Time to talk... about MHM

Menstruation is a taboo subject for women and girls in East Africa; many women and girls consequently miss out on education, or other productive activity, due to fear of embarrassment from their male peers. What's worse is that the social stigma has materialised: a study by Abanyie et al, 2021, showed that, within the municipality of Wa in Ghana, all the schools lacked menstrual hygiene facilities. In another Ghanaian municipality: West Gonja, only 30.8% of the schools had assigned sites for changing of menstrual materials, and no school had menstrual hygiene materials available for emergency use. 

Although hygiene and clean water is covered by UN SDG 6, women have specific hygiene needs, particularly during menstruation, and childbirth. During childbirth, only a third of women in Uganda, 18% in Kenya, and 7% in Tanzania could access improved water and sanitation in health facilities (Gon et al., 2016, Rombo et al, 2017). While I don't reflect on this topic for this post, it also requires critical attention. With unsafe access to latrines to change their pads, and unaffordable prices for menstrual health products, the consequences are dire: infection, a compromised education [school absenteeism] and girls engaging in transactional sex to receive menstrual hygiene products (Kearon, 2021). As a female, I cannot imagine facing these challenges, and have always taken for granted, menstrual hygiene management (MHM), which is what this post will explore. 

MHM relates to the "range of actions and interventions that ensure women and girls can privately, safely, and hygienically manage their monthly menstrual flow with confidence and dignity" (Giles-Hansen, Mugambi and Machado, 2019). A key approach has been to develop affordable and reusable sanitary pads:

 

The Global Women's Water Initiative is an organisation which teaches grassroots rural women economic and technical solutions within water and sanitation, which is a sector they are often left out of (remember how men predominantly oversee latrine construction?). One goal is for these women to become socialpreneurs, by making reusable inexpensive sanitary pads, which simultaneously empower women to lead in the water & sanitation movement, as well as generating their own income. This knowledge can be passed onto other women, who can produce such innovations for their own community.

Video which highlights how African women recognise the need for menstrual hygiene management, and answer the call, by developing reusable, cheap sanitary pads. 

It's not just women who are driving the MHM efforts, but men too! Paul Okari worked as a volunteer teacher at a girls' school in Narok, south-western Kenya, and realised that a lack of menstrual hygiene products, and its unaffordability, led to girls' school absenteeism. And so, he set out to develop Safi Pads, which was affordable, reusable and washable, and has now distributed over 1 million over East Africa. The company adopts a holistic approach by "employing more than 30 local men and women to produce the pads'!

Figure 1: Barclay Paul Okari, Kenyan entrepreneur and founder of Safi Pads, which targets its distribution across East Africa. 

I wholeheartedly agree that it is vital for men to be included in both conversations and projects of MHM, which can hopefully lead to genuine transformative change within the water and sanitation sector.