Appendix 4 – Suggestions for UNESCO

Appendix 4 – Suggestions for UNESCO from Key Informants
• Push for investigation of innovative and effective approaches e.g. linking schools and health services.
• Develope a database of curricula content – what should be taught and what is being taught.
• Promote the link between condoms and pregnancy avoidance and in general put reproductive health back on the
agenda.
• Place more emphasis on challenging harmful gender roles and stereotypes.
• Promote delaying rather than abstaining from sex.
• Provide opportunities for exchange of experience among practitioners and researchers.
• Support long-term development of local competence, avoiding as far as possible the use of external technical
support agencies.
• Emphasise skills in the context of relationships.
• Organise high-level meetings to share experiences in creating educators and gaining acceptance for sex education
at community level.
• Build capacity to do local research into problem identifi cation and generation of locally relevant solutions.
• Identify best practice.
• Invest in institutions rather than individuals.
• Promote programmes that incorporate the seventeen characteristics of effective sex education programmes.
• Explore issue of how to adapt programmes to different settings without diluting impact.
• Explore what it takes to train teachers to be able to deliver sex education properly so they are comfortable with
content and methods.
• Investigate how to get Ministries of Education and Health to support the roll-out of effective programmes.
• Clarify the division of labour among the different UN agencies.
• Support research and evaluation.
• Support professionalisation of sex education as a recognisable (and examinable) subject and support development
of a career path for teachers in this area.
• Collect evidence about what young people say they want from sex education.
• Commission work on the use and abuse of religious texts as they relate to sex education.
• Advocate for infrastructure support.
• Gather and disseminate research fi ndings.
• Arrange a policy-oriented sex education forum.
• Investigate the cost aspect of sex education.
• UNESCO has the potential to promote the implementation of effective programmes, such as life skills interventions
that clearly address sexual risk reduction.