As the world witnesses a terrifying anti-rights backlash in the US and many other parts of the world, Australia can’t afford to turn its back on adolescent girls in crisis, writes Susanne Legena, CEO of Plan International Australia.
This week, my teenage daughter returns to school for the year, and our house will be pure chaos for a few weeks as we settle into a new routine. Alarms slept through; breakfasts gulped down in a rush; uniforms hastily ironed; the bedroom turned upside down in a frantic search for the hair straightener and hair ties.
Somewhere in a small coastal village in the Pacific, a 15-year-old girl may also be preparing for the new school year – but in starkly different circumstances to my daughter. She’s uncertain whether she will actually even return to school. A recent cyclone has damaged classrooms and forced her family to make impossible choices about fees, transport and safety. Her mother worries about food and rising costs. Her father worries about debt. Neighbours quietly suggest that marriage might offer security. None of this feels extraordinary in her community. But for this girl, it is the moment when her future narrows, not because of a lack of ability or ambition, but because of the risks that encroach on girls during adolescence.
Across the Asia–Pacific, more than 240 million adolescent girls are coming of age in similarly fragile circumstances, in a time of profound uncertainty. Climate shocks are disrupting schooling and livelihoods. Economic stress is pushing families to the brink. Conflict and displacement are rising. And hard-won gains on gender equality and sexual and reproductive health and rights are facing a coordinated global backlash. Progress for girls has been real, but it remains uneven, fragile, and easily reversed when systems are under strain.
One year since the USAID cuts
We have just passed the one-year mark since dramatic cuts to the United States’ foreign aid program were made, the devastating consequences of which are now painfully clear – particularly for girls and women’s sexual and reproductive health rights.
The impact of these cuts is being compounded by a broader rollback of girls’ and women’s rights globally, including the expansion of restrictive anti-rights policies in the US, which limits funding for organisations providing or even discussing reproductive health care.
A sombre new analysis released by the Gates Foundation this month found that child mortality is projected to rise in 2025 for the first time this century, reversing decades of progress in global health. This is a decline unquestionably tethered to the dismantling of the US’s international assistance.
Mountains of research also tell us that adolescence is an irreversible inflection point in a girl’s life. It is when gender inequality becomes tangible: when girls are most likely to be pulled out of school, married early, exposed to violence or harassment, or experience an unintended pregnancy. Once these transitions occur, the losses compound across a lifetime and into the next generation. Investment delayed until adulthood cannot recover what is lost during these years.
I’ve been at the helm of Australia’s largest girls’ rights INGO for a decade now, and the tragedy – and the opportunity – is that this life stage remains chronically under-recognised in development policy, financing and focus.
Just a fraction of global gender equality funding reaches adolescent girls, who are often absorbed into broad categories such as “women and children”, making their specific risks invisible. And when aid budgets tighten, the adolescent girl-focused services are among the first to be cut. This is not a neutral omission. It is a choice that permanently constrains girls’ rights and locks in avoidable social, economic and intergenerational costs.
Adolescent girls are not a niche group; they are a large, high-potential population facing systematic under-investment at precisely the moment when intervention matters most.
With the world in the state that it’s in right now, this all matters not only for girls’ rights, but for Australia’s broader, regional development, financial and security objectives.
Across the region, fewer than half of girls complete lower secondary school in countries such as Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, Timor-Leste, and Myanmar. Girls and young women are twice as likely as their male peers to be not in education, employment or training. In low-income countries, nine in ten adolescent girls and young women remain offline, reinforcing a gendered digital divide that limits education and economic participation.
Risks to girls’ health and safety peak during adolescence. Complications from pregnancy and childbirth remain among the leading causes of death for girls aged 15–19 globally. Violence against women so often begins in adolescence: in parts of South Asia and the Pacific, more than one in five adolescent girls report physical or sexual violence. Climate-related disasters are already driving school dropout and child marriage across the region, as families resort to short-term coping strategies with lifelong consequences for girls.
Yet the evidence is equally clear about what works: targeted, integrated approaches fir girls that combine education, sexual and reproductive health and rights, violence prevention, skills development and norm change. It means serious health and social protection costs later in life are avoided, higher lifetime earnings for women and families and reduced exposure to violence.
This is why investing in adolescent girls is both a rights imperative and a strategic investment.
Australia’s International Gender Equality Strategy provides a strong policy foundation. Its ambition, across education, economic participation, health, violence prevention, and climate and humanitarian action, cannot be realised without deliberately reaching girls during adolescence.
Around the region, I have seen what becomes possible when girls are supported at this pivotal moment. When they are supported to stay in school after a cyclone, to access age-appropriate health care and sex ed without stigma, and to advocate for staying in school, learning skills for the future, and participating in shaping the big decisions that affect their lives. These are not acts of charity. They are investments in leadership, resilience and shared prosperity. It is not a magic solution, but it is the one with evidence and data to back it up.
The question before us is not whether the evidence is strong enough. It is whether policy and funding will finally align with what we already know. Adolescent girls can no longer be left to fall through the cracks. The cost of inaction is too high – and the opportunity too great – to ignore.