 Handmade Cloth Pads

Healthy, reusable, and biodegradable cloth pads that are good for menstruators and our planet.

More than 800 million people menstruate daily, and many of them are in low- and middle-income countries across sub-Saharan Africa (Mann Global Health Report, June 2021).   whereas 500 million lack access to menstrual products and adequate facilities to manage their periods in dignity (World Bank, 2022). Period poverty is a global health issue. It is a situation where menstruators lack access to adequate and hygienic sanitary products, knowledge on healthy period management practices and water, hygiene, and sanitation facilities. According to the study conducted by the Ministry of Basic and Secondary Education of The Gambia, girls miss 10-20% of school days in a year due to period poverty. School absenteeism eventually leads to school dropout. When girls from low-income families drop out of school, they become victims of early or forced marriage, teenage pregnancies, and female genital mutilation. Some women and girls go through rape, domestic violence, and psychological violence in the process of accessing sanitary products. Less privileged women and girls resort to transactional sex. Transactional sex refers to non-commercial, non-marital sexual relationships where women and girls exchange sex for money so that they can buy sanitary products to manage their periods with dignity. This predisposes them to urogenital infections, STIs, HIV, Herpes, and Cervical cancer. Recurrent urogenital infections can lead to infertility and thus cause gender-based violence. Period poverty results in mental health issues such as anxiety, depression, low self-esteem, suicidal thoughts, and suicide.

According to an article published by The Guardian in September 2019, a 14-year-old Kenyan schoolgirl took her own life after a teacher allegedly embarrassed her for having her period in class. A study commissioned by THINX in 2021 stated that Forty-two percent of women in the US have experienced period shaming, with one in five being made to have these feelings because of comments made by a male friend. Additionally, 12% of women have been shamed by a family member and one in ten by a classmate.

Currently, girls and women especially those in rural Gambia use different unhygienic products to manage their periods. Some of the products include old pieces of cloth, rags, sponges, gauze, and toilet rolls. Those who use disposable pads do not dispose of them appropriately. On average, a menstruating person uses and disposes of 12,000 to 16,800 disposable sanitary products in their lifetime which is about 32 products each period. Single-use menstrual products are made up of up to 90% plastic, and a cocktail of chemicals. Over a billion of these non-compostable sanitary products are making their way into sewerage systems, waterways, landfills, and water bodies every month causing harm to our environment, marine life, and human beings. The amount of non-biodegradable plastic accumulated every month is very high, a factor strong enough to raise concern over the crisis which the environment is facing currently. It is estimated that 1 disposable pad is equivalent to 4 plastic bags and if buried, it can spend 500-800 years in the ground thus causing lot of damage to the planet.

Our solution is skills training on how to make handmade cloth pads. Girls’ Pride cloth pads are locally made reusable, chemical free and biodegradable sanitary pads that help women and girls from low-income communities to manage their periods in dignity and prevent urogenital infections. We make our cloth pads using cotton and leak proof materials that are locally available in our communities. The handmade reusable cloth pads work perfectly well and better than single use disposable sanitary pads. They absorb blood during menstruation, post-partum period and any vaginal bleeding or discharge. Because of the leakproof or waterproof materials, it provides maximum security for women and girls and prevent staining. After using the cloth pads, it can be washed using clean water and chemical free soap, dried under the sun or it can be ironed when dried indoors. Our handmade cloth pads keep girls in school during their period, address period poverty in vulnerable communities, protect women and girls from transactional sex, sexual and gender-based violence, mental health disorders, prevent recurrent urogenital infections and contracting STIs and HIV. This simple innovation gives less privileged women and girls the opportunity to thrive in their communities and contribute to national development. Because we serve women and girls from remote and underserved communities with limited access to electricity, we train our target population how to make their own cloth pads using needle and thread and sewing with their hands instead of using a manual or electric sewing machine. Basically, our solution uses ancestral or traditional technology which makes it cost-effective, sustainable, and scalable.

