Who are you trying to help? What issue are you trying to address?

We are helping women and girls improving their menstrual health through the promotion of a better menstruation management and access to information about menstruation disclosed to the general public, hence a reduction of the stigma associations with menstruation.

Menstruation is a silent issue; nearly all people regard menstruation as a dirty (unclean), yet natural process, and half of adolescent girls consider it a disease and don’t know how to deal with it. Moreover, most girls and women are unable to afford sanitary napkins. The lack of feminine products and information lead to girls dropping out of school early as they have no opportunities to maintain their hygiene during menstrual periods, miss lessons and fall behind. The use of dirty materials – cloth rags, old sponge, newspapers, etc. put women and girls at high risk of infections of the urinary tract. The fear of embarrassment of leaking also makes them unconfident during their periods and therefore encourages them to skip school or general public activities.

What is your project and how will it help?

The project envisages creating awareness on puberty and its impact on girl child education, educating the communities on managing menstruation while promoting the use of alternative, cheap, environmentally, safe and reusable cloth sanitary pads. We will also offer counselling to teen girls.

Once all the people (female and male, youth and adults) learn more about menstruation, they should come to accept it and not stigmatize females in their periods. Once they accept menstruation as a normal (natural) process, they should also budget to always provide sanitary products to women and girls of reproductive age. Once sanitary pads are given to girls, especially school girls, more girls should keep going to school, increasing the amount of graduates while decreasing illiteracy.

How can other people partner with you on your project?

Donations, gifts in-kind or volunteers would all be useful to our project.

Here are five ways you could give us any of the three types of resources:

1. You can donate directly to LUYODEFO – we appreciate all kinds of contributions:
   i. Funds via our online donation link on the “get involved” page;
   ii. Reusable sanitary pads to our mailing address.
2. You can support those that are already working to help the project:
   i. Michelle has set-up a pad drive at her shop, http://thecrazyelephantboutique.blogspot.com/2012/05/have-heart-give-pad.html;
   ii. Kirsti Shields has set-up a fundraising page at this link https://www.everribbon.com/ribbon/view/6493.
3. You can spread the message about the project via your social pages, setting-up fundraising events, calling friends to support, or researching and contacting magazines to pitch project articles or stories, and organizations that can support the cloth pads project.
4. You can make a trip to visit Kasese, Uganda, East Africa to volunteer with the organization.
5. You can also donate materials to help us start to teach women and girls how to make the cloth pads locally.

Please detail the resources that you need.

We need numerous resources; you can contact us directly for more details. Below are some examples:

1. $1 buys a pant (underwear) for a girl or woman. Ideally, a girl will need 10 pants a year, worth $ 10.
2. $4 buys 1 (one) kit of reusable pad for 1 girl for 1 year. Ideally, a girl will typically require averagely 3 kits, worth $12.
3. $90 pays 1-month salary for a project staff – that conducts training and workshops on menstruation management, provides education on general health issues and counseling.
4. $1000 will help to start teaching women and girls to locally make the reusable cloth pads.