Operations in 2015

Plan International is one of the largest and oldest children’s rights organisations in the world. Religiously and politically unaffiliated, Plan operated in a total of 71 countries in 2015. In particular, our aim is to improve the quality of life of children in the weakest position and the position of girls in developing countries. We work in education, health, water and sanitation, protection, economic safety, disaster relief work, children’s participation and sexual and reproductive health.

During the financial year 2015, the operations of Plan International expanded into a new country, Nigeria. We are working for the education and protection of girls in Africa’s most populous country. Plan’s programme work in Nigeria is beginning in a socially difficult situation in which the terrorist organisation Boko Haram has violently attacked against education and girls’ rights.

Of the 71 Plan countries, 51 are programme countries and 21 are donor countries (two of the donor countries, India and Colombia, are also programme countries). In 2015, Plan’s global spending on its operations amounted to EUR 810 million, up 14% year-on-year. During the operational period, we implemented 216 programmes and over 4,000 projects, with over 100 million children in their sphere of influence.

As part of the international organisation, Plan International Finland carries out development cooperation with the support of sponsors and donors, institutional funding and corporate donors. Our work is supported by over 18,000 Finnish sponsors, which makes Plan the biggest sponsor organisation in Finland. Globally, Plan’s sponsor operations covered 1.4 million children during the operational period.

Plan International Finland is a programme support organisation of the Ministry for Foreign Affairs. The Ministry funds Plan’s programmes under three-year agreements, the previous of which for 2012–2014 ended during the operational period. Plan International Finland’s work reached over 600,000 children in 15 countries during the three-year period. For example, the improvements of basic education that we sponsored directly benefited over 97,000 girls and 82,000 boys, and over 420,000  children and adults took part in our child protection operations.

In total, Plan International Finland spent EUR 11.2 million on development programmes in 2015. The share of other sources of funds, such as EU funding, increased in development programmes year-on-year. We signed agreements on new projects in Cambodia, Ethiopia and Kenya. In cooperation with businesses, we strengthened our role as a pioneer that efficiently utilises information technology in support of development programmes. Our position in humanitarian work strengthened due to the ECHO status granted by the EU.

Plan International Finland prepared a new strategy aligned with Plan International during the financial year. In programme work, preparation for climate change and improving governance and the involvement of children rose as new themes alongside education and early childhood education, child protection and youth employment.

The total budget of the partnership programme supported by the Ministry for Foreign Affairs carried out in 2012–2014 and ended last year was EUR 21.2 million, of which our share was 15 per cent. The work focused on child protection, early childhood education, education and youth employment. During the past financial year, we also obtained a total of approximately EUR 2.3 million of new funding from the EU and UN organisations. The funds are allocated to humanitarian work, a youth involvement project in Kenya and climate change-related work in Cambodia.

With the support of the Ministry for Foreign Affairs, we successfully realised projects in a total of 15 countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America. In Uganda, Plan’s early childhood education model has received a lot of recognition, and the government is planning to adopt the model at the national level. We have also achieved good results in girls’ education: when we began the work to improve the level of basic education in the programme communities in 2012, only 30 per cent of girls graduated from elementary school. Now, their share has increased to 80 per cent.

Thanks to Plan’s long-term work, the quality of teaching has also improved in our project areas in Uganda. The schools of the Tororo region, for example, improved their ranking in the national final exams from 28th in 2012 to 9th in 2014. In the project, we conducted groundbreaking cooperation utilising information and communication technology with Nokia, which won us the international Plan’s innovation reward. The school project will also continue during the next three-year period. It now covers approximately 40,000 children and about 30,000 adults.

In Bolivia, we included 25,400 children in high-quality early childhood education during the project period. When we began the work, only 17 per cent of children were at the development level of their age. Today, at least 70 per cent of the children included in our early childhood education work are estimated to develop in line with their age.

In 2015, Plan International’s global spending on early childhood education totalled EUR 118 million. With this sum, we educated a total of 226,000 healthcare professionals and volunteers and launched almost 11,000 nurseries, among others. Our investments in basic education totalled EUR 99 million, with which we trained 112,000 people in the field of education and built or renovated 2,400 school buildings.

The most acute challenges in child protection include harmful practices concerning girls, such as child marriages and genital mutilation. In Ethiopia, Plan’s work has influenced the local legislation during the current three-year period so that a total of 14 communities decided to abandon these practices and ban them. The work will continue during the new partnership programme in 12 communities with a total of 125,000 people.

