By Celeste Mergens
Innovations that make the world
a better place come in many
forms. In the past decade, new
technologies have emerged that
provide urban populations with clean water,
that enable doctors in rural areas to give
patients life-saving medications, and that
connect pregnant mothers with the care
they need to reduce childhood mortality. At
Days for Girls, a nonprofit organization that
I founded in 2008, we use a different kind
of technology to improve the lives of people
in developing countries: We make washable
menstrual pads and distribute them as part of
a comprehensive feminine hygiene solution.
The Days for Girls pad, which is part of
a feminine hygiene kit that we provide, features
a special design. Women can wash the
pad using very little water, it dries quickly,
and it lasts up to three years. (The hygiene
kit also includes an instruction sheet, supplies
for cleaning the pad, and other items.)
Washable pads may not seem like a big deal.
Yet they can make a big impact. They allow
women and girls to reclaim the most valuable
commodity that they have: time.
A hygiene solution can save a girl from
losing valuable time in school. (Over the
course of three years, by our calculation, it
will give a girl up to 135 days of schooling that
she might otherwise miss.) Millions
of girls
worldwide miss classes during menstruation
because they lack access to effective
feminine hygiene
products. In Kenya
alone,
according
to UNESCO, half of all schoolgirls
fall into that category. Data from UNESCO
also highlight the benefits of removing this
barrier to regular school attendance:
With
each additional year of education, a girl is
more likely to have healthy children, more likely to earn an income, and less likely to
die in childbirth.
A hygiene solution can give a woman the
time that she needs to care for her family.
When a woman cannot move about freely,
she loses the ability to earn income. She also
loses the ability to gather provisions such as
firewood. According to one study, 56 percent
of women in Sindh, Pakistan—many of whom
engage in agricultural labor for their livelihood—report that it’s difficult for them to
work outdoors during menstruation.
Equally important, a hygiene solution
can help girls retain their sense of dignity.
For many girls in many communities, the
onset of menstruation can be scary. People
in those communities don’t talk about menstruation;
they regard it as a taboo subject.
In a study that covered a population of girls
in India, researchers found that 70 percent of that group did not know about menstruation
before their first period.
The Days for Girls solution includes
a health education component that aims
to remove
the sense of shame that often
attaches
to this natural part of a woman’s
life. We offer training that combines information
on menstruation, reproduction,
and personal hygiene with information that
promotes leadership. Our goal is to let girls
know that they are worthy of good health
and personal dignity.
A reliable feminine hygiene solution, in
short, can serve to break taboos, improve
access to education, and help lift communities
out of poverty. When women cannot
work and girls cannot go to school, a country
loses half of its social, political, and economic
potential.
At Days for Girls, we are working to
reverse that dynamic. To date, our organization
has reached more than 200,000 women
and girls in more than 85 countries on six
continents. And we’re not done.
Designed for Reuse
The evolution of the Days for Girls hygiene
kit wasn’t a straightforward process. It was
only through a commitment to continuous
improvement that we reached the place where
we stand today. By eliciting feedback and
learning from those we serve,
our organization developed a
solution that has helped close
a crucial health gap.
Days for Girls began almost
by accident. In 2008,
I was working with a private
foundation that provided
fuel-efficient stoves to an
orphanage on the outskirts
of Nairobi, Kenya. Following
an outbreak of political
violence, the population of
the orphanage suddenly
swelled, and meeting the
basic
needs of its residents
became a daily challenge.
Girls who had reached
puberty,
my colleagues and
I discovered, faced a special kind of vulnerability in this environment.
Lacking access to feminine hygiene resources,
they would stay in their beds and
sit on pieces of cardboard for several days
each month. Often they would go without
food, or even water, unless someone brought
it to them. We later learned that girls at the
orphanage could access menstrual pads
through the director of the facility—but
he would provide pads only to girls who were willing to provide sex in return. Subsequently,
we confirmed that a strong link
between menstruation and girls’ vulnerability
exists in many parts of the world.
