Students need to play an active role in building support for CSE. Student councils, other student groups and individual youth leaders should be actively encouraged to provide input on the design, monitoring and evaluation of CSE programmes; collect information about their peers’ needs to develop the justification for CSE; or initiate dialogues with parents and other community members about the importance of CSE in their lives.
(Source: UNESCO, 2018 -- International Technical Guidance on Sexuality Education)
(Source: IPPF – 2017: We Demand More: A Sexuality Education Advocacy Handbook for Young People)
Young people are influenced by and have the capacity to influence several layers of people and structures around them. The ecological model below demonstrates the relevant layers of influence for a CSE programme, keeping individual adolescents in the centre:
Source: Chandra-Mouli et al. (2018) – “Building Support for Adolescent Sexuality and Reproductive Health Education”
The model shows the multiple and interacting determinants for adolescent sexuality, including their knowledge, attitudes and practices. These different layers of influence also interact across the different levels. Interventions that focus on all the layers in a targeted manner are more likely to be effective. By keeping adolescents at the centre, the idea is to focus on empowering them and working with them to address all the other layers.
The following tips can be considered when working to enable youth to be actively involved in CSE in their communities:
(Source: IPPF, 2017 -- Deliver + Enable Toolkit)