Applying a total market approach to strengthen family planning commodity markets

For the past several years, SHOPS Plus has supported its government and private sector partners in Tanzania to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of family planning commodity markets through a total market approach (TMA).

A new brief, Implementing a Total Market Approach for Family Planning Products, captures this experience. The brief documents the project’s approach and outcomes, while offering practical tips that stakeholders in other countries can use to implement similar activities.

SHOPS Plus’s efforts sought to support its partners to prioritize and address challenges in the family planning market—with a special focus on condoms—through a TMA. This work built on multiple market assessments that identified a host of gaps and potential threats to contraceptive security and market sustainability. Particularly, a changing donor landscape raised concerns about the future levels of commodity supplies in the public sector, while at the same time, the private sector had limited ability to respond due to shifts in the social marketing landscape and previous donor investments that crowded out the commercial sector.

The brief highlights the project’s four-pronged strategy to support the Reproductive and Child Health Section at the health ministry, the National AIDS Control Programme, and the Tanzania Commission on AIDS to improve their leadership and coordination of various market actors:

1. Use data and evidence to orient various market actors to the most pressing market challenges and reach consensus on the need to act
2. Enable TMA champions in the government to convene market actors by aligning donors behind their efforts and developing tools and job aids to carry out discrete tasks
3. Create a comprehensive policy framework support of TMA principles through regular and ad hoc policy updates
4. Strengthen mechanisms for cross-sectoral collaboration to bring more diverse voices to the policy and planning table

Through this work, SHOPS Plus helped its partners make concrete changes in the market environment. These improvements included updating eight policies and plans to reflect TMA considerations; creating space for commercial condom importers to more than double their importations over a two-year period; and facilitating a market environment that supported the entry of two new sustainably priced family planning products.

Read the full brief here.