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Just before Christmas our family received a lovely handmade card from our sponsored child in the Philippines, Catherine, who is thirteen years old and attends her local school. After reassuring us she was in good health and being a “responsible student”, she listed what Plan was helping them bring to her community: a health centre, books, rainwater catchments, school latrines and medicines. “These things”, she said, “were only a dream before for me, but now it is a dream come true”.
At Plan’s 70th anniversary celebrations we heard vividly from Harriet, who is older than Catherine, and comes from Sierra Leone. A young girl from the second poorest country in the world, she also went to school, and has now helped her community set up a vibrant local radio station which has programmes which enable mothers and young women to get access to education and health services.
Two young women, thousands of miles apart, with common hopes and aspirations.
Stories like Catherine’s and Harriet’s are the raw material for the groundbreaking report, Because I am a Girl, commissioned by Plan UK and shared widely with Plan colleagues across the world, and other NGOs and governments. It traces both the adverse impacts of poverty on the world’s girls and the progress being made to undermine a cycle which means often passing on those miseries from grandmother to mother to daughter as uneducated, underage women give birth to underweight babies with little chance of going to school. The sheer physical effort of what is often a long two way daily trek to their local school can be overwhelming if a child has an empty belly and little energy. Having books as Catherine said is wonderful, but you need food to understand them.
As the “I am a Girl” report makes clear, there are some positive signs that all our efforts are bearing some fruit. In 2006, the number of children dying before their fifth birthday – the age many of them would start school – has fallen below 10 millions.
There has been significant progress in tackling the child killers of measles and malaria. Over the past six years, deaths from these diseases in Africa have fallen by over 50%.
Gender parity between boys and girls has been achieved in around 80% of the developing countries where data is available.
But there is still so much to do to enable women like Catherine and Harriet to fulfil their dreams. We are at the halfway stage in terms of the time we have set ourselves to achieve the Millennium Development Goals. In some societies, there has been relatively little progress towards enabling its citizens to live a healthy life with access to education. Indeed, in far too many cases, just staying alive is proving impossible.
As Plan celebrates its 70th year, and remembers its proud roots in the conflict of the Spanish Civil War, I ask you all to be as generous as you can afford to be to enable Plan to push harder still to enable the dreams of children to be realised. The founders of the charity did a remarkable thing in 1937 in enabling child refugees to avoid the worst impacts of a conflict they had no political part in. We owe it to them to continue and intensify their work in a new century.
Now Plan operates on a global scale. This report brings to life the hard work and commitment of thousands of Plan volunteers and communities who are making a difference. My thanks to all of them, and let’s make sure we support the Plan teams across the world as they battle to release many millions of children from poverty and fulfil their potential to invigorate their own societies.
Nigel Chapman
Plan UK Chair
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