Abstract
The Expanded Social Marketing Project in Nigeria (ESMPIN) is a five-year social marketing project funded by USAID/Nigeria to reduce maternal, and child morbidity and mortality and increase affordable family planning modern methods to Nigeria couples. The evaluation focuses on five questions: effectiveness of strategies, sustainability of strategies, evaluation of results, cost analysis, and gender conducted under the program. ESMPN is managed by The Society for Family Health (SFH), a Nigerian non-governmental organization that has implemented social marketing programs in Nigeria since the 1990s. Its partners for this award are Population Services International (PSI), British Broadcasting Corporation Media Action, and the Association of Reproductive and Family Health (ARFH), and the project worked in 22 states in Nigeria. ESMPIN was successful in building commodity-security, showing a reduction in stock-out rate from 30% to 15%. Although the program invested heavily in independent detailing and distribution networks, these are not sustainable operations without heavy funding from donors or outside sources. Cost analysis and primary research show the return on investment for the interpersonal communication agents in the South to be very low at about 2%, costing $3.321 million per Cycle (180 communities). ESMPIN conducted several pilot programs, including one with chemists, Proprietary Patent Medicine Vendors, and a public-private partnership with the Chi Pharmaceutical Ltd., manufacturer of an oral rehydration solution and Zinc. After $57 million and almost six years of implementation, Couple Years of Protection (CYPs) in 2011 for medium- and long-acting reversible contraceptive methods, (e.g., implants injectables, and IUDs) were 28.2% of the baseline CYP while over the five-year time frame by the end of ESMPIN (2016) the CYPs for these same products had increased only 0.1% to 28.3% CYPs.
