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06/10/2026
Emma Monk (Monk Debunks)
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First published on the "Monk Debunks" substack, which you can subscribe to here.
Matt Goodwin recently claimed in an LBC interview that Britain spends “£100 million per year on family planning and condoms in Pakistan”. When the interviewer showed understandable scepticism, Goodwin demanded to be fact-checked live on air.
The interviewer reluctantly Googled “£100million, condoms and Pakistan” and couldn’t find anything, but Goodwin read out loud from his phone, “According to a major news story in October 2025, UK taxpayers are on the hook for £74.3 million to promote contraception in Pakistan”, which he conceded wasn’t £100 million, but smugly suggested his claim was basically true.
So I decided to take a look at what the “major news story” was about and do a little digging…
It turns out the original story from October 2025 was from the Right-wing blog site Guido Fawkes.
It really was not a “major” news story. This was the entire post:
The post claimed they were reporting on research carried out by the TaxPayers’ Alliance, a Right-wing think tank with very opaque funding, who seem to appear fairly often in my debunks. However, when I searched their website, there was no research and no press release covering this topic.
There wasn’t much research needed for this scoop - all they needed to do was simply visit the publicly available Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) tracker, find numbers and phrases they could strip of all context and meaning designed for maximum ‘outrage’, and then give that directly to Guido Fawkes to publish.
Off the back of Matt Goodwin’s LBC interview, City AM ran the headline “£74m for branded condoms? UK must stop spaffing cash on foreign aid”. The article links back to the Guido Fawkes page, where all three hyperlinks in the blog post take you to the Delivering Accelerated Family Planning in Pakistan (DAFPAK) page on the FCDO website.
Let’s take a look at DAFPAK in more detail and see if it really is all about “condoms in shop windows” as Guido Fawkes wants you to imagine, whether we’re spending £100 million per year on “family planning and condoms in Pakistan” as Matt Goodwin claimed, and whether the UK spent “£74m for branded condoms” as City AM claimed.
The description of this project is as follows:
To increase access in Pakistan to quality family planning information and services by those who would like to use it, particularly underserved groups such as rural women. It will directly contribute to Sustainable Development Goal 3: Ensure healthy lives and promote well-being, as well as to the FP2020 target of reaching additional users of family planning.
For added information, Sustainable Development Goal 3 is a United Nations goal, and FP2020 is “a global community of partners working together to advance rights-based family planning, with the goal of enabling 120 million additional women and girls in the world’s lowest-income countries to use voluntary modern contraception.”
The program began, under the Conservatives, in November 2017, and is now 95% complete with 99% of the budget spent.
The spend so far has been £96,158,107, which has been spread over 10 years, so that is a clear debunk of Goodwin’s claim of £100m per year, or even the £74.3m he “corrected” himself to while live on air.
In 2023, the population in Pakistan was 241 million and is projected to double to half a billion by 2050, according to the DAFPAK 2024 report. It highlights:
Population growth at this rate risks acting as a barrier to human and economic development. Social services and institutions are unable to keep pace with the level of newcomers in schools (there are 22m out-of-school children in Pakistan) and the job market. The growing population will impact climate adaptation and resilience, water availability and can contribute to political instability and conflict.
The report explains how family planning has long been recognised globally as a “development best buy”, with each dollar invested “yielding up to $120 in short- and long-term benefits.”
By December 2024, DAFPAK reported the program had:
The report shows that the top-level impact they were aiming for was “maternal deaths averted”. Other aims included:
At no point was the aim to “promote condoms”. The aim was harm reduction to women and children, and lifting people out of poverty. Condoms formed one small part of the solution.
You have to ask why the Guido Fawkes headline, the City AM headline and Matt Goodwin wanted you to focus on condoms for Pakistani men rather than the family planning and maternal health services for the rural women who are actually highlighted at the very top of the government document Guido Fawkes referenced three times.
Guess how many times condoms were mentioned in the 31-page detailed review of DAFPAK?
Twice. (See what I mean by them having to dig deep for the rage bait)
Twice under the section titled “Increased access to family planning services”
The first mention was in the table of targets and achievements:
2.8 Number of regular contraceptives (injectables, pills, and condoms) provided by project-trained lady health workers (LHWS)
They were aiming for 3,000 regular contraceptives, which included, but was not limited to, condoms, to be provided by the specialist health workers trained as part of DAFPAK. They achieved 5,091.
The second mention was under “Social Marketing Outlets” - which has been completely misinterpreted by these media outlets (more on that shortly) - where they explain that shops and pharmacies already within hard-to-reach communities are now selling family planning commodities such as condoms and pills:
Social Marketing (SM) outlets (shops and pharmacies) sell family planning commodities, predominantly condoms and pills, to the public.
Let’s look at what Social marketing actually means in this context, as this is the section Guido Fawkes got so excited about, and was the part of the project that was expected to cost £74.3m:
Component 2(a): Service Delivery - Private Sector: Social marketing (SM) is used to promote the sale of branded contraceptives through retail outlets such as shops and pharmacies. Social franchising (SF) organises private providers into branded, quality-assured networks to increase access to provider-dependent contraceptive services.
We’ll get to the “branded contraceptives” shortly, but family planning “social marketing” is a tried and tested approach that uses commercial marketing techniques such as branding, advertising, market research and distribution networks to provide trusted contraceptives to private shops and pharmacies to sell to those within their communities
This model generates income for the shops and pharmacies, which incentivises them to keep stocking contraceptives; it allows access for people where they already shop, rather than them having to seek out healthcare facilities, and by adding a small cost there is an increased perceived value, reducing the waste that can happen with free giveaways.
