In 1989, Phil Harvey founded the nonprofit organization DKT International to promote family planning & HIV/AIDS prevention through social marketing. Today, DKT International designs & implements social marketing programs in 18 countries around the world.
Mission:
DKT Internationals core mission is to provide safe and affordable options for family planning and HIV prevention through social marketing. DKT makes its products and services affordable to the poor in several ways:Keeping prices low:
In every country, DKT programs price at least one brand of every family planning method within traditional afford-ability guidelines. To ensure that product pricing is affordable to the poor, DKT utilizes a well-established formula to determine consumer prices for a one-year supply of contraceptives. In this way, and by regularly checking the prices of 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 (DRC), for example, DKTs condom brands are subsidized at less than 2 American cents each to reach the poorest segments of the population. While DKT always strives to increase its revenues to achieve financial sustainability and is increasingly successful in doing that it never does that by putting its products out of the reach of our lowest-income consumers.
Putting products where the poor can access them:
In addition to affordable pricing, DKT takes extra care to ensure that family planning products and services are available in rural, hard-to-reach, and low-income areas. And it makes them available in sales outlets frequented by low-income and high-risk consumers, like street kiosks, truck stops, brothels and non-profit clinics. In China and India, DKT sells inexpensive condoms to sex workers in low-income, high-risk settings. It does this in both low- and middle-income countries.