Reproductive rights, sustainable development, and the sex education debates in Ghana

• In Event: Holistic approaches to girls’ schooling and schooling across the life cycle

Proposal

In the past decade, vociferous public and political debates about Comprehensive Sexuality Education or CSE have proliferated across the African continent. CSE is a United Nations-sponsored sexuality education curriculum that champions a positive approach to sexuality and reproductive rights for young people. For example in Ghana, the Ministry of Education introduced CSE into the public-school curriculum in 2017 (Ghana Education Service, 2017). Yet two years later in 2019, Ghanaian religious and political leaders, with support from the US Christian Right rallied against CSE, claiming that the curriculum was teaching children that homosexuality and premarital sex were acceptable behaviors. The accusations against the CSE curriculum fueled a national battle over what type of sex education curriculum schools should teach, either an abstinence-only model or CSE. Following Ghana’s sex education debates from 2018 to 2021, this presentation examines how religious leaders, policymakers, and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) position human rights and reproductive rights in their visions of sex education policy. Extant research on comprehensive sex education in Ghana (Awusabo-Asare et al., 2017; Keogh et al., 2018) have not captured this recent shift in sex education policy from a supportive environment to a hostile policy environment. Moreover, there is a rich body of literature on the influence of the US Christian right on debates on homosexuality in Africa (Kaoma, 2016; McEwen, 2018) ,but this work has not investigated how US Christian Rights activism is influencing sex education politics in Africa. Thus, this research is the first to ethnographically examine how different institutional actors contest and negotiate CSE policy for in-school children in Ghana. I use an African feminist lens (Tamale, 2011) and sociocultural study of education policy (Levinson & Sutton, 2001) to show how fights over sex education are not just concerned with the contents of the curriculum but are larger battles where the nation’s sexual and political future is contested. This presentation draws on a 3-year ethnography of the sex education battles in Ghana from 2018-2021 including 40+ interviews with faith leaders, UN organizations, policymakers, feminist activists, and NGO workers and 200 hours of participant observation of education and religious meetings on CSE and adolescent reproductive health. Data analysis included multiple rounds of coding, first by hand and then using MaxQDA software. This presentation asks, “how do actors position human rights, reproductive rights and sustainable development in battles over CSE in Ghana?” First, I find that proponents and opponents of CSE have two distinct views of human rights and reproductive rights. For proponents such as government policymakers and NGO actors, children and young people have inalienable reproductive rights, and CSE is requisite to teaching children about these rights. Opponents of CSE, such as Christian and other religious leaders, however rejected reproductive rights for children; for them, parents’ rights to choose what their children learn in school superseded sexual and reproductive health and rights for young people. Second, I contend that Ghana’s CSE debates are a response to the UN’s sustainable development agenda and development work in Africa. CSE supporters viewed the curriculum as a key part of building a sustainable, developed African nation with development partners. Religious and political leaders, however, rejected CSE’s promise of UN-supported sustainable development and offered a pan-African, anti-Western, and Christian nationalist vision of sustainable development in Ghana. The sex education debates in Ghana demonstrate the sex education policy is rarely just about schools but is a heated site where ideals about the nation, religion, and human rights are contested. Comparative and International Education (CIE) scholarship does not look at sex education policy often. This work adds to the body CIE literature on gender and sexualities in Africa (Bhana, 2018) by focusing on sex education policy as an important site of comparative international education research, examining the role of US Christian right organizations in Africa’s education and sexual politics, and building knowledge of CSE debates in Africa.

Author

• Regina Y Fuller, University of Wisconsin-Madison