When the curtain rises in a classroom, a faculty hall, a market square, or an open community ground, the drama that unfolds is not merely entertainment-it is intervention, education, and healing. This was the philosophy animating a landmark series of Theatre for Development (TfD) outreach programmes recently carried out across Ekiti State by academics from the Federal University, Oye-Ekiti (FUOYE), targeting drug and substance abuse on university campuses and at a pre-degree level, deadly infectious diseases at the community level, the deeply entrenched practice of female genital mutilation at a public market, and menstrual hygiene awareness at a secondary school.
Led by Professor Taofiq Olaide Nasir, a distinguished scholar in dramatherapy and applied theatre at the Department of Performing Arts and Film Studies, FUOYE, and facilitated alongside Mr Tesleem Salaudeen, the interventions were conducted at five venues: the Pre-Degree Centre, Itapa, Ekiti; the Faculty of Arts, Federal University, Oye-Ekiti; the community of Irare, Ekiti; Ilupeju Market, Ekiti; and St. Augustine High School, Ekiti. Together, the programmes represent one of the most ambitious deployments of applied theatre for community health in Ekiti State in recent memory – and a compelling demonstration of what Nigerian universities can accomplish when their creative faculties are turned outward toward the communities that surround them.
Confronting the drug menace:
The Pre-Degree Centre at Itapa, Ekiti, was the first theatre of intervention. The audience comprised students in the pre-degree programme – young adults at one of the most critical and vulnerable thresholds of their educational journey, many of them navigating first experiences of relative independence, peer pressure, and exposure to illicit substances.
Employing well-established TfD methodologies – including forum theatre, participatory drama, and process drama – Professor Nasir and Mr Salaudeen orchestrated dramatic scenes depicting the seductive pull of drugs, the insidious mechanics of peer influence, and the devastating social, health, and academic consequences of substance dependency. Characters portrayed in the dramatic sketches were not distant archetypes but recognisable figures: the struggling student, the manipulative peer, the grieving parent, and the recovering addict finding a path back to purpose.
In keeping with the participatory ethos of TfD practice, students were not passive observers. At key moments in the performance, the action was halted, and the young audience was invited to intervene – to re-enact scenes, alter decisions, propose alternatives, and engage in facilitated discussion. This technique, borrowed from Augusto Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed tradition, transformed spectators into what Boal famously termed ‘spect-actors’, active participants in reshaping the dramatic and, by extension, social narrative.
The response from the pre-degree students was remarkable. The session generated animated dialogue about the realities of drug temptation on campuses, and students openly shared their own experiences and fears. Facilitators used these moments deftly to introduce factual information about the health risks of commonly abused substances – including tramadol, codeine, cannabis, and alcohol – while reinforcing behavioural strategies for resistance and help-seeking.
Taking the stage at FUOYE’s Faculty of Arts quadrangle
The second intervention was staged within the Faculty of Arts at FUOYE’s main campus in Oye-Ekiti, bringing the TfD programme directly to an undergraduate audience. If the challenge at Itapa was to reach young people at the threshold of university life, the challenge here was to engage those already embedded in campus culture – students who may have normalised certain behaviours or who have become desensitised to conventional health messaging.
Drama, as a communicative medium, cuts through this desensitisation in ways that posters, pamphlets, and lectures rarely achieve. The performances at the Faculty of Arts combined scripted vignettes with improvisation, drawing on students’ own realities. Scenes depicted the academic decline of a promising student consumed by substance abuse, the social ostracism that follows addiction, the gendered dimensions of drug use, and ultimately, narratives of recovery and resilience.
Professor Nasir, who has published extensively on the therapeutic and social dimensions of applied theatre in Nigeria, anchored the post-performance discussion with characteristic intellectual rigour and warmth. He situated the programme within a broader national conversation about the drug epidemic among Nigerian youth, citing data from the National Drug Law Enforcement Agency (NDLEA) and linking the campus experience to wider social anxieties. His intervention was not merely moralistic but analytical, equipping students with the critical tools to interrogate the systemic conditions – unemployment, anxiety, academic pressure, and social dislocation – that make substances attractive.
