The Feasibility of Sustainable Youth Sexual Behaviour Change In Nigeria

Theoretical Background and research questions/hypothesis: For methodological, ideological, and strategic reasons, little systematic inquiry into factors responsible for limited youth sexual behaviour change in Nigeria is available. This is despite more than two decades of sexual health research, communication and condom social marketing. 

Methods: To distill and explain limited youth sexual behaviour change, this paper leverages Rob Stones rendition of structuration theory for empirical research, for a systematic review of empirical studies. These studies individually address important and plausible influences on unprotected sex but neglect to underscore their recursive interrelationships and ramifications for interventions.

Results: The author found that Behaviour Change Communication (BCC) interventions in Nigeria do not seriously consider the co-influence of youth internal states (such as emotions and need for pleasure); the perennial influence of external structures (such as gender, the mass media and romance ideologies); and youth experience of mostly intended outcomes from their sexual activities (such as pleasure, peer esteem, and material rewards) in intervention planning and execution. Youth sexual agencies, however defined, are co-governed by the outlined inter-dependent and recursive factors. It is the interplay among the outlined compelling structural and agential factors that nurture and sustain sub-population sexual ideologies and unprotected sex; not agency alone.

Conclusions: The neglect of structural co-factors on unprotected sex, and the operational focus on youth sexual agencies by  BCC interventions, has the unanticipated effects of nurturing the Knowledge-Attitude-Practice -Gap detailed in sexuality literature; and the unlikelihood of sustainable sexual behaviour change in Nigeria.

Implications for research and/or practice: Consequently, the feasibility of sustainable behaviour change in Nigeria will depend on sexual health stakeholders’ acceptance that multiple societal structures and youth variable agencies recursively co-influence their sexual ideologies and unprotected sex.  Accepting this reality will influence the development of interventions that would realistically address both influential sexuality structures and youth agencies driving unprotected sex in Nigeria.