Impact of a Mass Media Vasectomy Promotion Campaign in Brazil

Volume 22, Number 4, December 1996 and endorsement by party members4 and to educational campaigns that provide specific information relevant to sterilization candidates’ needs.5 In Africa, where vasectomy is very rarely used, a Kenyan nongovernmental organization implemented a mass media vasectomy promotion project in 1992–1994.6 The intervention, conducted by Innovative Communication Systems, used a wide array of promotional techniques—on-site training for service providers, periodic television talk shows, newspaper advertisements with coupons directing men to family planning sites, newspaper articles, film clips, booklets, posters, leaflets and flyers, and motivational talks held at work sites. (One of the planned components of the campaign, radio and television promotional spots, had to be canceled, however, because of the Kenyan Broadcasting Corporation’s fears of public and political backlash. The private Kenyan Television Network eventually broadcast the spots, but in the Nairobi area only.) Twelve-month monitoring of service records in six sentinel vasectomy sites showed that even though the cancellation of the planned broadcast weakened the campaign considerably, the number of vasectomies performed had increased by 125% after six months of the Kenyan campaign. Clients who cited newspapers as their main source of referral were more likely to have made a vasectomy-related visit to a clinic than were those referred by other sources. By the end of the project, 835 individuals had requested vasectomy inD. Lawrence Kincaid is senior research advisor and associate professor in the Department of Health, Policy and Management and Alice Payne Merritt is deputy project director with Population Communication Services at the Center for Communication Programs, School of Hygiene and Public Health, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Md., USA. At the time the data were collected, Liza Nickerson was program officer, and at the time the data were analyzed, Sandra de Castro Buffington was program officer, both at the Center for Communication Programs. Marcos Paulo P. de Castro is executive director and Bernadete Martin de Castro is project coordinator at Promoção da Paternidade Responsável (PRO-PATER), São Paulo, Brazil. The authors thank Robert K. Foreman for his assistance with the Poisson regression analysis of the clinic service data. Impact of a Mass Media Vasectomy Promotion Campaign in Brazil