People Are Finally Talking About The Thing Nobody Wants To Talk About

…menstrual hygiene.

This article discusses WASH (“water, sanitation and hygiene”) initiatives to address the impact the lack of access to feminine hygiene products has on young women in lesser-developed countries, such as Eritrea. This lack of access to products, proper toilets and facilities, can lead to girls dropping out of school once they start menstruation:

‘”A lot of girls were disappearing from school around puberty,” she says. In grad school, she recalls, “I started looking at the literature trying to understand why we still have this gap in schooling between girls and boys in lower-income regions.”

There were a range of theories, but no one seemed to be paying attention to what struck Sommer as an obvious one: For girls, puberty means getting your period, and the schools she’d seen in Eritrea weren’t exactly equipped for that. No toilets, no running water.’

Read the full story.