Evaluation of the 100% Condom Programme in Thailand

From the earliest days, many Thai public health workers and researchers had feared that widespread sex work would come to dominate the Thai epidemic, a viewpoint strongly validated by the available data from the early 1990s. Thus, even as early as 1989, a new approach to promoting condom use in commercial sex was being pioneered in Ratchaburi province: the 100% Condom Programme.

The programme addressed the observation that sex work establishments requiring condom use or sex workers insisting on condom use would often lose clients and money to those who did not. Because many clients did not want to use condoms, there were economic disincentives for establishment owners who promoted safer behaviour at their establishments: men could simply go to another establishment or to a sex worker who did not require condoms. Regional Communicable Disease Control officials in Ratchaburi in 1989 realized that one solution to this fundamentally economic problem was to require that all establishments and sex workers in the province use condoms in every sex act.