Today, DKT is providing safe, affordable, and effective family planning products and services — in some cases with dramatic impact. In the Philippines and Ethiopia, DKT provides an estimated 50 percent of all modern family planning methods. In Sudan, DKT is the country’s main private distributor of IUDs and manual vacuum aspiration kits.
In Ethiopia, DKT increases condom use through events like this parade during a holiday celebrated primarily by women. In 2010, DKT distributed more than 85 million condoms and provided more than half of Ethiopia’s modern contraception.
DKT places a major emphasis on educating and empowering groups with particular needs, such as poor women, marginalized and vulnerable populations, adolescent girls, and youth, so that they can fully understand and make use of their available reproductive health options. For example, one of the keys to DKT’s success in Indonesia has been the Andalan (meaning ‘reliable’) social franchises of midwives. DKT Indonesia has developed a strong relationship with midwives, the key providers of reproductive health services for the lower income and rural segments of Indonesia society. Working together and through central, regional, and provincial midwife associations, DKT-Indonesia reaches an estimated 15,000 midwives monthly through franchise agreements and other means, providing materials, technical support, and products. More than 40,000 midwives have been trained in IUD and implant insertion and removal under the program. To ensure that product pricing is affordable to poor people, DKT utilizes a well-established formula to determine consumer prices for a one-year supply of contraceptives. In this way, and by carefully checking the prices for everyday consumer goods like a cup of tea or a single cigarette, DKT ensures that its contraceptives are affordable. In Ethiopia and the Democratic Republic of Congo, for example, DKT’s condom brands are subsidized at less than 2¢ each to reach the poorest segments of the population. In addition to affordable pricing, the issue of availability is critically important. DKT takes extra care to ensure that family planning products and services are available in rural, hard-to-reach, and low-income areas.
In Sudan, DKT has trained thousands of midwives on IUD insertion and removal, enabling rural women to finally have access to long-term family planning.
In Bihar, India, for example, very poor women and men take advantage of the free sterilization procedures provided by DKT’s teams operating in remote government clinics. In India, DKT also holds educational meetings in rural villages and operates informational kiosks at local religious and cultural festivals that provide free contraceptive samples. In Nangjing, China, and Mumbai, India, DKT sells inexpensive condoms to sex workers in low-income, high-risk settings. In Ethiopia, Sudan, Mozambique, and the Democratic Republic of Congo, DKT responds to local government and NGO requests to provide temporary supplies of free contraceptive commodities to meet shortages or respond to other priorities. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, DKT is training doctors, nurses, and paraprofessionals to provide reproductive health-related counseling and services, including the insertion and removal of IUDs. DKT also will be working closely with the head of the Armed Forces of the DRC’s reproductive health program to train providers in clinics to advise army personnel about contraceptives.
