To better understand what her relative needed, she joined a UNFPA Safeguard Young People programme, aimed at empowering younger generations across Angola to take charge of their sexual and reproductive health. Francisco was given accurate, up-to-date advice on treating and managing HIV and how to discuss it with her relative. Today, she has accepted to follow all the protocols so that she can be healthy. High-quality sexuality education programmes teach adolescents and young adults the importance of safe sex not only through information on contraception and health check-ups, but by emphasizing consent, respect, and the need for careful decision making in their relationships.
Yet the topics covered in such programmes are also appropriate for a wider range of ages β for example younger children can learn about family relations, how to cope with puberty and menstruation, what consent means and how to recognize β and report β abuse and violence.
These are considered essential life skills, a set of tools with which children and young adults are better equipped to face a litany of potential risks and threats to their health and rights β and be able to defend them. Decades of research show this leads to positive health outcomes with lifelong impacts: Young people are more likely to wait before having sex, and when they do to practise safer sex, reducing sexually-transmitted infections β including HIV β and unintended pregnancies.
In Angola, extra-curricular, community-led initiatives are crucial, as almost one quarter of young women have never attended school; for boys the rate is just over 10 per cent.
This points not only to dangerously low levels of overall schooling, but also to a severe gender imbalance. Rates of violence against women and girls are high meanwhile, with about one in three women aged 15 to 49 experiencing some type of physical or sexual abuse. Unequal gender norms are perpetuated from an early age across the world, but sexuality education can challenge and change these biases, by teaching young people about gender inequality, gender-based violence and other harmful practices such as early and forced marriage.
