Paying for Condoms and Contraceptives

Although condoms and contraceptives are inexpensive and cost-effective technologies, cost continues to be a barrier to their availability. International donors and developing country governments need to give due regard to the indispensable role of condoms and contraceptives in HIV prevention, and commit to providing the necessary resources to implement programs and services. The growing need for condoms and contraceptives worldwide has been met with long-term stagnant funding on the part of donors and only small increases in numbers of commodities.

International Donors

Donor support for condoms and contraceptives is channeled bilaterally (directly from one government to another), multilaterally (through international organizations such as the United Nations or the World Bank) and through the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria.

Overall, donor funding for contraceptive commodities has changed little over the past five years. Total donor support for all commodities in 2006 is reported by UNFPA as US$196 million. Bilateral donors provided 51 percent of total support, multilaterals provided 30 percent, and social marketing organizations accounted for 19 percent of the total support. While social marketing organizations do generate income through cost-recovery activities, the majority of their funding originates from bilateral support. Although the number of donors funding contraceptive commodities has more than doubled over the past two decades, the vast majority of funding continues to be provided by USAID and UNFPA, who together provided over 60 percent of 2005 funding, as shown in Table 2.

The donor support figures shown below reflect only the cost of the commodities themselves and their sampling and quality testing. Costs associated with improving access, logistics and distribution capacity, and raising awareness and promoting use of the commodities are not included. These costs are estimated to be four times the costs of the supplies,³⁴⁴ and may be even higher for condoms.³⁵⁵

Like support for contraceptive commodities overall, there has been little increase in donor provision of condoms in response to the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Indeed, donor funding of these essential commodities has been both erratic and inadequate.³⁴⁶ Of the estimated 18 billion condoms needed in 2006 (13.5 billion for HIV prevention and 4.4 billion for family planning)³⁴⁷ donors provided just 2.3 billion.³⁴⁸ In the ten-year period between 1998 and 2007, donors have provided on average 2.9 billion male condoms per year, peaking at 3.3 billion in 2007, as shown in Figure 7.³⁴⁹ During the period 2000 to 2006, condoms accounted for approximately 35 percent of total donor support for contraceptive commodities. Africa (47 percent) and Asia Pacific regions (36.6 percent) received the largest shares of donor support for condoms in 2006.³⁵⁰

Please see the Appendix for this section's end notes.