We are a consortium of some of the region’s leading organisations working on sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR). We all focus on reaching marginalized and underserved young people, and we normally rely on face-to-face contact to deliver comprehensive sexuality education (CSE). The Covid-19 crisis has forced all of us to change how we work radically in a short space of time and all SRHR organisations are facing challenges in the provision of services and information. Coordinated by YSAFE, the youth network of International Planned Parenthood Federation European Network (IPPF EN), our project aims to capture what we are all learning under lockdown about moving our educational activities online and make this available to other organizations. Many members of our network are already using digital methods to support CSE delivery, and an emerging literature does exist on requirements for designing quality online CSE under normal circumstances. However, prior to our project, there are still no resources published on how organisations reliant on face-to-face CSE delivery might maximise their existing tools to shift to online working cheaply and quickly. Our objectives are therefore 1) To create and disseminate set of guidelines on delivering CSE online, which will help organisations move online to overcome challenges where face-to-face delivery has been blocked and support their improvement of youth-friendly online reach even during normal operating. 2) To raise the capacities of young youth workers from 8 organizations to pilot the use of the guidelines in designing and delivering online educational activities A core group of 16 young peer sexuality educators and youth worker staff attached to YSAFE, seven national members of IPPF EN, and the End FGM European Network will come together to share good practices and key learnings from their experiments in moving educational activities online. Together we will draft a 50-page document that draws on our experiences and the most recent UNESCO and WHO guidance to provide practical advice on: (1) delivering urgent key messages in an acute situation that blocks in-person work, including • assessing the most relevant needs in an urgent situation; • making use of existing social media channels to deliver concise educational messages; • appropriate branding and visual content creation for online campaigns • reframing messages for specific audiences/contexts (2) delivering 'live action" CSE online, to expand an organisation’s existing offer and increasing reach in a sustainable way, including • adapting existing CSE workshop plans for delivery through video platforms • using online work to bridge the gaps between those who are currently being served and those who are not Once the guidance is drafted we will offer training and support a further 45 young participants to test it out through delivering their own action plans for online peer-led educational activities. These will be on the theme of sexual and gender-based violence to build on YSAFE’s continuing work on prevention among marginalized youth and activities will be connected to thematically relevant international calendar events, such as the 16 Days of Activism and International Women's Day. The action plans will include "live" CSE sessions on video platforms as well as activities run using their existing social media channels, to test out the youth-friendliness and usability of both areas treated by our new guidelines document. We expect to reach 250,000 young people during the implementation of their online activities. We expect the guidelines to be of use to any organization looking to reach youth online with rights-based educational content when in-person delivery is not possible, thus maintaining the benefits of CSE to their personal development, health and wellbeing and reducing the disruption to this aspect of young people's education. For all organisations, SRHR or otherwise, the guidelines will have relevance both in crisis situations - the continuation of Covid-19 lockdowns, for example, or national events that cause a breakdown in normal educational access - and also in regular operating times, when it can be used to increase online work to reach more youth. The possibilities for using online methods of education to reach specifically marginalized young people with CSE to counteract their marginalization has been recognized by the major actors in our field, noting that digital interventions can reach populations missed by other forms of education. We therefore expect the guidelines to impact positively an organisation's reach to those who are marginalized and/or underserved.
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.
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.