I think this is a vital issue for parliamentarians to address because what we've found is that in many countries the biggest challenge is a legal challenge to whether this can be part of an education curriculum in a country.
We advocate strongly for the fact that comprehensive sexuality education needs to be part of a high school curriculum and in fact a whole school curriculum with age-appropriate information being provided at every stage of education. Many countries have those, but even when they do have those laws in place, it's very hard to implement them. We're not only talking about developing countries here, but we're also talking about a global issue with comprehensive sexuality education.
It is a right of young people to understand how their bodies work and to have basic information about how to protect themselves and how adolescence and puberty is going to affect their lives. The challenges there are often socio-political obstacles rather than practical obstacles. We have, with our partners at UNICEF and UNESCO, developed a wide range of culturally appropriate curricula that can be deployed in various countries and at various age groups. The challenge is more social and political in terms of getting that accepted. For many of these adolescent girls, particularly the most marginalized, they're not in school or they're at danger of dropping out of school. How do we reach them? That's why our action for adolescent girls program is a holistic community-based intervention that creates safe spaces within the community for girls to get that information.