The female condom - currently the only female-controlled method of preventing HIV - is rarely available to women who need it. Blaming poor marketing and insufficient investment, activists at the International AIDS Conference in Mexico City said failure to promote the female condom had hurt global HIV prevention efforts.
"When the female condom first came to us, it was marketed to sex workers, women in bars, and other women thought to be at high risk of HIV or to have loose morals," said Gladys Chiwome, of Zimbabwe's Women and AIDS Support Network, which promotes the use of the female condom in the southern African nation. "As a result, women who thought they were safe, such as married women, were, and still are, reluctant to use it."
Farah Karimi, director of Oxfam-Novib, the Dutch arm of the UK-based international charity, told a press conference that 28 million female condoms were distributed worldwide in 2007, compared with 11 billion male condoms. The unit cost of a female condom, she added, was 18 times higher than that of the male condom.
"Even here at the conference, the bag supplied by the conference organisers to all delegates contained five male condoms but only one female condom," she said.
While policy makers and donors continued to believe that lack of investment in the female condom was driven by low demand, Karimi said the reverse was true: if more governments bought more female condoms, promoted more female condom programmes, and invested more in the development of a lower-cost version of the prophylactic, demand would shoot up.
"The male condom was promoted so hard in advertising, through school education and advocacy - we need the same effort for the female condom," she said.
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