Annual reports
Read our 2025 Trustees’ annual report and reports from previous years.
Read our 2025 Trustees’ annual report and reports from previous years.
Our Trustees' Annual Report shows how Plan International UK is advancing children's rights and equality for girls. It highlights our progress, income and spending over the past year. Despite major global challenges, your support helped us reach nearly 6 million children, young people and their communities around the world with our work this year.
our impact this year (2024 - 2025)
was raised to support children's rights and equality for girls.
people directly supported by our programmes, 65% of whom were girls and women.
projects in 45 countries reached young people and their communities across the world.
How have we delivered impact for children and girls?
We deliver impact for children and girls through programmes around the world that meet both urgent humanitarian needs and deliver long-term change, and are shaped and delivered with local communities and partners. And they include our global child sponsorship programme which strengthens whole communities’ ability to provide for children and girls’ unique needs.
We also deliver bold campaigns and influencing work, with girls’ voices at the heart, to challenge the systems and structures holding them back.
To ensure this work has lasting impact on the lives of children and young people, we prioritise three cross-cutting areas in all that we do: focusing on achieving equality for girls, ensuring our approach is youth-centred and responding to the growing climate crisis.
This year, we continued to support those affected by ongoing humanitarian crises in Gaza, Sudan and Ukraine delivering life-saving aid including psychosocial support and protecting children from violence. We also supported communities affected by the devastating 7.7 magnitude earthquake in Myanmar reaching over 20,000 individuals with emergency food, drinking water, shelter materials and blankets. Other highlights from some of our programmatic work globally over the last year include:
- Helping 60,000 out-of-school children – mostly girls – to learn again after conflict and trauma in Nigeria
- Equipping young women with the skills and training to gain employment and earn a livelihood across Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam, Korea and Philippines
- Improving access to school for children in Tanzania who often miss out due to poverty or living with a disability
- Reaching thousands of young people in the UK with period related information and launching our Period Peers handbook designed by and for young people, through our new Period Peers Programme with Nurofen.
This year we:
- Ensured that politicians heard what girls wanted to see from a new Government after the July 2024 general election, sharing our youth manifesto Girls Can’t Wait
- Helped secure government funding commitments impacting girls and their communities affected by the devastating humanitarian emergency in Sudan, including through speaking out in the media about the Sudan crisis, and delivering a petition and open letter to the Prime Minister
- Achieved a win for youth voices being heard at the UN, through supporting a member of our Youth Advisory Panel (YAP) to attend the 58th Commission on Population and Development (CPD), where she co-created and delivered a major statement and fed into the UK’s position on sexual and reproductive health issues
- Highlighted challenges facing girls in the UK through our State of Girls’ Rights in the UK report, securing significant media coverage and increasing engagement with MPs and Ministers around policy solutions
Achieving equality for girls – Mitais’s story
“I can make dresses, uniforms, tracksuits, as well as pillows,” says 20-year-old Mitais in Zimbabwe. “Before SAGE, I had nothing to do, no skill or any source of income.”
Supporting Adolescent Girls Education (SAGE TEACH) is Plan International’s flagship programme funded by UK Aid. Now in its second phase, the programme supports girls and young women like Mitais to access education and employment. Since the programme started in 2018, over 19,000 girls and young women have been supported to complete accelerated learning courses, technical and vocational qualifications, and gender empowerment and life skills training. “I was taught to read and write which is something I could not do before, as well as mathematical calculations,” explains Mitais.
A youth-centred approach
Our State of Girls’ Rights in the UK report launched in July 2024 was one of our biggest exercises to date in listening to girls’ voices. Engaging with over 3,000 girls and young women aged 12 to 21, our research showed that girls don’t feel safe, in public or online, and face relentless pressure to look and act a certain way. They feel unprepared by their education, worried for future job prospects and scared by a rising culture of misogyny.
The research received widespread coverage in media and was raised in Parliament. We hosted a parliamentary launch event, co‑created with youth groups and our Youth Advisory Panel (YAP), attended by the Minister for Violence against Women and Girls, scores of MPs and others. This helped build crucial new relationships to keep up pressure on the Government to deliver for girls’ rights, demonstrate the action that girls want, and restore girls’ trust in politicians.
Responding to the climate crisis – Ethel’s story
Farmer Ethel, 23, from Malawi relies on agriculture for her family’s livelihood. The impact of climate change has reduced crop production and they have struggled to eat a balanced diet making their daughter Lonny unwell. Now, Ethel and her family have learnt how to eat more healthily with limited resources, through training delivered by community care groups.
“Since I started participating in the cooking sessions and household visits, I have gained knowledge about nutrition. I’ve seen how they’ve significantly helped my child fight off diseases. Now that my daughter isn’t getting sick as often, I can focus on taking care of my household and watch her play happily.”
The care groups also promote poultry rearing as a sustainable source of food making Ethel and her community more resilient to climate-related food shortages.
Driving meaningful change
Since our last report, the scale and depth of our impact have continued to inspire. From delivering bold new programmes to responding to global humanitarian crises, our work has reached far and wide – transforming lives, shifting narratives, and driving meaningful change.
— Rose Caldwell, CEO of Plan International UK
Thanks to our supporters
UK sponsors supported nearly 58,000 children.
campaigners in the UK stood with us to fight for equality for girls.
supporters generously donated to our work.
Delivering on our strategy
We’re shifting power to support more locally led and globally connected change. Our goal is to ensure communities drive decisions that affect them while we collaborate across borders for greater impact.
This year we advanced our Building Equitable Partnerships initiative, shaped FCDO policy on localisation within global humanitarian settings, and promoted Pledge for Change principles. In Zambia, we piloted a “reverse call for proposals,” putting communities in control of programme design.
By sharing learning and tools across the sector, we’re helping build stronger, fairer systems so aid works better for girls and young people everywhere.
We’re scaling up our humanitarian impact to meet growing global needs caused by conflict, climate change and displacement. Girls are often hardest hit, so we’re acting faster to deliver aid, raise awareness and mobilise funds.
This year we responded rapidly to crises in Myanmar, Gaza and Sudan, providing life-saving support and helping influence the UK Government’s £226.5m commitment to Sudan. We also shared expertise from across five countries to make education in emergencies more gender equal and inclusive - ensuring girls can keep learning, even in the toughest circumstances.
Despite global aid cuts and economic uncertainty, we strengthened and diversified our funding to keep delivering change for girls. This year we secured major new income, including for a World Bank funded programme to empower women in Liberia as well as funding for humanitarian support from diverse donors including the UN.
We're shifting from relying on a few fundraising methods and audiences to adopting new, revitalised approaches that reach more supporters. We reached record highs in brand awareness, grew regular giving, and saw online donations rise 55% after improving digital tools and payment options. We introduced a new high-value donor product, co-funded by major donors and foundations, which has so far raised over £300,000 supporting families in drought-affected regions of Somaliland with food security and child protection.
On International Day of the Girl 2024, Plan International UK unveiled ice sculptures of schoolgirls along the Thames, highlighting the millions of girls worldwide being frozen out of education. The sculptures, are based on girls from Gaza, Sudan and Afghanistan, some of the toughest places for girls to access education.