Mr Tesleem Salaudeen, who served as co-facilitator across all three interventions, brought a complementary energy to the sessions – agile, responsive, and deeply attuned to the dynamics of student audiences. His ability to modulate between the comic and the solemn within a single scene kept audiences engaged and emotionally present throughout the proceedings.
Faculty members and departmental heads were present at the FUOYE intervention and reportedly expressed support for institutionalising similar programmes on a semesterly basis. The response from students confirmed what TfD practitioners have long argued: that communities, when given the opportunity to see their own stories on stage, are moved to action in ways that no abstract lecture can replicate.
Drama against disease: Lassa fever and cholera intervention at Irare
The third intervention in this series moved from the institutional setting of the campus to the heart of a rural community, and in doing so, confronted perhaps the most urgent and the most lethal of the public health challenges addressed across the entire programme. At Irare, a community in Ekiti State, Professor Nasir and Mr Salaudeen performed a TfD intervention targeting two of Nigeria’s most feared infectious diseases: Lassa fever and cholera.
Nigeria’s battle with Lassa fever is chronic and deepening. The haemorrhagic illness, caused by the Lassa virus and transmitted primarily through contact with food or household items contaminated by infected rodents – particularly the multimammate rat – claims hundreds of lives annually across the country’s endemic states, with Edo, Ondo, and Ekiti among the worst-affected. The Nigeria Centre for Disease Control (NCDC) has consistently flagged Lassa fever as a high-priority public health threat, yet community-level awareness in rural areas remains dangerously low. Myths and misconceptions about the disease’s transmission, symptoms, and treatment abound, and fear of stigmatisation often prevents infected individuals from seeking timely medical care.
Cholera, driven by contaminated water sources and inadequate sanitation infrastructure, compounds this burden in communities like Irare, where access to clean water remains inconsistent. The disease’s speed – it can kill an infected person within hours of symptom onset if untreated – makes community education about prevention, oral rehydration therapy, and prompt health-seeking behaviour a matter of survival rather than merely public health best practice.
Into this context stepped the TfD team with a performance designed not to frighten, but to illuminate. Drawing on the community’s own social landscape, the dramatic scenarios staged at Irare depicted recognisable domestic scenes: a household that stored food carelessly and attracted rodents; a family that dismissed early Lassa fever symptoms as ordinary malaria and delayed seeking care with fatal consequences; a woman drawing water from a visibly contaminated source because the distance to the clean water point seemed too great; a community health worker battling the twin obstacles of fear and misinformation as she tried to assist an affected family. These were not abstract cautionary tales. They were, for many in the Irare audience, mirrors held up to their own daily practices and assumptions.
Crucially, the performance did not stop at diagnosis. Scenes of prevention and correct behaviour were rendered with equal dramatic investment: the proper storage of foodstuffs in rodent-proof containers; the correct preparation and administration of oral rehydration solution for cholera; the importance of reporting suspected Lassa fever cases to health authorities without delay; and the distinction between the disease itself and the social stigma that so often accompanies it. The facilitators understood that in communities where health misinformation travels faster than formal health education, drama has a unique power to correct the record by making correct behaviour as emotionally compelling as incorrect behaviour is dramatically convenient.
The community audience at Irare – comprising adults, elders, youth, and women’s groups – engaged with the performance with palpable intensity. The forum theatre component, during which audience members were invited to intervene and redirect the action, generated some of the most passionate participation witnessed across all four interventions. Community members debated rodent control practices, disputed received wisdom about the relationship between Lassa fever and witchcraft, and pressed the facilitators for clear, actionable information about what to do when a neighbour presents with symptoms. Professor Nasir fielded these questions with the precision of a public health educator and the warmth of a seasoned community practitioner, navigating cultural sensitivities while refusing to dilute the scientific clarity of his responses.
The choice of Irare as a venue was itself significant. Rural and peri-urban communities in Ekiti are precisely the settings that formal health campaigns – broadcast on television, distributed via smartphones, delivered in English – most consistently fail to reach. Theatre, performed in the open air and in the language of the community, operates on entirely different terms. It requires no device, no literacy, no signal. It requires only bodies, voices, and the willingness of a community to gather and watch – and, in the TfD model, to participate.
