Sharing innovations from the Covid-19 crisis to improve sexuality education access online

Background We are a consortium of organisations working on sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR), all focused on reaching marginalised and under-served young people, and all normally reliant on face-to-face contact to deliver comprehensive sexuality education (CSE). Covid-19 lockdowns caused a double layer of need in terms of young people’s sexual and interpersonal health and safety. They presented us with major challenges in the provision of information and services, while also causing rates of sexual and gender-based violence to rocket among vulnerable youth who were stuck in unsafe homes or struggling to navigate an increased proportion of online-only relationships. There were no resources yet published on how we might maximize our existing tools for CSE to shift to working online quickly and cheaply. We applied for this project to capture what we were still learning-by-doing, condense all the information we had cobbled together ourselves from relevant international standards and educational guidelines, and make our hard-won knowledge available to any other organisation, group or individual educator looking to improve their online CSE reach in the future. Objectives We wanted to create and disseminate a set of guidelines on delivering CSE online. These guidelines would help organisations move online better and faster to overcome the challenge of having their face-to-face delivery blocked in a crisis, as well as being useful in improving their youth-friendly online reach even during normal operating. At the inception of this project, many of us were already using digital methods to support CSE delivery, and a literature was beginning to emerge on requirements for designing and delivering quality online CSE under normal circumstances, but no such guidelines yet existed. We also wanted to raise the capacities of youth workers from 8 organizations to pilot the use of the guidelines in designing and delivering online educational activities. Implementation Our activities enabled us to pool all the information we had collected and learned about good digital CSE, share the work of drafting our new guidance text, and train youth workers in each of our organizations to pilot it, so that we could publish a version that had been tried and tested. We reviewed existing materials and our collective experiences under the pandemic before our first transnational meeting in April 2021. We explored the challenges we faced in our national contexts in terms of CSE provision and agreed an outline for the tool we wanted to create. Over the summer months we worked independently within our organisations to create a first draft. Each organisation formed a team of young peer educators who would carry out the piloting of the guidance. In September 2021, the IPPF EN youth network YSAFE led a three-day online training for all the youth teams on how to design, deliver and evaluate online sexuality education activities, how to use our new guidance to maximize the impact of their activities, and how to evaluate both their work and their assessment of the piloted tool. The project team then provided additional support remotely as they carried out national action plans over the following six months. Achievements We have published brand-new guidance on how to deliver safe and effective sexuality education online. This is usable by any organisation running comprehensive sexuality education programmes and by individual sexuality educators. It is available as a 60-page PDF or as a navigable online platform connected to the YSAFE website. The practical guidance it offers is built on the pooled experiences of eight member associations of the IPPF European Network (national-level sexual and reproductive health and rights organisations) plus the End FGM EU network. It combines everything that we learned during the first two years of the Covid-19 pandemic with the most up-to-date advice produced by leading authorities on educational standards, such as UNESCO and WHO. It provides advice on: • Identifying potential crises that may impede educational activity and preparing your organisation to react effectively; • Supporting a team of educators to make decisions about what to teach and on which platforms in order to meet the needs of the community you serve; • Adapting your existing CSE workshop plans for delivery in online platforms to deliver the most-needed educational messages in concrete and interactive ways; • Evaluating your online impact.