Plan International Ireland launch world’s biggest data tracker for girls to 'identify the barriers"

“In today’s world girls have to be counted, we have to matter, girls are invaluable. This world needs us and we will not back down.”

These are the words of 18-year-old Etáin Sweeney Keogh, speaking in Dublin yesterday on the United Nation’s International Day of the Girl.

Etáin is on the youth advisory panel of the children’s charity — Plan International Ireland.

Yesterday Plan launched the world’s biggest data tracker for girls, with the aim of counting every girl on the planet by 2030.

“Essentially this is the biggest ever data tracker for girls in the world,” said Etáin. “It will gather information, it will help us to identify the barriers that hold girls back and look at ways to tackle those,” said broadcaster Maia Dunphy, who launched the initiative in Dublin.

“I know in our own country we still have our own struggles for equality as we’ve seen in the last couple of years from Waking the Feminists to the current battle to repeal the Eighth Amendment, but the difference is we have a voice in this country.

“We can go out and protest and we can make some noise. But so many girls living around the world don’t have a voice, they’re afraid to walk to school, they could be attacked, there’s sex trafficking, they’re forced into child marriage, these girls don’t have a voice and I honestly believe that we need to find their voice for them.”

Etáin said she joined Plan International after seeing a moving video in school.

“Two years ago I was brought into an all girls’ school somewhere in the back end of nowhere,” she said. “It all seemed very ordinary until I saw a video by Plan International.

“There was a young girl standing in a pretty white wedding dress at an altar. By her side stood a man, a groom four times her age. Her eyes held this look of dread that I will never forget.

“It was this compelling and powerful image that made me realise just how lucky I really was.

“At first I thought the girl would just stand there and take it, say ‘I do’, and submit but she didn’t.

“She shook her head, turned around and walked straight out those doors. It was empowering. It was much more than a statement against child marriage, it was a statement for change.

“In today’s world, girls fall between the cracks, we are voiceless, invisible, exploited. But if you thought we’d take that lightly, you are sorely mistaken.

“We are breaking the silence, changing the face of gender roles, we are the game changers, revolutionaries in our own right and we will not back down.”

For more information about the data tracker, see plan-international.org/girls