Drama in the marketplace: Confronting female genital mutilation at Ilupeju market
Of all the venues across the five-site intervention programme, Ilupeju Market presented perhaps the most unconventional – and, in many respects, the most strategically important – stage. Markets in Nigerian communities are not merely economic spaces; they are social theatres in their own right, gathering points where information circulates, opinions are formed, and community consensus is negotiated. It was here, amid the noise and colour of everyday commerce, that Professor Nasir and Mr Salaudeen brought their most politically charged and culturally sensitive intervention: a TfD performance targeting the practice of female genital mutilation (FGM).
Female genital mutilation – the partial or total removal of external female genitalia for non-medical reasons – remains one of the most severe and widespread violations of the bodily integrity and human rights of women and girls in Nigeria. Despite being criminalised under the Violence Against Persons (Prohibition) Act (VAPP) of 2015, and despite decades of international advocacy and public health campaigns, FGM persists in significant measure across the South West, South East, and North East geopolitical zones of the country. Ekiti State, situated in Nigeria’s South West, has historically recorded relatively high prevalence rates. According to data from the Nigeria Demographic and Health Survey, FGM is deeply embedded in cultural and traditional practice across many communities in the region, often performed on infants, young girls, or adolescents, and reinforced by beliefs about female purity, marriageability, and community belonging.
The challenge for any campaign against FGM in such a context is formidable. The practice is not merely a behaviour; it is, for many communities, a cornerstone of cultural identity and social organisation. Those who perform it – traditional circumcisers and birth attendants – occupy positions of social prestige. Parents who subject their daughters to FGM do so, in the main, not out of malice but out of genuine conviction that they are fulfilling a sacred duty and protecting their daughters’ social futures. Conventional health messaging – which catalogues the physical and psychological harms of FGM – often fails to penetrate this belief system because it speaks the language of biomedicine to communities whose relationship with the practice is fundamentally cultural and relational.
Theatre for Development is uniquely equipped to address this challenge. By dramatising the lived consequences of FGM – not through statistics but through story, not through condemnation but through embodied human experience – it creates the conditions for communities to interrogate their own practices from within, on their own terms. This was the approach adopted at Ilupeju Market.
The performance staged at Ilupeju Market was a carefully constructed dramatic narrative that followed the experiences of a young girl from the moment her family began preparations for her ‘initiation’ through the immediate physical trauma of the procedure, the medical complications that followed – severe bleeding, infection, the long shadow of chronic pain – and the psychological aftermath that shaped her adult life. Crucially, the narrative also gave dramatic form to the perspectives of those who perpetuate the practice: a grandmother who genuinely believed she was acting in her granddaughter’s best interests; a suitor’s family that regarded unexcised women as unfit for marriage; a community elder who framed the practice as an ancestral obligation. By rendering these voices sympathetically rather than as simple villains, the performance avoided the trap of self-righteous denunciation that so often causes rights-based campaigns to alienate their intended audiences.
The market setting amplified the intervention’s impact in ways that a formal auditorium could not have replicated. Traders, buyers, elderly women, young mothers with children strapped to their backs, and men passing through the market were drawn into the performance organically. The crowd that gathered was not a curated audience but a cross-section of the community in its full social diversity – precisely the constituency that needs to be reached if attitudes toward FGM are to shift. When the forum theatre component opened the stage to audience participation, the response was electric. Women who had themselves undergone FGM spoke of experiences they had never before articulated publicly. A traditional birth attendant in the audience challenged certain aspects of the portrayal, prompting a facilitated dialogue that was, by all accounts, one of the most honest public conversations about FGM that many in the market had ever witnessed.
Professor Nasir navigated the ensuing discussion with both scholarly precision and deep cultural intelligence. He acknowledged the sincerity of the beliefs that underpin FGM while presenting, with clarity and compassion, the medical consensus on its harms: the risk of haemorrhage, infection, tetanus, and HIV transmission during the procedure itself; the long-term consequences including chronic pelvic pain, urinary tract complications, sexual dysfunction, and the devastating obstetric risks – prolonged labour, fistula, maternal and infant mortality – associated with infibulation. He situated these harms within a rights framework without dismissing the cultural anxieties of his audience, drawing on the VAPP legislation not as a threat but as an expression of the nation’s collective commitment to the dignity of its women and girls.
