Q&A: Locally led development and a ‘relentless’ focus on girls’ rights

“I want us to work on normative change so that attitudes towards women and girls are never up for negotiation,” says Mustafa Kudrati, who joined Plan International USA as its new president and CEO on April 1.

Hailing from Tanzania, Kudrati comes to Plan with over three decades of experience working on issues related to gender equality, sexual and reproductive health and rights, social inclusion, and local ownership.

Drawing from his previous experiences at organizations including EngenderHealth and Pathfinder International, he wants to ensure that Plan International programs and practices worldwide are driving local change rather than imposing “top down” management structures.

“I think it’s very important for us to better understand: ‘What does it mean to engage with a local organization? Also, what does it mean to engage with our own offices around the world? What are the dynamics in the way we work and what's the kind of culture we want to create? How do we ensure that the engagement is not top down?’” he told Devex.

Kudrati is also a lifelong supporter of girls’ rights. He praises Plan International’s “relentless” focus on the adolescent girl and its approach to listening to and including the voices of young people.

Now, he says, he wants the organization to take that approach even further — “so that in all of our programs where there is a focus on the adolescent girl, that we are always engaging them, and never assuming.”

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. 

You previously worked with EngenderHealth, Pathfinder International, and other organizations on sexual reproductive health and rights, social inclusion, and local ownership. Can you tell us more about your career background and what drew you to Plan International USA?

I actually started my career working on children’s rights — and I’m dating myself a bit here, but I was really inspired by the U.N Convention on the Rights of the Child [in 1989]. I was studying international development in the U.S at the time, and my home country, Tanzania, was one of the first signatories.

So, with a friend of mine, we decided we needed to do something to help street children. We based ourselves in Tanzania’s second largest city [Mwanza] on the shores of Lake Victoria. As we worked we realized that a lot of the literature we'd been reading on child homelessness — examples [of projects] from India and Brazil — were actually working primarily with boys. We thought: “How can we engage girls? Is their pathway to the streets the same as boys?”

The answer was absolutely not … so we had to develop different programs. I think that was my first big insight into thinking “Hey, you can't just be a child rights activist and not have that nuance: you can’t assume that an intervention that is right for one group is necessarily right for another.”

This is one of the things that drew me to Plan International USA. Plan has had a relentless focus over the last several years on adolescent girls in all their diversity and where they feature in development — and I think that focus is one that we need both in advocacy and in programming.  

Once you work in sexual reproductive health and rights — as I have done for the past 20 years — you realize very quickly that you have to design projects with girls in mind, and with them involved.

How will your career experiences inform your leadership at Plan International USA?

We are a membership organization — there are over 20 countries [in Plan] that are fundraising countries, and many of those are implementing programs in their countries too. We're working in 78 countries overall. So one of the perspectives I bring is around engaging members — as locally-led development has been a big part of my career — and really ensuring we engage with all Plan offices and entities in a way that is not top down.

Secondly, there is this issue of programming for children — and how we need to listen to them. We’ve seen many different groups in recent years say: “No more programming without us involved,” and I agree. But when it comes to children, suddenly the standards change, because we start saying, “Oh, well, if you're under 18 years old, then perhaps we need to curtail all the ways in which you should be involved.”

Of course, we have to engage with children appropriately based on their maturity level and age, but I think there are so many opportunities to really engage and listen. That is something Plan already does a fantastic job at. We want to take that approach further, while ensuring child protection.

Given the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, protracted crises, and recent backsliding of rights for women and girls in a number of places around the world, what would you say are the key challenges and opportunities for Plan International USA in the upcoming period?

The context is very interesting. There are challenges and there are opportunities too as the world opens up.

Plan International has been working on raising awareness around the online violence that especially girls experience. In our policy work, we’ve been engaging heavily with the Biden Administration to increase their focus on online harassment and gender-based violence and hope to see that reflected in their upcoming strategies. We are now ready to support the U.S government on addressing online violence, not just in the U.S. but worldwide, as digital access becomes more available to girls.

Another area I’m excited about is locally-led development. It’s a concept being interpreted by many INGOs as an existential threat, but I don’t see it that way at all. It's high time we meet the commitments we made in the Paris Declaration [which called for greater local ownership of aid and development projects], almost 20 years ago. We haven’t met them all, but Plan plays a very special role.

We have heavy engagement at the grassroots level and at the community level to ensure local elites don’t just take all the opportunities being created. We will always ask: “Are ethnic minorities and women at the table?” We need to ensure adolescents are there too, and that they are being integrated into decision-making processes — that locally-led development includes all their voices.

How do you ensure that projects are locally driven and fair?

I’ll give you an example that I’m really excited about. In Brazil and Guatemala, we have developed the Equality Accelerator program where, instead of setting up systems for young women and girls to access funding, we shifted the paradigm and worked with more than 30 girls and young women leaders to design a funding platform for organizations led by girls and young women.  

This resulted in the development of a platform with an easily understood and common grant application process, [as well as] the linking of young-women- and girl-led organizations to a range of flexible funding opportunities, access to networks, selection of funding recipients through a democratic process led by young women and girls, and the approval for submission of video, rather than written reports.  

Internally, the program has required our own staff to yield power and to unlearn business as usual, and make processes more girl-friendly. We are still working on this internally, and we are continuing to learn; however, with our partners CIVICUS, Mama Cash, Frieda, and others, we have successfully distributed over $2.5 million in funding to young women- and girl-led organizations in both countries.

I think this is an approach that is a good example of locally-led development and I’m excited to look at how we take it beyond Guatemala and Brazil.

What are some other key priorities for Plan International USA going forward?

There are few priorities that stand out. We need to really listen to our Youth Advisory Board as we start to develop our next strategic plan. As I’ve been having conversations with them, a couple of things are coming across very strongly.

One thing they are very concerned about is the reproductive health and rights conversation in the U.S. While we recognize that our supporters come from a variety of backgrounds and political beliefs, we are going to provide platforms for young people to continue to advocate for what they believe is a right to own their own bodies — and that’s part of a larger, comprehensive SRHR program too.

Another thing that young leaders have brought up multiple times to me is what Plan is doing to address the climate justice issues that the world is facing. I think in the next five years it’s important for us to develop that muscle more strongly and to really figure out the best way for us to engage, both here in the U.S and in the countries that we're working in.

Finally, we will continue our focus on bringing the voices of young women and adolescent girls everywhere to our work.

What is your vision for the work of Plan International USA and what do you hope will be your legacy at the organization?

Plan, globally, is a very well known organization, but it's not the case yet in the U.S. And so I'd like us to become better known, in order to drive impact, so that when people hear Plan International in the U.S, they quickly associate us as being an organization at the forefront of adolescent girls’ rights. We have several programs on the way that should help us with stronger brand recognition moving forward.

My longer term dream with Plan — and something that has been wired into my career — is to make sure that girls’ rights are taken care of as a given, not as something that we have to be doing as a special case. I’m going to be really sick and tired if another narrow-minded person comes into power and undoes decades of work. I want us to work on normative change so that attitudes toward women and girls are never up for negotiation. This is the change we need to continuously work on.