Coalition building The DOH promotes cooperation with NGOs by inviting their participation in its National Family Planning Committee and also through extensive direct contact. This strategy is regarded as successful by both sides. The last meeting of the Committee had recommended prioritisation of the ten components of reproductive health, with adolescent reproductive health and sex education as top priorities. The NGOs themselves form a loose network, and cooperate on important issues which cannot be handled by a single organisation. The most prominent of these issues is the abortion law reform.
Sex education is also a crosscutting issue.
While there is increasing acceptance of the need for sex education, obstacles remain. One obstacle is that teachers in general are still not equipped to teach sex education courses, or prepared to teach them. Another obstacle is that there are politicians who do not yet accept the need for sex education in schools. While the MOE is planning to introduce a new curriculum to include sex education, PPAT observes that it has started to do so many times before but each initiative has faltered, for example because of claimed lack of money to change the curriculum, or other misleading reasons. In the opinion of PPAT, the real problems are the reluctance of teachers and worry about the reaction of parents.