The table above comes from a webinar entitled Perspectives on MA pricing and distribution channels held on 14 September 2021. It reports findings of research on marketing channels to access medical abortion pills and their pricing (primarily combi-packs but also misoprostol only) in Kenya, Nigeria and Uganda. Speakers on the webinar were Aasha Pai and Krishna Jafa of Mann Global Health and Andrea Fearneyhough of Population Services International (PSI).
Mann Global Health conducted the study, commissioned by the Children’s Investment Fund Foundation. Highlights from the study are presented by MGH. Population Services International present their own perspective. But both NGOs clarify that what is presented is what they// were told, not what they think about their findings.
The second half of the webinar is for questions and discussion. Chris Purdy from DKT International points out that by focusing on combi-packs alone, the findings fail to show the extent of growth in sales of misoprostol alone in all three countries, which are now in the millions of pills. He also raises the question of what the level of “affordability” was for most women in each of these contexts in relation to the costs reported for obtaining the pills.
For anyone interested in the role of marketing and marketers in access to abortion pills in these three countries, this webinar is a snapshot though not always easy to follow.
SOURCES: You can find the webinar recording here. A 100-page written report of this same research was published in January 2019 by the Reproductive Health Supplies Coalition as Landscape Assessment: Leveraging the role of national distributors to increase access to MA combi-packs in Africa, by Mann Global Health. There are apparently some differences in this report to what was shared in the more recent video, perhaps to be expected given the time difference of the two.