RHSC to produce Contraceptive Social Marketing Report

This month, RSHC took over the production and dissemination of a respected community resource – the Contraceptive Social Marketing (SCM) Report. Produced annually for more than 30 years by DKT International, the report shares statistics for contraceptive social marketing programs that report their sales data to DKT and generate 10,000 Couple-Years of Protection (CYPs) or more.

It is a move welcomed by members of the reproductive health (RH) community, with PSI’s President / CEO pronouncing it to be a wise decision in a recent webinar introducing the report’s latest issue. Claudette Diogo from the Ghana Health Service voiced her confidence that the RHSC, which has managed the VAN efficiently and accountably since its inception five years ago, is up to the task. 

VAN Director Julia White called this transition “natural and timely”, adding that the move is in keeping with RHSC’s long history of promoting data visibility within the community. Commissioning, producing, and disseminating key data harks back to the RHSC’s management of the VAN precursors such as the Reproductive Health Interchange, the Procurement Planning and Monitoring Report, the Family Planning Market Report, LEAP, and the VAN, she said.

The first issue of the CSM Report, published in 1991, shared self-reported data from nine countries, equivalent to 9 million CYPs, while the current report covers 87 million CYPs from more than 80 countries, said DKT’s President Chris Purdy. Users can complement the figures with NGO and government data to work toward a balanced picture of how end-users access RH supplies.

Ms. Diogo explained how DKT Ghana has used data from the CSM report on contraceptive prevalence rates (CPR) order to build capacity, train reproductive health service providers, and in 2022, avert 150K pregnancies and 1,000 maternal deaths. And Mr. Salah Uddin Ahmad from the Social Marketing Company in Bangladesh shared how his company contributed 65 million CYP to the country’s National Family Planning Program from July 20222 to June 2023.

Likewise, Mr. Ashish Das from the Viatris healthcare manufacturing company said, “The insights we received encouraged us to expand our range from only IUDs and one contraceptive pill, through to injectables and hormonal IUDs. We started extrapolating data and making forecasts for country-wide plans, all with the confidence that our decisions were based on sound knowledge. We were able to harmonize our plans with local expectations; indeed, this is one of the greatest resources we’ve used.”

The RHSC will gather forward-looking feedback from the community and call on the support of key partners in the planning and production of the CSM Report’s next issue.

Watch a recording of the webinar here.