This originally appeared on the Huffington Post on December 15, 2015.
From 1992 to 2001, I did some of the most important – and
fun – work of my life: I managed social marketing programs for the nonprofit PSI in Zambia, Bangladesh and Paraguay. Social
marketing is a technique that uses the tools of social marketing to achieve a
social outcome – in PSI’s case, that outcome is improved health. The programs I
worked on were HIV prevention, family planning and child health but social
marketing can also be applied to other disciplines as well.
I owe that singular experience to Phil Harvey, who founded
PSI in 1970 to promote family planning through the social
marketing mechanism. In 1989, he founded DKT International, another social
marketing organization more tightly focused on reproductive health mainly in
very large countries (in order to have cost-effective impact at greater scale).
Harvey has also served, and continues to serve, for many years on the board of
directors of Marie Stopes International,
another organization that uses social marketing.
Phil Harvey is introduced as “a visionary, pioneer and titan
in the world of social marketing” in this
new video interview. Harvey describes his early work in India, the roots of
social marketing, his creation of two social marketing organizations, his legal
battle with the State of New York over reproductive health issues (that went
all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court) and the impact of social marketing.
“We demonstrated to the world – indeed, the entire world –
that this method of social marketing, this method of providing birth control
through commercial networks and infrastructure is effective, it goes to scale,
it’s very cost effective,” says Harvey in the interview. “Social marketing of
contraceptives is now going on in 60 or 70 countries. The total of
contraceptive social marketing beneficiaries is over 70 million couples. It’s a
major contribution and I would be delighted to be remembered for having at
least demonstrated that that approach is effective.”
He recounts a moment of epiphany he experienced with a
desperately poor woman “with a ragged sari” in India in the 1960s and how this
experience led to his interest in social marketing. This encounter brought him
to the conviction that “however we were going to help people, by God, we were
going to do it in such a way that as not to create this disparity between the
giver and the recipient, or to generate “gratitude,” a word he pronounces with
great scorn.
“Social marketing is particularly well designed for this
because when you’re selling a subsidized product through a commercial
distribution system, the customer is an equal. They give a little bit of money;
the storekeeper gives them a product. The deal is done. Nobody is superior to
anyone else. Nobody needs to be grateful to anybody else. It works just fine
that way.”
He speaks with pride of the success of social marketing and
family planning over the last four decades.
“As a personal and moral issue, family planning is a big
winner. The ability of parents to control the number and timing of pregnancies
and births is an enormously liberating phenomenon. We saw 40 or 50 years ago, a
world in which most women were virtual slaves to their fertility, to their
repeated pregnancies. Making it possible for women to become free of that
burden, to decide when to have children and how many children to have, is an
enormous advance in human rights.”
“And it multiplies with its impact on family economics. Time
after time, we hear from parents that “Now I have enough money to educate my
children.” Education becomes possible when you have three kids instead of
seven, so the impact of giving people the right to control their own fertility
is very significant. Anyone who opposes it is a fool, and probably an evil
fool.”
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