Emmanuel Ikubese knew the TV drama in which he starred was having an impact the day a stranger walked up to him and thanked him for saving her life.
The girl told Ikubese, who plays Femi in the serial Shuga, she had watched a crucial episode just before she and her boyfriend decided to embark on a sexual relationship.
“She said they had not yet had sex but were planning a weekend in Mombasa and they had been watching Shuga where Femi finds out about his HIV status and they decided to go and get tested,” said Georgia Arnold, executive director of MTV’s philanthropic arm, which makes the show.
It was that storyline, the girl believed, that saved her life, because her boyfriend had HIV.
Arnold has heard many similar stories in the years since Shuga first broadcast in Kenya in 2009. The serial – which Arnold is keen to stress is not a soap – is made in Africa by Africans but produced by the MTV Staying Alive Foundation, a charity that provides grants and produces content to help prevent HIV.
“It’s an African version of Skins, but with sexual health messages running through it,” she says. It’s primary purpose is to educate, inform and encourage people to talk and get help in countries where HIV is a heavy and sometimes secret burden; where young girls are often under emotional or financial pressure to have sex and the is no equality of gender or age.
However, assessing the charity’s progress – beyond the collection of anecdotal evidence – is not easy. Its goal is to change behaviour, which has proven incredibly difficult with regard to HIV, for all sorts of cultural, social and economic reasons. In 2010, research from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, US, found Shuga had reached 60% of Kenyan young people, half of whom had talked about it with their families. Although only 15% discussed it with a partner, 90% of a panel of viewers interviewed believed it had an impact on their thinking.
In Nigeria however – more populous and with different attitudes and cultural traditions – there could be no guarantee that Shuga’s 2013 launch in Lagos would have the same impact.
Shuga’s storylines are about sex and relationships. But because in many families the older generations are in charge of the remote, Arnold says programme-makers sometimes have to tread more cautiously than they otherwise might. In countries where homosexuality is illegal – and an educational TV drama will not get anywhere without government buy-in – this can mean only the subtlest references to the problems of gay men.
But on young girls and sugar daddies, on sexual violence and domestic abuse and the subservience of women – all of which contribute to the high toll taken by HIV – Shuga comes out punching. And the first research into the impact of the show, carried out by market research company Tapestry, suggests it is encouraging young people in Nigeria to talk. Although its survey was small, Tapestry found that 22% of 500 viewers aged between 16 and 24 said they had discussed safe sex and HIV with friends after watching it; 18% said they had done so with a partner. Better still, 15% said they had used a condom last time they had sex because of the TV show.
But the best evidence of all comes from taking Shuga into the community. The foundation trained 140 young people as peer educators, who went out into beyond Lagos, the capital, to screen Shuga in five states across Nigeria to large audiences of young people, not all of whom would have access to a TV, computer or a smartphone where they could download it.
“It is when you have the conversations around Shuga that you see that lightbulb moment,” said Arnold. Only 26% of Nigerians have been tested for HIV, but after the screening, young audiences enthusiastically agreed they should get checked. The talk did not translate into people turning up at testing centres, however.
Over six months, they aimed to test 24,000 young people, said Arnold, but the take-up was slow and they realised within a fortnight that they would not reach their target.
“We realised we needed to change the way we ran the project. We trained the kids as testers and counsellors, and then they queued up in the centre with their friends. Just under 48,000 young people were tested in four months,” she said.
“It is very difficult for any evaluation to say this person used a condom because they watched Shuga. But we can show that young people are watching Shuga and getting tested because of it.”
Next year, the World Bank will publish a major evaluation of Shuga’s impact on behaviour change, while Arnold has South Africa – which has the highest number of HIV infections in the world – in her sights. And maybe there will be the opportunity to introduce a main character who is gay. Shuga will keep pushing the boundaries.
