Menstrual health and hygiene isn’t merely a women’s issue. If a large number of the population is being held back because of a problem which is often ignored then it affects the whole population. If only the policy makers could recognise and accept this truth.
In many cultures and societies around the world, there is a stigma attached to menstruation. Girls in developing countries miss up to one week of school or work every month due to lack of sanitary products, inadequate facilities and shame associated with periods.
Shortcomings in education and poor hygiene during menstruation can also lead to medical conditions.
But in Bangladesh, India and Nepal, various efforts are underway to help make sanitary napkins affordable and available to the country's women.
The message spreads in Bangladesh
In Bangladesh, the available sanitary napkins on the market are costly. Foreign manufactured ones cost more than 120 Bangladeshi taka (US $1.50) as there is a 60% supplementary tax imposed on the imports.
But a locally manufactured brand called Joya, which costs 60 taka (US $0.75) for eight pads, falls short, according to blogger and activist Marzia Prova:
After watching the much hyped advertisements I started using “Joya” with the zeal I reserve for local products. [..] I saw that the adhesive in that pad is inadequate. So it does not stick to the undergarment and is prone to be displaced. Its cover is very rough, I got rash on my thigh in just three days.
Can you believe, in our country there may be 50 million menstruating women. But only two or three female sanitary products are “made in Bangladesh” and their quality is not up to mark! Whose negligence is it? We see campaigns across the country to increase awareness among women to use hygienic sanitary pads, but there is no affordable and good quality pad in the country. It seems nobody is interested to provide affordable or free pads to every women in this country.
But there are people who are doing something about it. Girls in a drop-in-centre (shelter home) in Dhaka, run by an NGO called Oporajeyo Bangladesh, are making their own pads by hand with a cost of only 4.50 taka (US $0.06).
The organisation provides shelter for these girls with violent or tragic pasts, trains and rehabilitates them for school or work in different garments factories or beauty parlours. In an interview with Feminism Bangla, a feminist blog, the organisation's executive director Wahida Banu explained her dream of commercialising the product:
Oporajeyo Bangladesh works with street kids. We teach every kid about reproductive health, HIV, etc. We tell them to change pads every three to six hours. When they go to mainstream school, they communicate this knowledge to other children, even the teachers don't teach them this. [..]
Our girls are telling their friends in their class, and they are also interested. So they come to us saying that their friends want the pads. We got an offer from others, who are eager to help with purchasing the raw materials in lot — 1 tonne of cotton or 1 tonne of elastic rubbers. When we can buy them in lots, the cost will be lower. I want to produce sanitary pads costing 4 or 5 taka before I die.
A ‘revolution’ in India and Nepal
In Nepal, there are a number of menstrual pad projects that train local women to sew menstrual pad kits. A huge problem in using the traditional methods is to wash the menstrual rags for reuse and dry them in an hygienic way without much exposure. Students at the Art Center College of Design in California have built one low-cost, easy-to-use tool to wash and dry reusable sanitary cloths.
And in India, Arunachalam Muruganantham, a school dropout from a poor family in southern India turned social entrepreneur, has ‘revolutionised‘ menstrual health for rural women by inventing a simple machine to make cheap sanitary pads. His machines have been installed in more than 1,300 villages in 23 of the 29 states of India. A manual machine costs around 75,000 Indian rupees (US $1100) and can provide employment for 10 people. The machine can produce up to 250 pads a day, which cost about 2.5 rupees (US $0.04) each.
According to a 2011 survey by AC Nielsen, only 12% of India's 355 million menstruating women — compared to 88% in Japan, 64% in China and nearly 100% in Singapore and Japan — use sanitary napkins, with 70% of women saying their family can't afford to buy them. The rest resort to unhygienic alternatives like non-sanitised clothes with cotton, sometimes combined with ashes and husk sand.
Muruganantham, who was recognised in 2014 among Time Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People in the World, shared in a TED talk how he began his movement for sanitary napkins in India.
[video type='youtube' id='zkQL7UJYDIY' height='365']
Muruganantham's machine was reportedly replicated in Jordan to help Syrian refugees.
The impact on the environment
Inspired by Muruganantham, more and more social enterprises have been launched in India to manufacture cheaper sanitary pads. However, there are also the critics who say that focusing on sanitary pads and ignoring traditional cloths used for menstrual hygiene isn't sustainable. Sinu Joseph, a menstrual health educator from India, comments:
The hypocrisy is such that while foreign organizations are promoting the need to introduce sanitary napkins in India by saying that 88% of Indian women are using cloth, in their own country they are promoting reusable cloth pads and menstrual cups, citing environmental reasons. If that is the case, then India is far ahead of the rest of the world in being environment friendly. [..]
What we do need is a simple solution of providing information in schools and communities on maintaining menstrual hygiene, be it with cloth or pads. And leave it to women to decide what they wish to use.
Then there is the question of disposing the pads. The thought of hygienic disposal of sanitary napkins got Kathy Walkling into the business of making biodegradable cloth pads as part of the Indian all woman group Ecofemme that produces and exports fair-trade cloth sanitary napkins from India to 14 countries in the world. Other organisations in India have started producing cheap compostable pads like Azadi pad and Anandi pad.
Menstrual health and hygiene isn’t merely a women’s issue. If a large number of the population is being held back because of a problem which is often ignored then it affects the whole population. If only the policy makers could recognise and accept this truth.
This article was republished from GlobalVoices.org.
