MENSTRUAL HYGIENE MANAGEMENT – A BASIC NEED

It is the twenty first century and menstruation, a natural biological system, is still a matter of social taboo. Women and girls cannot open up about menstruation and feel ashamed because of this natural bodily function.

More than 85% of the women and girls in rural areas still use cloth during menstruation and they dry these cloths in a hidden place – none of which can be considered safe hygiene practice. Many adolescent girls miss at least three school days during each menstrual cycle and only 1% of schools have menstrual pad disposal facilities. As a result, they lose scholarships and drop out of school, which leads to early marriage. In the academic curricula, there is a section focusing on MHM issues, but in reality almost every school avoids this chapter. Low-cost sanitary napkins are hardly available in remote and hard to reach areas.

Evershine foundation with Pinkishe started this initiative in 2022 in Gandhi Nagar college of Girls Govt Hostel Jaipur to stimulate and sensitize safe menstrual hygiene practices and also sensitized them of various disease such as PCOD etc . This approach involved adolescent girls and initiated this learning centres to promote low-cost and safe menstrual hygiene products. Foundation members Dr R.K Sharma ,Dr Pankaj Goyal & Dr Abhinav also supported the urgent need of awareness campaign practices of safe menstrual hygiene behaviours of adolescent girls and women. The main objective of this approach was to enrich the knowledge and skills of adolescent girls in alleviating the prior notion about low-cost sanitary napkins. Pinkishe has been successful in empowering girls by getting them on board as torch bearers for others also.There is no doubt that this will empower many adolescent girls.And promote, safe menstrual hygiene practice throughout girls.

Need to include all

However, there is another side of the coin we’ve not missed – by making it an all-girl initiative, we still could break the silence about menstruation. This is an approach that sensitized the menstrual hygiene practices among adolescent girls and women. The beautiful packets of the sanitary pads are still wrapped in dark papers so that no one sees what is inside when a girl carries that. We also came to know that girls hardly ever talk about their work in schools because there is a chance that their peers will make fun of them. And we would wonder when and how menstruation became a matter people can ridicule.

Menstruation matters – to everyone, everywhere It happens every month to almost half of the world population. We must have #NoMoreLimits to talk about menstruation with anyone who matters in our lives.