Miss Abiola’s contribution at Ilupeju was characteristically vital. Her ability to hold space between the dramatic and the real – to move an audience from laughter to tears to earnest debate within the span of a single scene – was particularly significant in a market environment where attention is hard-won and easily lost. Several observers noted that her performance of the young girl at the centre of the narrative was among the most affecting dramatic portrayals of the entire five-venue programme.
The Ilupeju intervention will not, by itself, end FGM in Ekiti. No single performance can. But what it achieved – the opening of a public conversation in a space where that conversation has rarely been held, the humanisation of both victim and perpetrator, and the provision of accurate health information within a culturally resonant frame – represents exactly the kind of first-order community engagement that behaviour-change researchers identify as essential to the long process of shifting deeply held cultural norms.
BREAKING THE SILENCE: MENSTRUAL HYGIENE AT ST. AUGUSTINE HIGH SCHOOL, OYE EKITI
The third and perhaps most emotionally charged of the three interventions took place at St. Augustine High School, Ekiti, where Professor Nasir and Mr Salaudeen turned their attention to a subject that remains, in many Nigerian communities, shrouded in silence and shame: menstrual hygiene.
In Nigeria, as across sub-Saharan Africa, menstrual stigma continues to affect girls’ school attendance, academic performance, mental health, and self-esteem. Many schoolgirls lack access to proper sanitary products, accurate information about their reproductive health, or a safe space in which to discuss their experiences. The consequences are documented and severe: absenteeism during menstrual periods, social anxiety, and in some cases, early school dropout.
The TfD intervention at St Augustine’s was designed to meet this challenge head-on. Through carefully crafted dramatic scenarios, the facilitators depicted the experiences of female students navigating menstruation in an environment lacking both material support and cultural openness. One powerful scene portrayed a student mortified by a menstrual stain on her school uniform, surrounded by laughing peers – a moment that resonated painfully with many in the audience. Another scene depicted a young girl’s confusion and fear at the onset of her first period, having received no prior education on the subject from either family or school.
These dramatic representations were not merely cautionary tales. They were springboards for open, facilitated conversations about menstrual health, hygiene practices, the use of sanitary pads and alternative materials, and the importance of destigmatising natural biological processes. The facilitators also engaged the male students present – a deliberate and important pedagogical choice – encouraging them to become allies rather than agents of stigma.
Teachers and school administrators who witnessed the session noted that the dramatic method succeeded in opening conversations that formal lessons have struggled to initiate. Several female students approached the facilitators after the session to ask questions and, in some cases, to share their own experiences. The cathartic and educational dimensions of the performance were, by all accounts, deeply felt.
THEATRE FOR DEVELOPMENT: A METHODOLOGY WHOSE TIME HAS COME
Theatre for Development is not a new concept. Its roots lie in the post-colonial era of the 1970s and 1980s, when African theatre practitioners – among them Ngugi wa Thiong’o in Kenya and Wole Soyinka and Ola Rotimi in Nigeria – began to articulate a vision of theatre not as elite entertainment but as a democratic tool of community empowerment and social change. Over the decades, TfD has been deployed across the African continent to address issues ranging from HIV/AIDS awareness and gender-based violence to environmental degradation and civic education. The five-venue Ekiti programme sits squarely within this tradition-extending TfD’s reach from tertiary institutions and secondary schools to rural communities and the marketplace itself.
What distinguishes TfD from conventional public health campaigns is its insistence on community participation, cultural specificity, and emotional resonance. Where a billboard speaks to its audience, a TfD performance speaks with it. Where a pamphlet delivers information, a dramatic enactment creates experience. And it is experience – the visceral recognition of one’s own situation rendered on a stage – that has been shown, time and again, to catalyse genuine attitude change and behavioural transformation.
Professor Nasir has been one of the leading advocates for the systematic application of TfD within Nigerian university communities. His academic work, which spans dramatherapy, applied theatre, and community performance, has argued consistently that institutions of higher learning have both the responsibility and the creative resources to serve their surrounding communities through the arts. The interventions in Ekiti represent this argument translated into action.