We serve women and girls of reproductive both in rural and urban Gambia. We are working to make an impact in the lives of women and girls from low-income families earning less than $1 a day, women, and girls with disabilities (physically challenged, albinos, deaf and hard of hearing, and the visually impaired and blind), refugees, internally displaced women and girls, adolescent girls who live in boarding schools and orphans. The handmade reusable cloth pads will impact the lives of the population we serve in many ways. They will have access to healthy sanitary pads to manage their periods in dignity thus protecting them from the risk of contracting deadly sexually transmitted diseases from multiple sexual partners. Women and girls will no longer have sex with men in order to get money to buy sanitary pads during their periods, girls will have the opportunity to stay in school, complete their education, get jobs, start their businesses, support their families, and contribute to economic growth. This simple solution will protect women and girls from mental health disorder such as depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorders and suicide which are related to the lack of access to basic human needs like sanitary pads. Cloth pads are environmentally friendly which means it will reduce the amount of plastic waste that is generated from the use of single used disposable sanitary pads made of plastic, reduce their carbon footprint, prevent blockages of the sewage system and waterways, prevent contamination of waterbodies, destruction of marine life and air pollution related health risk such as asthma, respiratory tract infection from burning of sanitary waste in the open space.

Gils’ Pride has been working with local and international partners and donors like the Global Youth Mobilization, The Pollination Project, UNFPA Gambia, Network Against Gender-Based Violence, Girls Talk Organization, Society for the Study of Women’s Health, Gambia Deaf Women’s Society, and the Comprehensive Health Project under Ministry of Education to implement health-related projects in rural The Gambia. I (Maimuna) am the Co-founder of Girls’ Pride Gambia, and my professional background is business management, and garment construction and tailoring. Since 2017, I have been working with my team making reusable cloth pads. I sewed our first cloth pad prototype in 2017. I also conduct trainings for women and girls and Trainer of Trainers on how to make reusable cloth pads (handmade pad making or using a sewing machine) using materials that are locally available in The Gambia. I supervise our pad production team and period poverty and period shaming school and community projects in rural Gambia. Our CEO has over 10 years’ experience in Nursing and 5 years in social entrepreneurship. She has undergone a six-week leadership and project management training in the US and a 9-month training on project management, entrepreneurship, sustainable development goals, planetary health, how climate change affects human health, and how developing countries can address climate change with limited resources at the International Sustainability Academy and Wurzburg University in Germany. She developed the innovative Funneh board game while in Germany. She supervises our projects funded by the Italian Cooperation for Development Agency through UNFPA. Our project team/part-time staff includes nurses and midwives who have expert knowledge, skills and experience in sexual and reproductive health and rights, mental health, period poverty, and how climate change affects women’s health. Our community volunteers come from different professional backgrounds. Some are classroom teachers, students, social workers, entrepreneurs, students, survivors of gender-based violence, child marriage and teenage pregnancies. Our collaborators include the regional youth council and women leaders of grassroots community organizations, school administration, the regional directors representing the Ministry of Education in rural Gambia and the media. These are people we have been working with for 3years on our community projects. They have adequate knowledge, skills, and expertise in community mobilization and facilitating participants, and preparing the ground for implementation. My team is best positioned to implement this project because we have done a pilot project of this type in urban Gambia. This project was subcontracted to us during The Ministry of Basic and Secondary Education Comprehensive Health Education project in 2021.  We trained 26 home science schoolteachers from 26 different schools on how to make handmade reusable cloth pads. Upon completion of their training, the teachers continue training their students and set-up pad banks in their various school. Pad banks are safe corners in schools where boys and girls learn how to make reusable and biodegradable cloth pads for themselves and their sisters. This initiative aimed at addressing period poverty affecting girls from low-income families who cannot buy commercial disposable pads for them.  My team and I already have the knowledge, skills, and experience in implementing such a project and this funding will support us train more people in The Gambia who never benefited in such a project.

