Creating a body of youth-led evidence and innovation for pleasure-based sex education

Project:
Future Sex Ed

Location:
El Salvador, India, Nigeria, USA

Funders:
The Case for Her, The Vitol Foundation, Waterloo Foundation

Category:
Sexual & Reproductive Health
HIV/AIDS

Challenge

Global attempts at delivering sex education that are responsive to young people’s real questions about sex, consent, pleasure, and healthy relationships are failing to meet the mark. When sex education is present, the messaging often focuses on disease and pregnancy prevention, and is imbued with a toxic narrative of shame, stigma, fear, and consequences. In the absence of effective, positive ways to learn about sex, youth often turn to their peers or porn, both of which pique curiosity but do not provide safe and accurate information.

Pleasure, consent, and sex-positivity are missing from conversations about sex, creating barriers that would allow young people to make healthier and more confident decisions about their sexual health and interpersonal relationships. A new, youth-led approach to designing and delivering sex education is needed. 

Innovation

There is an opportunity to transform sex education and young people need to lead the way. Building on our formative research with youth in El Salvador (2019), YLabs connected with young men and women across Nigeria, El Salvador, India, and the USA to re-imagine the future of sex ed. This ambitious and sector-transforming initiative includes a global consultation and co-design challenge with young people that elevates young people’s needs and ideas. Using a youth-driven design approach, we’ll develop and test and launch scalable solutions to meet the needs of future generations of young people.

Key activities and achievements of this project include: 

Global Consultation (2022)

YLabs conducted a first-of-its-kind, mixed-methods study of over 12,600 youth and key stakeholders in Nigeria, India, El Salvador, and the USA. In summer 2022, our team completed fieldwork in each of our study areas to map the needs, preferences, and behaviors of young people for sexual health information and services, including needs for pleasure-based content. Findings from the study, with this degree of diverse geographic and socioeconomic representation and robust sample size, are transformative for the sector in making the case that youth-driven pleasure-based sex ed is essential. 

Achievements:

• 12,478 youth (18-24) participated in our Interactive Voice Response and Facebook surveys

• 61 in-depth interviews, 38 focus groups, and eight co-design sessions conducted with a total of 146 youth (15-24) and 68 stakeholders

• Five design principles developed to guide future testing on effective, inclusive, accessible, and culturally competent sex education

Next Steps

We hosted the Future of Sex Ed: Global Convening, a virtual event bringing together a curated group of educators, researchers, funders, youth, and activists from around the world to inspire an alternative, youth-led vision for the future of sex education! Learn more about the Global Convening here. If you are interested in getting involved in this sector-transforming initiative, please reach out to us.