Lunapads Blog

We are thrilled to announce another campaign to help menstruating girls in Africa get back in the classroom. Carrie-Jane Williams (pictured with her students at the African Women’s English Support Group that she volunteers at each week through Frontier College) is a University of British Columbia masters student who is traveling to Uganda to do a volunteer teaching placement. While she’s there, in addition to doing her master’s research on digital literacies in rural libraries, she’ll be supplying girls with our very own “U-Go-Girl Kits” (with the “U” of course being for Uganda.)

Last month, I met with Carrie-Jane, Dr. Shelley Jones and Mr. Dan Ahimbisibwe (a Ugandan community leader, businessman, father, librarian and student at Uganda Martyr’s University) to explore ways we could work together to help girls and women in Uganda, both in the short term and long term. Dr. Jones is one of Carrie-Jane’s mentors. Her doctoral thesis (titled “Secondary schooling for girls in rural Uganda: challenges, opportunities and emerging identities”) was focused on educational policy in Uganda and the emerging government policies making education more accessible to Ugandan youth (girls especially). While in Uganda, Dr. Jones talked to the girls about their hopes and dreams and saw the daily challenges they faced, including the lack means to deal with their menstrual cycles. Women and girls use cloth rags, leaves and newspapers for absorbance in lieu of unaffordable disposable pads and tampons. In some cases, girls may not even own underwear with which to keep these products in place. Girls risk feeling humiliated when they are inadequately protected as they end up with leakage, blood-stained legs and clothing. The girls will hesitate to go to the front of the class to write on the board or stand up to answer teachers’ questions, which is common practice. As a result, the girls stay home during their period, and some stop going to school altogether.

Menarche (the onset of a girls first period) should be cause for celebration, but for many girls throughout the developing world, menarche signals not only the end of girlhood but also of education. Carrie-Jane wants to change this. Moved by what she has learned from Dr. Jones and Mr. Ahimbisibwe, Carrie-Jane will be holding a fundraiser in Vancouver this summer to collect donations to buy pads for the girls and distribute them. To date, she has already collected funds for over 20 U-Go-Girl Kits and we just received another 10 orders on our website! In addition to providing cloth pads, Lunapads will be donating Lunapanties to support Carrie-Jane’s efforts.

To read more about Carrie-Jane’s trip and plans, see her blog here. If you want to support Carrie-Jane and supply her with pads for her trip (she’s leaving September 1, 2008, so hurry!) you can purchase the U-Go-Girl Kits here. Thank you (or “webale” in the Luganda language) for your generous support and thank you Carrie-Jane for your amazing work.

This entry was posted on Friday, June 27th, 2008 at 11:47 am by Suzanne and is filed under Global Outreach, Pads4Girls. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.