PSI’s Chastain Fitzgerald shows the
audience a female condom during a
presentation on Capitol Hill.
WASHINGTON, December 17, 2008 — Chastain Fitzgerald, PSI’s Vice President for New Business and Advocacy, presented on PSI’s female condom programs during a Capitol Hill briefing on “Female Condoms: A Women-Centered Response to the Feminization of HIV.” The briefing was organized by The Center for Health and Gender Equity (CHANGE) in conjunction with Senator Dianne Feinstein (CA).
Greater biological vulnerability, gender norms, and inequitable access to resources and information leave women at high risk for HIV and other sexually transmitted infections (STIs). Almost half of all HIV-infected adults around the world are women.
Fitzgerald described how the female condom is an important tool for women who are unable to depend on their partners to use male condoms to protect them from HIV and other STIs. She identified a variety of lessons that PSI has learned in its fourteen years of female condom programming experience:
- Lesson 1: Female condoms have an important place in global efforts to protect people engaging in unsafe acts that would otherwise go unprotected.
- Lesson 2: While female condoms are far more expensive than their male counterparts, there are ways to make the female condom more cost-effective, such as targeting it to most-at-risk populations, or reducing its marginal cost programs by sharing or spreading costs across other programs.
- Lesson 3: There is often strong demand for the female condom among women.
- Lesson 4: Market segmentation and targeted promotion is important to offset potential stigma that could occur if female condoms were only marketed to marginalized populations like sex workers.
- Lesson 5: A combination of innovative distribution methods and interpersonal outreach should be used to reach priority target groups.
- Lesson 6: Partner support for the female condom can increase the likelihood of sustained use.
Fitzgerald encouraged policymakers to treat the female condom more like the male condom. The U.S. government should offer female condoms, like male condoms, to its HIV prevention and family planning partners working in the developing world as a donated commodity, and should finance their promotion and distribution.
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