Our cloth pad was developed using design thinking methodology. In 2017, while at Syracuse University, my co-founder discovered about reusable cloth pads and told me about it, and we started our desk review research on reusable and biodegradable cloth pads. We wanted to start making it immediately but unfortunately, we did not have any knowledge, and skills, experience. Because my team have undergone a training on design think, we agreed to use this methodology to develop our solution. We did a small survey in a rural community targeting adolescent girls and women of reproductive age to know what their problems are and what are they using at that moment to address their problem. After collecting this information and analyzing the data, we learned that girls are dropping out of school, forced into child marriage and child labor, becoming victims of gender-based violence, and been exposed to STIs just because their families cannot afford sanitary pads for them. As such, they are left with no other choice but to use old pieces of cloths, rags, sponges, tissue paper, leaves and other unhealthy materials which predispose them to recurrent urogenital infections, or some restore to transactional sex. Initially, we had lot of possible solutions to address the problem. However, we settled for cloth made reusable and biodegradable pads because of the advantages they have over other options like distribution of disposable pads which is not sustainable and generates lot of plastic waste in our environment causing harm to the waterbodies, blockage of the sewage systems and pollution of air and water due to poor management of menstrual waste. Because of my background, skills, and experience in tailoring, I sewed some cloth pads as our prototypes using materials that were available in our local market. We distributed them to some girls to use and give us feedback. After some time, they shared their feedbacks with us which were incorporated, we made several changes in terms of shape, design, thickness, and the materials until we were able to develop a product that puts a smile on their face. In short, we put our target beneficiaries in the center of our product/solution development.

Our solution is innovative because Girls’ Pride was the first entity in The Gambia that uses materials that are biodegradable, chemical free, reusable and leakproof to make reusable cloth pads for women and girls within reproductive age and from less privileged communities. Another reason that makes our solution innovative is that we conduct training on handmade reusable sanitary pad production using materials that are locally available in the beneficiaries’ village so that they can always get the materials and continue making pads for themselves and others. The government and other NGOs donate or distribute single use disposable sanitary pads in schools. This is a good initiative however, the solution is not sustainable, cost-effective and  environmentally friendly thus causing sewage blockage in schools, generating lot of waste that find their ways on the landfill, waterways, rivers, oceans and affecting marine life. Girls’ Pride on the other hand uses a different and innovative approach to addressing period poverty in The Gambia. We don’t only donate or sell reusable pads, but we educate girls, women, boys and men about period poverty, healthy period management practices and how boys and men can support women during their periods like buying sanitary pads, helping them with household chores when they are having cramps, learning how to make reusable pads, and educating their wives, daughters about periods thus eradicating the taboos and stigma surrounding periods and sexual and reproductive health rights in The Gambia. To be unique, we use gaming (Funneh board game) and other simulation exercises during our training sessions in schools and communities. Through our advocacy and sensitization programs on TV, radios, schools, communities, and social media, we raise awareness about reusable and biodegradable cloth pads and now many people in Gambia are switching to eco-friendly and chemical free pads and this is a proof that our solution is scalable in other communities and countries. Other charitable organizations in The Gambia and beyond have been buying reusable pads from us to donate to girls and some of them have been coached and trained on how to make eco-friendly cloth pads. With reusable and biodegradable cloth pads, low- and middle-income countries can eradicate period poverty and the risk that women and girls are exposed to when they lack access to sanitary products.

Our impact goals for the year 2023-2024 are to train 10,000 women and girls from low-income families in all the 7 regions in The Gambia on how to make their own reusable and biodegradable cloth pads. We also plan to educate all of them how to use and care for the pads and also how to dispose them off after 2 years. They will also learn how reusable, biodegradable, chemical free and plastic free cloth pads are good for their health and for the planet. When we receive funds from the MIT SOLV(ED) Youth Innovation challenge, we will use it to train women and girls on menstrual hygiene, how to use and care for reusable pads and how to make their own pads with cotton materials that are available in their local communities. The impact of this project will address period poverty, normalizing conversations around menstruation, women and girls will have new knowledge and skills on how to make their own pads and each of them will be tasks to train 5 of their friends in their villages who could not participate in the project. The project would change the lives of many adolescent girls as girls will stay in schools even during their period, practice proper menstrual hygiene management and they will be protected from all the negative consequences of period poverty. A long-term impact of this project will contribute to achieving SDG 3, 4, 5, 6, 10, 12, and 13.

