Condoms for viral marketing and other social media awkwardness

By Rebecca Oas, Ph.D. | June 7, 2013

At the end of each day at the Women Deliver conference, the final plenary session was followed by a brief “Last Word” presentation.  On Wednesday, the “Last Word” was delivered by Hugh Evans, CEO and Co-Founder, Global Poverty Project.

In reference to the oft-repeated statistic that 222 million women are designated as having an “unmet need” for contraception, Evans said:

“222 million women have no access to modern contraception.”

I’ve written about how self-reported lack of access is actually only a small component of what “unmet need” includes, but Evans is hardly alone in thinking his statement was a valid paraphrase – the UNFPA routinely uses the same phrasing.  But then Evans went even further:

“What does it mean for this issue of family planning when 222 million women are denied access to contraceptives?”

“Denied access” implies that not only do these women lack contraceptives, but that they are actively being prevented from obtaining them.  There is nothing in the Demography and Health Survey questions used to define “unmet need” that in any way implies the purposeful denial of contraceptives to women who want them, but the concept of “unmet need” gains much of its traction by manipulating or redefining words.

Scholarly reports have defined “total demand” for contraceptives as the sum of women with “unmet need” plus those currently using modern contraceptive methods.  Since “unmet need” in turn includes women who personally oppose contraceptives for religious and other reasons, such women are therefore classified as simultaneously demanding and opposing contraception.

But these inconsistencies are generally the exclusive domain of academic types who view impassioned advocacy with a jaundiced eye and ask for citations in lieu of reaching for their checkbooks.  As for the advocates themselves, they spin a heart-wrenching narrative about women being denied access to things they not only want but demand.

However, within Evans’ brief presentation, he referred several times to his goal of “increasing demand” for family planning worldwide.  It would seem that the inconvenient truth behind “unmet need” is that the demand isn’t already there.

In fact, in a personal conversation, a representative of the UNFPA admitted that “it isn’t just about access; it’s also about behavior change.”  This was after I asked him about the low percentage of women with “unmet need” who claim they lack access to contraceptives.  Apparently, the UNFPA and its allies believe that when women in the developing world are educated about contraceptives and informed of their rights, they will get around to demanding that access which, unbeknownst to them, is being denied.

So Evans is launching a social media campaign called “It Takes Two” in order to manufacture some demand for family planning products through a combination of free concert tickets, a condom wrapper design contest, and other forms of “gamification”.  This combined effort of Women Deliver and the Global Poverty Project (the eponymous “two”) is of course targeted at youth.

In any campaign to promote “slacktivism” among a population presumed to have a short attention span, there are more important things than consistency of message.  And perhaps it would be wrong to expect too much from an initiative that displays a howler like this in its promotional video on Youtube:

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