Increasing attendance for rural school girls: washable, reusable affordable pads (WRAPS)

• In Event: Evidence-based decision making in education
  In Refereed Round-Table Session: Local and global manifestations of girls' education

Proposal

How is the topic relevant to comparative and international education, sustainability, or a SIG?
Washable Reusable Affordable Pads (WRAPS) is a growing non-profit organization located in Sodo, Ethiopia that has a small factory making reusable sanitary pads and then distributes them for free in the rural primary and middle schools in the Wolaita Zone region. In addition to giving out pads in the rural schools, we teach on menstruation, STD prevention, and rape prevention. Our purpose is to support girls’ attendance in school.

What is the need or the problem that the program or intervention tries to address?

Not having access to sanitary napkins keeps girls from going to school. Many rural Ethiopian school girls are missing school from 2-4 days a month due to menstruation and lack of sanitary pads. Furthermore, because shame is associated with menstruation there is a lack of education for girls on this topic. Working with the local education authorities we go into the rural primary schools and distribute reusable sanitary napkins. Furthermore we teach grades 5-8 on menstruation, hygiene, STD’s, rape prevention and pregnancy.

What advice do you offer or do you seek at CIES, and how can it address similar challenges elsewhere?
We have five years of experience making and delivering sanitary pads. Even though we have been working in this capacity, we are always encountering new problems and issues. For instance, we have grown 1200% this past year. With that growth comes problems, particularly obtaining cloth in a country that does not produce high quality cotton. We would appreciate hearing from other groups on how they managed their growth. Furthermore if other organizations are importing items we would like to learn from their experiences. We are also very interested in long term sustainability and would like advice on how other non-profits are becoming financially sustainable. Lastly, we are discussing on the feasibility of including sex education for the boys in the primary school at the same time that we teach the girls. Hearing from other similar projects would be helpful to us.

What would you have done differently, knowing what you know now about the project or program? What was the impact of the project on the problem it targeted?

My approach to starting WRAPS would have been different from the beginning. I would have spent more time investigating the overall needs of female students in the Wolaita Zone and meeting the appropriate government officials before starting our factory and outreach program. Now I am working with the gender departments and making decisions alongside them. For the factory portion, I would have bought industrial sewing machines from the beginning of our project. We received them this year and the output of pads has tripled!

We have sponsored a graduate student from Wolaita Sodo University who has collected data in five of the schools where we have visited. The results are showing that we are making a substantial difference in the attendance of the girls in these schools. We have also done our own personal interviews with several principals who have confirmed that the girls who received our kits have increased their school attendance.

Author

• Alice Karnes, WRAPS (Washable, Reusable, Affordable, Pads)