Comprehensive Sexuality Education Training With Teachers and Community Leaders in Bikita District
Group Photo after the training at Chaka's Lodge in Bikita District
Despite the fact that every young person will one day have life-changing decisions to make about their sexual and reproductive health, research shows that the majority of adolescents lack the knowledge required to make those decisions responsibly, leaving them vulnerable to coercion, sexually transmitted infections and unintended pregnancy.
Realising this gap, Batanai HIV and AIDS Service Organisation in partnership with VSO, VSO Zimbabwe have launched comprehensive sexuality education. This has targeted teachers and traditional leaders, people who are believed to work with children and adolescent boys and girls. They are also custodians of the rights of young people.
Comprehensive sexuality education will enable young people to protect and advocate for their health, well-being and dignity by providing them with a necessary toolkit of knowledge, attitudes and skills. It is a precondition for exercising full bodily autonomy, which requires not only the right to make choices about one’s body but also the information to make these choices in a meaningful way. And because these programmes are based on human rights principles, they advance gender equality and the rights and empowerment of young people.
BHASO works with MoHCC, teachers (MoPSE) and local leaders (The Ministry of Local Government, Rural and Urban Development) to implement comprehensive sexuality education, both in schools and outside of schools through community-based training and outreach. BHASO also promotes policies for (through advocacy), and investment in, sexuality education programmes that meet nationally and internationally agreed upon standards.
Comprehensive sexuality education is a rights-based and gender-transformative approach to sex education, whether in school or outside of school. It is most effective when comprehensive sexuality education is taught over several years by integrating age-appropriate information that accounts for the developing capacities of young people. In this regard, we applaud the move by the government of Zimbabwe to integrate Comprehensive sexuality as a crosscutting them in the new curriculum.
Thus, the goal of the program is to prepare teachers and community leaders to educate young people in their schools and communities about comprehensive sexuality. During the training, it emerged that the laws and the current advocacies are in tangle. This relates to the issue of contraceptive commodities in schools and allowing health facilities support young women and young boys access services. Traditional leaders raised concern over the age of consent and the unreserved access to contraceptive. According to one of them, allowing young women have access to contraceptive is no problem, the problem is when we do not enforce the law on age of consent to sex. Thus to them, all efforts to grant open access to contraceptives should consider age.
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