From the very start, there were complaints about Plan International’s multi-year campaign focusing on the plight of the world’s girls.

Girls in developing countries need help: they spend less time in school, are the last in line to eat in a family meal, and are “the poorest of the poor,” as pink posters in the development agency’s “Because I Am A Girl” program proclaimed across Canada.

“But, from the get go, people were asking ‘what about boys?’” says Rosemary McCarney, President and CEO of Plan Canada.

In that spirit, Plan International’s new annual report, the fifth since the series began in 2007, is called “So, what about boys?” It will be released around the world next week.

Over the years, Plan research has shown that educating girls — some 500 million girls and young women live in the developing world — can have a powerful ripple effect, boosting the economies of their towns and villages.

But the simple truth, as this year’s report acknowledges, is that improving girls’ lives and achieving gender equality won’t happen without the partnership of boys and men, and of political and religious leaders, who are overwhelmingly male.

As the report says, unless men and boys work alongside the women and girls in their lives, equal rights “will remain a distant dream.”

Women meeting in women’s self-help groups will not in themselves produce change.

Meanwhile, boys in the developing world need help, too, in different ways.

Their lives are more violent. They are more likely to die from suicide or in traffic accidents. In Brazil there are 200,000 fewer men than women aged 15-29.

Boys are less likely to see a doctor. Rates of alcohol and drug use are higher.

Failing boys has been a sensitive issue in Canada in the past decade as boys have higher school dropout rates, and fewer men than women complete university and enter the professions.

“We wanted to tackle it head on,” McCarney says. There was a tension, often unspoken: by focusing on girls, was Plan leaving boys behind and encouraging discrimination against them?

Some of the criticism was direct, as in this email sent to Plan Canada: “It was pretty unfair to exclude boys from your work. Don’t you think that young boys need education, nutrition and opportunities as much as girls?”

“I thought, finally,” 15-year-old Maneesa, a youth spokesperson for Plan Canada who lives in Scarborough, says of the shifting of attention to boys. “I hear it every time I talk about girls’ rights. That’s the first question they ask.”

Sophie Grégoire-Trudeau, a volunteer for Plan Canada, also believes focusing on boys was long overdue. “When we don’t think that boys and men are part of the solution to gender inequality, we undermine their spirit and their minds.”

Men and boys’ behaviour bears on women in many ways — from domestic violence to health, housework and child care.

One of the striking observations in this year’s report is that men have more influence and may be able to convince communities to curb early marriage and female genital mutilation — which can lead to a host of medical problems for girls — more effectively than women. “We have decided that our daughter will not go through this bad, inhumane experience,” Egyptian religious leader Sheikh Saad, who has campaigned against the practice,” says in the new Plan report. “. . .I am part of the change.”

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Still, research cited in the report shows how much work is to be done. In Rwanda and India, 65 per cent of the 12- to 18-year-old boys and girls interviewed agreed with this statement: “A woman should tolerate violence in order to keep her family together. Some 43 per cent agreed that “there are times when a woman deserves to be beaten.”

On the domestic front, in India 83 per cent of the boys and 87 per cent of the girls interviewed said changing diapers, feeding and bathing children is a mother’s responsibility.

Girls spend between 33 per cent and 85 per cent more time on household chores than boys.

A girl from El Salvador complains that she does all the work while her brother watches TV. And a boy from El Salvador says when he looks after his younger siblings or does housework, his friends say he’s gay.

“People are counting on us to talk about girls and some are going to say we’ve caved in,” says McCarney. “But it isn’t working for boys and it isn’t working for girls.”

Achieving equality doesn’t “take away” from boys, she says. “Instead, it lifts us all up.”

The report urges probing the roots of violence and inequality and offers that boys and men become trapped in “traditional” notions of what it means to be a man. Mostly those gender roles are handed down through the generations and can be addressed both at home and through education.

The Because I Am A Girl reports focus on different themes each year but have also followed the lives of 142 girls (six have died) since 2007, a year after they were born, and will continue to follow them until their ninth birthdays, in 2015.

The girls’ fathers were interviewed for the new report, and all but one said they had been hit by their parents. Just as the burden of housework fell to their mothers, these men believed their wives should carry that same burden. “I didn’t help with chores,” said a father in the Philippines. “I was allowed to be idle here (at home). Ha. Ha.”

A father in Togo said a girl has to be prepared to serve her future husband. “Children learn what adults do.”

But the Plan survey showed that children were happier seeing their parents share cooking, laundry and decision-making. Not surprisingly, they benefited from growing up in more harmonious families.