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Where the Rubbers Meet the Road

Chris Purdy, MPS ’93, promotes family planning in the developing world

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The colorful little packets look like they’d contain gummy candy. There’s a cornucopia of flavors—watermelon, mint, banana, grape, strawberry, chocolate, cola, tutti-frutti. But then you realize that some of the labels don’t describe tastes; they say things like “ultra sensitive,” “extra large,” and “delaying effect.” Each of these festive packages contains three condoms.

Sold in Brazil under the Prudence brand, the prophylactics are made and marketed by DKT International, a global nonprofit devoted to promoting family planning and HIV prevention in the developing world. “We try to overcome all the reasons that people give for not wanting to use contraception,” says Chris Purdy, MPS ’93, DKT’s executive vice president. “People say, ‘I don’t like condoms because they’re expensive.’ Well, here’s one you can afford. ‘I don’t like them because they’re not fun.’ Well, here’s a fun brand. ‘I don’t like them because they smell bad.’ Well, here’s one that smells like grape.”

Chris Purdy

Provided

In Ethiopia, DKT sells coffee-flavored condoms; in the Philippines, under a brand called Lick, it sells mango-orange twist. In Turkey it offers—what else?—Turkish delight. “People like to try them, and it gets them laughing and talking,” says Purdy, days before leaving on a February fact-finding trip to Egypt and Sudan. “One of the big issues about condom use is people’s discomfort. How do you get them talking about condoms around the dining room table—to not be embarrassed when they walk into a pharmacy and say, ‘I’ll have a pack of these’?”

In addition to condoms, DKT offers a variety of contraceptive options including birth control pills, injectables, IUDs, vasectomies, and tubal ligations. In 2011, according to its most recent annual report, it distributed more than 650 million condoms (enough, as it notes on its website, to encircle the Earth three times) and more than 74 million oral and emergency contraceptives. Those and other efforts translated into preventing more than 1.4 million abortions and 7 million unwanted pregnancies. “There are few greater goods than allowing women and men to control their fertility and plan their families as they want to, because it has such a huge impact on every other aspect of their lives,” Purdy says. “I can’t imagine a greater freedom.”

Purdy has been with DKT for seventeen years; he’s been based in the U.S.—at the organization’s headquarters on K Street in Washington, D.C.—only for the past two. He has spent much of his life abroad. He lived his first six years in Indonesia, where was born to American parents. After undergrad at Minnesota’s Carleton College, he backpacked around the globe for a year, applying for a Cornell master’s degree in nutrition en route; he took the GREs in Istanbul, put his application together in Kenya, and was in India when he got his acceptance letter. Purdy was working for Save the Children in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, when he recognized the need to help street girls working in the sex trade protect themselves from HIV. “So I approached DKT and asked if we could have 1,000 condoms,” he recalls. “I thought that was a lot.”

Purdy went to work for DKT—first in Ethiopia, then Indonesia and Turkey. Much of his job involved crafting creative methods of social marketing. In Indonesia, he worked with some of the 2,000 women employed by the largest brothel in Southeast Asia; hundreds of them attended an event he held that featured dancing and games like condom blow-up contests. DKT’s current efforts range from guerrilla marketing—such as parades featuring people in condom costumes chasing others dressed like the HIV virus—to sophisticated ads, including an Indian TV spot in which two women in a café discuss the IUD. “Commercial marketers are happy to sell you a hot cup of coffee that you want,” Purdy notes. “But no man actually wants to put on a condom, and no woman enjoys taking a contraceptive pill or having an IUD inserted. So you’re trying to convince people to do things they don’t want to do—that the benefits of doing them outweigh the negatives—and not only to do it, but to pay you for it.”

pharmacy

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DKT doesn’t give away its products for free, for a variety of reasons; it wouldn’t be economically feasible, for one thing, and customers might think they’re shoddy. (In fact, one of its strategies is to design packaging that’s upscale and chic, like the Intimo brand of condoms it sells in Mozambique, whose boxes resemble high-end cigarette packs.) To keep its products affordable—a year’s supply should cost a couple no more than 0.25 percent of per-capita income—DKT uses a formula that takes into account factors like the average price of a cup of tea. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, for instance, DKT’s condoms cost less than two American cents. “It’s not that you’re empowered, therefore you use contraception—it’s that you use contraception, therefore you’re empowered.” Purdy observes. “If you look at the U.S. women’s movement in the Fifties and Sixties, it was directly related to the Pill.”

On a coffee table in the common area of DKT’s headquarters, there’s a clear plastic bowl filled with a kaleidoscope of condoms; visitors are welcome to take some. Purdy’s office features a round Indonesian basket similarly stuffed with festive prophylactics, like an adult version of a Halloween pumpkin. “When I was working in Indonesia, my wife used to call me and ask where I was, and I’d say, ‘Oh, I’m in a brothel in Bandung.'” Purdy recalls with a laugh. “And she’d say, ‘Okay, I’ll see you at home for dinner.’ Not many men could do that.”

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