The Power of a Sanitary Pad

Published June 16, 2008, last updated on March 8, 2013 under Research News

It started as a simple question, to explain the curious phenomenon of a school in Kenya that had never graduated a girl who could pass the college entrance exam. One practical answer was simple, the enduring solution far more complex.

The practical answer was sanitary pads. One reason girls were falling behind in school was because they couldn’t afford this personal necessity that would enable them to stay in school during menstruation.

Duke professor Sherryl Broverman learned this hard fact of Kenyan life when she traveled to Kenya’s Egerton University to develop a course on HIV/AIDS. The people at Egerton connected her to Muhuru Bay, a community hit with the highest HIV/AIDS rates in Kenya. Twenty percent of children there are AIDS orphans, and the rate of HIV infection is 30 percent, compared to a national rate of 7 percent.

Broverman found a community where health education doesn’t exist; where extended families that could pass on their feminine wisdom had been wiped out by the extraordinarily high rates of HIV and malaria infection. It was a place where conversations about menstruation were practically non-existent.

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