In Kenya, primary and secondary school students take courses called Life Skills Education. So do students in Malawi, Mozambique, Namibia, and Swaziland. South Sudan adds “peace-building” to the subject title. Lesotho, Madagascar, Rwanda, Tanzania, Uganda, and Zambia are more direct. These countries add the word “sexuality” to the course name.

Lofty Aspirations

Rwanda and Zambia, in fact, abide by what the United Nations argues young people most need in an increasingly crowded and challenging world of human relationships. In those countries, schools offer something actually labeled—perhaps reflecting aspiration more than technical accuracy—Comprehensive Sexuality Education.

Thus, many eastern and southern African countries have begun dealing in the past few years with the perpetually fraught question of how to teach children and adolescents about sex and sexuality. While pervasive social attitudes in many cases limit what can be discussed in class, some African nations are taking creative steps toward education that could support not only healthy sexuality but better gender relations and a reduction in sexual violence in the world’s most youthful continent.

Young and Sexually Active

Definitive data on these topics throughout Africa’s 54 diverse countries are not easy to come by. But according to the Guttmacher Institute, an estimated 7.5 million adolescent women in Sub-Saharan Africa—not much less than the population of New York City—are sexually active and don’t want to be pregnant now or in the next two years. Yet they are not using modern contraception. Nearly two-thirds of sexually active women in the region between 15 and 19 fit this description.

Compared with females elsewhere, those in Africa are under more pressure than average to get married young and have sex. By one estimate nearly one-fifth of all African girls and women between 10 and 19 become pregnant. Nearly four in 10 girls younger than 18 in Sub-Saharan Africa are married, and African women generally face some of the highest rates of sexual violence in the world.

Well-being, Relationships, and Rights

Widespread adoption of comprehensive sexuality education (CSE) in Africa could address—and arguably reduce some of these dismal statistics. Done right, such courses are about much more than sex. As defined by United Nations agencies, CSE means “teaching and learning about the cognitive, emotional, and physical aspects of sexuality. It aims to equip children and young people with knowledge, skills, attitudes, and values that will empower them to:

• realize their health, well-being, and dignity;
• develop respectful social and sexual relationships;
• consider how their choices affect their own well-being and that of others; and,
• understand and ensure the protection of their rights throughout their lives.”

Few classrooms worldwide achieve the full array of aspirations in this definition. Thousands of school districts in the United States are probably farther from achieving this ideal than the African countries mentioned above. The ambition is at least substantively evident in age-appropriate programs like one offered in St. Jan de Doper elementary school in Utrecht in the Netherlands, where children as young as kindergarteners learn about the pleasures as well as risks of feeling close to others.

As they advance through the grades, students in programs like these learn not just about the sexual aspects of closeness, but about how to tolerate differences in appearance and beliefs. They learn how to make decisions with intention, how to communicate effectively, what consent is and how to refuse it, and how to accept rejection—all skills that everyone needs to learn not when but well before sexual situations and decisions present themselves.

Actions Fall Short

The limited documentation that can be found on CSE in Africa offers a hopeful, albeit mixed picture. On the one hand, 21 governments in Eastern and Southern Africa agreed in 2013 to ramp up sexuality education and youth-oriented reproductive health services in their countries, largely to respond to the HIV threat to young people. Each of the countries mentioned in the first paragraph signed that agreement, leading to the courses their schools offer today. A 2019 Population Reference Bureau (PRB) scorecard of youth-oriented family planning policies in 15 Sub-Saharan African countries found that 13 supported the provision of sexuality education.

But actions have fallen well short of intent. Of the countries PRB surveyed, only one, Côte d’Ivoire, fully promoted the UN’s comprehensive sexuality standards. And it’s not clear how or to what extent the country’s policy was implemented in schools. Nigeria discouraged sexuality education altogether. Uganda, despite calling its course “sexuality education,” requires students to commit to sexual abstinence.

A 2019 report on comprehensive sexuality education in Sub-Saharan Africa, a collaborative effort by Forum for African Women Educationalists (FAWE) and the African Population and Health Research Center (APHRC), concluded that “most countries lack frameworks for monitoring and evaluating CSE programs” and fail to engage adolescents as stakeholders in designing the programs. Worse yet, their report concluded, social taboos prevalent in many African countries ban some topics—abortion, homosexuality, and masturbation, for example—from the classroom altogether.

Experts “would tell us that it’s not comprehensive sexuality education if you don’t include this lesbianism and gayism,” one Zambian education official said, according to the report. “That one we just had to put a foot down.”

In many schools, teachers barely mention even condoms and other contraceptives for fear of encouraging promiscuity or igniting the fury of parents and local authorities. Few countries take one step the UN agencies consider critical for CSE: integrating reproductive health services with the education itself.

Reasons for Optimism

Despite the obstacles, however, green shoots of healthy CSE activity are sprouting in pockets of Africa. But they need publicity, encouragement, and nurturing to flourish and spread. A program in some schools in Burundi makes available “school aunts” and “school fathers,” school staff is chosen with student input, to counsel students who ask for help on matters of sex or sexual violence. The program is modeled on family tradition in the country, where trusted paternal aunts teach girls about sex while fathers are tasked with the responsibility for boys. It’s not strictly speaking comprehensive sexuality education, but it is a creative step in the right direction.

Small-scale programs in Senegal, Nigeria, and Mozambique, the report found, “have invested extensively in pre- and in-service training for teachers to develop their capacity to deliver CSE in schools.” Zambia’s program, despite its skittishness on some topics, earned high praise for engaging not just the country’s ministries of health and education but also those involved in development, gender, and sports. Digital technologies supplement the country’s school-based programs. Zambia’s education budget includes line items for instruction in sexual and reproductive health. Teacher training is prioritized, as is monitoring and evaluation.

Zambia’s CSE program stands out in Africa. But the fact that CSE appears to be moving forward in that country—and in Namibia, which earned similar praise in the report—looks promising for the continent. Some experts in African affairs have argued that comprehensive sexuality education can’t happen in Africa, given pervasive social mores and taboos related to sex and gender. But the available documentation makes clear that it can happen and that there are classrooms in Africa that are beginning to approach the ideal right now.

What’s needed is more attention and discussion of comprehensive sexuality education, to the point that other countries around the world—and not only those in the developing world—begin to emulate and build on lessons learned in the most youthful continent. The result could be truly healthy sexuality and personal relationships among young people worldwide.