hasan & partners Unveils a Maternity Pack for 11 Year-Old Girls in Developing Countries

Children's rights organisation Plan International Finland has today unveiled a maternity pack concept designed for 11-year old mothers-to-be in developing countries.

With two million girls under 15 becoming mothers every year, the pack serves to highlight the shocking facts about child pregnancy.

Created by hasan & partners Helsinki, the initiative coincides with the annual International Day of the Girl Child on 11 October.

At the heart of the campaign is a one minute 30-second stop motion-style film, which shows how the pack would look and is crafted to encourage the public to donate money to Plan International to help reduce child pregnancies and ensure these packs aren't needed.

The film starts with bright colours and cheerful music which imitates a joyful baby product video, but quickly gets darker as the horrific reality of child pregnancies becomes clear.

The video explains each item from the pack, such as a "how to take care of your baby" picture book, because most girls cannot read.  There’s also a half litre bottle of water, so that the mother gets at least one drink of clean water after childbirth.

Other items include two dolls, one for the child and one for the mother to play with. There are also vaccines for mother and baby, plus a birth certificate - because the latter is often missing.

The pack is housed within two colourful boxes, decorated with prams and teddy bears, that wouldn’t look out of place in a child’s bedroom.  They could be repurposed as beds for the baby and the mother, because both at risk of abandonment by their families.  They could also be used as coffins given the high risk that both mother and baby could die during childbirth.

The concept is particularly poignant for Finns who are proud of their 75-year national tradition, which sees a maternity pack full of useful items given to every new mother by the state.

It's designed to give every child in Finland, no matter what their background, an equal start in life. Finland has one of the world's lowest infant mortality rates which some say the maternity packs have helped to achieve.

Tobias Wacker, creative director at hasan & partners, comments: “In modern societies it is easy to close your eyes to the issues that girls face in developing countries. The Finns have a deep-rooted national affection for the maternity package. We’ve used this connection to highlight how different a pack made for 11 year-old mothers would look, and to help people recognise the problem of child pregnancy in developing countries.”

Kirsi Mettälä, marketing director of Plan International Finland, adds: “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. The necessities that we often take for granted are simply not available to these expectant young mothers.”