By Emmanuel Mwamba
I have been privileged here at the African Union to immerse myself in the debate about Comprehensive Sexuality Education and Sexual Reproductive Health and Rights (SRH&R).
I have been privileged to have traveled to the USA, twice, to specifically represent Africa to discuss these two programmes being unleashed on Africa.
Is our problem sex or poverty?
I think the focus should be implementing comprehensive entrepreneurship education than aggressively funding Comprehensive Sexuality Education (CSE).
We will benefit more from vocational, money, business and trade training being taught in our schools from primary schools than the sharp interest in Comprehensive Sexuality Education (CSE).
CSE was designed to make the next generation “less homophobic”, accept sex as a matter of right and exclude parents from sex education of their own children and adolescents to promote “It’s my body, it’s my right”!.
More and more countries are calling for the discardment of CSE and for the adoption of a sex education that is friendly, approved by parents, the Church and stakeholders.
CSE is like those IMF Structural Adjustment Programmes (SAP) now held in shame!
No matter how much you “localise” the content, no matter how you make it “cultural sensitive”, at the heart of CSE is a determined goal to achieve, sexualise children, make them less “homophobic”, and let them know that sex is a right with whoever they wish to have it with.
No matter how determined our experts were, SAP achieved its goals: de-industrialised our economy, liquidated our state-owned enterprises and shifted us to an import-oriented and dependent economy.
So is CSE! CSE was designed for a purpose and will receive huge funding from the cooperating partners and sponsors to achieve the purpose it was created for.
CSE has a twin partner that is also co-heavily funded, the Sexual Reproductive Health and Rights (SHR&H) which promotes adolescent sexual rights, sexual orientation, and abortions.
The solution to child marriages, teen pregnancies, sexual abuse and unwanted pregnancies may not lie in CSE and SRH&R.
Our traditions have rich sex education that can be adapted, modernised and adopted without eroding our culture, without insulting our religion, and without polarizing the parents and without adopting CSE programmes.
Why don’t we invest in our indigenous and tested knowledge?
This is not an experts’ issue, it is a parents’ issue.
Africa has been raped, defiled, enslaved and bankrupted but, has stood the test of time and foreign pressure and invasions because of its culture and traditions.
The two programs are designed to dismantle that!
Imagine if the $300million earmarked for Zambia for CSE was spent on entrepreneurship training and support!
We can unleash an economic beast in our young people!
Bane, ukwali insoke, takwafwile muntu.