The grass root-level projects were supported by Plan’s global work to strengthen children’s rights. Plan and other non-governmental organisations jointly influenced national and international legislation aiming to create pressure on abandoning harmful practices. A resolution of the UN’s General Assembly urging all countries in the world to prohibit child marriages in their national legislation was a significant achievement. We executed campaigns against child marriages in 20 countries around the world, and they reached over 150,000 girls in all. On the whole, our programme work covered three million girls.

In our work, we aim to ensure that the basic needs, protection and schooling of children are secured also in a disaster situation. Foreseeing disasters and preparing for them in the programme countries is an important part of the work. We are already present in many disaster areas through our development programme, which makes work faster during an acute crisis. For example, after the earthquake in Nepal, our support reached over 8,600 children during the first eight weeks.

In 2015, Plan International Finland continued humanitarian work with refugees in Uganda, Ethiopia and Mali. At refugee camps in northern Uganda, we supported the well-being of South Sudanese children in cooperation with UNICEF. We established early childhood education centres and child-friendly premises on the camp, trained volunteer instructors and strengthened child protection. We also strengthened communities’ child welfare mechanisms in Ethiopia, maintained a child welfare register and monitored child protection violations. We supported the access of children to schooling by building schools and early childhood education centres. Our refugee work in Mali continued as part of a more extensive programme, and it focused on child-friendly facilities and early childhood education.

Plan International Finland’s institutional funding for humanitarian work was EUR 0.8 million during the financial year, in addition to which we received private donations from fundraising for Nepal, for example. Thanks to our long-term, high-quality work, we were granted the ECHO status for humanitarian aid by the EU during the operational year. The Ministry for Foreign Affairs of Finland also approved us as their humanitarian partner. Our employees were active in disaster areas as part of the humanitarian work coordinated by the international Plan.

Globally, Plan’s big humanitarian work efforts included work to overcome the Ebola epidemic in West Africa in 2015. We trained almost 17,000 people to fight the disease in Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea.

During the year, Plan’s children’s rights ambassadors gave 1,300 lessons in almost 200 schools and youth centres. 14,000 children and youths attended them. To support teachers and educators, we published a book, Kuvien tarinat (Stories of images), which aims to develop media and graphic literacy and understanding of children’s rights through images. The authors of the book are professionals from the media, arts and museums.

Three-year cooperation between Finnish and Ugandan schools deepened during the operational year. In the Osallisena maailmassa (Involved in the world) cooperation project, 11 Finnish and 11 Ugandan partner schools exchange experiences of strengthening children’s rights and involvement in the school world. Thanks to the cooperation, the Ugandan schools have adopted the Finnish peer mediation process, verso, with good results.

During the operational period, Plan’s volunteers organised a total of 165 events, including photography exhibitions. Girls’ Day was visible around the country in 12 locations through publicity stunts, events and cash collections organised by volunteers. Volunteers successfully coordinated cooperation between different organisations in Kemi and Turku for the Red Nose Day. We also awarded the volunteers of the year for the fifth time, rewarding them for their long work for the rights of children.

The parliamentary election took place during the operational year, and it was strongly visible in the activities of the Children’s Government, Mitä? network and volunteers. The Children’s Government organised election panels on children’s right and development cooperation in Jyväskylä, Tampere, Turku and Helsinki. After the election, children took their greetings to the new members of parliament personally in the Painavaa asiaa event of NGOs.

The youths’ Mitä network was particularly visible with its nationwide Sukupuoliroolien vangit (Prisoners of gender roles) campaign. The campaign challenged both Finnish youth and political decision-makers to ponder the effects of gender roles in their own lives. The symbol of the campaign was a bar cage that toured the events, from which one could get free by solving tasks related to gender equality.

We conducted immigrant work in particular in Finland through separate funding. Funded by the RAY (Finland’s Slot Machine Association), the four-year Matkalla(On the way) project focuses on supporting children who have moved to Finland towards the end of their compulsory school age and their parents. A new democracy advocacy project, Muuttajat! (Immigrants!) was also launched during the operational year, aiming to increase immigrant youths’ awareness of their possibilities to influence and make the channels of involvement part of the youths’ everyday lives. The project is aimed at youths aged 15–29 who have moved to Finland towards the end of their compulsory school age. The Kokeile ja liiku (Try and move) project to integrate immigrant youths through sport was also launched in 2015 with the support of the Ministry of Education and Culture. Every year, youths representing over 30 nationalities take part in our work.

The Ei vihapuheelle (No to hate speech) movement, also funded by the Ministry of Education and Culture, which particularly supported teachers and educators in work against hate speech, ended in 2015. The movement daily reached over 25,000 followers on social media. The material produced by the movement or teachers, educators and those working with youths will remain available online also after the work has ended.

