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Top 10 Facts About Period Poverty in the U.K.

Top Ten Facts about Period Poverty in the U.K.
Nearly 800 million women and girls menstruate daily. Period poverty encompasses the shame, guilt and cost barriers around access to sanitary products. One in 10 girls in the United Kingdom is unable to afford sanitary wear, resulting in detriment to their self-esteem, education and overall quality of life. Eliminating period poverty has often been the focus of nonprofits and the U.K.’s government. Below are the top 10 facts about period poverty in the U.K. that are important to know.

Top 10 Facts About Period Poverty in the U.K.

  1. An estimated 49 percent of girls have missed a day of school due to their periods. One in five girls surveyed in a 2019 study reported being a victim of bullying and teasing because of their periods. Girls faced increased feelings of shame and embarrassment when on their periods or discussing their period in an academic setting. This resulted in absences from school and led female students to struggle to keep up with their schoolwork.
  2. Women in the U.K. spend as much as 18,450 euros ($20.744 USD) due to their period across their lifetime. The total accounts for the costs of sanitary items, pain relief for cramps, new underwear and other period-related costs such as sweets or magazines. Of those interviewed, 91 percent purchase pain relief to ease the symptoms of periods on a regular basis. All of the 2,134 women surveyed responded that feminine hygiene products should cost less money, and some added that the government should remove its tax on those products.
  3. Free Periods is a campaign supplying low-income girls with menstrual products. Amika George, a 19-year-old student studying at Cambridge University, founded Free Periods. George called on the U.K. government to assure sanitary products are widely available in educational settings. The campaign also held a protest in London to bring attention to the ongoing issue.
  4. Plan International UK found that 10 percent of girls are unable to afford sanitary products. The cost of sanitary products has led 14 percent of girls to borrow sanitary products from friends, 12 percent to improvise sanitary products and 19 percent to change to less suitable products.
  5. Bloody Good Period, created by Gabby Edlin in 2018, supplies 25 asylum seeker centers in the U.K. with a flow of menstrual products. The growing initiative aspires to supply more food banks and centers in its mission to end period poverty.
  6. Girls throughout the U.K. not only miss school but often improvise sanitary products to use during their period. Girls have shared their stories of wrapping a sock around their underwear to control the bleeding. Others have wrapped rolls of tissues or newspapers in order to prevent leakage through their uniforms.
  7. In 2018, the Scottish government rolled out a plan to provide free sanitary products to women unable to afford them. Projections determine that it will reach approximately 18,800 low-income women and girls in an attempt to combat period poverty.
  8. The Gift Wellness Foundation provides non-toxic sanitary pads to women in crisis throughout the U.K. The Foundation relies on donations and the generosity of local community businesses. Donated sanitary products contain all-natural ingredients to ensure they are free of harmful chemicals.
  9. As of 2017, an estimated 68,000 women lived on the streets in temporary housing or shelters. These women have to make decisions that often leave them without sanitary products due to their financial situation. Each year, shelters get an allowance for condoms but not for sanitary products.
  10. Three individuals who met as interns at a London advertising agency founded #TheHomelessPeriod. Inspired to minimize the hidden side of an inequality, #TheHomelessPeriod aims to have tampons and towels available in homeless shelters through donations, crowdfunding and fundraising.

The top 10 facts about period poverty in the U.K. show the frequent inaccessibility of sanitary products to girls and women throughout the nation. While the Scottish government leads the way in the efforts to end period poverty, other governments have yet to replicate its actions. Individuals within the U.K. have taken it upon themselves to create campaigns to combat the hidden inequality and have seen success in their efforts.

– Gwen Schemm
Photo: Unsplash

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10 Facts About the Myna Mahila Foundation

Myna Mahila Foundation
The Myna Mahila Foundation is an NGO that was founded by Suhani Jalota in 2015 during her studies at Duke University. The organization’s goal is to create a social enterprise that can improve women’s access to menstrual healthcare.

In India, 23 million girls drop out of school early because they begin menstruating. The Myna Mahila Foundation aims to address this problem of girls missing school and limiting their potential because of their periods. The foundation has recently gained global attention due to high involvement with Meghan Markle, the Duchess of Sussex. The following are 10 facts about the Myna Mahila foundation that everyone should know.

