Myna Health: Mission 2 Million

Suhani Jalota is the founder and CEO of Myna Mahila Foundation, an organization working on women’s health in slum communities in India. She is currently a Knight Hennessy Scholar pursuing her MBA and PhD in Health Policy and Economics at Stanford University. For the last eight years, she has been working in urban slum areas and rural communities on projects ranging from adolescent girl health, water and sanitation, to social protection policies in South Africa, Thailand, and several cities in India. She was involved in sanitation evaluation projects with IDinsight, UNICEF and Department of Education in the Philippines. She holds a Bachelor of Science in Economics and Global Health from Duke University. She is a Forbes Asia under 30 recipient 2018, Asia 21 Leader 2019,  Young Achiever’s Mother Teresa Memorial Awardee 2018, and Queen’s Young Leader 2017.

We are a community based organisation committed to shift health behavior among women and to develop a sense of agency by fulfilling their basic needs: safer menstrual hygiene. Our MHM education module entails affordable sanitary products, awareness sessions at doorstep, completely free of shame and stigma associated with menstruation. This need has become greater than ever as healthcare services and emergency response has shifted to address an ongoing pandemic.

Our frontline staff is working tirelessly to provide hygiene essentials to women in need. We propose to facilitate zero-contact distribution by setting up sanitary pad dispensers(ATMs) and mobile vans to reach remotest locations. All of these health services will be offered on our recently launched mobile app-Myna Mahila Health App where girls can order pads through the app or locate the nearest access point. App will also host webinars and sessions to facilitate virtual education.

At least 23 million girls in India drop out of schools and colleges due to lack of adequate facilities for menstrual hygiene management (MHM). Inadequate WASH (water, sanitation and hygiene) facilities, particularly in public places, such as in schools, workplaces or health centers and lack of sanitary napkins can pose a major obstacle to women and girls.

Menstruating girls and women not only face the challenge of the availability of infrastructure, but also social norms and beliefs. In many cultures, menstruating women are considered impure and are excluded from participating in day-to-day activities, such as education, employment, and cultural and religious practices. Moreover, the taboos and stigmas attached to menstruation lead to silence around the topic, resulting in limited information on menstruation and menstrual hygiene. 

To bridge this gap, Myna Mahila Foundation trains and employs young female entrepreneurs in urban slums that produce and distribute high quality, affordable menstrual hygiene products to increase adoption of safer menstrual hygiene management practices. We are creating a cultural revolution and generating local employment. We improve health and educate women at the doorstep. 

Myna Mahila Foundation started in 2015 with the mission to provide voice to women all over the world in marginalized communities by creating a network of young female entrepreneurs. We needed to make sanitary pads because we wanted every woman to have access to them. And because Myna was started by the same community members who it was intended for, the producers are our consumers. We go door-to-door to educate and distribute pad packets. We hold meetings and courses with them, and counsel them to work and respect themselves.  

One of our flagship educational initiatives - Sponsor a Girl - was kick-started in 2018 to equip underprivileged girls with proper menstrual products and to impart knowledge through training on menstrual hygiene management. Till date we have supported around 4000 girls through our Sponsor a Girl events, along with more than 500,000 women at the doorstep. With an aim to increase access to menstrual hygiene products, we propose to scale our programmes by leveraging technology and contact-less distribution through a system of mobile vans, ATM accessed by mobile application through which girls can access awareness sessions and sanitary napkins at their fingertips. 

We are working towards improving access and awareness about menstrual hygiene among women from urban slums. Myna Mahila Foundation has now been in existence for five years. In this time, we have been able to benefit more than 500,000 women. Our beneficiaries are concentrated in 15 slums communities. These women belong to families living in a very close proximity, often in spaces smaller than 25x15sqft - without access to water to maintain basic hygiene.

We identify these women by going door-to-door to understand their needs, educate them using sanitary napkins and to take care of themselves and make their own choices. to instill a sense of financial freedom, we start with training women on producing these sanitary napkins and selling them in their own communities. Once they disassociate with the taboo, they are able to speak their mind and demand things that they are entitled to. Young women themselves are trying to break this cycle preventing their daughters and future generations to realise that menstrual hygiene management (MHM) is not only a sanitation matter but also an important step towards safeguarding the dignity and overall life opportunities of women and girls.

“Do you know what it means to have a sanitary pad?” he said. I didn’t know what he meant, so I looked at him perplexed. He said, “Freedom”. Maybe there was something in his poignant eyes - I believed him. I didn’t know why then. It took me a few years to really understand why Dr. Jockin Arputham, a man who had spent his entire lifetime trying to uplift the poor from poverty, thought that pads meant freedom. But when as a 15 year old, I saw women in Mumbai’s slums every day walking long distances to go to a public toilet because they did not have any at home, and when I saw women being harassed on the way, and when I knew women who were married as children brutally beaten up by their husbands, I realized how pads and toilets were symbols of achieving individual freedom.
 
Women could feel that if they had pads at home, they could have more control over their lives. I talk about these women and pads now, because it is with these women that we started an organization, Myna Mahila Foundation many years later, for the purpose of helping women feel confident.

