Mombasa — “We wanted honest answers, but many adults thought we were too young to ask the questions.”
Young people are often at the centre of debates about their bodies, relationships, sexuality and health, yet their own experiences can be treated as secondary to the views of adults making decisions on their behalf.
For years, comprehensive sexuality education (CSE) has been treated as a taboo subject in many African classrooms.
CSE remains one of the most contested – and most urgent – conversations in youth health across the continent. Limited or incorrect information about sex, sexuality and reproductive health continues to be linked to higher rates of gender-based violence, HIV transmission, and teenage pregnancy in communities where CSE is patchy, poorly resourced, or absent altogether. Despite this, only a small fraction of schools in many countries currently provide anything close to a comprehensive curriculum, and the subject remains politically, religiously and culturally sensitive – often caught between competing views from parents, religious groups, educators and policymakers.
But what happens when young people are not simply asked for their opinions, but are given the tools to investigate the issues themselves?
It’s against this backdrop that a youth-led research initiative set out to do something different. Rather than have adults interpret what young people need, the researchers were young people, trained to go into their own communities, ask difficult questions, and bring back evidence grounded in lived experience rather than assumption.
Ahmed Kasule, who facilitated the session at the MenEngage Africa SRHR Learning and Exchange Symposium PROGRESS 2026 in Mombasa, Kenya, captured the principle behind the approach: “Nothing about us without us.”
Dr Remmy Shawa of UNESCO framed the significance of that shift.
The research, he said, showed the importance of young people being involved in generating, collecting, interpreting and disseminating evidence about issues affecting their lives. He described it as core to UNESCO’s commitment to comprehensive sexuality education programming and advocacy.
The research placed young people where they are too often missing from the conversation: not just as the subjects of policies and programmes, but as people capable of helping shape the evidence, policies and solutions that affect their lives.
Evidence gathered by organisations working in this space, including Sonke Gender Justice, whose Youth Participatory Action Research initiative engaged nearly a thousand young people in Malawi, Uganda and Ethiopia, points to a consistent pattern: where accurate, age-appropriate sexuality education is missing, young people don’t simply go without information. They fill the gap with less reliable sources – peers, pornography, harmful cultural narratives – often with damaging consequences for their health, safety and relationships.
Christian Fellner, Ambassador of the Republic of Austria to Kenya, said that the difficulty of researching sexuality begins with a simple problem: people often do not talk openly enough about it.
Fellner, who also described himself as an adjunct professor of political psychology, said that sexuality is an area where knowledge is often shaped by silence, assumptions and information passed between peers rather than evidence.
“People generally know very little about sexuality, because they simply don’t talk enough about that,” he said.
That lack of knowledge, he said, creates a problem for policymakers and others seeking to address issues such as sexually transmitted infections and teenage pregnancies. Effective interventions require an understanding of what is actually happening, rather than assumptions about young people’s behaviour and experiences.
He said that five hundred years ago, everyone would have agreed the sun rises in the east and sets in the west, a belief later overturned once science, and the willingness to ask questions, caught up with it. “How about sexuality? How do we know about such a complicated matter?” he asked. “No one tells us, except maybe from our peers” – information passed along mostly through “endless giggling,” and “in all likelihood pretty much nonsense.”
“If I don’t know what things are like, I cannot change them,” said Fellner.
He challenged political leaders who oppose or dismiss research on sexuality while simultaneously seeking to address the consequences of limited knowledge, including sexually transmitted infections and teenage pregnancies.
“You cannot on the one hand be concerned about sexually transmitted diseases, or teenage pregnancies for that matter, and on the other hand have no interest in research into sexuality or obstruct such research,” he said.
Fellner said the work of the young researchers contributes to a better understanding of the world and that evidence can help inform better decisions. He added that Austria’s own development approach places sexual and reproductive health rights (SRHR) at its centre, treating them as fundamental rights and “a key driver of sustainable development,” with gender rights central to that framework.
We went as people who were going to listen
Catherine Nakachwa, a youth researcher from Uganda, explained the journey behind the findings before the data itself was presented.
“Imagine you are a young person, let’s say an 18-year-old young person trying to figure out life,” she said. “You’re trying to look for someone I can safely open up to. Someone who won’t judge me. Someone who will be honest with me.” That search – for someone willing to have the difficult, honest conversation – was, she said, exactly where the research began.
Researchers from Ethiopia, Uganda and Malawi went into communities to explore that gap. Before collecting data, the young researchers received training in research ethics, focus group discussions, report writing and other research skills. This meant they were not simply sent into communities with questionnaires, Nakachua said, but were prepared to listen to their peers and have conversations without approaching them from a position of judgement.
The research involved 1,232 participants across the three countries. One of its clearest findings was that CSE is reaching many young people who are in school. In Malawi, 77.2% of young people in school reported receiving CSE, compared with 93.1% in Ethiopia and 82.6% in Uganda. But the researchers pushed further, asking two follow-up questions that reframed the picture entirely: what happens to young people outside the school system, and what, specifically, are in-school students actually being taught?
On the second question, she said, the answer was telling.
Much of what young people reported receiving centred on biology, HIV and AIDS, and abstinence -useful information, but narrower than what young people said they actually needed. “We need to have those difficult conversations,” Nakachwa relayed from participants. She described the kind of question a young person often can’t safely ask a teacher: which contraceptive method to use, for instance, only to be redirected toward what religious or cultural authorities say instead.
“Why do we make them as difficult conversations?” she asked. “Because they are part of us.”
