Plan Equips Young Mothers with Maternity Packages

You may not have known it until now, but today is International Day of the Girl Child – a date commemorated by the UN since 2012.

The date aims to raise awareness of gender inequality around the world and improve living conditions for women worldwide.

To mark the occasion, Finish agency hasan & partners has created a clever campaign for developmental organisation Plan International to highlight the fact that in some developing countries, as many as two million girls under 15 are becoming mothers on an annual basis.

The tongue-in-cheek spot, entitled The Maternity Package, evokes the Finnish tradition that new mothers are given maternity packages with useful products and items to kit them out at the start of motherhood.

However in this campaign, what initially starts as a light-hearted spot about the importance of nurturing mothers and their babies after birth, quickly descends into dismay once the horrific facts are revealed.

“We want to raise awareness of the huge number of child mothers in the world, and the conditions in which these young girls have to give birth and raise their children,” says Plan’s marketing director, Kirsi Mettälä. “The necessities that we often take for granted are simply not available to these expectant young mothers.”

Some of these conditions include young mothers who can’t read; who don’t have access to clean drinking water; and who are separated from their child at birth.

Almost a minute into the stop-motion spot helmed by Jukka Honkanen, the bright colours used at the start become discoloured to reflect the most depressing fact of the campaign; that young mothers and their offspring often die during childbirth due to the lack of sanitation.