NTHIANO AND FATINATO: Scale up sex education among youths

In 2013, Kenya was among the 20 countries which endorsed a declaration committing to scale up comprehensive rights-based sex education beginning in primary school.

There was also sexual reproductive health services for adolescents and young people dubbed East and Southern Africa Commitments

The declaration, which is set to be renewed during the International Conference on AIDS and STIs in Africa 2021 in South Africa, under the steering of Unesco and other partners, was specifically designed to address poor reproductive health outcomes among adolescent and young people.

These include HIV transmission, cases of new infections that are still high among ages 14 – 25 according to Kenya’s HIV estimates 2018.

The commitments were geared towards reducing cases of teenage pregnancies, eliminating gender-based violence and child marriage which are detrimental to the social and economic wellbeing of adolescents and young people.

Seven years later, little progress has been made except in the form of documents, policies and frameworks at the country level which hardly get implemented.

A major challenge has been to reconcile rights-based approaches to providing information and services to adolescents with conservative approaches that oppose certain aspects of sex information, such as improving access to condoms and other reproductive health services for young people.

Education-sector policies have largely promoted HIV education and focused on abstinence, resulting in a limited scope of topics offered in school.

Life skills, the subject into which the widest range of topics are integrated is not examinable and hence there is little incentive for students and teachers to give these topics high priority.

A study by the Guttmacher institute in 2015 established that fewer than half of teachers (46 per cent) had received any in-service training on sex education and only 31 per cent had received such training in the past three years.

Among teachers who received either pre-service or in-service training, only 36 per cent were trained on all topics that constitute a comprehensive curriculum.

Nearly half of the teachers (45 per cent) felt unprepared or uncomfortable answering students’ questions on sex education.

The main barriers to teaching sex education were lack of teaching materials, time or training and embarrassment about certain topics.

Evidence compiled by UNFPA in Kenya, Netherlands and Germany show that young people who receive comprehensive sex education feel it is better to delay sex and initiate it at a later age consequently reporting lower teenage pregnancy and abortion rates than their peers in countries without CSE.

Ahead of the review and re-endorsement of East and Southern Africa commitment, the Ministries of Health, Foreign Affairs and Education should purpose a clear and coordinated action plan.

This will unlock the opportunity of decreasing the number of young people having sex at a very young age and reduce high-risk sexual behaviour by delivering age-appropriate sexuality education.

Nthiana is a youth advocate at the Network for Adolescent and Youth of Africa and Fatinato is the Youth Coordinator at the Centre for the Study of Adolescence 

Edited by Kiilu Damaris