Uganda Red Cross Society

The Uganda Red Cross Society (URCS) in collaboration with the Ministry of Education & Sports and partners, in 2019 launched a countrywide initiative named: 'Keep a Girl in School – (KAGIS), aimed at improving Menstrual Health Management among Primary and Secondary School going adolescents in vulnerable communities. 

While in 2019, the main focus was to mobilize resources to procure the pads from other manufacturers, URCS’ programming has evolved to include a more sustainable approach that includes setting up a mini-manufacturing unit for re-usable pads for vulnerable school-going girls. 

The Randal Charitable Foundation in 2022 provided significant grant funding towards the URCS’ mini manufacturing plant in Namakwa, Mukono district in Uganda, which is targeted to significantly improve the lives of 50,000 vulnerable girls and women within 12 months.   

Thanks to the Foundation’s support, 200,000 pads, which is an equivalent of 50,000 (4-pad packs) will be produced over the year 2023. The pads will be sold using the 80/20 rule, which equates to 20 percent (10,000 packs; 40,000 pads) being given to 10,000 vulnerable girls in schools free-of-charge, and 80 percent (40,000 packs, 160,000 pads) being sold to 40,000 girls from the wider community at a subsidised price. This in turn raises revenue to contribute to the operational costs of the mini-manufacturing unit and ensures its long-term sustainability.

The main activities, which the significant grant will fund include; setting up of the manufacturing plant to produce re-usable sanitary pads, training and up-skilling of selected girls and women to make the sanitary pads, and capacity building to involve more girls and women in specific skills such as records keeping and marketing. It also caters for routine support supervision and monitoring, as well as documenting success stories.

After acquiring the required production skills, each trained girl/woman is expected to produce 50 reusable pads per day, which is a total of 1,000 reusable pads produced each year. Once the first group of 20 girls/women have mastered the skills to produce the reusable pads, they will recruit another group of 20 trainees to expand the ‘skills’ labour force. While the first set of materials will be imported, URCS will advocate for in-country factories to start producing the materials locally.

The grant is so beneficial to the community because without access to good menstrual materials and private toilets, or washrooms for changing, girls and women may not want to go far from home. The consequence of this is that they cannot attend school, and in some cases become trapped in their homes unable to earn a living to support their families. 

As a result of a lack of access to hygienic sanitary wear, girls and women in the community often resort to using inappropriate materials such as rugs torn from their old clothes, papers, pieces of old mattress foam and leaves. And in some cases in rural communities they become house bound, and forced to sit over a hole dug in the middle of their mud floors until the menstrual flow ends. 

School going girls who get blood on their clothes are also often teased by teachers, boys or other girls, and this has been reported as a significant cause of school drop outs for girls.