Tim Black

Born: January 7, 1937;

Died: December 11, 2014.

Tim Black, who has died aged 77, was a pioneer of birth control and co-founder, with his wife Jean, in 1976 of Marie Stopes International, one of the world's largest family planning organisations. The group provides reproductive and sexual health services through the NHS for over 100,000 women and men every year in a network of clinics around the UK and in almost 40 other countries. The organisation was founded when Mr Black stepped in to save the famous Marie Stopes Clinic in London.

He served as chief executive of Marie Stopes International for 30 years until 2006, and during his time built an organisation that reached 150,000 women a year in the 1970s into one that offered family planning and safe abortion services to nearly five million by the end of his tenure. Today, in 2014, more than 15 million women are using contraception provided by the organisation he founded. He will be remembered as a forceful, visionary pioneer of family planning and safe abortion.

He married his wife Jean in 1962 after qualifying in medicine. The couple started their international careers by travelling to Harare, in Zimbabwe, where he spent a year as a house doctor. At the end of that posting, looking for adventure, he and Jean took three months leave and drove in a jeep up through Africa, across to Tunis, Europe and back home to Sussex.

On his return to the UK, he worked as a senior house officer and registrar while studying for membership of the Royal College of Physicians at Croydon General and Harefield Hospitals. Jean, meanwhile, worked as a medical secretary at Queen Mary's Hospital in Carshalton.

In 1966, looking for more excitement, the couple drove to India through Europe, the Middle East, Afghanistan and Pakistan. Jean, by this time, was expecting their first child. They left Pakistan by cargo boat and, via Bombay, as Mumbai was known then, arrived in Australia. Jane was born in Queensland, in October 1966, after which the Black family went to Papua New Guinea. Daughter Julia followed in 1969.

It was in Papua New Guinea, whilst working as a physician in a remote area of that country that Mr Black became convinced of the urgent need for family planning. On one occasion, he saved the life of a tiny child of an impoverished widow, but was shocked to see the despair on the mother's face.

Recalling the moment in later years, he said: "I suddenly realised that I had presented her not just her baby, but with another mouth to feed - another dependent human being to whom she could offer nothing: no father, no education, no future - merely the cruel ritual of her bare survival. It was at that moment that I began to realise that preventing a birth could be as important as saving a life."

Returning to the UK, he completed a diploma in tropical medicine and hygiene and then went to the University of North Carolina as a Ford Fellow and gained his Masters in Population Dynamics in 1969. It was here that he met and set up business with another Ford foundation fellow, Phil Harvey. The pair began creating ad copy promoting condoms by mail ("What will you get her this Christmas-pregnant?"). Marketing such "obscene" items by mail was illegal and for a time it was touch and go whether they would be arrested, but despite the risks when the ads ran in 300 of the biggest college newspapers the orders began flooding in.

Encouraged by their success, the entrepreneurs began considering a new idea: what if their condom venture could generate enough cash to fund projects overseas? So, Tim and Phil founded Population Services International (PSI), and began pioneering family planning and social marketing in some of the world's poorest countries.

Their first project was in Nairobi, driving a contraceptive social marketing programme in the early 1970s. Mr Black returned to the UK in 1974, where he and Jean set up a European branch of PSI - Population Services Family Planning Programme Ltd - soon shortened to Population Services. The following year the Marie Stopes Memorial Foundation went into liquidation and the three pioneers put up money to buy the lease of the famous clinic at 108 Whitfield Street, London W1, where Marie Stopes had opened her Mothers Clinic in 1925. Marie Stopes International came into being.

The enterprise was so successful that shortly afterwards Mr Black began setting up clinics overseas, first in Ireland and soon after in Sri Lanka and Kenya, working out of a modest office in his garden shed, except for performing vasectomies himself on Fridays at the central London clinic.

When the Balkans War was raging in the 1990s, he took a call from the UK government who had identified rape and the resulting pregnancies as one of the most devastating consequences of the war. What might Marie Stopes do to help, he was asked? In two hours Mr Black wrote a proposal to provide counselling services across Bosnia, and within a year had opened 67 centres across the country, at one point having to go from one site through a corridor of sniper fire.

When Mozambique was in the throes of civil war in the 1980s, Marie Stopes International also set up services in a refugee camp across the border in Malawi, providing sexual and reproductive health at a time when the camp had more than 250,000 people in it.

Mr Black's enduring legacy remains his unique approach to running the organisation he founded in 1976. He believed absolutely in the power of what he called a social business: not a charity with a mission to do good, but an organisation that used modern business, management, marketing and financial techniques to pay a social dividend.

For those who worked with him, one abiding impression will be his intense focus on doing, not talking. To him, risk was worth taking. Acting meant taking risks and not having meetings to discuss potential pitfalls. He was fond of quoting the mantra that "the best committee is made up of two people - with one away sick".

He was awarded the CBE in the 1994 Queen's Birthday Honours for services to international family planning in developing countries.

He is survived by his wife Jean, now retired, and daughters Jane, a humanitarian aid worker and Julia, a social entrepreneur, and grandchildren Jack, Ellie, Finn, Esme and Seb.