MTV Shuga Naija (season 3)
Also: Shuga Naija · MTV Shuga
Eight-episode TV drama about young people's sex lives, HIV stigma, testing and risky sex, filmed in Nigeria in 2013 by the MTV Staying Alive Foundation and broadcast widely across Africa. A randomised trial in south-west Nigeria tested whether watching it changed HIV testing and sexual health.
- Years
- 2013
- Country
- Nigeria
- Topic
- HIV/STI
- Asks people to
- Reduce stigmaSeek helpStart
- Strategy
- CelebrityEntertainment education
- Channel
- TV
- Audience
- Young adultsYouthTrial sample: 4,986 people aged 18-25 in seven towns in Oyo, Osun and Ondo states
Evidence
PreregisteredPositive
80 screening sites randomised to Shuga, Shuga plus peer videos, or a placebo series (Gidi Up); AEA RCT Registry AEARCTR-0000509. Eight months later: self-reported HIV testing +2.5 pp vs 8.6% (29% increase); redemption of free HIV-test vouchers +3.1 pp vs 3.3% (94% increase); HIV knowledge index +0.13 SD; stigma index improved 0.10 SD; women 1.7 pp less likely to test positive for chlamydia (55% decrease vs 3.1%); 3.3 pp more likely to report not having multiple partners. No effect on condom use or choosing condoms over cash. Peer-norm videos and bringing friends added nothing. Also reduced acceptance of domestic violence (AEA P&P 2019).
Sponsor (who paid)
- MTV Staying Alive Foundation (now Shuga Global) NGO, creator
- National Agency for the Control of AIDS (NACA), Nigeria Foreign government, partner
Credits (who made it)
- MTV Staying Alive Foundation Production, 2013 source
- Abhijit Banerjee, Eliana La Ferrara and Victor Orozco (World Bank DIME / J-PAL) Research evaluation, 2014-2015 source
Sources
- J-PAL evaluation summary: MTV Shuga: Changing social norms and behaviors with entertainment education in Nigeria evaluation
- Banerjee A, La Ferrara E, Orozco V. Entertainment, Education, and Attitudes Toward Domestic Violence. AEA Papers and Proceedings 2019;109 evaluation · 2019 · DOI 10.1257/pandp.20191073
- Banerjee A, La Ferrara E, Orozco V. The Entertaining Way to Behavioral Change: Fighting HIV with MTV. CEPR Discussion Paper DP13892 (2019) evaluation · 2019
- Shuga (TV series) (Wikipedia) reference
Research notes
Production credit and all results fetched from the J-PAL summary PDF 2026-10-22. Effects are for watching in organised screenings (an efficacy trial), not for broadcast reach. The CEPR/World Bank working paper was found via search snippet only; the AEA P&P DOI was read from J-PAL's link list. NACA's role as partner from Wikipedia and J-PAL partner list. Wikipedia reports an estimated audience of over 550 million households on 88 stations (unverified). Not in PubMed.
Record cases/mtv-shuga-nigeria.json, updated 2026-10-22· Link to this campaign