10 Facts About the Myna Mahila Foundation

  1. The three goals of the foundation are improving menstrual hygiene affordability, generating female employment in slums and building women’s networks. The foundation manufactures low-cost high-quality sanitary napkins and sells them door to door, thus employing women in the Mumbai slums and providing affordable sanitary products to those in need.
  2. The foundation not only aims to have a direct impact by providing employment and affordable hygiene products, but it also wants to start a conversation about this issue and how it affects women in India and around the world.
  3. In 2018, founder Suhani Jalota was honored by Forbes 30 under 30 Asia. She was also previously honored with the Queen Young Leaders Award, the Melissa and Doug Entrepreneurship Fellowship and a Glamour Magazine Award.
  4. Meghan Markle wrote about the Myna Mahila Foundation for TIME in 2017. Additionally, Suhani Jalota attended the royal wedding of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle in May along with three other members of the foundation, Archana Ambre, Deborah Das and Imogen Mansfield.
  5. Less than a year after its creation, the foundation had already reached 1,500 women across five slums in Mumbai both through employment and hygienic products.
  6. There are over 3,000 regular users of Myna pads in India.
  7. Over 500,000 pads have been manufactured since the foundation was created.
  8. In addition to the menstrual hygiene initiative, the Myna Mahila Foundation also provides opportunities for women to work from home so they can take care of their children. The organization also collects donations such as books, toys and clothes and makes these available to people from the slums.
  9. The foundation empowers its staff by providing education in English, Math, health, computers and self-defense.
  10. The Myna Mahila Foundation was chosen by the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, Meghan Markle and Prince Harry, as one of the charities where guests were to send contributions in place of wedding gifts. This has brought a large amount of attention to the foundation and its efforts.

These important facts about the Myna Mahila Foundation reveal the organization’s enormous impact on Indian women and on the issue of menstrual hygiene. The organization is expanding beyond its original goal, changing lives with education and work opportunities and improving the way women feel about their bodies.  

– Luz Solano-Flórez
Photo: Flickr

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Low-Income Communities Deserve Sanitary Menstrual Products

Low-Income Communities Deserve Sanitary Menstrual Products
In 2015, 18 percent of Rwandan females didn’t go to school or work because they couldn’t purchase sanity menstrual products.

Sustainable Health Enterprises (SHE) recycles trunk fiber from banana farmers to be cut, carded, washed, fluffed and solar dried for menstrual pads. The company supplies farmers with the necessary equipment and training services for production. They offer health and hygiene education to the community through schools.

SHE believes it’s a personal injustice that menstrual hygiene is seen as a luxury item. In Rwanda each year, the country has roughly a gross domestic product (GDP) loss of $115 million for women needing to take sick leave due to their periods. The company is fighting for the removal of value-added taxes on menstrual pads.

“We’re creating a blueprint to franchise globally. It’s a sustainable system that can be rolled out anywhere. We think it’s straight up common sense,” SHE outlined on the company’s website.

Most U.S. food stamp programs do not define sanitary menstrual products as an essential item. In India, people believe menstruation makes women impure. Most of the time females who are on their period are banished from completing their household obligations such as cooking, or even from inhabiting their homes at all.

In the largest slum, Mukuru, in Nairobi, Kenya, a study found that girls 10 to 19 years old were having sex with older men to gain access to sanitary menstrual products, according to Dignity Period.

In Burkina Faso, 83 percent of girls don’t have a sanitary menstrual changing area, and more than half of schools in the poorest countries lack private toilets, according to UNICEF.

Diana Sierra, a founder of Be Girl Inc., created a pair of underwear with a menstrual, mesh pocket that females can fill with any type of recyclable materials, such as cotton, grass or fabric, depending on the materials readily available in their geographic location.

After Sierra finished a master’s program in sustainability management at Columbia University, she traveled to Uganda for her internship. While conducting research on a coffee farm and cultural arts, she was working on the side to create a prototype for the most effective sanitary pad.

“So I said okay I’m going to hack this material with what I have handy. I took an umbrella for the layer on the bottom, I took like a mosquito net and cut it in pieces and stick it all together and created a kind of a universal pocket, a mix-proof pocket for a certain material,” said Sierra.

Sierra took her product to a school and the children found it successful, but they didn’t like the color black because they found it boring. In Tanzania and Malawi, the stigma associated with menstruation is more than a negative connotation. It is considered a curse.

“When we were asking them, they were talking about how they can’t touch an animal because the animal would just drop dead, and they cannot touch a baby because the baby can die. They cannot go through the crops because the crops will die,” said Sierra.

Sierra realized that she spent years working for global companies, designing for about 10 percent of the population with their extra TVs and face steamers, but she wondered about the other 90 percent of the world who feel that they aren’t deserving of a sanitary product.

Be Girl was launched in the U.S. to fiercely distinguish between and within genders. Sierra is mining a conversation of equality worldwide. It’s a product not exclusive to any socioeconomic status. She wants women to educate themselves about their options and teach others in every country so that generations that follow will spread the knowledge.

“They have the same value as a human being, but they’re completely overlooked. So that was the very first thing that I said I have to go and see this for myself and experience firsthand what it is that a designer can do for this type of scenarios,” said Sierra.

– Rachel Williams

Photo: Flickr