co-fundable projects - countries and themes

Kirstine Vangkilde Berner, Head of Section at the Department for Global Cooperation and Economy, Danish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, explains why Danida is supporting the Universal Access to Female Condoms project:

 

“Danida is interested in female condoms as a contribution to our wider policy dialogue on women’s rights and gender equality. We believe in looking at how new technologies can inform new ways of thinking about these important issues, and female condoms are one way to empower women by giving them more ability to protect themselves.

 

“We’ve been supporting the advancement of female condoms through various programmes. We saw that the UAFC project could add value by being targeted and comprehensive, so we decided to support it even though its two initial focus countries – Cameroon and Nigeria – are not ones in which Danida usually works.

 

“We saw the potential to learn a lot from this project for scaling up and rolling out in our future initiatives, in terms of seeing how a really targeted and comprehensive approach could strengthen the use of female condoms. The project is giving us valuable into how women react to different ways of marketing and promoting female condoms.

 

“The project is also helping us understand how to address the central barriers to broadening the uptake of female condoms. As well as the question of marketing, these include the price, which is higher than for male condoms; research and development, to optimise the product itself; and learning which are the most effective distribution channels to use.

 

“Working directly with manufacturers of female condoms, through the public-private partnership element of the project, is an especially interesting area for us.

 

“The project is showing good progress and we look forward in particular to seeing how sustainable it becomes. As a major donor we are committed to making sure that what is learned from this project is put to good use – not only by ourselves in our own future work, but also by sharing lessons with others.”

 

For more on the project, check out our UAFC.

For more on the MFA, visit their website.

Bron	Oxfam Novib, 22 march 2011