That gap pushed the researchers to widen their inquiry beyond young people themselves, into conversations with health workers, teachers, and cultural and religious leaders, and from there, toward a question about power: who decides what is taught in a classroom, what is considered acceptable to discuss in a community, and what a young person is “supposed” to encounter at a health facility.
Nakachwa described this as one of the more difficult parts of the research. Her conclusion was not that culture, religion and community stand opposed to young people’s wellbeing “let culture guide young people, let parents protect young people, let everyone do their part” but that a problem emerges specifically when those in positions of trust decline to engage with difficult questions at all. “That is where the problem begins,” she said, “because the young person is left to make a decision.”
Young people with disabilities
A further finding centred on young people with disabilities, whose experience of CSE the researchers found to be significantly more complex. Nakachwa questioned how comprehensive the education could really be termed when whole groups – those with different communication needs or learning environments – are effectively excluded from it: sign-language interpretation that doesn’t extend to reproductive health content, schools without ramps, health facilities that remain physically inaccessible.
“We realised that, well, the three countries are trying,” she said. “But when a certain section of young people are left behind, it is that we are walking backwards but also facing backwards.”
The findings, therefore, point to a gap between having CSE on paper and making it meaningful in young people’s lives. Policies may exist, schools may teach aspects of sexuality education, and countries may commit to CSE frameworks, but implementation can still leave young people without the knowledge and safe spaces they need to ask difficult questions.
Teachers face their own constraints, she said; some described defaulting to abstinence-only messaging because it felt safer, while some cultural leaders and health workers expressed discomfort or suspicion toward young people seeking information, particularly around family planning.
For the young researchers, the answer was not to remove these adults from the conversation, but to strengthen their capacity to have it. “Our demand was not that we erase the work of those people,” she said. “Let us train them. Let them know what they are doing… We as young people, let us not be beneficiaries.”
“Let us be at the center of these policy discussions. Let us not be treated as recipients, but let us be treated as partners.”
She said that the goal was to stop “walking world-facing upwards” and instead move forward together, “without leaving any young person behind, regardless of their ability, disability, gender, race.”
In their own words
The research also brought young researchers face-to-face with stories that exposed the consequences of silence, stigma and gaps in sexuality education.
Anna Khaza from Malawi said that one of the most disturbing findings was how little space some young people had to talk openly about pregnancy and sexuality. She recalled a case in her community in which a girl hid her pregnancy from her family and neighbours until she gave birth.
“What is really shocking for me is that things are happening, but we don’t really have a safe space to be talking about these issues,” she said, describing it as the moment she understood why the research mattered.
Selemon Fikadu, from Ethiopia, found a different contradiction: young people could be taught about contraception, but still face judgement when they tried to access it.
“CSE access does not necessarily mean preparedness,” he said. He described how young people could be taught about condoms in classrooms and health facilities, yet face questions or stigma when they sought condoms or family planning services. Health workers who spotted a young person collecting contraceptives sometimes reported it back to their families. “Even up now I’m still asking why they teach about those methods… and yet in actual sense they don’t want us to put into practice,” he said.
Bokello Kaddir from Uganda, the research highlighted another gap: inclusion does not always translate into access for young people with disabilities. He said young people with disabilities were often included in policy language, while practical barriers remained at schools and health facilities.
“They seem to forget people with disabilities” when it comes to implementation, Kaddir said. He pointed to barriers ranging from inaccessible facilities to a lack of appropriate health services and personnel.
“Young people are supposed to be happy after decisions are being made for them,” he said, “but not to be happy after being supported to make decisions for themselves.”
Together, their experiences revealed a recurring gap between what policies promise, what CSE teaches, and what young people are actually able to access and use in their daily lives.
Turning evidence into a tool
“Teaching a child how to fight a lion does not mean they should go out and fight a lion,” said Jude Thaddeus Njikem of Sonke Gender Justice. “Teaching young people comprehensive sexuality education does not in any way promote sex, any sexual debut. That is a fact.”
He said that the researchers’ findings come at a time when comprehensive sexuality education is facing growing resistance across the continent. “We told ourselves that the evidence we’ve gathered needs to be transformed into something that young people can use,” Njikem said. “The people that have the loudest voice are the people that are least informed about what CSE is,” said Njikem. “Communities hear only about the myths, and they don’t hear about the evidence, how CSE is transforming lives.”
The team’s answer was to convert the research into a public resource hub.
The resource hub itself is built around six audience-specific tool sets for educators, parents and caregivers, community and traditional leaders, care leaders, government officials, and civil society. Each is tailored with the specific arguments, evidence, and language relevant to that audience.
Njikem said the resource is grounded in three principles: protection, evidence, and youth voices. It includes a stakeholder toolkit, an evidence hub that responds to common myths about CSE, and messages that can be adapted for different audiences. The platform also hosts the voices of the young people interviewed during the research – anonymised, but attributed to the youth researcher or country they came from – alongside a digital toolkit of ready-to-edit, Canva-based social media templates that anyone can customise and share.
One misconception the resource seeks to challenge is that CSE encourages young people to have sex. “Teaching young people comprehensive sexuality education does not in any way promote sex, any sexual debut,” he said. Instead, he pointed to evidence showing that CSE can support delayed sexual activity and help young people better recognise and respond to abuse.
For Sonke, the aim is to put the evidence generated by young people back into the hands of the communities, educators and policymakers shaping their lives and to ensure that young people’s voices remain part of those conversations. The research began with a simple premise. Young people should not only be the subjects of conversations about their bodies, relationships and futures. They should have a say in what is researched, what the evidence shows and what happens next.
“Let us not be treated as recipients, but let us be treated as partners in these policy discussions,” said Nakachwa.
