Over the past twenty-five years, there has been a dramatic decline in Malaysia’s birthrate. It plummeted from 5.2 births per woman in 1975 to 2.9 births per woman today. The drop in fertility has been attributed to urbanization, later marriages, the expansion of employment opportunities, increased education, and an energetic family planning program by the national government and nongovernmental organizations.
Today, the contraceptive prevalence rate is rising. In 1974, 33 percent of Malaysians used some form of birth control. Today this figure is over 60 percent. However, there are differing birthrates among Malaysia’s ethnic groups with Malays having the highest rate, and family planning services are not widely available in rural areas.
Since DKT established its social marketing program in 1990, the country’s economic growth has enabled DKT to switch from subsidized contraceptives to fully commercial products. Today, DKT focuses its efforts on providing high-risk groups such as prostitutes with high-quality, low-cost condoms, who in turn market them to colleagues and clients.
The DKT Malaysia program has become completely self-sustaining by adopting the principle of cross-subsidy. Some of the profits from commercial sales are used to lower the cost of condoms to the sex industry. Sex workers can purchase DKT’s condoms at just 0.017 USD per condom, while the price to consumers at traditional commercial outlets is more than ten times higher.
In 2012, DKT Malaysia sold nearly 4.7 million condoms. This translates into 46,922 CYPs.
For more information:
DKT Malaysia
Director: R. Thetchanamoorthy
Address: PHI Consultants, Number 38A, Jalan Intan 5, Taman Cheras Permata 2, Cheras, 43200 Selangor, Malaysia
Tel: 60-3-905-5223
Fax: 60-3-9075-3675
E-mail: Renganathan@dktinternational.org
