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Rutgers as ‘Centre of Excellence on Sexuality Education’ has launched a new report: Scaling Up Sexuality Education: Lessons learned and considerations for civil society organizations. The report presents key steps needed to scale-up sexuality education to reach large groups of young people in a sustainable way.
The study also highlights the issues that civil society organisations must consider when deciding if and how they can provide support in the scale-up process. It is based on experiences and lessons learned from a number of case studies from a wide variety of countries like Benin, India, Indonesia and Zambia, and many others.
Why focus on scale-up and sustainability?
Despite a wealth of evidence on the need and effectiveness of learning about sexuality, amassed by Rutgers, her partners and likeminded organisations through a long history of working in this field; many children and young people still lack access to comprehensive, curriculum-based sexuality education. Lack of political commitment as well as insufficient budgets for implementation has often resulted in a patchwork of small-scale pilot projects and programmes. This has grave implications for the sustainability of sexuality education. In many countries, pilots and programmes have ended when donor funding ends, because the approach is not sustained by the government or implementers or funders have neither developed a robust handover to government, nor an approach to long-term sustainability.
How can civil society organisations contribute to scale-up?
This report by the Centres of Excellence gives an overview of the trajectory for scaling up sexuality education. Crucially, it demonstrates; in theory and practice, the different ways in which civil society organizations can contribute to sustainable sexuality education. It also provides questions for civil society organizations to consider in determining their potential role. It presents key steps in each stage of the process of scale-up – explaining what each stage involves and sharing lessons learned, including factors that can contribute to or undermine success.
About the Rutgers Centres of Excellence on sexuality education
This report is produced by Rutgers under the Centres of Excellence program. The Centres of Excellence program supports four member associations of the International Planned Parenthood Federation: Rutgers (The Netherlands), Association Togolaise pour le Bien-Etre Familial (Togo), Planned Parenthood Association of Ghana (Ghana) and Profamilia (Colombia) to act as ‘Centers of Excellence’. Their objective is to share expertise and knowledge with other organizations, institutions, peer educators, activists and government decision-makers to support them to deliver quality sexuality education and address the challenges of large-scale implementation. The activities focus on the dissemination of existing and development of new knowledge, identification of gaps and promising practices, testing and validating concepts, with the aim of providing support to others, while avoiding duplication.
Questions or feedback, please tell us!
Rutgers continuously aims to improve and adapt its work to remain relevant for its partners. Do you have comments, questions or feedback related to this publication? Please tell us via centreofexcellence@rutgers.nl.