The core technology that powers our solution is the traditional or ancestral technology. We do not use advanced or complicated technology to be able to produce our solution for our beneficiaries or for our beneficiaries to be able to produce the solution for themselves. Our solution a reusable and biodegradable cloth pad. We do not manufacture the raw materials needed to make the cloth pads as we source them locally from our markets. The population we serve live in remote, neglected, and underserved communities in urban and rural Gambia without access to source of electricity that is why we choose the traditional way of empowering women and girls to address period poverty in a simple and sustainable way as they don’t need machines and electricity to be able to make pads for themselves. All they need is cotton materials, needle and thread and we will teach them how to cut and sew the cloth pads with their hands. We use other form of technology during the training sessions on menstrual hygiene management, period shaming and how to use and care for reusable cloth pads. Our team has a mobile learning hub (mLearning Hub). The learning hub brings experts and equipment to the remote communities so that women and girls can also benefit and enjoy learning with us through the use of audio-visual aids. The mLearning hub has a vehicle, laptops, rechargeable projectors, stage mics, speakers, TEEN machines (that induces period cramps in boys and men as we want them to experience the pain that menstruators go through during their period), projector screens, pointers, speakers, and other equipment powered with advanced technology. We believe people in underserved communities should also have the privileged to know and enjoy learning using audio-visual aids available in our mLearning Hub because it makes learning easy. After the in-person training, we play our presentations and videos on how to make pads for our project participants as this helps them to remember the steps while practicing. Communities with access to desktop computers receive these learning materials in their resource center for others who did not participate in the project to watch and also learn a skill or gain a new knowledge.

From 2017 to date, we have impacted the lives of many people through our different community projects and partner’s support. We have distributed over 15,000 eco-friendly and biodegradable cloth pads, over 20,000 people were trained on issues related to sexual and reproductive health, and rights. Seven-six people were trained on how to make sanitary pads. These include schoolteachers and community members. One hundred and sixty (160) schoolteachers from conventional and non-conventional schools were trained on menstrual hygiene, sexual and gender-based violence, and period shaming. Majority of the teachers trained were male teachers. With support from media houses in The Gambia, we have conducted about 50 TV and community radio sensitization programs to educate Gambians on period poverty, menstrual hygiene management, and how we can work together to address it problem. Through our #Tree4Pads initiative, over 3000 trees (mangroves been the majority) have been planted in our communities to restore the ecosystem. In December 2022, two hundred and seventy-five (275) students and schoolteachers were trained on how to use the Funneh board game and learn about menstrual hygiene management. This activity trained both male and female students including the school for the deaf and both male and female classroom teachers were trained how to use the game to educate their students on sensitive and taboo topics that are part of the school curriculum, but they don’t teach them because of the taboos. Five public schools participated in this pilot project through the support of the International Sustainability Academy and approval from the Ministry of Basic and Secondary Education. This month (January 2023), we implemented our new pilot project titled #Plastic4pads, a community initiative where women and girls exchange house whole plastic waste and plastic water bottles with reusable cloth pads, and they also learn how to recycle and upcycle these plastic waste into something useful. We have distributed 54 kits of pads in North Bank Region. These pads will last for 3 years before they will be disposed, and the plastic waste collected and diverted from the landfill will be recycled by our partners into pellets or trash bags and some will be upcycled into household materials that can be used. From now to the end of 2024, we plan to empower 10,000 women and girls with adequate knowledge and skills on healthy period management practices and access to sanitary pads through the support of our partners. This year, UNFPA Gambia has approved our budget to train 4000 students in schools in rural Gambia on menstrual hygiene management and sexual and gender-based violence and set up 10 youth safe spaces where students and out-of-school adolescent boys and girls will have access to sexual and reproductive health education, products, and services in their regions. We are also engaging UNDP-Gambia to finance our community and school educational project to educate 4000 young people on mental health and psychosocial support through the use of sport (FUNNEH BOARD GAME) and they are also interested in supporting us digitize the boardgame into a mobile app which can help young people access accurate and age-appropriate information about sexual and reproductive health and rights and mental health in their mobile phones. We hope to reach the remaining 2000 women and girls through funding from the MIT solved youth innovation challenge.

