Executive Director of the MTV Staying Alive Foundation (SAF), Wame Jallow, has said health storytelling is helping Nigerian communities, particularly young people, to engage in difficult health conversations and make informed choices.

Ms Jallow said this on Tuesday in Abuja at a post-SBCC summit engagement organised by the Centre for Communication and Social Impact (CCSI).

The engagement is a follow-up to the recently concluded 2026 International Social and Behaviour Change Communication (SBCC) Summit in Panama.

It provided an opportunity for stakeholders to reflect on key conversations and insights from the summit, examine their relevance to Nigeria’s development landscape and discuss how the media could continue to amplify the role of communication in driving positive social and behaviour change.

The Panama summit brought together communication experts, policymakers, researchers and development practitioners from around the world to examine how communication could drive sustainable social change.

Ms Jallow said SAF’s experience with its edutainment series, including MTV Shuga Naija and MTV Shuga DownSouth, demonstrated that storytelling could go beyond awareness creation to influence health behaviour.

She said the organisation spent nearly three decades using research and co-created stories with young people to address issues affecting their health and wellbeing.

According to her, SAF’s programmes have reached more than 300 million households globally, while evaluations also examined the health outcomes associated with exposure to its content.

She said evidence from the organisation’s work in Nigeria showed a two-fold increase in the likelihood of HIV testing among people exposed to its content, while chlamydia infections were reduced by 50 per cent among viewers.

“Once people have the knowledge, their inclination to take action behind it is quite significant,” she said.

She stressed that SBCC should not end with reaching audiences but should also ensure that people have access to the services and commodities needed to act on the information they received.

She said one of SAF’s Shuga Shorts programmes in Nigeria had also helped to open conversations between parents and young people on sensitive issues.

She stated that the intervention demonstrated how storytelling could create opportunities for families to discuss sexual health, consent and protection, while encouraging more open communication between parents and their children.

She said practitioners, therefore, needed to measure not only audience reach but also the extent to which communication contributed to changes in behaviour and health outcomes.

She warned that SBCC was being systematically defunded in some settings, with advocacy and behaviour-change initiatives often among the first areas affected when budgets were reduced.

According to her, SBCC should not be regarded as a luxury because it contributes to demand generation and helps people connect health information with available services.

Emmanuel Nwala of the Policy Innovation Centre said Nigeria needed to make better use of its existing research and programme evidence to sustain SBCC, particularly as global funding for the sector declines.

Mr Nwala said the funding situation had prompted practitioners to rethink how SBCC interventions were designed, implemented and sustained.

He said one emerging approach was to move SBCC from stand-alone community interventions into broader systems.

According to him, practitioners are increasingly using existing evidence to understand behaviour, design interventions, engage communities, evaluate programmes and scale successful approaches.

“Nigeria is not lacking data,” he said, noting that the country had substantial research and programme evidence that could inform decision-making.

He said stakeholders should move away from repeatedly generating new evidence when relevant evidence already existed.

He said both research evidence and programme evidence could be used to design, implement, evaluate, learn and scale interventions.

He also identified a gap in the evaluation of some digital SBCC programmes, saying many interventions concentrated on measuring how many people were reached without adequately determining how exposure translated into behavioural change.

According to him, communication, behaviour and social norms are closely linked and needed to be considered together when designing SBCC interventions.

He said the increasing use of digital platforms and artificial intelligence (AI) could strengthen SBCC in Nigeria but cautioned that technology should not replace human-centred approaches.

He urged practitioners to consider access, cost, trust and Nigeria’s cultural diversity when deploying digital and AI tools.

“We need to think about who has access to it. We need to think about the cost of also bringing and institutionalising the AI. We need to think about the trust,” he said.

He also called for stronger data-protection measures in the development and implementation of digital and AI-driven SBCC interventions.

He said such measures were necessary to ensure that the collection and use of personal information did not infringe on people’s rights.

“As we implement our AI models, as we implement our digital models, we need to now think of how we build in data protection measures in such a way that they do not infringe on people’s rights,” he said.

Beyond technology, he identified the private sector as a source of support to sustain SBCC amid declining external funding.

He said private companies could adopt SBCC initiatives as part of their corporate social responsibility programmes.

He also advocated partnerships with media personalities, actors, actresses and other influential individuals who could help deliver health messages and support behaviour-change interventions.

According to him, such partnerships can provide cost-effective ways of reaching wider audiences.

He said Nigeria already had a diverse SBCC ecosystem, adding that evidence and successful intervention models remained scattered across organisations.

“Our models are scattered. So it’s a time now to connect the dots. It’s a time now to leverage what other people have done,” he said.

He called for stronger collaboration among government institutions, civil society organisations, development partners, private-sector actors and media organisations to share evidence, resources and expertise.

He said stakeholders should identify their respective strengths and build partnerships around common health objectives rather than waiting for large volumes of external funding.

“People are no longer waiting for those billions of funds to arrive, because it’s clear that it’s difficult to come. But people are now looking for alignments. What strengths do I have to do that?” he said.

He said stronger collaboration would enable Nigeria to preserve gains already made in SBCC while ensuring that successful approaches were adapted, scaled and integrated into existing systems.

On her part, a media expert, Chair of the Nigeria Universal Health Coverage (UHC) Forum, Moji Makanjuola, said the post-summit engagement offered an opportunity to translate lessons from Panama into practical actions in Nigeria, particularly by strengthening the relationship between communication, communities, evidence and health outcomes.

Ms Makanjuola said the importance of placing communities and people with lived experiences at the centre of communication interventions, describing them as active participants in defining and driving change. 

(NAN)