In Kenya, only 35% of girls between the ages of 16 and 20 are still in school, compared to about 50 percent of boys. The leading cause of death of adolescent girls is botched abortions, typically due to transactional sex resulting in unplanned pregnancy.
Each month, 868,000 girls in Kenya miss 3.5 million learning days, while at least 15 million potential working days are lost by their mothers – all due to poverty resulting in unaffordable sanitary pads, which cost twice the daily wage for most people. Girls regularly are forced to choose: do I prostitute myself for pads, or miss school? Do I stay home, or I do I risk shame if I have an accident? These are choices no girl should have to make.
The statistics are unequivocal: Educating girls is the best intervention to help a country socially and economically in the short and long run. In Kenya, for instance, girls in Secondary School are four times less likely to be HIV+ than their female counterparts who drop out of Primary School, and their children live longer, are better educated, and help beat the generational cycle of poverty. The Nike Foundation calculated that educating the 1.6 million current High School girl drop-outs would gain the economy $3.2 billion dollars each year. This figure represents the culmination of dreams actualized.
There are so many things we can’t do. For instance, we cannot pay school fees for every girl. But, what if for just a few dollars a year we could keep a girl in school for two months out of the year by providing pads? Then she could do the work of earning the grades to stay in school. We believe that this small hinge of pads can swing wide the door of development and break cycles of poverty.
Sanitary pads are arguably the lowest cost intervention to yield the largest social and economic change in both the short- and long-run.
(Read statistics here on the benefits of keeping girls in school, or read the results of some studies in Africa on the impact of sanitary pads on attendance and class participation here.)
To provide free pads for every post-pubescent girl in school would cost about $13M USD per year, increasing at nearly 5% a year. This is why we believe social enterprise in a network of partnerships is the way: reducing costs dramatically to allow more girls to purchase pads and a reduced cost to all stakeholders doing distribution, while building Kenya’s economy.
But we’ve got a comprehensive solution, 8 years in the making…
