Colombia: Agreement between Carrefour and IOM Promotes Products Made by Vulnerable Populations
Products covered under the agreement include items for home decor, office supplies, handicrafts and clothing made by displaced persons, victims of human trafficking and minors demobilized from the illegal armed groups, and Afro-Colombians and indigenous populations.
The initiative stems from IOM's Social Marketing Strategy, which seeks to improve the levels of economic sustainability that are part of the Organization's income generating projects. These initiatives have received financial support from the governments of the United States, Canada, Holland and Italy.
23-Year-Old Hopes to Revolutionize the Marketing of Clean Living to Teens
...Jordan has developed a concept he calls “social branding,” which uses CIA-like methods to infiltrate teen social circles and work to steer kids away from drinking, smoking and other destructive behaviors…
Commercials, billboards and magazine ads with slogans such as the classic “this is your brain on drugs . . . ” may be catchy, said Jordan and other social marketing experts, but, by themselves, have little effect at the house party where a teen is likely to be offered a smoke or a beer.
Preventing Underage Drinking, Drug Use is Coalition Goal
So how do we prevent drug and alcohol abuse, specifically among young people? We start by trying to address the environment in which they live — by changing the so-called social norms (those beliefs which are held by community members about the frequency and amount of drug and alcohol use that takes place), addressing policy issues (the laws that govern underage drinking and drug use and its repercussions) and the accessibility of drugs and alcohol (where and how young people either buy or get drugs and alcohol).
...our Social Marketing Committee is developing marketing campaigns and media materials that will raise awareness among parents and youth in order to influence them to make healthy decisions. Our current campaign has the goal of reducing youth access to alcohol and is targeted to middle school parents.
Canadian Health Initiatives: Global Companies Dishing Out Support
New initiatives launched in Canada to highlight the importance of healthy eating are being backed by leading consumer goods companies, including Coca-Cola. The initiatives will alter the landscape of advertising directed at children, and demonstrate that global players are taking the issue of rising childhood obesity seriously…
The strength of the program lies in its integrated approach, with government and industry players uniting to tackle the issue. Whether other countries will follow Canada's example, combining changes to advertising practices with enhanced social marketing and education initiatives, remains to be seen. Canada already has some of the toughest rules when it comes to advertising aimed at children, and, against this backdrop, the new initiatives represent a clear stance that the country is taking the rising rates of overweight and obese children seriously.
Women as Brood Mares
... India was the first country to launch a Government family planning programme in 1952. Due to mismanagement, forced sterilisations and chasing fictitious targets, the programme received an unsavoury reputation it just cannot discard although decades have gone by.
Post-1994, Cairo and ICPD, Governments the world over supported by international organisations and NGOs ushered in a new reproductive child health approach. Today, people who talk of population control and explosion are considered barbaric. In the name of giving "reproductive choices" to women and offering "a cafeteria approach", the old targets, incentives and disincentives have been struck off the strategy list. Rightly so, if one goes back to the horrors of family planning excesses, but wrongly so if there is no cafeteria, no coffee (read condoms), IUDs or oral pills to make that choice.
The emergency contraception pill, the most needed of all, is unheard of in most of the country. The social marketing approach can deliver up to a point - no more…
It is time that spacing and male sterilisation were resolutely brought back on the front line. Lest the next generations require more hospitals than schools to attend to the abysmal levels of anaemia among women, and the resultant wasting and stunting of children, accompanied by high levels of under-five mortality. This beckons a deliberate restoration of family planning services to prevent unwanted pregnancies.
Keeping It Clean: The Chemical Industry is Finding Ways to Secure and Expand Global Water Supplies
…Seeing both human need and, someday at least, profits, companies in the chemical industry have begun developing a wide range of technologies that can help secure safe drinking water for the world's poor. Usually the projects are offshoots of technology that companies are developing for profit-generating business…
Arch Chemicals' involvement in a safe drinking water program reflects the company's relationship with P&G, to which it supplies the calcium hypochlorite in P&G's PUR sanitization sachets. The partnership focuses on provision of two household-level technologies to disinfect drinking water: PUR sachets and WaterGuard, a dilute chlorine solution developed by the Washington, D.C.-based Population Services International (PSI), the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention, and the Pan American Health Organization.
"We have provided more than 600 million L of safe drinking water over the past three years," says Charlotte Otto, global external relations officer at P&G...
The project works, in great part, because it has turned to social marketing partners. For P&G and USAID, the main partner for social marketing is PSI, which has outreach programs for PUR in eight countries and WaterGuard in 18 countries.
Among the lessons learned in the project, according to Arch's Campbell, is that "we have to provide people in undeveloped regions with simple, easy-to-maintain, water treatment systems that villages or even individual households can continue to operate when relief workers have moved on to other communities or other crisis-stricken regions."
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