Mombasa, Kenya — What happens when the first thing a parent hears about comprehensive sexuality education is that it teaches children to have sex? Or when a faith leader encounters CSE through a social media post warning that it is foreign, anti-family, or incompatible with African values?
For organisations working on sexual and reproductive health and rights, that has increasingly become the problem.
The debate around Comprehensive Sexuality Education, commonly known as CSE, is no longer simply about what happens inside a classroom. It is being fought in churches, homes, community meetings, parliaments and, increasingly, online.
And in those spaces, evidence does not always arrive first.
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That challenge sat behind the launch of cseresources.genderjustice.org.za, a new digital resource platform unveiled in Mombasa, Kenya, on 14 August during the MenEngage Africa SRHR Learning and Exchange Symposium PROGRESS 2026.
Its premise is deliberately simple: communities should be able to encounter evidence about CSE before misinformation defines the conversation.
The platform describes itself as a space for informed dialogue about comprehensive sexuality education, built around the idea: “Rooted in values. Ready for life.”
It comes at a difficult moment.
Across the continent, CSE has increasingly become a contested political, cultural and religious issue. The platform’s developers argue that communities frequently hear myths before they encounter evidence and designed the resource hub as one way of reversing that order.
But can another website really change a debate this polarised? The answer, according to Sonke Gender Justice, depends on what is put on the website – and whose voices shape it.
From research subjects to knowledge producers
One of the most important things about the platform is what came before it.
Young people in Malawi, Uganda and Ethiopia were not simply asked what they thought about sexuality education. They participated in Youth Participatory Action Research, investigating how CSE was experienced in their own communities.
Nearly 1,000 young people across the three countries ultimately informed the platform. Their experiences, questions and words were used to shape its content.
That distinction matters.
At the PROGRESS 2026 Symposium, young researchers described environments where sexuality is constantly present in young people’s lives but conversations about it remain difficult. They spoke about questions around contraception, pregnancy, relationships and health that young people sometimes struggle to raise with parents, teachers, health workers and other adults.
They also described a recurring contradiction: information may technically exist, while the social conditions needed to use that information do not.
Young people may learn about contraception and still be judged for trying to access it. Policies may promise inclusion while young people with disabilities continue to encounter inaccessible schools, information and health facilities. CSE may appear in a curriculum while difficult questions are redirected toward silence, abstinence or someone else.
For the researchers, the question therefore became bigger than whether CSE exists.
What kind of CSE are young people actually receiving, and can they use what they learn in their everyday lives?
That question sits at the centre of the new platform.
Protection, not provocation
For years, some of the strongest opposition to sexuality education has been built around a particular fear: that giving young people information about sex will encourage them to become sexually active.
Jude Thaddeus Njikem of Sonke Gender Justice used an analogy from a religious leader during discussions around the research. Teaching a child how to respond to a lion, he argued, does not mean encouraging that child to go looking for one. The same principle, he said, applies to sexuality education. Giving young people comprehensive information does not require encouraging sexual activity. It equips them to understand situations, recognise risks and make informed decisions.
That thinking shapes how the resource hub presents CSE.
Rather than beginning with confrontation, it frames sexuality education through ideas that already matter deeply in families, faith communities and African societies: care, protection, dignity, responsibility and partnership.
The distinction is strategic.
The platform is not asking parents to stop being parents, religious leaders to abandon their beliefs or communities to disregard culture.
Instead, it asks whether protecting a child from abuse, helping a young person recognise coercion, preventing unintended pregnancy, understanding HIV and sexually transmitted infections, or knowing where to seek help can themselves be understood as family and community responsibilities.
In other words, the conversation shifts.
The question becomes less about whether communities have values and more about how those values are used to keep young people safe.
One message does not work for everyone
One of the weaknesses of public debates about CSE is the assumption that the same explanation will persuade everyone.
- A teacher does not necessarily have the same questions as a parent.
- A parent may not have the same concerns as a government official.
- A religious leader may agree strongly with protecting children from violence while still struggling with particular language around sexuality.
The platform responds by dividing its resources across six stakeholder groups: educators; parents and caregivers; community and traditional leaders; faith leaders; government officials; and civil society organisations.
Each receives material designed around the questions they are most likely to encounter.
