Sanitary pads help Ghana girls go to school

[ccharles000]

Schoolgirl absenteeism in Ghana could be cut by half by providing free sanitary towels, a study has shown.

The Oxford University research team found in a six-month trial that with pads and hygiene education, girls were more confident about attending school.

The research was conducted in four villages where the traditional method for period protection was cloth rags.

"It's a taboo subject,but we found they were very anxious to try something else," researcher Linda Scott said.

"There girls are so poor that they have to use whatever cloth they can find," she told the BBC's Focus on Africa programme.

"The cloth is so scarce that they only have two pieces of it, so they have to wash it at night and hope that it dries in the morning, which of course in a damp climate it doesn't, so they end up wearing damp and soiled cloths which is not hygienic."

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/8488375.stm

[JCMach1]

1. Another component to this is simply CLEAN and SANITARY toilets

at schools... I know there is at least one NGO in Africa working on this... Not sure if they are in Ghana though.

[Hekate]

2. Half the world is women, and yet... Several years ago I read that disaster relief workers...

... took a long time to recognize that they desperately needed to include women's sanitary supplies in with the tents and bandages and drinking water and whatnot. Otherwise women and girls in a disaster area feel they have no recourse but to hide out during their periods, which puts them at a terrible disadvantage when it comes to providing for themselves and their children.

We think it's not a taboo subject in the West, because of all the advertising in magazines and on tv, but it's still not much of a subject for mixed company. Yay for researcher Linda Scott, even though we had to wait until the 21st century. They undoubtedly couldn't even do this particular research without a woman to ask the questions. The girls of Ghana would never give this information to a male.

Over and over again I find that introducing diversity of gender and ethnicity into groups (such as various forms of research) ends up getting new and different and sometimes startling results. My all-time favorite is still the female Artificial Intelligence scientist who made the breakthrough discovery that if you want to be able to have a human being "teach" a robot, you have to get away from the masculine ideal of a big chunky machine and construct an expressive "baby face" for it, complete with googly eyes. The human brain is virtually hard-wired to interact in a very specific way with infants when teaching them, very repetitive and patient, very interactive.

Interesting article, cc.

Hekate

[postulater]

3. Such a simple thing we overlook.

Thanks for pointing this out to me.

[KitSileya]

4. Lunapads have a charity that's about giving these girls non-disposable pads.

A set of non-disposable pads that gets them thru a period is the best way to support them - it makes them independent from further help, while giving them over 3 weeks to wash and dry them for the next use. It's called Pads4Girls.

[pipi_k]

7. Menopausal myself, but I use non-disposable pads

for mild bladder control problems when I'm away from home.

The ones I use are "Glad Rags", which are for periods, but very useful for mild incontinence. I love them. The disposables were giving me all sorts of nasty rashes and stuff. These are soft and very absorbent, but not backed with plastic so they don't hold the moisture in...yet I can wear them for 4 hours or more and they don't leak, either.

I'll have to check out the Luna Pads, too.

[unabelladonna]

5. i've always wondered about what sanitary products

are used in the third world. i can't imagine what a difficult life women and girls have. we're used to having dispensaries in school and public bathrooms or being able to run down to the nearest pharmacy....

[Hekate]

8. A college friend of mine, raised in the Appalachians, used folded diapers on the farm...

I met her in the late 60's when she was working on a Master's degree in linguistics, but she had been raised on a small farm in Pennsylvania Appalachia. It was considered a real treat by all the women when one of the uncles went to the big city and brought back a box of Kotex pads along with whatever else he went there for. When she left home for college, and later for the Peace Corps, her mother gave her several cloth diapers to take along "just in case" there were no disposable supplies available wherever she landed. Oddly enough, she never had to resort to that method once she left the farm.

Never in my life was I taught how to fold and wear a home-made pad. Kotex may have been bulky, but at least they were disposable.

Using washable Glad Rags (as mentioned in another post) for post-menopausal mild urinary incontinence sounds like a great idea to me, however.

Hekate

[proud2BlibKansan]

6. When I was in high school we supported a charity that provided feminine hygiene products to girls

in African countries.

So this article makes me very sad. Because I was in high school 40 years ago.

Damn. Some things never change. :cry: