Across the Asia–Pacific, more than 240 million adolescent girls are coming of age amid converging crises: shrinking aid budgets, intensifying climate shocks, demographic pressure, and a growing global backlash against gender equality and sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR). These forces are colliding at the precise life stage when inequality becomes entrenched, and when intervention delivers the highest and most durable returns.
Australia’s International Gender Equality Strategy (IGES) will not be successful without targeted investment in adolescent girls. Progress across all five IGES priorities: ending gender-based violence and advancing SRHR; climate and humanitarian action; economic equality; peace and security; and leadership and locally led change, depends on whether girls are supported through adolescence. Without adolescent-specific action, Australia risks paying higher downstream costs while falling short on its own policy commitments.
To deliver the IGES and safeguard development gains in a global context of escalating crisis, Plan International Australia calls for Australia to:
- Commit AUD 50 million over four years in a cross-portfolio funding envelope for adolescent girls,
aligned explicitly to the five IGES priority areas. - Set a portfolio target so that at least 15% of gender equality investments identify adolescent girls
as primary beneficiaries by 2030, with potential to increase this share as systems mature. - Introduce tagging and annual reporting to track investment reaching adolescent girls.
- Require age- and sex-disaggregated data, including younger adolescents, across relevant investments.
