When a community can access safe water, it’s just the beginning. Access to water saves lives, improves people’s health, education and livelihoods.

Last year, Kingspan launched our 2021  Planet Passionate Communities Programme, where we partnered with international water charity, Just a Drop, to support communities across the world to overcome barriers that poverty can build.

One of the ways Just a Drop looks to help communities to escape the poverty trap is through improving livelihoods through practical and sustainable solutions related to water, hygiene and sanitation.

As women and girls are usually the ones that it falls on to collect water, they are often forced to miss out on their education and further opportunities to support their families financially. Further to this, prejudice and taboos around menstrual health can cause women to be held back, bullied and mistreated, putting them at further risk of missing their education. We’ve found that giving women the skills and understanding to break down these harmful taboos about their bodies whilst also giving them the opportunity to support their family is life changing.

At the start of 2022, we spoke to Sheila, a thirteen year old girl at Norah School in Uganda about this and her experiences. 

Sheila awoke one day to find blood dripping down her leg. She was alarmed and quite scared, it was the first time that this had happened to her. In Sheila’s community, it was taboo to discuss periods, it was seen as unclean and something that should be hidden. It’s a topic that Sheila had not even discussed with her own mother.

Fortunately for Sheila, she knew exactly what to do. Before the coronavirus lockdown, Sheila’s school was chosen to be trained as part of the menstrual hygiene enterprise group. Her school, and others in the area has been trained to understand what menstruation is, and then taught how to sew and pack menstrual pads made from local materials and liquid soap to keep clean.

The group had then shared their knowledge across their villages, breaking down taboos and educating the community. They had even taken the excess pads to market and sold them at affordable prices to the community members whilst also making a profit to recoup the costs of materials and to be able to keep the pad making as a sustainable ongoing process.

Everything she had learnt as part of the group helped her that day. She could not afford to go to the shop and buy herself sanitary pads but she had the skills to make her own. She told her mother what had happened, and together they made Sheila her own hygienic pads.  

Sheila told us; “I got the skills in marketing because I can confidently market the soap and the pads. I earn some money from the soap and the pads which I market and am saving this money to use it when the schools open.

I confidently train other girls in my village in MHM and this has helped me and my friend to stay safe without getting pregnant due to the wrong information we used to get from other peers during the lock down. I know we shall safely go back to school, when the schools open.”

Uganda is a country that is still reeling from the impacts of the coronavirus pandemic. Schools shut in Uganda in March 2020 and only opened again in January 2022, nearly two years later.

Whilst Sheila was able to return to school safely, one of the severe impacts that the pandemic lockdown caused was on teenage girls who were denied the security that school offers. The limited teaching resources, lack of understanding around their bodies, and cultural taboos around menstruation led girls who were out of school to become exposed to risks of sexual violence, exploitation, child marriages, and notably teenage pregnancies.

This, combined with the economic impacts on families caused by covid, meant that when schools reopened, there was a dramatic decrease in the number of children, both boys and girls, that returned to school.

Even before coronavirus, girls were missing around 14% of the school year due to period poverty, with at least 2.5% of girls being forced to drop out of school completely.

Sanitary pads extremely expensive and cannot be disposed of at school hygienically. This leads girls to use old cloths, napkins and leaves to protect themselves during their period – insecure methods which often lead to bullying by the boys and embarrassment for the girls.

It’s helping children, particularly girls like Sheila, to return into school, whilst also taking the novel approach of giving women and girls the skills they need to start their own businesses.

This is why Just a Drop’s menstrual hygiene programme is so important. It’s estimated that 500 million people live in period poverty without access to period products or private, hygienic places to change their period products during menstruation and this figure disproportionately impacts low-income communities. 

In 2023, Kingspan will be addressing the issue of period poverty by supporting Just a Drop to roll out a brand new menstrual hygiene programme in Kenya. 

We’ll initially teach two communities about menstrual hygiene and how to sew their own pads, and then provide the communities with sewing machines and help them to establish a market supply for the local area; training them in book keeping to help them to control their finances.

We look forward to bringing you more updates about the work in the coming months. 

Learn more about the Just a Drop Programme in the below video.