violence. I am proud of SheDecides’ focus on youth SRHR and in ensuring that the rights and needs of adolescents are also included.

Johanne Westcott-Simpson

Global SRHR Policy and Advocacy Lead

Bodily autonomy is essential to achieving gender equality and a key priority for Plan International. We work to ensure that - without exception - girls, adolescents and young women in all their diversity enjoy the fundamental right to control their own bodies. Comprehensive sexuality education is at the heart of our SRHR work, with access to age and gender responsive SRH services another key priority. Our approach also includes challenging harmful gender norms and practices that perpetuate discrimination, violence and gender inequality; and ensuring that adolescent girls are given the space, legitimacy and resourcing to shape the policies that affect their lives.

How we are working so SheDecides

Sexual and reproductive health rights (SRHR) are a global priority for Plan International across development and humanitarian settings. We promote comprehensive sexuality education in and out of school settings and access to inclusive, age-and gender-responsive SRHR services. We also work to end harmful practices such as child, early and forced marriage and unions and transform harmful negative gender norms, including around the control of female sexuality. As a youth-centred organisation, we champion the meaningful engagement of all children, adolescents and young people in decisions that affect their lives.

Comprehensive Sexuality Education (CSE)

Plan International believes that all children, adolescents and young people are entitled to CSE to gain knowledge, explore values and attitudes, and develop the skills they need to make conscious, healthy and respectful choices about relationships and sexuality.

Plan International’s work seeks to strengthen access to CSE both in and out of formal education settings. We have developed a gender-transformative, inclusive and sex-positive CSE programme and influencing model which is based on international evidence and good practice. Our CSE programme and influencing model is based on our CSE Standards.

We also collaborate externally as an active member of the Global Partnership Forum for CSE.

Our ground breaking research and comic and film includes Real Choices, Real Lives and Say it Out Loud: Sexual Wellbeing Matters, presenting findings on young peoples’ voices on sexual wellbeing that highlight the vital need for CSE.

Our Learning from Operational Research in three countries focuses on the ‘how’ of CSE.

Our Translating Comprehensive Sexuality Education Commitments into Action toolkit provides a range of strategies that governments can use to translate their commitments on CSE into tangible action.

My Body, My Future

This gender-transformative programme is funded by the Finnish Ministry for Foreign Affairs in Ethiopia, Laos, Mozambique, Myanmar, and Uganda. It works to ensure that children, adolescents, and youth in all their diversity have control over their bodies and futures in a healthy, safe, and supportive environment. It seeks to transform gendered power relations and tackle root causes of gender inequality and exclusion at the individual, family, community, and state level. With a multi-component approach, it includes working in partnership with vibrant civil society partners, scaling up comprehensive sexuality education, improving access to climate resilient, quality, inclusive, age-and-gender responsive SRH services, and increasing societal and political acceptance of children, adolescent and youth sexuality.

Generation Change! Programme

This 5-year programme, funded by SIDA, works to fulfil the SRHR of children and young people, particularly girls and young women in Rwanda, Zambia, Uganda, Malawi, Tanzania, Togo, Benin, Lebanon, and Egypt. It is centred on strengthening civil society that promotes gender equality and fulfils the rights of children and youth locally and globally.

It supports rights-based and positive sexuality education and access to platforms where children and young people can take action and influence SRHR issues. It addresses unintended adolescent pregnancies; HIV/AIDS; gender-based violence; child, early, and forced marriage and unions; and female genital mutilation/cutting. The programme also involves children and youth as active drivers of change.

My Health, My Rights

This 3-year multi-country programme, funded by the European Union, is implemented in Benin, Burkina Faso, Guinea Conakry, Guinea Bissau, Sierra Leone, and Togo in partnership with FEMNET and local implementing partners FADeC, ADPP, SLADA, and La Colombe.

The focus is to contribute to public and community health systems by providing adolescents, especially girls, with quality sexuality education and adolescent-responsive SRHR information and services in an enabling, empowering, and safe environment. It has 3 pillars:

  • Comprehensive Sexuality Education

  • Adolescent and Gender Responsive Services

  • Civil Society Strengthening (CSS) through south-south learning and exchange

About Plan International

Founded in 1937, Plan International is a development and humanitarian organisation that works together with children, young people, supporters and partners to strive for a just world, where we are all equal. To do this we tackle the root causes of the challenges and inequalities that children and young girls face. We’re there for children from birth until adulthood and we enable children to prepare for and respond to crises and adversity. We strive for a just world that advances children’s rights and equality for girls.

We engage people and partners to:

  • Empower children, young people and communities to make vital changes that tackle the root causes of discrimination against girls, exclusion and vulnerability
  • Drive change in practice and policy at local, national and global levels through our reach, experience and knowledge of the realities children face
  • Work with children and communities to prepare for and respond to crises and to overcome adversity
  • Support the safe and successful progression of children from birth to adulthood
  • We work towards our purpose through our programmes and influencing approach

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