Education on sexuality and HIV can help adolescents develop the capacity for healthy, respectful relationships and protect themselves from unwanted and unsafe sex, unintended pregnancy, and sexually transmitted infections. A 2015 Population Council study found that sexuality and HIV education programs that address gender and power in intimate relationships are five times more likely to be effective than programs that do not. Fully 80% of such programs were associated with a significantly lower rate of STIs or unintended pregnancy. In contrast, among programs that do not address gender or power, only 17% have such an association. However, most curricula still do not address these issues.
It’s All One Curriculum: Guidelines and Activities for a Unified Approach to Sexuality, Gender, HIV, and Human Rights Education provides a rationale, content, and sample activities for placing gender and rights at the center of sexuality and HIV curricula—both as stand-alone modules and integrated with topics such as relationships, puberty, and condom use. The two-set book is user-friendly and designed to be used flexibly, so that educators in diverse settings can easily understand the content and extract the level of detail they need to meet local goals.
Sexuality education takes place in a variety of cultural and political contexts around the world. The first section (It’s All One Curriculum: Guidelines) presents sensitive information appropriately in a wide range of such contexts in Africa, the Americas, the Arab world, Asia, Europe, and the Pacific. The material includes many examples from various cultural settings. The second section (It’s All One Curriculum: Activities) offers guidance to educators and policymakers on how to adapt these materials for their particular setting.
This resource is designed primarily for curriculum developers, schoolteachers, and community educators responsible for education in the areas of sexuality/sexual health (including AIDS) and civics or social studies. Users may draw on the guidelines and activities in this kit to meet their needs, for example:
- to develop or modify comprehensive curricula (of any duration) appropriate for their setting;
- to design more narrowly focused teaching units (for example, on gender or sexual health); and
- to use as a resource for single-topic lesson plans (for example, gender and the media, deciding about sex, protecting oneself and one’s partners from HIV, reflecting on masculinity).
It’s All One has been in high demand since its publication. It has been translated into Arabic, Bangla, Chinese, French, Portuguese, and Spanish. Requests have come from more than 150 countries and every state in the United States—from government agencies, international NGOs, and community organizations reaching young people.
It’s All One was created by the Population Council in collaboration with six other nongovernmental organizations: Creating Resources for Empowerment in Action (India); Girls Power Initiative (Nigeria); International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF); IPPF Western Hemisphere Region (Latin America and Caribbean); International Women’s Health Coalition; and MEXFAM (Mexico).