As a second-year undergraduate, the thought of unlocking various opportunities for young ones lingered at the back of my mind. I felt strongly that helping young ones to succeed will contribute positively to addressing pressing challenges in my community. I was therefore overjoyed when a year later, I had the opportunity to be invited to a basic school as a guest speaker on Founders Day, a day set aside to celebrate the academic achievement of some students. I spoke passionately on personal Hygiene. Through this, I came to understand that access to sanitary pads was a significant challenge for these girls. It also came to light that they lacked proper training on menstrual health practices (MHPs) and were unprepared for changes that occur during puberty. Due to these challenges and the potential stigma and embarrassment involved, most of the adolescent girls stayed home from school during menstruation. Careful analysis through a one –on- one engagement with these girls revealed poverty and menstrual health illiteracy at the root of this issue and while the situation persisted; however, no solution was forthcoming, a teacher explained. This moment birthed Menarche Initiative Ghana, which I co-founded to develop a regionally scalable solution to address these pressing and complex needs.
Initial research revealed that menstrual health topics in general were taboo in these communities; thus, residents were generally reluctant to discuss such issues. Specifically, a UNESCO report through a 2016 study by Human Rights Watch estimates that one in ten girls in Sub-Saharan Africa miss school during their menstrual cycle. This supporting evidence underscores the need for the core mandate of the Menarche Initiative: promoting menstrual health management practices to reduce the rates of absenteeism and school dropout among adolescent girls.
Through the Menarche Initiative, my team devised an action plan in January 2018 to address this issue in two ways: (1) raising awareness about MHPs among target communities; and (2) providing adolescent girls with access to free sanitary pads. We achieved Aim 1 by utilising workshops and training programs to sensitise teachers, community members and leaders on good MHPs to address any misconceptions and myths prevalent among folks in these areas. We accomplished Aim 2 by raising funds to purchase and supply sanitary pads to adolescent girls in Winneba in 2019.
As with many global health initiatives, the Menarche Initiative team has overcome multiple complex challenges. We first faced major financial constraints: funds are needed to organise workshops and purchase sanitary products to support adolescent girls coming from lower-income backgrounds. In light of this, I led my team to participate in the Resolution Social Venture Challenge, a multi-step competition designed to inspire undergraduate students to propose socially-responsible projects that address pressing social issues around the world. Through this platform, we pitched and won a $4000 grant to scale up our project--a significant milestone that was critical to the goals and growth of our non-profit.
So far, the Menarche Initiative has provided sanitary pads for 3, 260 adolescent girls in nine basic schools across Central region in Ghana. In addition, 15 peer counsellors and teachers have been trained by Ghana Health Service to deliver education on puberty and menstrual hygiene to help adolescent girls in their communities to overcome the shame they feel during menstruation. More importantly, post-intervention monitoring and evaluation through a period of six months revealed a seven percent reduction in the rate of absenteeism and school dropouts among adolescent girls within the target communities.
The Menarche Initiative taught me crucial lessons in leadership and community engagement. Foremost, I came to understand the importance of self-awareness as I learned to carefully evaluate my strengths and weaknesses prior to setting up the non-profit. This was critical to building an effective and skilled team: I chose to recruit co-workers whose talents complemented and balanced out each other’s. Secondly, the co-leading the Initiative heightened my sense of compassion for others and taught me the power of emotional intelligence in effective leadership. This was instrumental in pushing me to persevere until change was affected in the lives of the adolescent girls and effectively managing a positive working environment for my teammates. Furthermore, I have developed a strong sense of accountability: I have continued to take responsibility for my performance and that of my team, with respect to the communities with which we have worked. In summary, my experiences have instilled in me invaluable leadership and team working skills, which I hope to transfer and apply to future creative endeavours.