For educators, there are classroom-focused resources, including attention to inclusive delivery for learners with disabilities.
Parents and caregivers are offered material dealing with questions such as age-appropriateness, faith and the role of parents. Community and traditional leaders receive dialogue tools grounded in culture and community concerns. Faith leaders are invited to explore how the protective elements of CSE can coexist with religious traditions. Government officials can access material on nationally owned curricula, policy engagement and partnership. Civil society organisations are given tools for responding to anti-CSE messaging while communicating accurate information more widely.
The approach recognises something often lost in advocacy: people rarely change their minds simply because they are given more information. They also need information that speaks to the questions they are actually asking.
When a myth goes viral
That challenge has become even more complicated online.
A lengthy research report may take months to produce. A misleading graphic can move across WhatsApp groups in minutes.
Claims that CSE promotes promiscuity, undermines parents, attacks religion or imports foreign values can therefore reach communities long before advocates have assembled a response. The platform’s Evidence Hub is designed around that reality. Instead of leaving evidence buried in reports, it places common claims alongside short evidence-based responses.
Does CSE encourage risky sexual behaviour? Does it undermine parents and faith? Is it foreign? Does it conflict with African values? These are treated not as questions too offensive to answer, but as questions that must be answered clearly if public understanding is to change.
The accompanying stakeholder toolkit goes further, bringing together an introduction to CSE, an evidence base drawing from research, a claims-and-response matrix, and audience-specific messaging guides.
This is not accidental.
The platform was designed not simply as another repository of publications, but as something advocates, educators and communities can actually pick up and use.
Taking the conversation online
There is another acknowledgement built into the platform: young people are already having these conversations digitally, whether formal institutions participate or not.
The Digital Toolkit includes 11 shareable social media tiles, editable Canva templates, ready-to-use messages, guidance on safer online engagement and downloadable material that can also be used offline.
That may seem like a small addition to a much larger evidence platform.
It is not.
Much of the contemporary battle over sexuality, gender and reproductive rights is being shaped by narrative – by what is memorable enough to share, simple enough to repeat and emotionally powerful enough to travel.
Evidence that cannot move risks losing to misinformation that can.
The challenge therefore becomes not only producing good research, but translating it without stripping away its meaning.
The platform attempts to bridge that gap: from a young person’s research interview in Malawi, Uganda or Ethiopia to a policy discussion; from evidence in a report to a message a parent can understand; from data sitting in a PDF to a social media tile someone can share.
Whose knowledge counts?
There is also a deeper question underneath the technology.
Who gets to produce knowledge about young people’s sexuality?
For decades, young people have often entered research as respondents. Adults ask the questions, analyse the answers, write the reports and eventually make recommendations about what young people need.
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The research behind the CSE Resources Hub challenged that model.
Young people collected evidence, listened to peers and helped interpret what they were hearing in their communities. That evidence has now been carried into a public platform intended for educators, policymakers, faith leaders, communities and civil society.
During the research conversations presented at the symposium, one demand from the young researchers was particularly clear: young people should not simply be treated as recipients of policies and programmes but as partners in the discussions shaping them.
That may ultimately be the more important test of the platform.
- Not how many resources are downloaded.
- Not how many social media graphics are shared.
But whether the evidence young people helped generate begins to influence the conversations, classrooms, policies and institutions that shape their lives.
Changing the order
A website cannot resolve every disagreement about comprehensive sexuality education.
It cannot make political resistance disappear, remove deeply held religious concerns or erase the discomfort many adults still experience when talking about sexuality with young people.
But perhaps that is not the standard against which it should be judged.
The more immediate ambition is to make it harder for misinformation to be the only information available.
- To give a parent somewhere to take a genuine question.
- To give a teacher evidence when challenged.
- To give a faith leader language for talking about protection without feeling that faith must be abandoned.
- To give a policymaker research they can interrogate.
- To give advocates something more useful than another report sitting on a shelf.
- And to make sure that, somewhere in all of those conversations, young people’s own voices remain visible.
The platform closes with a direct invitation: explore the audience hubs, download the tools and put them to work.
The platform is live.
Use it. Share it. Teach with it. Preach with it. Legislate with it.
Because if myths are already travelling, the question is no longer whether evidence should enter the conversation.
It is whether evidence can reach people in time.
