Developing contextually-sensitive Comprehensive Sexuality Education (CSE) for out-of-school adolescents in refugee settings in Uganda

Refugee youth are particularly at risk of poor sexual and reproductive health. Sexuality education improves sexual and reproductive health outcomes and helps young people claim their sexual rights, but young refugees usually receive little formal sexuality education. When sexuality education is available, there are recurrent challenges to its effectiveness and implementation. These include acceptability and trust in messages, especially if these conflict with more widely available messages from family, peers, online and physical popular media, and cultural norms. Contextually-sensitive sexuality education, therefore, needs to consider which sources of information about sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR) are valued by particular groups of learners and the wider context in which young people live.

This project undertook qualitative research into knowledge, resources and access to SRHR among young refugees, in order to improve the design and delivery of sexuality education in the longer term. To ensure that the knowledge produced by the research was as useful and relevant as possible, the research was designed, carried out and analysed by young refugees (peer researchers), alongside staff from Ugandan NGOs and a UK university. The project focused on Uganda because it hosts the largest number of refugees in Africa, more than half of whom are aged 18 years and below.

The six peer researchers currently or until recently lived in Kyangwali Refugee Settlement in Western Uganda and were aged 18-24. They interviewed eighteen further young refugees living in the settlement, each of whom spoke about the knowledge and experiences of SRHR topics of other young refugees they knew. Interviewees were aged between 15 and 24 (average 19.5), included both young men and young women, and were predominantly originally from the Democratic Republic of Congo. The majority had only participated in primary-level education.

Our findings are summarised in this report and eight short audio clips, which some of the peer researchers developed after the main project ended, for broadcast on Spice FM Hoima (listenership c. 5M).