Plan International hold annual global awards ceremonies to award their volunteers and projects that are excelling. I was asked to produce four films to profile these volunteers and the work they do for Plan. The films were screened in Germany at the end of 2014. 

One of the films is about Plan Uganda’s ‘Mobile Phone Participatory School Governance Project‘. Also known as The Nokia Project, it was awarded for ‘best use of technology’ by Plan. For this film I was given a lot of dense information about the Nokia scheme which I condensed into a script and narrative for the video. I was also given the ‘long version’ of it which was made from footage taken at the Kziba School in Luweero, Uganda. I cut this to make the three minute version you see here.

The Ugandan civil war of the 1980’s left a lot of the country crippled and its infrastructure destroyed. On top of that, hundreds of thousands of civilians were killed in the conflict and children were orphaned. Luweero was one of the places worst hit by the war. Plan International set up in the region in 1992 and from then on has been building Schools and improving the provision of education for Uganda’s children.

With support from the Finnish government, in 2011, Plan introduced a ground- breaking initiative to the Luweero district using Nokia’s mobile phone technology. The project has widely improved on the standards of Schooling in the area and subsequently the numbers of children both starting, and staying in School has increased.

In the process of producing these films, I discovered all the positive game-changing work Plan does in developing countries. I learnt about health projects promoting gender equality for women and children in Ghana, about a children’s group in Bangladesh fighting child marriage and an IT specialist at Plan Egypt committed to digitalising years of unworkable analogue systems.

To find out more about Plan’s Projects and how you can help to end child poverty, visit their website here: https://plan-international.org/what-you-can-do