“IT’S NECESSARY TO SENSITIZE BOYS ABOUT THE TOPIC, SO THAT WHEN THEY HIT PUBERTY THEY UNDERSTAND GIRLS EXPERIENCING THIS PROCESS IS ALSO NORMAL AND THAT’S HOW THEY DEVELOP PHYSICAL AND MENTAL CHANGES.”
Imagine being a 14 year old girl, ailing from debilitating period cramps and a swollen stomach, only to learn from medical tests that a caterpillar have laid eggs in your uterus? And your only saving grace is to undergo an emergency hysterectomy and permanently lose the ability to give birth!
Such are the cases unearthed by Barrister Mifrah Zahir, in her quest to eradicate period poverty from our country. The Founder of Shaathi Foundation, shares how her social enterprise aims to rewrite the narratives surrounding Menstrual Hygiene Management (MHM) and social taboos among underprivileged communities by introducing low-cost reusable ‘Shaathi Pads.’
For underprivileged girls and women, regular sanitary napkins are considered a luxury product; thus over 89% of 78.4 million women in Bangladesh still use rags as opposed to sanitary napkins.
Executive Director,
Shaathi Foundation
To make matters worse, menstruation remains a ‘hush-hush’ topic in the presence of male members in families. “In most cases, the earning member of the family is a man, who doesn’t exactly pay extra money to his wife, mother or sisters to purchase sanitary napkins. As a result, women manage their menstruation with whatever they can find. They usually turn to unhygienic materials to manage their periods from which they can experience various complications such as Urinary Tract Infection (UTI), white discharge resulting in stomach cramps, Reproductive Tract Infection, infertility and in later stages can even develop cervical cancer,” she explains.
Mifrah conducted a survey in the slums of Rayerbazar, from which she gathered that girls and women of diverse age groups encounter various health problems in the context of menstrual health management. “Not just adolescent girls but even their mothers are not aware of menopause – that periods gradually end once they grow older. In addition to that, they are not fully aware of how to hygienically manage menstruation,” she says.
She learnt that in slums, where there’s only one communal washroom, women are used to hiding the rags under the bed or behind the doors. In the absence of sunlight, the rags are left damp, thus making it a perfect breeding ground for fungus. This encouraged Mifrah to stand by these women by finding them a sustainable solution for them.
Shaathi pads are made with colourful printed materials. Their black back covers give them such an appearance that they cannot be identified as a menstrual hygiene product. There are three forms of Shaathi cloth pads: day pad (Shiuli), night pad (Jaba) and belt model (Shapla). “The pads have ultra-absorbent core layers as well as anti-leak security layers, thus making them very sleek and comfortable for use with no scopes for overflowing,” she emphasizes. Shaathi pads are designed neatly using modern technology, making them easy to use and carry. Above all, they are environmentally friendly as they are plastic free and are reusable, unlike plastic sanitary napkins which pollute the environment and eventually endanger sea-life when they are disposed in drains and lakes.
“In the initial phase of launching the product, I was apprehensive about how it will be received by people. But now I can see that people are more accepting of it and they are comfortable using it,” Mifra shares. In comparison to the commercial napkins, Shaathi pads provide a sustainable and cost-effective solution as women can use one product for nearly a year. Since the product is new, they conduct an orientation prior to distribution. “People are more familiar with commercially produced sanitary napkins, hence they prefer those. However, they don’t realize that reusable ones are actually better than the former,” Mifrah says. “So, one challenge
is getting them accustomed to this product; another is the reluctance of some to even spend 30 taka on the product as they usually manage menstruation without spending money,” she highlights. Other challenges include receiving support from male members of the family due to menstruation being a taboo topic in society. Understanding this lingering stigma, Shaathi aims to include men in the conversation of periods. “It’s necessary to sensitize boys about the topic, so that when they hit puberty they understand that menstruation is a normal biological process girls go through during which they develop physical and mental changes,” she explains. Furthermore, Mifrah adds that bodily developments aside, boys should learn these things in order to empathize with their predicament, thus preventing them from bullying girls. Hence, she hopes to do more work in this area in collaboration with schools and universities and run more campaigns and sessions on the issue.
Many do not understand the health benefits of using sanitary napkins, which becomes a struggle for small organizations like Shaathi when promoting their products and raising awareness about the advantages of reusable pads. While their efforts to provide safe means of MHM is commendable and have been lauded on many accounts, we cannot yet shrug off the fact that a society like ours still considers menstruation as ‘impure’ or something that needs to be hidden. According to Mifrah, rewriting that narrative will take a long time as the stigma has been around for a long time. “I feel that it should be incorporated into our education curriculum – what menstruation is, why it happens and how it should be managed,” she suggests. Girls tend to get very overwhelmed because these issues surrounding female puberty is not discussed at length by their mothers or teachers. To bridge that knowledge gap, Shaathi has launched a Menstrual Health and Hygiene Education Programme which is available in both English and Bengali. It mainly targets those girls who haven’t yet gotten their first period. The curriculum covers what menstruation is and the ways it can be managed hygienically, things girls should and shouldn’t eat during the time, what product choices they have in the market as well as the benefits of reusable sanitary napkins. “The curriculum is accessible for the girls and they are able to recieve it at home in the form of a booklet which they can read in their spare time. It’s been well received by the girls as the booklet is picturesque and packed with information,” Mifrah says.
Since their inception last year, Shaathi Foundation has launched notable campaigns such as ‘Let’s Start the Conversation About Menstrual Health’ in partnership with Rights and Sight for Children, as well as Safe2Bleed in collaboration with Labaid Hospital and East Coast Group, both of which have provided for the menstrual health needs of marginalized girls and women.
So far, Shaathi Foundation has distributed 3000+ reusable sanitary napkins to people and they hope more women are able to access these products soon. Aside from aiding the female labourers in Kamlapur Railway Station in Dhaka division, Shaathi’s contributions to MHM has branched out to Chittagong, Rangpur and Barisal, helping schools, madrasas as well as sex workers. Among other notable feats for the new organization is distributing reusable sanitary napkins to communities in Bhola affected by Cyclone Yaas.
Currently, Shaathi Foundation is operating with 10 people – five of whom are the women who produce the Shaathi pads. Moving forward, Mifrah aims to expand her team, recruiting more women in an effort to increase production. She also shares that the organization aims to visit various slums, and launch training centers and workshops to enable women to design and use reusable sanitary napkins using whatever resources are readily available to them.
Shaathi Foundation would like to kickstart the training programs and workshops which will help train women to make reusable sanitary napkin and even sell them in their community, raise awareness and enable women to become financially independent. “It’s not just about equipping women with low-cost period products but also about uplifting them through opportunities of employment. Moreover, it’s necessary to make sanitary napkins accessible and affordable by abolishing the period taxes in our country, so that women will not consider pads a luxury item.”
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Photographs: Courtesy of Shaathi Foundation