Individual’s abilities, while embedded in the household, societal, and cultural contexts, are of utmost importance for achieving sexual health and well-being. Most health interventions, however, do not emphasize much on developing the capabilities, and mainly focuses on provision of commodities and services. There is limited discourse about the need to address abilities and which abilities matter the most when it comes to improving sexual health. This document focuses primarily on youth as it is a period of critical transition in physical, psychological, and behavioural aspect of life. It is based on the experience of implementing a program to improve self-efficacy of young people, through our research project named ‘youth in transition’ which is a life course study among unmarried youth and through critical understanding of the literature.

The report attempts to elucidate how individual capabilities can help to improve and uphold the sexual health of the young population, and enlist specific capabilities for the same. The purpose of exploring the domain of individual capabilities in this document is to advocate an approach for interventions and programs targeted for improving sexual health keeping capabilities at the core of these interventions. As a first step, identifying all abilities that are essential for youth to achieve their sexual health, given the socio-cultural context is essential. To achieve this end, the document first operationalizes sexual health, demarcates its different aspects while considering the present social context of India. With that as a basic framework, the role of capabilities and the underlying self-efficacy (the perception of one’s ability to execute a task) in motivating health promoting behaviour is examined. Finally, we categorize and enlist the abilities pertaining to the different domains of sexual health.