Abstract
For family planning, a whole market approach considers the entire market for commodities and services in a country or region to ensure the needs of all clients are best met. This broad market is served by supply and demand channels for goods and services, which operate in all sectors – public, commercial, non-governmental, faith-based, and others.
Employing a whole market approach requires understanding in some detail how the market is segmented. For contraceptive security purposes, the whole market approach:
• Uses population-based segmentation research to identify client segments according to a variety of criteria, such as contraceptive use, socio-economic level, willingness to pay, and/or attitudes and behavior;
• Analyzes the current market for contraceptives to identify incentives (or lack of incentives) for private sector involvement;
• Develops or revises policies to promote private sector involvement in contraceptive supply;
• Provides a framework to define roles for the public, commercial, and non-governmental organization (NGO) sectors in meeting these clients’ needs, identifying segments that can be used to develop strategies and policies to meet the needs of the whole market;
• Develops strategies to better meet demand for contraceptives; for example, targeting subsidies to low-income clients and encouraging the private sector to serve those who can afford to pay for commodities (see Ready Lesson I #3: Taking a Whole Market Approach).
The whole market approach can lead to more sustainability, increased demand for contraceptives, increased number of people with access to contraceptives, increased CPR, better allocation of resources, and the achievement of national family planning goals. This Ready Lesson describes recent successes in implementing whole market approaches as well as the challenges of adopting such an approach.
