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In Kenya, both girls and boys get trained in school to fight and prevent sexual and gender based violence. The training is facilitaed by our Keyan Yes I Do partner Umajaa.

Explore4Action is a pioneering research programme, exploring how adolescents experience ‘growing up’ at three locations in Indonesia (Sumatra, Bali and Java) and what can support their positive and healthy sexual development. These important insights will be used to make the case for better services and health education. Young people will be at the forefront of the research and play a central role in the advocacy for better services and health education.

Young people in Uganda have taken a stand against a ban on sexuality education in schools, announced by the Ministry of Gender. At the Intergenerational Dialogue (IGD) on sexual health in Kampala, 3,000 youths expressed their discontent.

On May 19th Rutgers will give a special lesson on sexuality education to a committee from the Dutch Parliament, which has caused quite a stir. Rutgers will be accompanied by sexologist and television personality Goedele Liekens and a group of students. During the lesson Rutgers will promote the idea that empowerment should become an integral part of the primary goals i in education regarding sexuality and relationships. Rutgers hopes that the Netherlands will continue to encourage other countries to address this issue as well.

Last Sunday, January 31, the Italian news programme Presa Diretta focused extensively on the Taboo of Sex: cyberbullying, sexting and sex education for young children. The Dutch situation is taken as a good example. The broadcast caused a stir in conservative Italy.

On World Aids Day, 1 December 2015, experts and policy makers from all over the world will gather in Durban, South Africa to explore a bigger role for female condoms in the prevention of HIV/AIDS and unintended pregnancies.

The Royal Netherlands Embassy in Burundi has today approved EUR 17.4 million in funding for a joint national programme “Improving the sexual and reproductive health of adolescents and youth in Burundi” (2016-2020). Over a period of five years the programme will be gradually scaled-up nation-wide.

In October an expert meeting took place in Pretoria (South Africa) on SRHR education and HIV prevention programmes for adolescents and young people. For three days 100 people, from 18 different countries, working with and for young people and sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR) and HIV prevention had the opportunity to link policy and practice. Read a reflection of the results in the online magazine called ‘More Access and Better Quality’.

The documentary Sex in Class was broadcasted on Channel 4 in the UK on 6 august 2015. In this programme Belgian tv-presenter and sexologist Goedele Liekens advocates for a more explicit style of sex-and-relationships education in British secundary schools. A pilot was held in a Lancashire school. Right after the show #SexInClass was trending topic on Twitter UK.

Recently Rutgers Indonesia, in cooperation with all eight partners, launched a smartphone app ‘Sobat Ask’, which translates to ‘Ask your friend’. It is the first app for Indonesian young people that allows them to gain access to accurate, reliable, non-judgemental and youth-friendly information regarding a range of subjects relating to sexual and reproductive health and rights.

In April, Savana Signatures (SAVSIGN), a Tamale-based NGO, launched the Ghanaian CSE program ´The World Starts With Me´ (WSWM). With this launch Ghana is the 11th country in Africa and Asia that provides young people a comprehensive and evidence-based programme on sexual and reproductive health and rights.

Teachers from 10 schools in the Northern Region of Ghana have been trained on how to teach comprehensive reproductive health.The aim is to help educate teenagers at the junior high schools (JHS) about their bodies and the impact of early sexual activities on their lives. The training is under the NGO’s teacher facilitation training of ‘My World and My Life’ (MWML), which is being piloted in some schools to equip the beneficiary teachers with skills to teach sex education. The MWML curriculum is developed by Rutgers.

The Burundi government has recently adopted a national module for Comprehensive Sexuality Education (CSE) in all schools. It even decided to train community workers and health workers in Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights so that the information will be more widely accessible within communities and the healthcare system.

While UNAIDS recognizes the importance of comprehensive sexuality education in the 2011-2015 Strategy Getting to Zero, the 2014 World AIDS Report hardly mentions education. Our experiences show how comprehensive sexuality education may be the missing link to achieve the end of the epidemic and make it sustainable for generations to come.

With a quarter of the world’s population under 24 years old and 90 percent of them living in developing countries, now is the time to invest in the sexual and reproductive health and rights of young people. Only that way developing economies will be able to reap the benefits of the demographic dividend. This was the message of Young People and the Transformation of the Future, an interactive afternoon held in The Hague on November 18.

In a world of adult concerns, young people are often overlooked. While the number of young people will continue to rise in coming years, countries that meet youth’s needs now will be in a far better position by the second half of the century. These are some of the key points of UNFPA's State of the World Population Report 2014 The power of 1.8 Billion: Youth and the Transformation of the Future.

Kampala, Uganda - Today nearly half of the World’s population – around 3 billion people- are under the age of 25. As these young people become sexually active, sexual and reproductive health services are under increasing pressure.

A delegation from Burundi are in Nairobi to learn from their Kenian colleagues about comprehensive sexuality education (CSE) and how it can best be taught in secondary schools. In July a group of young people, UN officials and government and civil society representatives from Burundi are in Nairobi to visit the Centre for the Study of Adolescence (CSA). This Rutgers partner organisation is implementing the comprehensive sexuality education programme the World Starts with Me (WSWM) in schools in Kenya.

It will not be much longer before we know how the international community thinks the world should change, and how much we will support each other to do this.

A memorandum of understanding was signed to develop a sign-language curriculum called Life Skill Based Education (LSBE) for young hearing-impaired people that lack the necessary resources. It was signed by the Family Educational Services Foundation (FESF) and Rutgers Pakistan, said a press release.