When we first sought to address the
lack of feminine hygiene options in this
part of Kenya, we focused on the kind of
solution
that women in developed countries
would typically seek: We provided
disposable pads. But we quickly discovered
that in areas without access to reliable
waste facilities, disposable products were
not a practical solution. Girls rolled up
used pads and placed them in chain-link
fences or hid them between roof tiles. Or
they deposited them in latrines, thereby
causing the latrines to clog up. In any case,
using the disposable items only added to
the stigma of menstruation. The use of
disposable pads posed an additional challenge:
If we provided funding to buy them,
we had no way to ensure that the money
would go toward that purpose.
For these reasons, we shifted our efforts
to the creation of a reusable product. Over
the next five years, Days for Girls developed
27 iterations of a washable pad before we
arrived at a design that responded to the
social, cultural, and environmental needs
of women and girls in our target population.
Ultimately, we decided to file a patent
application for the final product. (We did so partly in order to support local enterprises
that manufacture Days for Girls Pads.)
Women told us that they needed a pad
that would be easy to wash, that would dry
quickly, and that they could care for without
experiencing embarrassment. In response
to their input, we created a pad that has two
main components—a liner and a shield. The
liner provides an absorbent layer, and the
shield guards against leaks. We designed the liner to resemble a washcloth; users can fold
it into three parts and fit it inside the shield
(just as they would fit a letter inside an envelope).
When it’s unfolded, the liner has a
large surface area, so it requires less water
to clean and dries more quickly than other
washable pads. Because the liner doesn’t look
like a traditional feminine hygiene
product,
women can hang it outside to dry without
calling attention to it. Hanging the liner outside
allows it to dry completely. That feature
enables women to care for their hygiene pad
even in areas without consistent access to
clean water. It also helps to ensure that each
pad will last up to three years.
Developed for Impact
Our goal is to ensure that women and girls in
all parts of the world have access to a feminine
hygiene solution that they can count
on, month after month. The tagline on our
website makes this point simply: “Every girl.
Everywhere. Period.”
To help meet that goal, Days for Girls
has built a global distribution network that
includes more than 450 volunteer chapters
and teams. These chapters and teams partner
with local organizations to bring hygiene
kits to areas where women and girls are most
likely to benefit from them. Complementing
this chapter-and-team system are in-country
enterprises that give women an opportunity
to make and sell hygiene kits in their communities.
This social enterprise model has
several advantages: It supports local economies
(the enterprises use locally sourced
materials), it provides income-generation
opportunities for women, and it allows us to
reach women and girls even in remote areas.
Providing an effective feminine hygiene
solution can directly affect outcomes for
women and girls in the areas of education,
health, economic participation, and social status.
A growing body of research, for example,
shows a clear link between reliable menstrual
hygiene and increased school attendance
rates for girls. Our own monitoring and
evaluation efforts highlight that link as well.
We surveyed a group of girls in Uganda both
before and after we distributed hygiene kits
to them. Before kit distribution, 36 percent
of the girls reported missing school one or
more days each month. After distribution,
that number dropped to 8 percent.
Measuring school attendance is relatively
simple. Quantifying the broad social impact
of a feminine hygiene solution is more difficult.
How does access to our hygiene kits
shift the way that women and girls think
about their leadership abilities, or about the
roles that they fill in their families and communities?
We at Days for Girls are eager to
collaborate with global health professionals
and experienced program evaluators who
can help us measure this kind of impact.
Even apart from such studies, however,
we know that our work has the potential to
catalyze real change for women and girls.
Once, after we distributed kits at a school
in Zimbabwe, we learned that one person
there had trained other girls at the school
in how to sew their own hygiene kits. When
we came to the school to thank this person
directly,
a school administrator introduced
her to us: “Here she is. This is Kgotso, and
she’s 12 years old.” Kgotso’s parents, we
learned, had passed away many years earlier.
But the experience of engaging with
the Days for Girls solution had changed how
Kgotso viewed her place in the world. “I no
longer consider myself an orphan,” she told
us. “I am now a leader of women.”