Where I grew up, girls are told to be silent. If I would talk too loudly, I would be called out to talk softly. Told to calm down...Women don’t speak up when others are talking – their views don’t matter. I am irked by women’s untapped burning potential. When they can do so much, but are chained due to no fault of their own. Our women have as much potential as women around the world, but it is unrealized. What we need to do first, is bring these poor, and these women with incredible potential at par with others in their generation around the world. We need to support them to be at a fair game – that is first providing them with the basic amenities they need to grow. The tools to understand how to learn, and how technology works. But teaching girls in slums about technology when they don’t have access to it, and are falling sick all the time and don’t have a teacher or school to go to, or toilets to relieve themselves,  or pads to use, we are not playing fairly with them. We need to first provide them with these basic amenities. 

For the last ten years moving around small towns in India, the US, South Africa and the Philippines, I have been listening to women’s stories of suffering, disrespect, and shame. When I saw how invisible the women were, I knew this was it. I was going to work with these women all my life. As a Development and Health Economist (pursuing my PhD and MBA at Stanford University), I bring a unique perspective from the academic, business and social impact worlds, with more than 10 years working hands-on in slum communities. I am from Mumbai, and have been running Myna Mahila Foundation, an organization that has reached more than 500,000 women at their doorstep, as Founder and CEO for the last five years. I have managed marketing, sales, manufacturing of consumer goods, supply chain, fundraising, and customer management, among other aspects, at Myna Mahila (where I have done everything from square one along with a fantastic team). Having worked at IDinsight, an impact evaluation firm, I am well-equipped with monitoring and evaluation tools needed for assessing the project. Further, my research experience in health care, economics skill-set, a diverse team at Myna Mahila, and community trust built over the last decade are all instrumental in making Myna Health’s Mission 2 Million women a reality.   

We have failed many times at Myna Mahila, and every time we have had to swiftly come back up again. We’ve built stronger teams, better incentives, aligning cultures, working with community leaders, dreaming big but acting today. It’s been a constant learning. It’s been about building credibility and making people take us and our work seriously. It’s about making our group of 20-somethings matter. It’s not easy. But we are doing this precisely because it’s so difficult, and needs to be done. Two years into the organization, some of our biggest community leaders and supporters all turned against us in a coordinated effort. We refused to give financial commissions to the middlemen (including them) and directly paid women in need. Since we were working on such contentious topics like menstrual hygiene, they did not want to take on the risk anymore. Our pad product was selling at a loss since volumes dropped significantly with the leaders pulling out. I pegged on cultural change in the organisation by constantly speaking about a growth mindset, build other leaders within the organization, and work so incredibly hard together and build community trust again by providing more jobs and pads to women all over. 

Myna Mahila was founded as a social enterprise.  At a point I felt trapped between our mission of creating social impact in a dignified truthful way keeping to our values, and pleasing the community leaders to get things done faster, but compromising on values. Although I was clear I did not want to take the easy route, this was such a delicate matter that shook the very fabric of Myna that held us together. People left, others joined, but the sentiment was disappointing. We decided to show the leaders how we intended to build a more sustainable organization, and this would be the only way we would function. Indeed, after three more years, some of the leaders came back to us to support and this time without any expectation. They are joining us with the right intention in their hearts. We continue to grow with more than 35 people on the team and counting. I have trained and manged each of the managers, now working independently in their divisions, learning and adopting newer, better practices to boost productivity. 

I worry that our girls are sheltered from their dreams. That they are too often told the world is foreign for them, they would not be able to manage and that they need to prioritize others over themselves. With a mere 23% of women in the labor force in India today and abysmal outcomes for maternal and child health indicators, the norms for women are set too low. This shouldn’t be happening today. Since I was 15, I have been working with young women from urban slums in India to understand the constraints holding them back (internal, household-level and external) and tackling them ground-up. First, we realized they did not even have access to basic hygiene services and knowledge. Taboos around their bodies kept them silent even when they suffered miserably. So the slum women and I founded an organization, Myna Mahila Foundation, for women in slums to speak up openly about the issues they were most afraid to discuss aloud like the chatty “Myna” bird. Our overall vision is to create youth employment, entrepreneurship opportunities for women living in informal settlements and to spread health awareness and affordable hygiene products back into the community made by community women.

Women don't speak up due to poor menstrual hygiene management, none or negligent income. I feel that if women are given basic facilities, they will be more healthier and respect their bodies as they will have access to better health. This dignified status is first step to incite a sense to gain independence over their finances. Once a woman is employed and has a stable income they are likely to develop agency to make decisions and move forward to become leaders. 

We currently serve 10,000 women at their doorstep on a monthly basis. We aim to serve 21,00,000 by 2025. 

Our Vision is to ensure women are healthy and taboos don’t hold them back from speaking up and taking care of their bodies. 

Our primary objectives over the next five years are: 

1. Improving access to MHM products and services for 21 lac women. 

2. Shift health behavior by breaking taboos and encouraging better hygiene and health practices. 

We seek to raise the following towards our project:

Phase I: Rs. 43,42, 013 (USD 57,266)

Phase II: Rs. 20,55,360 (USD 27,108)

Phase III: Rs. 46,56,750 (USD 61,272)

Minimum budget required:  Rs. 50,00,000 (USD 65,944)

Budget for last fiscal year:  Budget for FY 2019-20: Rs. 88, 43,149 (USD 116,632)