VOICES FROM THE GROUND
Speaking after the conclusion of the five-phase intervention programme, Professor Nasir reflected on the significance of the project. ‘Theatre’, he observed, ‘has always been the most democratic of the arts – it requires nothing more than a performing body and a willing audience. When we bring it into spaces where young people are wrestling with the pressures of drugs, of bodily shame, of uncertainty – where communities are facing the terror of Lassa fever and cholera with little more than rumour to guide them – or where the bodies of girls are being harmed in the name of tradition – we give them something that no textbook can: the experience of seeing their own lives clearly, and the possibility of choosing differently.’
Mr Tesleem Salaudeen, for his part, expressed particular satisfaction with the breadth of the programme. ‘These five venues represent five distinct communities and five distinct challenges,’ he noted. ‘That the same methodology – participatory drama, dialogue, shared storytelling – could speak so effectively across all of them, from a university campus to a market square to a rural community ground, is a testament to what theatre can do when it is used with intentionality and care.’
Participants across the five venues offered uniformly positive assessments. A second-year Arts student at FUOYE described the session as ‘the most honest conversation about drugs I have had since coming to this school.’ A female student at St. Augustine’s told facilitators that the performance made her feel ‘seen’ in a way she had not expected from a school programme. At the Pre-Degree Centre, a participant said simply: ‘I did not know drama could do all this.’ At Irare, a community elder who had initially watched the proceedings with cautious reserve reportedly rose at the end of the forum theatre session and told his neighbours: ‘Everything this drama has shown us, we have been doing wrong. Let us begin again from today.’ And at Ilupeju Market, a woman trader who had witnessed the FGM performance quietly told one of the facilitators afterwards: ‘I had this done to me. I did not know it had a name. I did not know it was wrong. Now I know. My daughter will be safe.’
IMPLICATIONS AND THE WAY FORWARD
The Ekiti TfD interventions arrive at a moment of acute national anxiety about drug abuse among Nigerian youth. According to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) 2021 survey conducted in partnership with the Federal Government, approximately 14.4 million Nigerians between the ages of 15 and 64 used drugs in the past year – a figure that has prompted emergency legislative and law enforcement responses from the federal government. Yet enforcement alone has demonstrably failed to stem the tide. The experience of Itapa and FUOYE suggests that creative, community-centred education may be a vital complement to punitive approaches.
The intervention at Irare strikes at an equally urgent national emergency. Lassa fever kills hundreds of Nigerians every year, and the NCDC has repeatedly emphasised that community awareness is the single most effective tool in reducing transmission – more impactful, at the community level, than any pharmacological intervention available. The 2024 Lassa fever season recorded one of the highest case counts in years, with Ekiti among the states reporting significant burden. Cholera, meanwhile, remains endemic in communities lacking reliable water and sanitation infrastructure, with outbreaks following predictably in the wake of floods and the dry-season collapse of water supplies. The Irare intervention demonstrated that TfD can penetrate precisely the communities that formal disease surveillance and health education systems most struggle to reach.
Similarly, the menstrual hygiene intervention at St Augustine’s and the anti-FGM campaign at Ilupeju Market both speak to a broader national conversation about girls’ bodily autonomy, education, and health. The Ilupeju intervention is particularly timely: despite the VAPP Act’s prohibition of FGM, enforcement in rural and peri-urban communities remains weak, and the practice continues to be sustained by cultural inertia and the social power of traditional practitioners. TfD offers what legislation alone cannot – a means of reaching into the cultural logic of communities and opening spaces for reflection and change from within. Nigeria’s commitment to the Sustainable Development Goals – particularly SDG 3 (Good Health and Well-Being), SDG 4 (Quality Education), and SDG 5 (Gender Equality) – demands precisely this kind of ground-level, culturally sensitive engagement.
Education stakeholders, health advocates, and human rights organisations in Ekiti State are now calling for the institutionalisation of similar programmes across the state’s schools, markets, communities, and tertiary institutions. There are also calls for dedicated funding for TfD research and practice within Nigerian universities and for formal partnerships between institutions like FUOYE and state-level health and social welfare authorities – partnerships that would enable applied theatre practitioners to be deployed as first responders in disease outbreak communication and gender-based violence prevention, complementing statutory responses with culturally resonant community engagement. The five-venue Ekiti programme offers a compelling proof of concept for exactly this kind of collaboration.