From using revenues from a condom catalog to fund family planning programming to fighting laws that restricted contraceptive advertisement, Phil Harvey was a trail blazer. He was a visionary and “serial founder” who co-founded three organizations that expanded reproductive rights and choices for women globally – Population Services International (PSI), Marie Stopes (now MSI Reproductive Choices) and DKT International.
Phil forever changed the landscape of global health and social justice. In the year since his passing, his legacy lives on. We asked the CEOs of the three organizations he co-founded – PSI, MSI, and DKT – to reflect on Phil’s legacy and what he would do to work towards the United Nation’s SDG goals.
A VISIONARY RULEBREAKER WHO TRANSFORMED GLOBAL HEALTH
Karl Hofmann, PSI
Phil Harvey was a visionary rulebreaker who transformed global health’s landscape. He championed personal freedom, he advanced civil liberties, and he believed in supporting consumers everywhere to take their health and lives into their hands. Phil’s legacy inspires PSI’s people-powered approach, our commitment to people’s right to make their own health decisions and our ability to break from tradition and chart a new course – with and for the people we serve.
To achieve the SDGs, Phil would break the rules. From his mail-order condom business to his social marketing roots, Phil showed us the power of doing development differently. He knew that the best solutions for people started with themselves: listening to people’s voices, and meeting their needs. Phil would be innovating to find ways to enhance the individual as the agent of our progress. And he would avoid conferences.
WHEN HE SPOKE, YOU FELT COMPELLED TO LISTEN
Simon Cooke, MSI
Phil’s contribution to global health cannot be overestimated. From the early days, his mission was to provide affordable contraception to anyone who wanted it, and to normalize the idea that sex could be for pleasure. Through his actions, and the organizations he founded, hundreds of millions of [people] have benefitted from the high-quality contraceptive products and services these organizations distribute and provide, and in so doing, many taboos and barriers have been broken. Phil also put his money where his mouth was and invested his own time and funds to promote and defend individual reproductive rights. With his emphasis on accountability and measurement, he ensured that progress was measured in people served and results, not effort expended. Phil was a man of few words, but when he spoke, you felt compelled to listen.
If Phil were in charge of achieving the SDGs (a task, by the way, I am sure he would not want to take on) he would probably take the responsibility away from many of the organizations tasked with trying to deliver them today. He would consider them to be ill-equipped to deliver results, too self-interested, and unaccountable for their delivery. I am sure he would prefer to engage more private sector actors, and he might, for example, look to distribute cash directly to the poorest so that they could find their own solutions.
THE WORLD IS A MUCH BETTER PLACE BECAUSE OF PHIL HARVEY
Christopher Purdy, DKT
Phil was a pioneering, iconoclastic, optimistic big thinker. An unassuming and quiet champion of freedom, Phil’s ideas, work, and philanthropy have touched the lives of millions of people all over the world. Furthermore, his fingerprints have impacted multiple organizations and thousands of professionals who work in the field of reproductive health. The world is a much better place because of Phil Harvey.
Phil was always happy on the outside looking in, providing contrarian thinking to solving the world’s problems. His approach to most issues, including those tackled by the SDGs, was to deeply trust individuals to solve their own problems when given sufficient agency, education, and resources. Phil believed that empowering people, without the confines of institutional oversights, helped them unleash their potential through civic and private life.
* * * * *
This article is a part of PSI’s ICFP 2022 Impact Magazine. Explore the magazine here.
