Total Market Approach

Bringing together all sectors in the market place to improve availability of health commodities.

Getting health products to an entire population requires collaboration among all partners in the market place—including the public, nonprofit, and commercial sectors that all play a role in ensuring commodity security within a given country. To leverage the relative competencies of each sector, the project developed the total market approach, which helped improve access to family planning among all population segments. In 13 countries, the project worked with stakeholders to conduct market segmentation exercises, creating a better understanding of how each sector meets the needs of clients, and how to maximize their resources. This approach encourages the development of coordinated strategies to identify and reduce gaps in family planning services and supplies.

The project’s Latin America and Caribbean Regional Contraceptive Security Initiative developed and tested a series of participatory market analysis activities in Honduras and Nicaragua to improve how in-country stakeholders understand and respond to family planning customers’ needs and work to expand the contraceptive market. Through this series of activities, the project developed a participatory market analysis approach, which was published as a guide. The guide provides background and material to help family planning stakeholders in other countries adapt and apply this approach to their own setting. The process takes stakeholders through a series of six steps to analyze, understand, and use market analysis data to inform family planning policy decisions. As a result, stakeholders gain new insights and can develop concrete, coordinated, and sustainable strategies to reduce gaps in access to family planning services and commodities.

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