Social Marketing for Health: AIDS prevention, family planning, and maternal and child health

The social-marketing component of SFPS aims to reinforce host-country programs to ensure that key products such as condoms, hormonal contraceptives, and oral rehydration salts are known to the consumer, distributed at affordable prices, and accessible to the vast majority of people in the target population. Products are branded and attractively packaged, and are distributed through both the private and public sectors. The implementing agency for this component is PSI (Population Services International), a Washington-based nonprofit group specializing in AIDS prevention, family planning, and maternal and child health. The leading social-marketing organization in the world, PSI has projects in more than 45 countries on five continents.

Social marketing is one of the most effective ways to improve the health and quality of life of low-income people in developing countries. It involves selling needed health products and services at affordable prices, motivating their use, and promoting related healthful behavior. In so doing, it creates both supply and demand. The products and services are sold, rather than given away, so that people will value and use them. The prices are low enough to be affordable by even the most economically disadvantaged segments of society. To carry out its promotional and educational campaigns, social marketing makes creative use of a wide range of media and techniques, from radio and television to mobile video units to interpersonal communications.

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