Sanitary Pads For Africa

Globally, 150 million children currently enrolled in school may drop out before completing primary school - at least 100 million of these are girls. Kenyan adolescent girls miss approximately 3.5 million learning days per month due to lack of funds to purchase sanitary pads. This impedes their ability to compete in the classroom, leads to low self-esteem, higher drop-out rates and, in many areas of Kenya, makes them vulnerable to early marriage.

ZanaA has found a long-term and holistic solution to this problem, which is to establish a sustainable business creating locally-produced, environmentally-safe sanitary pads in Kenya while advocating for greater policy support of girls.

First, ZanaA plans to coordinate, on-line, the national distribution of sanitary pads, to ensure all vendors are distributing proper sanitary pads and with synchronized training in sanitary pad use and disposal as well as age-appropriate sexual maturation education.

This will help reduce the logistical burden of sanitary pad distribution, ensure sexual predators are not given entry to the school, distribute pads at the convenience of the school curriculum, enable equitable distribution across the country, and reduce the cost burden to donors. Along with this comes the development of a tool kit for enhancing policy around girls and education.

Second, ZanaA has become the exclusive distributor to the informal market (including school girls) for a sanitary pad invented by Dr. Musaazi of Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda, called MakaPads™, made from local, easily replenishable natural resources.

MakaPads has been approved by the Ugandan Bureau of Standards, is in the final stage of registering with the Kenyan Bureau of Standards, and is pending international patent. This is the first of several solutions, to provide sanitary pad production opportunities using available natural resources.

Third, ZanaA is interesting in networking with any producers of sanitary pads and any organizations who provide or who are planning to provide sanitary pads to schools because the world can handle many solutions for different contexts. We are particularly interested in leveraging agricultural waste.

Alongside product innovation, conversations have been started with networks of women’s groups regarding sales of pads to women at the bottom of the pyramid, and with NGOs to buy to distribute to school girls. Using a “salesmoms” sales force, ZanaA will help to keep limited financial resources within communities rather than going to a small group of shareholders in the West at the expense of Kenya’s systematic growth.

Publicly available: yes
Countries where available: Kenya
Price range (USD): Contact supplier for quote
Countries where spare parts can be purchased: Keyna