One More Pill for the Road
You probably have friends with annoying travel habits. Do they put their feet on tables in restaurants, or attempt terrible foreign accents? Well, they have nothing on me. Wherever I travel, I cheerfully walk into pharmacies or drug shops and try to buy some contraception.
You can imagine the awkward giggles as I enquire about the price of emergency contraception in a roadside shop, usually in a rural town someplace in Africa. Luckily for me, I have plenty of advantages — I’m old enough to have plenty of grey hair, and white enough to be exempt from many local expectations. A range of boxes appear from under the counter, some from established brands, others known Nigerian fakes and still others with instructions only in Chinese.
While embarrassing for my travel companions, the fact that safe, affordable contraception is more and more available over the counter is a revolution. Globally, women and especially adolescents find a visit to a doctor a major barrier to accessing the products they need — they can face high prices, long lines and humiliating stigma or even refusal from providers. These barriers are so high that many women go without — leading to high rates of unwanted pregnancy, unsafe abortion and school drop-out due to early motherhood.
When I was developing programming for adolescent girls in Kenya, I heard again and again that girls were not interested accessing contraception in the same way their mothers had. Technology has put them in control of so many parts of their lives, why not their contraception?
This is why I am now so excited to be working on the Frontier Technologies Livestreaming project to introduce an Internet of Things enabled contraceptive vending machine to two markets in Africa.
Delivering contraceptives through vending machines isn’t new, but many interventions have failed due to practical barriers — vending machines breaking or running out of products, or taking coins that no one carried anymore. What if we could update this technology for the modern world, giving girls a machine that can send its manager a text when it runs low on stock? What if it could accept a discount code distributed to girls who are too poor to pay in cash?
We will be launching in the coming months, and documenting early lessons on Medium.
