Condom Awareness Week starts February 14: Global Shortages Leave Millions Vulnerable

Basic Facts

In sub-Saharan Africa, AIDS is the number-one killer. Yet the condom supply there equals less than five condoms per year for every man between 15 and 59. click here to read more...

Political Situation

Donors are not supplying the developing world with enough commodities for reproductive health care, including condoms for HIV prevention. click here to read more...

Related Spokespeople

Sarah Craven, UNFPA scraven@ccmc.org (202) 326-8713 Laura Rogers, UN Foundation lrogers@unfoundation.org (202) 887-9040 Tawana Jacobs, Population Action International tjacobs@popact.org (202) 557-3422

February 9, 2005: Condoms are the only proven technology for preventing HIV/AIDS infection for both men and women, and they also prevent sexually transmitted infections (STIs). But a global shortage looms, distribution is spotty, prices are unpredictable, and the quality may be unreliable. Broad questions of access, user perspective and culture also arise in any effort to make condoms more widely available.

In successful programs to increase condom use, male and female condoms are often supplied through non-traditional outlets such as small shops, bars, vending machines, workplace restrooms, etc., at highly affordable prices. Barbara Crossette took a look at some of these programs.

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Since When Are Condoms the Problem?

By Barbara Crossette

MEXICO CITY, Mexico -- Yes, it is true that schoolboys in Mexico City spend their pocket money on condoms.

That’s applauded by the staff at a pint-sized shop called Condonería Eros, where young people help other young people choose from an array of affordable high-quality products (most of them made in the USA). The shopping experience is intended to be fun.

Condoms in a rainbow of colors decorate the windows. There are condoms tipped with animal shapes and bright red hearts. Also for sale are lollipops made of Mexican chocolate in the shape of various sexy parts of the body.

If this scandalizes a lot of people in Washington, where American policy in recent years has been to promote abstinence rather than safe sex, there’s more. Boys -- and girls -- come to the shop, a two-year-old project of one of Mexico’s oldest and most respected family health organizations, Mexfam, because they heard about it in school, from teams of young “promoters” who volunteer to spread the message of safe sex to children as young as 10.

Mexico has the third-largest number of AIDS victims in the Western Hemisphere, after the United States and Brazil. It battles a number of sexually transmitted diseases. In a country where half of the 100 million people are under the age of 24, three out of every 10 Mexicans are born to mothers under 20 years old. There are estimated to be more than 50,000 abortions a year among girls between 15 and 19.

It is something of a bizarre reality that in some developing nations with strong conservative religious institutions – about 94 percent of Mexicans are Roman Catholics – there is often a far more open attitude toward youthful sexuality than in the United States these days, at least officially.

From the vantage point of the third world, American policies on reproductive health are doing more damage internationally than American weaponry. The “imperialism” the poor see is the message that saving their lives is less important than taking moral positions in a far-away country that has no idea of how most of the world suffers.

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