One of the challenges we are currently facing now is financial challenge to be able to scale up our solution, and community impact projects in villages in need. Access to adequate and sustainable funding has been a challenge in the area of women empowering and advancing women’s health. As a hybrid organization growing in a country where majority are poor and depend on donations and aids to access some products and services has made selling of our cloth pads very challenging because they are expensive for a girl from a no to low-income family. A family that earns less than $1 a day, would rather spend their money on food than buy sanitary pads. This leave women and girls with no other option than to use unhealthy materials like rags, socks, tissue paper, or sponge or restore to transactional sex which exposes them to recurrent urogenital infections, STI, HIV, infertility, gender-based violence, teenage pregnancy, mental health disorders including suicide. Getting financial supports to donate cloth pads or train them how to make their own pads will helps us address the complex social, health, gender, and human rights issues they go through. Another challenge we have is with mobility, we do not have a vehicle of our own. Whenever we travel to the rural communities, we rent vehicles and pay a minimum of $100 per day which is very expensive and limits us from reaching other remote communities with poor road networks.

Girls’ Pride started in 2017 as a result of period poverty affecting women and girls’ education, health, and socio-economic status in The Gambia. We work with over 15 local and international partners such as Because International, Tony Elumelu Foundation, Global Youth Mobilization, The Pollination Project, SheTrade Gambia, Girls Talk Organization, Balal Public Library, Green Up Gambia, CAPED-Gambia, The Mandinka Family, Network Against Gender-based Violence, UNFPA, UNDP, GEMS, Society for the Study of Women’s Health, eTrash2Cash, International Sustainability Academy-Hamburg, Akkon University-Berlin, Comprehensive Health Education Project, the Ministry of Basic and Secondary Education and other local charitable organizations to implement gender, human rights, health and climate change-related projects in The Gambia. Our partners or donors give us funds to do advocacy, capacity building programs and provide reusable cloth pads for women and girls who live in The Gambia. We work with collaborators and the target communities to design the community intervention packages and implement the activities that address the needs of the communities. Our collaborators include the regional youth councils in all the regions, and women leaders of grassroots community-based organizations and the media. These are people we have been working with for 3years on our community projects. They have adequate knowledge, skills, and expertise in community mobilization, asset mapping, facilitating participants, and preparing the ground for implementation.

Girls’ Pride is a hybrid organization, we have two separate entities working together to achieve the same mission. We have a registered business and a registered community-based charitable organization. We use three business models to make revenue and sustain our community impact projects as we don’t rely surely on donors to be able to make impact in our communities.  Girls’ Pride uses premium model for premium products and consultancy for individuals who can afford our pads and NGO who subcontract us to provide products and services for them as part of their project implementation. We also use price based on product cost plus margin for our reusable cloth pads made with materials that are locally available in our communities, the Funneh board game and capacity building training programs on sexual and reproductive health and rights, mental health, and skills training on reusable cloth pad production. We use the freemium model during our online health education, online counseling services and during partner funded community projects and when friends and families make donations to us.

We generate revenue for Girls’ Pride through grants, donor funding, individual sponsors, donations from friends, and families, crowd funding, and service contracts from NGOs and community-based organizations. Another path to our financial sustainability is through selling of our products and services. Some of our team members sometimes make contributions in kind during our community project activities by providing their expertise and skills for free.