In cooperation with Development Centre Opinkirjo, we implemented the Aktiiviseksi maailmankansalaiseksi koulun kerhossa (Becoming an active global citizen in a school club) project in which we developed the social club activities of primary school pupils.

During the Because I am a Girl campaign we conducted pioneering, global research on the position of girls. Data sorted by gender and age and limited exclusively to girls has been more poorly available than general statistics on, for example, children or women, even though the position of girls in many developing countries puts them in an especially vulnerable position. The annual The State of the World’s Girls report is the flagship of our research on education, sexual and reproductive health and violence targeted at girls. In 2015, we published the report before the girls’ day also in Finland.

During the past year, our campaign received support from an increasing number of state governments and leaders, including nine presidents. It affected the changing of 22 laws and the passing of 18 new laws and regulations to protect girls.

Involvement of children is important to us also within the organisation, and during the past year over half of our offices around the world involved them in decision making.

Plan International Finland has had a leading role within the international Plan in creating indicators for the programme work that help us estimate the projects’ impact on gender equality and improvement of girls’ position in practice. The Global Girls Innovation Programme does pioneering work modeling how girls can be involved in project planning, research, decision making and advocacy work. In 2015, the importance of the GGIP programme grew significantly within the organisation, and it is not by accident that the programme’s director and lead innovator were chosen for their tasks from the Finland office.

Plan International Finland has a greater role than its size would suggest also in utilising technology to support development cooperation. In 2015, the international organisation awarded our project done in cooperation with Nokia as Plan’s best innovation project. This education project in Uganda is still  continuing.

Plan sponsors support children in developing countries. Every sponsor has a sponsored child of their own with whom they can also correspond and visit, if they wish. Sponsored children receive no special treatment in comparison with other children; the entire community benefits from the sponsorship.

During recent years our entire international organisation has reformed sponsorship and made the correspondence increasingly electronic as traditional letters become less common. Plan International Finland updated its sponsorship-related information systems during the year. Now sponsors can manage their information better through their Oma Plan page and, for example, access their correspondence history that is automatically saved in the database. The goal is tomake the correspondence between sponsors and sponsored children faster: before, the letters were sent via traditional mail and receiving a reply could take months, but now the letters written in villages can be scanned directly into the database in an increasing number of programme countries.

We will continue to monitor and develop the efficiency of our sponsorship activities. The new indicators that were implemented by the international organisation in 2015 allow us to monitor sponsorship’s impact on the lives of sponsored children and their communities more accurately than before. During the past year, we finished our work in a number of communities, as the target results were reached during the follow-up period.

Our biggest partner was Nokia. The five-year education project supported by Nokia is improving literacy and developing teaching methods in 300 schools in Kenya. As for Nokia’s and Plan’s project in Uganda, it is improving the communication between schools, homes and authorities with the help of an SMS application. Cooperation with Metso continued in India. The new four-year project in the Alwar region in North India is a continuation of the school project that makes high-quality education available also to children in the weakest position.

In addition to funding, businesses can support the projects with their special expertise in their field. Plan began a research project with Kesko that looks into the position of migrant workers in the fish industry in Thailand and their children’s access to protection and schools.

During the year, we also initiated new types of cooperation where businesses’ personnel and clients are also closely involved. For example, Wärtsilä’s personnel had the opportunity to vote for their preferred charity target out of several options, and as a result, Plan’s campaign for promoting girls’ education was chosen. Seppälä also involved their clients in the cooperation: they had the opportunity to round up the final sum of their purchases for the benefit of Plan.

Buildings around the world were lit up in pink, and Plan presented UN’s Secretary General with a photography appeal where a total of 2.3 million people are raising their hands for girls’ education. In Finland, we gathered together politicians and other societal agents to discuss girls’ position, and our volunteers organised events in many localities.

We promoted our international Because I’m a Girl campaign on other fronts as well. The award-winning photographer Meeri Koutaniemi photographed and compiled a photography exhibit of Nepalese girls, whom Plan had freed from their slave-like positions as kamalaris. In Ethiopia, Koutaniemi documented our project against female genital mutilation and child marriages. Both topics were widely covered in the Finnish media and the pictures were also used in international connections.

During the year, we also cooperated with TV host Arman Alizad in the programme Arman ja aymara-lapset (Arman and aymara children). The format reached new supporter groups and received a lot of publicity in social media. Alizad also participated in our campaign that highlighted the dreams of children in developing countries and encouraged people to take action to fulfil those dreams. We produced the Plan episode in The Voice Kids programme in cooperation with the TV channel Nelonen.

