Prioritising sexuality education in Mississippi and Nigeria: The importance of local actors, policy windows and creative strategy

ABSTRACT

Mississippi and Nigeria are two socially conservative places unlikely to prioritise sexuality education. Nonetheless, Mississippi passed a bill in 2011 mandating all school districts to offer sexuality education, and Nigeria approved a national sexuality education curriculum in 2001. To identify the factors that drove the process of prioritisation of sexuality education in each context, we conducted more than 70 semi-structured interviews with nongovernmental organisations/nonprofits, donor organisations and federal and state ministries involved in the prioritisation and implementation of sexuality education in Mississippi and Nigeria. Prioritisation of sexuality education occurred for similar reasons in both Mississippi and Nigeria: (1) local individuals and organisations committed to sexuality education and supported by external actors; (2) the opening of a policy window that made sexuality education a solution to a pressing social problem (teen pregnancy in Mississippi and HIV/AIDS in Nigeria) and (3) strategic action on the part of proponents. We conclude that promoting sexuality education in challenging contexts requires fostering committed local individuals and organisations, identifying external resources to support implementation costs and building on existing relationships of trust between actors, even if those relationships are unrelated to sexuality education.

KEYWORDS:

• Sexuality education
• Nigeria
• Mississippi
• nongovernmental organisations (NGOs)
• policy adoption

Acknowledgements

Special thanks to our respondents in Mississippi and Nigeria for their insights and time. Thanks also to those who provided comments on earlier drafts – Nicole Angotti, Michael Bader, Ernesto Castaneda, Josh McCawley, Taryn Morrissey, Kirsten Stoebenau and Nina Yamanis – as well as to Julia Fischer-Mackey for her assistance editing.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 See Pick, Givaudan, and Reich (2008) as an important exception.

2 Authors’ calculation based on data from the 2013 Demographic and Health Survey.

3 Davis does not use candy as a means to denigrate sexually active women, as have some abstinence-only programmes.

4 Bush's 2008 co-authored book (with Joe McIlhaney), Hooked: New Science on how Casual Sex is Affecting Our Children (Northfield Press), gives full explication of this argument.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation [grant number 102417].