KARACHI: Local startups in Pakistan are working to raise awareness about menstrual health and provide access to necessary sanitary materials in a country where up to 79 percent women suffer from poor menstrual hygiene each month.
Period poverty, the lack of knowledge regarding menstruation and the inability to access necessary sanitary materials, has hit global headlines in recent years, with statistics showing that even in a wealthy Western country like Britain, one in 10 girls have been unable to afford sanitary products.
In Pakistan the problem is particularly acute. A poll launched by UNESCO in 2017 and targeting women aged between 10 and 35 concluded that 49 percent had no knowledge of menstruation prior to their first period, 44 percent did not have access to basic menstrual hygiene facilities at home, school, or place of work, and 28 percent missed school or work because of pain or shame.
But in recent years, several local ventures have redoubled their efforts to fight period poverty in Pakistan.
“We create safe space for young girls and women in [grassroots] communities to talk about menstrual health in detail,” Ayesha Amin, who hails from Jamshoro and founded the nonprofit Baikhak in 2008, told Arab News this week.
In this picture taken on September 27, 2022, internally displaced flood-affected people stand in a queue with their doctor's prescriptions to get medicine at a medical camp set up for the flood affected in Jamshoro district of Sindh province. (AFP/File)
Baithak has held around 300 community awareness and over 30 training sessions on menstrual health across Pakistan and reached around 30,000 women directly. During record-breaking floods in Pakistan this summer, the group Baithak conducted an extensive campaign on menstrual health and provided menstrual kits to 10,000 flood-affected women.
Amin said the two biggest challenges for the organization was raising funds and starting a conversation around menstruation given the sensitivity of the issue in Pakistan. She also called for the government stop treating sanitary products as luxury items and reduce taxes:
“Globally, there have been a lot of movements toward removing the pink tax to cut the production cost and we are working to achieve the same in Pakistan.”
Another anti-period poverty digital platform called Khair, which launched Pakistan’s first period and pregnancy tracker in November 2022 with menstrual hygiene products available for a subscription, also aims to increase health literacy in Pakistan. The app is free and available in Urdu, Roman Urdu, and English.
“A platform for women’s health was much needed in Pakistan to provide [them] with a safe space to learn more about their health and empower them through information and awareness,” founder Mahnoor Farishta said.
“Our survey with over 5,000 urban women found that over 60 percent of them never even visited a gynecologist and that really shocked us. A lack of awareness around periods, pregnancy, and ovulation results in Pakistan being one of the riskiest nations in the world to bear a child.”
Over the last 1.5 years, Khair has conducted health sessions in over 50 communities and impacted over 100,000 people in Sindh and Punjab provinces. During the floods in Pakistan, Khair donated more than 10,000 packets of pads across rural areas. The startup also runs a rural health clinic in Thar.
Another initiative introduced in July 2022 to provide relief to women floodsurvivors is called Mahwari Justice, led by graduates Anum Khalid and Bushra Mahnoor, who started off by sending basic period kits to flood-affected areas, including in the remote Las Bela and Qilla Abdullah districts of Balochistan.
“We started visiting flood-affected areas and asked women about culturally appropriate methods to manage periods,” co-founder Mahnoor told Arab News this week. “We tried it ourselves and also consulted doctors to make sure these methods were hygienic. We came up with four kinds of period kits based on the needs of women in flood-affected areas.”
Mahwari Justice has sent more than 100,000 period kits to Gilgit-Baltistan, Balochistan, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, South Punjab, and Sindh since July 2022 with the help of teams based in the areas.
“We wanted to break the taboo around periods or else these issues will keep emerging as we witnessed during recent floods. Right to safe periods is a fundamental human right which was compromised during floods for over 7 million women [of] reproductive age,” Mahnoor said.
University students take part in packing sanitary pads for women displaced by massive flooding on November 11, 2022. (@MahwariJustice/Twitter)
Global youth-fueled nonprofit, PERIOD, which strives to eradicate period poverty, also officially came to Pakistan in January 2022.
“We brought the PERIOD chapter in Pakistan to highlight issues that never get attention and people are not willing to talk about openly. We want to build a platform in Pakistan that help women and creates awareness,” Hassan Daudpota, who brought the company to Pakistan, told Arab News this week.
“The biggest challenge is [that] Pakistani media don’t broadcast such topics and without media support, it’s difficult to create awareness effectively.”
The Pakistan chapter of the nonprofit aims to support local efforts for menstrual equity and held its first women’s conference in October 2022, bringing together experts to talk about menstrual health.
“Our aim is to take this initiative to the government level,” Daudpota added.
