Choice or No Choice? The Need for Better Branded Public Sector Condoms in South Africa
Abstract
Condoms are one of the cornerstones to any response to the HIV epidemic. However, targeted marketing strategies that make condoms more attractive to people at high risk of infection are often overlooked. The South African National Department of Health has recently purchased more attractive condoms to distribute in higher-education settings free of charge, targeting atrisk youth including young women. The authors applaud this move but note the importance of expanding better branded condoms to young people elsewhere – for example, via youth clinics and in high schools. Exploratory, routine data from Médecins Sans Frontières in Khayelitsha are presented, showing the popularity of alternatives to the government’s ‘Choice’ brand.
The author(s) retain copyright on work published by AOSIS unless specified otherwise.
Licensing and publishing rights
Author(s) of work published by AOSIS are required to grant AOSIS the unlimited rights to publish the definitive work in any format, language and medium, for any lawful purpose. AOSIS requires journal authors to publish their work in open access under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) licence.
Read more here: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
The authors retain the non-exclusive right to do anything they wish with the published article(s), provided attribution is given to the applicable journal with details of the original publication, as set out in the official citation of the article published in the journal. The retained right specifically includes the right to post the article on the authors’ or their institution’s websites or in institutional repositories.
Previously published work may have been published under a different licence. We advise the community that if they would like to reuse the work to consult the applicable licence at article level.