Featured Projects

AFFORD

Constella Futures is the marketing and distribution subcontractor to the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health Center for Communications Programs to implement the five-year USAID Uganda AFFORD project.

AFFORD stimulates Uganda's growing private commercial sector to embrace and expand the healthcare market. By offering consumers products they need at the price they can afford, AFFORD creates an environment for sustainable growth. Excellence in marketing, communication and management are our tools to achieve this.

Our focus is on HIV/AIDS, Reproductive Health, Malaria, Child Survival and Safe Water and Sanitation prevention and treatment. Within these sectors, AFFORD strengthens local organizations and distribution systems to achieve sustainable long term market solutions.

AFFORD's three main objectives are:

• To increase access to HIV/AIDS, reproductive health, child survival, and malaria prevention and treatment products and services through innovative marketing approaches;
• To enhance knowledge and correct use of these products and services; and
• To strengthen local sustainable delivery of products and services.

AFFORD's first year marketing and distribution activities included conducting product-specific market research and segmentation analysis of the Ugandan health product market; establishing partnerships with Uganda's private health marketing and distribution sector; introduction of new oral rehydration salt and zinc products for child survival; and developing expanded marketing strategies for three existing social marketing brands – Protector® condoms, Pilplan® oral contraceptives, and Injectaplan® three-month injectable contraceptives. Under the Social Marketing for Change (SOMARC) Project, Constella Futures (then known as Futures Group) was responsible for the introduction of these three products in Uganda between 1991 and 1997. Under AFFORD, Futures also leads the design and management of activities to expand product and service distribution networks to better reach Uganda's rural areas and underserved markets.