Sustainable Solutions to End ‘Period Poverty’
In Malawi, a young woman leads her community to champion menstrual hygiene health
Driven by the desire to understand why girls were not finishing school in rural Malawi, Temwa Chirembo, 18 at the time, ventured out to local communities in search of answers. After weeks of listening to and learning from community members, especially women and girls, Temwa confirmed her initial assumptions: a major barrier to finishing school was due to menstrual hygiene health (MHH) issues. Neither taught nor discussed as it is seen as a taboo topic in the community, MHH was layered with negative perceptions and limited understanding.
UNICEF estimates one in 10 African girls miss school while on their periods due to feeling shame, lacking privacy in bathrooms, and facing costly sanitation pads. The result is worsening academic performance and school dropouts. When women and girls cannot access proper sanitary products or do not have the information and facilities to use them correctly, it can put their health, education, and well-being at risk as they turn to unsafe substitutes.
Realizing the important role MHH plays in improving the well-being of women and girls, Temwa looked for new and innovative solutions to address these cultural and societal barriers. Eventually, she and her friend, Modester Mangilani, founded Ukani Malawi, an organization to empower adolescent girls.
In the Tumbuka language, Ukani means to “to rise up.” Temwa explains that the organization’s name is “a battle call to the country and to everyone, whether you’re young or old, to stand up and do something about the girl child.”
To ensure girls can go to school while on their periods, Ukani Malawi provides training, distributes reusable pads, and teaches girls and other community members how to make their own reusable pads. Temwa emphasized the importance of the ‘he for she’ movement and highlighted that men had played a role as volunteers with Ukani for the past four years. With 14 staff and about 200 volunteers, the Ukani Malawi team works together to identify girls, young mothers, and women in general in the community who would be interested in learning how to make the reusable pads or who simply need access to safe products.
Temwa and Modester lead a series of gender equality and women’s empowerment programs, including their longest-running project: Breaking Red. “The Breaking Red project aims to break the silence on issues to do with menstrual health because it’s seen as taboo,” she says.
A Sustainable Path Forward
Lacking the technical skills and ideas to grow Ukani Malawi, Temwa sought out the Young African Leaders Initiative (YALI), a U.S. government initiative that provides holistic training in civic leadership, public management, and business and entrepreneurship.
“I got more than I had bargained for,” Temwa says. “YALI guided me on my journey to address menstrual hygiene health, and it also ignited my Pan-Africanism because I was exposed to all these issues that Africa was facing and wanted to do more in my country, region, and continent.
Through YALI, Temwa had the opportunity to evaluate Ukani Malawi’s business model and adjust its programming with additional training and guidance. It was also through YALI that she was able to meet other young African leaders working on social enterprises and learn from their models. After this, Temwa came up with a new sustainability approach.
As a part of this new approach, Temwa and Modester founded Bloomkin’s, a social enterprise that provides reusable pads at an affordable cost to other NGOs. The name Bloomkins is representative of their vision to inspire girls to embrace themselves and “bloom” or blossom into confident young women. This social enterprise also provides consultancy services on developing MHH programs and skills training in producing reusable pads. The profit from these two activities is then fed back into supporting Ukani Malawi’s programs.
In 2019, Temwa and her team conducted an eight-month program in Mgona, Malawi. Through a USAID-funded program, World Connect, Ukani Malawi worked with 300 girls and 150 volunteers. Participants were taught how to make and properly use reusable pads.
“As a result of the training, 86 percent of participants were able to go to school more consistently than they were eight months before the program,” she says.
The training program created an unexpected ripple effect, as some of the women returned to their communities and trained others to make reusable pads from locally sourced ingredients. In response, Ukani implemented the Training of Trainers program to continue the positive impact and engage more community members.
Nominated by a fellow YALI alumnus, Temwa was recently awarded the prestigious grant opportunity from Queens Commonwealth Trust (QCT), which helps social entrepreneurs expand their programs, gain visibility from other funders, and strengthen their operations. The QCT is helping her scale Bloomkin’s, the social enterprise arm of Ukani Malawi.
Today, Ukani Malawi has empowered more than 2,500 women and created 6,000 reusable pads at no-cost. Temwa hopes to build upon this progress and aims to expand into hard to reach locations, more specifically in southern Malawi, where poverty, early and forced marriages and teenage pregnancies are prevalent.
Temwa is deeply appreciative for YALI helping her early in her career. She passionately says that, “nothing is too small, ideas matter, and one could scale them up and turn it into something that will help others.”
About the Author
Danayt Abraham is an intern in USAID’s Bureau for Africa on the Young African Leaders Initiative team.
