EU Reports & Positions

On 9 March 2020, the European Commission (EC) and the European External Action Service (EEAS) published their Joint Communication ‘Towards a Comprehensive Partnership with Africa’, which provides a framework for the discussion that will take place at the 6th EU-AU Summit in October 2020. As Plan International, we are convinced that Youth Economic Empowerment (YEE) should be a key pillar for this renewed partnership and that it is essential to support a gender transformative approach at the same time, to ensure all young people, including young women, have the skills, knowledge and competence they need to succeed. Building on our first set of recommendations from February 2020, we would like to take it a step further and demonstrate how the EU-AU partnership can give girls and young women the opportunity to be whatever they want to be.

Inequality should be addressed in its broadest sense: it does not only concern income inequality but may touch on every part of a person’s life. Today, we are witnessing billions of people facing deplorable inequalities of opportunities, choices, resources, security, freedom and power, with women and girls being particularly affected. Girls and women face social, economic and political marginalisation and, owing to harmful social and gendered norms, they are also confronted with violence and discrimination.

CSOs developed recommendations on what should be part of the European Fund for Sustainable Development so that it effectively contributes to sustainable development.

As a development and humanitarian organisation that works to advance children’s rights and equality for girls, Plan International is calling for urgent action to protect the rights, and lives, of child migrants and refugees and their families, both within, at and outside Europe’s borders.

SDG Watch Europe, an alliance of 70 organisations including Plan International, wrote to European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker calling for him to adopt, as a matter of urgency, an overarching strategy to guide implementation of the 2030 Sustainable Development Agenda.

Plan International's Recommendations on the EU Action Plan on Gender Equality and Women's Empowerment 2016-2020

In April and May 2015, Nepal was struck by two massive earthquakes, affecting hundreds of thousands of people across the country. Plan International is responding to the emergency, ensuring children's core needs are met.

Plan International's response plan to the Ebola outbreak covers prevention, case management, psychological first aid, child protection and other life-saving measures.

Plan International’s response provided life-saving aid to some of the most remote and difficult to reach communities in The Philippines.

Plan International EU Office is offering an executive summary of the 2013 State of the World's Girls Report and formulating recommendations to the EU to ensure specific needs of girls in disaster settings are taken into account.

Overall, the new global development framework should focus on the most marginalized people in society, with special focus on women and children, says Plan International EU Office.

The European Union must reflect its commitments on children's rights by allocating adequate financial means for children in the next MFF, say the members of the Children's Rights Action Group.