We encouraged our supporters to make one-time donations and monthly donations as well as to become sponsors. A particular focus was given to developing the forms of regular donating because long-term support forms the most solid base for our operations. Digital approaches and social media, including cooperation with bloggers, have an increasingly central role in our fundraising. We also strengthened our preparedness for urgent disaster fundraising.

Face-to-face fundraising was the new and successful form of fundraising implemented in 2015 in the metropolitan area as well as in Turku, Tampere, Jyväskylä and Lahti. Its themes were girls’ education and protection. During the year, we also participated in the organisations’ shared estate plan donation campaign. On the Day of the Girl we organised a national cash collection with the help of volunteers.

Our audiovisual expression was enhanced and received recognition. During the year, we produced many materials that utilised video content in an innovative way. For the first time, we published Plan International Finland’s annual report as an online publication only, and it received an honorable mention especially for its visual outlook in the annual report evaluation of ProCom, the Finnish Association of Communications Professionals.

Plan International Finland’s total income for the financial year, EUR 16.2 million, was on par with the previous year. The amount of private donations and the funding for development programmes received from international organisations increased, while the amount of public funding decreased.

Overall, we didn’t quite reach the financial year’s income objective, falling short by three per cent. The changing of the funding agreement period hindered the implementation of programmes in target countries, which in accrual accounting affects the amount of recorded income in the financial period. In obtaining new institutional funding agreements we reached 80 per cent of the objective. Our results from private fundraising exceeded all expectations, while in corporate cooperation we fell short of the objective. The operational environment is expected to remain difficult in the future as well.

The total costs for the financial year amounted to 15.2 million. The combined costs of all operations of the entire foundation in Finland grew by three per cent from the previous year, the same amount that the expenditure budget was exceeded by.

Plan International Finland’s income
EUR 16.2. million

Plan International Finland’s costs
EUR 15.2. million

The foundation’s result from the financial year exceptionally showed a surplus of EUR 994,000. The foundation’s board of directors deemed it necessary to define a special use for this large sum of unallocated estate plan donations, so at the end of the financial period, they were not allocated to already ongoing development programmes. In connection with confirming the financial statement, the foundation’s board of directors decided that the surplus will be used to fund humanitarian programmes in target countries during the next years.

Programme work’s share of the total costs totalled EUR 11.2 million or 74%, so during the financial year we did not reach our objective of an 80% share. This was due to investments in fundraising and related systems, which is already showing in increasing income from donations, and also due to the recorded income amounts of public funding that were smaller than budgeted. The third factor that affected the number was the surplus recorded in the financial year.

We allocated EUR 8.6 million (57 % of total income) of programme work costs to Plan’s international development cooperation programmes. We spent EUR 1.1 million (7 %) on the programme and technical support of international and national work, EUR 1.0 million (7 %) on national programme work and EUR 0.5 million (3 %) on advocacy work, development education and communications.

The costs of fundraising amounted to EUR 2.3 million (15% of total income). During the financial year, we implemented a new system for fundraising and customer management. The transition period lasted longer than expected, increasing the costs of fundraising and also slightly delaying the updating of the donator services.

The costs of the organisation’s communications, management and administration, finance and IT totalled EUR 1.7 million (11 %).

Our operations in Finland are managed by the foundation’s board of directors, and the Secretary General is responsible for day-to-day operations. Plan International Finland’s Secretary General is Ossi Heinänen.

During the financial year, the board of directors of Plan International Finland had eight members. Gunvor Kronman, CEO, was the chair of Plan’s board of directors. Members of the board of directors were Kati Ihamäki, Tuula Kallio, Timo Kaunisto, Tauno Kääriä and Pentti Sydänmaanlakka. The youth member of the board of directors was Anniina Kontinen, the Mitä? network was represented by Sara Nurmilaukas and the Children’s Government was represented by Sofia Böling. The board convened six times during the financial year.

In addition to our programme work, the involvement of children is reflected also in the values of our entire organisation and in the internal culture. During the operational period of 2015 we involved children and youth more strongly than before in Plan International Finland’s decision making, and the youth’s Mitä? network was given a permanent representative position on the board of directors.

The members of Plan Finland’s management team were Secretary General Ossi Heinänen, CFO Olli Jahnsson, Marketing Director Kirsi Mettälä, Head of Domestic Programmes Sanna Viitanen, Communications Director Anna Könönen, Programme Director Julia Ojanen and Director of Business Cooperation Susanna Saikkonen.

On average, Plan Finland employed 47 regular and 17 fixed-term employees during the financial year. In addition, an average of 8 employees were on study or parental leaves. The average age of employees was 40.3 years.

Most of the contracts were regular (72%). Fixed-term work contracts were mainly signed with maternal leave substitutes and project workers.