Sem Medo—Transforming Sex Education in Brazil

Fighting teen pregnancy, misinformation, and prejudice towards LGBTQIAP+ youth by providing comprehensive and friendly resources about Sex Education.

A majority of Brazilians do not have access to sex education in their formative years. In the later generations, it causes prejudice and hate aimed at minority groups. Without resources, youth are left on their own, which results in teenage pregnancy, an obstacle for women to join the workforce, ISTs, and a lack of understanding from an early age about sexual assault. The worrying scenario is that while the sexual liberty of Gen Z is higher than that of the previous generations, the understanding of sex as a whole is lower.

On its first pilot, Sem Medo is an online platform that gathers data and resources on sex education topics, focused on youth, and provides a blog with experts' point-of-views and first-hand stories that involve gender, sexuality, and everything in between. 

In 2023, as the initiative develops, the goal is to act in multiple ways, both community-based and asynchronous. Besides the online platform with online short courses on specific topics, such as menstruation or contraceptives, Sem Medo will also feature an app and two Whatsapp-based chatboxes. 

The App, called Sem Pânico, is a menstruation journal made to focus on the user itself. When looking into competitors, most only focus on pregnancy, when menstruation is much more than that, so our questions will go beyond sexually active lifestyle and include articles on common illnesses women suffer, like endometriosis. As well as featuring questions that can map out possible difficulties, like lack of vitamin d and nutrients, so the woman can better ask for help when consulting with doctors. 

The two chatboxes have two very different publics. The first, focused on youth, will be a quick friend who will be able to help with questions. It serves the purpose of emergency, so when our users cannot complete a lesson on our main platform, they can ask the most important question on their cell phones. The second is focused on parents and grandparents and exists to answer frequent questions families have that might lead to prejudice towards the youth in their circle. Such as: “What should I do after my child comes out to me?”. 

Based in Brazil, Sem Medo's main focus are young people aged 6 to 21 years old in the low to middle-income classes, especially those in the public school system who identify as women or LGBTQIAP+. Inspired by Naiara, my mother, who was impregnated at only fourteen years old, Sem Medo focuses on this public because they are generally the ones without access to sex education. The lack of sex education leads to teen pregnancy, ISTs, and a lack of understanding of what is abuse, this is dangerous for children, especially for those growing up in a country in LatAm where there is a known culture of rape. 

Sem Medo impacts their lives because if a teenager is curious about sexualities, they can go into our platform for free and take a quick short course. If another teenager needs pressing answers to questions like “how can I avoid becoming pregnant?” they can access our chatbox via Whatsapp—a platform used by 147 million Brazilians. 

Furthering the need for help, I understand that families also have a great impact on their children, it is not uncommon to see teenagers hiding their identities because of transphobic parents or other relatives. So, Sem Medo also will have a chatbox focused on doubts older adults and the elderly have. 

My mother’s story inspired me to get involved in gender and sexuality activism, and my own life experiences of 12 years of gender violence inspired me to make it my own mission to change the reality of my community. Since 2019 I have led over 20 initiatives, gathering the recognition of UNICEF, the Latin American Leadership Academy, Next Generation Foresight, Embassies, and more. 

During my five years of experience in the philanthropy and social impact world, four of them were focused on the cause of sex education and women. Currently, I work for Força Meninas, where I directly impact more than 30 thousand girls per year, and I am signed with Engajamundo, acting as an activist in world-renowned conferences representing Brazil.

With Sem Medo, I have avidly searched for ways to make it one of the most impacting organizations, from completing mentorships and courses, such as the Global Citizen Year Academy, DreamDAO, and Global Changemakers, to moving in this first semester of 2023 to South Africa to learn with a local NGO with a similar mission as Sem Medo.

Sem Medo is an initiative led initially by the personal experiences of women, where it was clear sex education was inaccessible. Previous knowledge of gender issues came from volunteering with the activist NGO Engajamundo and specializing in gender advocacy.

As Sem Medo was beginning to be crafted, research was done in four steps:

Community assessment: Studies on what community to serve and where to focus. After, understanding the assets and issues of the community served in a five-page report, analyzing Brazil and its different facets.

Interviewing process: A series of questions on how students understand sex education, its importance, character, and consequences. Points of view varied within different identities of gender, sexuality, and exposure to social-economic factors. Ranging from "It is a taboo topic, not discussed", "We are recently developing Sex Ed in my community" to "We have an extensive background in Sex Ed." Only 10% said that they had an extensive background, while 50% said it is taboo.

Root Cause Analysis: Seeing the divergences in the last step of contacting the intended users, it was time to research academic writings and health professionals to understand how local power dynamics and local beliefs, values, and attitudes may be causing this problem. As an overlook into the main causes, the final activity for the third step was making a summary of all information gathered.

Mapping of organizations and professionals: Since our mission and values were defined, the last research was looking into more than 25 related organizations and entering into contact.

Sem Medo is unique because it directly targets youth, but also allows their parents to learn together. Currently acting in Brazil in the area of sex education are only organizations that are international, such as Plan International. Sem Medo is innovative because it comes directly from the community it aims to impact. Made for youth by youth, it keeps in mind the current trend in languages, it is made for short-time span and is designed user-friendly with multiple possibilities for learning. 

Within the next year, our main aims are to launch more online courses on our official platform, as well as to work in our chatboxes and app so they can be released in early 2024. For our impact, we are focused on Brazil and want to gather users across all five regions, our goal is to serve 7000 people in our chatboxes (close to 20 per day), have 2000 registered users, and 1000 followers to spread Sem Medo on social media, and 600 in-person students.

In order to achieve them, our focus is on creating and consolidating a community of volunteer writers and health specialists. With more help, Sem Medo can fall into an organizational system that is more efficient, and the volunteers’ realities will also be impacted by direct contact with the students.

In terms of our growth, to promote our works and achieve as much diversity in our users as possible, our plan is to grow an online presence, as well as partnering local governments and educational institutions to promote a sex education campaign and partnering with companies that sell menstrual and intimate hygiene products to donate for centers for youth in need.

The main platform is hosted by WordPress and Hostinger. Our app is planned to employ consumer-facing software (cloud services), as well as digital systems, such as machine learning and big data, and will be available on the Google Play Store and Apple Store. The chatboxes are going to be hosted on Whatsapp, either using ChatSac, a system that is free and based on the app, it uses technologies such as customer relationship management (CRM), or using Python, for this it is important to use a WebHook URL to send the data with the POST command. We are currently partnering with DreamDAO to understand WEB3 and how it can be used in Sem Medo’s favor.

Currently 1400-between social media and registered users of our official platform. For the next year, our goal is to serve 7000 people in our chatboxes (close to 20 per day), have 2000 registered users, 1000 followers to spread Sem Medo on social media, and 600 in-person students.

• Brazil’s prejudice with sex education: as many parents do not encourage their children and teenagers to learn about the topic, our focus has to be shared between showing adults why it matters and making the youth have an interest in learning.

• Health workers and volunteers pay: as the organization is still developing itself, workers are not paid. We hope to change that so Sem Medo can sustain itself, have workers dedicated to it, and help the lack of employment in Brazil.

Civics Unplugged. This partnership was made as Sem Medo became the first Brazilian project to enter the Civics 2030 campaign. The grant was used to make the platform and all costs involved with it.

Next Generation Foresight Practitioners. As Sem Medo was recognized by the Next Generation Foresight Practitioners Awards for 2021, it became part of their network which helps youth leaders.