Module 4.7: Message Guide for CSOs

Module 4, Stakeholder toolkit

Introduction

This module consists of 6 individual guides tailored for engagement with the following groups:

Community and Traditional Leaders.
Religious Leaders.
Teachers and School Administrators.
Parent Teacher’s Association.
Ministry of Education and Health.
Civil Society Organisations and NGOs.

Research has shown that it is useful to engage with key groups separately before bringing them together. These individual guides allow each stakeholder to engage in robust and extensive dialogues and to raise their own concerns within their familiar groups. Once each group has used these resources to talk through any concerns and have reached some settled ground, they can be brought together for a wider national dialogue. Engaging groups separately means that the people who are genuinely open to CSE are not silenced by the few who are set against it.

Starting point: safeguarding the rights of children

Every resource in this Toolkit, across all stakeholder groups, operates under one non-negotiable principle:

The safety and well-being of children and young people always comes first.

This means that safety considerations should take precedence before any other considerations, including institutional reputation, political sensitivity or cultural expectation.

If a child or young person discloses, or you suspect, abuse, neglect, exploitation, violence, child marriage, or any other form of harm, this stops being a conversation, a lesson, or a dialogue, and becomes a safeguarding matter. No stakeholder group in this toolkit is asked to act as a counsellor, investigator, or safeguarding authority. Your responsibility is to RESPOND, PROTECT AND REFER:

RESPOND with care.
PROTECT the child’s confidentiality and dignity, and
REFER immediately through your organisation’s or school’s child protection procedure.

Children with disabilities require specific, deliberate care throughout this Toolkit’s implementation. Evidence from YPAR identifies young people with disabilities, alongside out-of-school and rural youth, among those structurally excluded from CSE delivery in the region. This exclusion also leaves them more exposed to harm and less likely to be heard when something is wrong. Every stakeholder group should ask, deliberately, whether the format, language and setting of any CSE-related engagement is genuinely accessible to children with disabilities, and whether local referral pathways are actually equipped to receive and act on a disclosure from a child with a disability, not only from other children.

While each of these guides should be used separately for each Stakeholder group, they all have emerged from the premise of a framework of shared values.

A framework of shared values

Anti-CSE messaging is often organised, disciplined, and repetitive across countries, and works, in large part, by setting the terms of the debate.

There are several ways to respond or counter harmful narratives. Direct responses with facts and statistics are commonly used to correct falsehoods and present a position grounded in evidence. This is an important and powerful tool, but it can have its downsides. In an effort to disprove false or harmful claims, the harmful claim itself often gets restated and amplified. This keeps the conversation anchored to the anti-CSE narrative. For example, the act of debunking a myth requires restating it, which can inadvertently spotlight it. Each repetition, even one framed as a correction, gives the harmful claim more airtime, extends its reach to audiences who may not have encountered it, and makes it more familiar. A strategy built solely on responding claim by claim therefore risks amplifying the very narratives it sets out to dismantle and keeps CSE permanently on the defensive.

Mindful of this, this Toolkit, and each individual guide, advances values-based communication, a conscious approach to advocacy and messaging, which grounds messages in the audience’s own deeply held values rather than only in facts, statistics or rights-based arguments. It leads with a positive, values-anchored account of what CSE is and does, expressed in accessible vocabulary. It does not deny the attack or repeat it but rather aims to it makes the attack less resonant by offering a more compelling lens through which to see the issue. This addresses the backlash without amplifying it.

The principles of values-based communication include:

VALUES & FACTS: Leading with what audiences already care about. This includes protection, care, responsibility and family rather than opening with statistics on HIV incidence, contraceptive use or pregnancy rates, which rarely persuade on their own. Facts still matter, and evidence is a valuable tool for substantiating the case and countering disinformation. But finding common ground first opens the door for the evidence to land. Values start the conversation and facts help deepen and defend it.SHARED LANGUAGE AND HUMAN RIGHTS: Uses accessible and relatable terms and concepts that the audience already uses, such as the words “care”, “protection”, “family” and “tradition”, rather than leading with or only using technical language like “sexual rights” or “bodily autonomy,” which can feel imposed and trigger defensiveness, especially with conservative and religious groups. Rights remain the foundation of CSE, and the aim is to translate them, not ignore them. Concepts like bodily autonomy and consent lose nothing by being expressed as “keeping children safe” or “helping young people make responsible decisions”; they simply arrive in language the audience already trusts, rather than language that puts them on guard.SUSTAINED REPETITION FOR IMPACT: Recognising that values-based framing shifts durable, underlying attitudes through consistent repetition across channels and audiences over time, not through a single persuasive fact or appeal. Values-based framing works by changing durable, underlying beliefs, and that happens through consistent repetition across channels, messengers and audiences over time. This mirrors how anti-CSE actors operate. The impact comes not from any one argument but from disciplined, repeated messaging. Countering it therefore means committing to a coherent narrative that is reinforced everywhere and often, rather than relying on individual campaigns or standout moments to carry the case.SHARED VALUES: Showing how CSE already serves values that a parent, faith leader or policymaker holds rather than asking them to adopt new ones. When CSE is framed as protection, care and responsible preparation for adulthood, it is no longer a foreign idea to be resisted but an expression of goals the audience already shares.EQUIPPING & EMPOWERING: Anti-CSE narratives weaponise “empowerment” “agency” and “autonomy” as concepts that encourage sexualising children, displacing parents, or encouraging promiscuity. Values-based communication frames empowerment as a way for young people to be equipped to recognise risk, make safe and responsible decisions, and protect themselves and their peers. This framing aligns with values aligned with protection that parents, faiths and traditions already hold.