VIENNA -- It's a story of sexy young guys and girls having a good time in the big city, of friendships pushed to the edge, and families struggling to survive, but underneath all the drama, MTV's "Shuga" is a story about HIV. “My character, Ayira, is young, attractive and very ambitious. When her father left it changed her economic status, and she’ll do anything to get back up there,” Lupita Nyong’o, who plays one of the main characters, told IRIN/PlusNews. Ayira cheats on her boyfriend with an older man at her workplace, who convinces her to have sex without a condom. He turns out to be HIV-positive.
An evaluation of the impact of the series – set in the Kenyan capital, Nairobi – by the Johns Hopkins Centre for Communication Programmes, was discussed at the International AIDS Conference in Vienna.
“What Ayira can teach young people is the harm that multiple concurrent partnerships can do; it’s physically risky but also emotionally damaging to you, and people you care about,” Nyong’o said.
Shuga, which aired in November 2009, ends with Ayira at a voluntary counselling and testing centre, waiting for the results of her own HIV test. Other themes woven into the storyline include condom use, HIV testing, alcohol use, cross-generational sex and HIV discordance (where one member of a couple is HIV-positive and the other is HIV-negative).
“[The] evaluation shows that young people were less inclined to have multiple partners, more inclined to get tested for HIV, and less likely to discriminate against people living with HIV after they watched Shuga,” Bill Roedy, CEO of MTV, told IRIN/PlusNews.
Worldwide, 40 percent of new HIV infections occur among young people between the ages of 15 and 24. Behaviour change campaigns have shown some success, but Ambassador Eric Goosby, head of the US President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), said MTV offered something that traditional government-run programmes could not.
“MTV knows how to package hard-hitting programmes that target young people in an effective way; they bring a ‘cool factor’ that is beyond the reach of governments,” he commented.
Shuga was produced by Ignite, a partnership between MTV’s Staying Alive – which produces TV programming for young people around the world – PEPFAR, and the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF).
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