Guest Bloggers

A few weeks ago, I wrote a blog about the “what” behind the recently launched SuzyKnew website (www.suzyknew.com): what it is and how it seems like all my life I’ve been enjoying working in and writing about sex (and love!) Today, I want to explain why I think SuzyKnew can reach women in developing countries and encourage them to take charge of their sexual health and pleasure, attracting both modern and traditional women.

Well – it was about two years ago when I explained to friends and colleagues that I wanted to launch a website where women from different countries could go to have fun – you know like sexual and erotic fun! – and at the same time get accurate up-to-date facts on sexual and reproductive health.

“That’s a stupid idea. The internet is used by only the wealthy few in developing countries. Just keep it in the US.” most said. “Women in the developing world don’t use the internet – especially traditional women,” others quipped.

But, I didn’t let the statements discourage me. I wasn’t convinced that women in the developing world weren’t accessing the internet. Why? Between 2005 – 2009, I had to travel to 2 or 3 countries a month for my work in reproductive health and afterwards, I started living in Africa to manage public health projects. I visited health centers in remote districts and often had to use the local internet café for work. Off dirt roads in crumbling buildings, I would find women-run internet cafes in the peri-urban areas of Tanzania, Kenya and Rwanda. In urban Jo’burg and Manila, I would see teenage girls laughing together at internet cafes, and in Phnom Penh and Kiev, the internet was a way of life for women, as it was for women in hijab in Kuala Lumpor. From their faces, I could tell that the time spent on the internet was one that gave them freedom from their day-to-day routine and an opening into a world and information beyond what they knew.

Looking at the data back in 2009 to determine whether to launch and which countries to focus on, I saw while the internet was not widely used in Africa, its growth was phenomenal. Top 5 internet using countries in Africa included Nigeria and South Africa. Nigeria’s user growth was 5,400% at the time. Turkey and Russia, countries with burgeoning “women power” and strong and growing contraceptive use, ranked in the top 8 countries with the largest number of internet users. However, when looking at the per capita number of physicians globally, the lack of physicians in Africa was glaring and convinced me to start my efforts to improve access to sexual and reproductive health information in Nigeria and South Africa, in addition to the US and UK. I included the Philippines, another country with rapid internet user growth, when a young woman from the Philippines agreed to be my volunteer intern and cultivate a Filipina following.

Jump forward to the spring of 2011, a peaceful democratic revolution emerged in Tunisia to cause its leader to depart and then spread to Egypt. Read the rest of this entry »

This month, we’re featuring guest blogger Denise Harrison, founder and CEO of SuzyKnew.

In Junior High School, I used to write hot, steamy love stories and circulate them around my friends. The stories centered around one woman – actually a friend from school – who would fall in and out of love while having numerous wild adventures. They were titillating and a little racy for the late 1970’s. They were fairly popular as well. Friends and other students would impatiently wait for the next edition to come out and would constantly ask me when I would write another story.

Fast forward 30 years later after an MBA, time at a big pharmaceutical company and 12 years working in global sexual and reproductive health all over the world, I find myself writing stories about love and sex again. In the NGO world of HIV/AIDS, family planning and reproductive health, I am frustrated and concerned about how relatively little effect many programs have in light of how much money is being spent. Also, these programs tend to be very critical of and reluctant to use tried and true marketing approaches from the commercial world and are rarely managed by people with real world experience in selling sex and love. Their main customer is the donor – not the man or woman on the street with HIV/AIDS or who needs birth control. On the commercial side, my experience is that the sole pursuit of profit prevented many from truly connecting with their customer and providing needed education and information was secondary. All information and education had to eventually lead to a sale. And ultimately, success is only measured in dollars. Read the rest of this entry »