An academic review of evidence into the effectiveness of social marketing in preventing unwanted pregnancies in low-income countries found that “social marketing was a cost-effective strategy for reducing unwanted pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases”
Whenever the press get hold of a story about foreign aid, they always push the idea we're sending some sort of chest full of money to another country where upon it disappears into the ether (or is used to buy hundreds of millions of condoms, apparently!)
In reality, most of the money is spent on NGOs and companies, some of which (though not all) are British organisations, paying British bills and British wages, and are therefore part of our own economy, as well as benefiting the developing country they’re working with.
In this case, the three firms involved in the “£74.3m social marketing” part of DAFPAK are:
The amount that has been paid to them from this program, according to the transaction list, is ~£59m, less than the £74.3m projected.
DKT explains in more detail their campaign in Pakistan:
Rapid Scale-Up of Social Marketing: As in other countries, DKT started its work in Pakistan by establishing a strong social marketing program, leveraging the infrastructure and incentives of the private sector to deliver high-quality, affordable contraceptives. DKT sells a variety of reproductive health products with the objective of promoting healthy spacing and timing of births. DKT ensures that these products are affordable in all corners of Pakistan through more than 50 distributors and widely dispersed networks. DKT puts these products into thousands of little shops on the side of the road, supermarkets and pharmacies.
DKT advertising blends modern views of pleasure and choice with traditional norms, and instils confidence in the products. These ads are promoted on television and radio but also on rickshaws and pharmacy walls. Through DKT advertising, more men are familiar with, and willing to use, condoms, and women have a greater choice of contraceptives, including long-acting reversible contraceptives, which have long been underrepresented in Pakistan.
Alongside the social marketing element of DAFPAK, there were many other aspects of the program designed to support the aim of “increasing access in Pakistan to quality family planning information and services by those who would like to use it, particularly underserved groups such as rural women”
There was a successful behaviour change programme implemented by Palladium (a global company with “over 60 years of experience creating strategies, building partnerships, mobilising capital, and implementing programs that transform societies, economies, and lives”) and UK-based M&C Saatchi (“the world’s largest independent creative network”).
M&C Saatchi created a trusted brand to improve access for women to contraception and break down cultural taboos:
Pakistan’s future depends on modern family planning, and KhairKhwah—the brand created for the DAFPAK program—is leading the charge. With six million women lacking access to contraception, the program tackles a critical national priority: reducing strain on resources, improving public services, and lifting families out of poverty.
KhairKhwah serves as a trusted voice in family planning, uniting all communication under a common visual identity to provide reliable information and friendly advice to young couples. Our nationwide campaign, launched across TV, radio, and digital, reached 92 million people, using powerful visual metaphors to highlight deep-rooted taboos and inspire open conversations under the bold tagline: “Let’s Talk.”
Guido Fawkes saw “branding” and wanted you to picture Durex condoms, rather than a successful, trusted communication campaign aimed at preventing maternal deaths and helping people out of poverty.
As well as the campaign to get contraceptives readily available to all women, and a national campaign to break taboos around talking about family planning within families, DAFPAK also trained healthcare workers, worked with local and national government, integrated family planning clinics into maternal and child health clinics, created training manuals that are now being widely used, trained community workers to be able to administer injectable contraceptives, encouraged a national narrative around the balance between population growth and resource availability, created digital campaign videos explaining these trade-offs, and so much more.
The UK spent £96m over ten years with multiple companies and organisations, several of whom are UK-based and therefore contribute to our own economy, on a wide-ranging campaign to increase family planning services for women, particularly in rural Pakistan.
And we did it to try and support Pakistan in bringing its population growth down to ensure future regional and climate stability, which benefits us all.
So no, we don’t spend “£100mil a year on condoms for Pakistan”, or even “£74m for branded condoms”, nor are “TAXPAYERS ON HOOK FOR £88 MILLION SPLURGE ON CONTRACEPTION IN PAKISTAN”
Whenever you see “taxpayers are paying for [insert outrageous claim here]” in the press, you can be sure that a huge swathe of nuance and detail has been stripped from the reality in order to find the rage bait headline.
£96m over ten years can seem like a big number, but in reality ~£10m per year is about 14p per person in the UK, and equates to just under 4 minutes of government spending each year.
When you consider the 5,412 averted maternal deaths, 7.11 million fewer unwanted pregnancies and 2.31 million fewer unsafe abortions, in a program that generates up to $120 for every $1 spent, in a Commonwealth country with a GDP per capita 1/30th the size of the UK, it feels like fairly good value…
Someone posted on X that it had taken them “less than a minute” to prove Matt Goodwin correct. This is what they produced:
I’m sure AI did take less than a minute to provide that answer.
However, it is riddled with inaccuracies, because it has drawn the information straight from the Guido Fawkes piece!
It pushes the “promoting branded condoms” line (without explaining what the “branding” in this context means), says the UK has a “£88 million total spend on contraception” in Pakistan (contraception is not what £88 million was spent on!), and that £74.33million “specifically pays to market and sell branded contraceptives in private shops” (The £ 74.33 million figure is not what was actually spent, nor was it just spent on marketing and selling branded contraceptives. Again, the meaning of “social marketing” in this context has been lost)
So please be aware that if you ask AI to fact-check something you’ve seen in the media, particularly when the story is new, it will almost always use the story itself as the basis of its response, which is of course, completely pointless!
First published on the "Monk Debunks" substack, which you can subscribe to here.
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