My Time Project
WHAT is the “my time Project”?
MY TIME PROJECT is a project which is going to aim at providing over 340 girls with sanitary pads, health rights education, and counseling every month.
The Project will be run on a monthly program which will be led by 2 nurses and 3 community health workers. The program will run in 6 different locations of our village, on the 1st, 2nd and 3rd Sunday of every month for 100+ girls each of these Sundays.
Challenge
In Uganda, drop-out rates are high for rural girls. Up to 80% of girls entering primary school will never complete their primary education. Uganda has the highest teen pregnancy rate in sub-Saharan Africa with over 30% of Ugandan girls having their first baby by the time they are 18.
HIV infection rates are 9 times higher in girls than boys the same age and Uganda has one of the highest maternal death rates in the world, 25% of which are from unsafe abortions. Background
“During my period, I mostly use rags and sometimes toilet paper, but I am most comfortable when I just do not go to school,” Annette Mirembe of Denis Katumba Primary School in Mityana district says.
“I cannot concentrate in class when I am in my periods because I keep wondering if my dress is soiled,” says Justine of Fairway Primary School in Mityana district.
Similarly, Susan Namazzi of Public Primary School, also in Mityana district, says at the onset of her period, she carries a sweater and wraps it around her waist to avoid the stares whenever she gets up. She says boys once teased her friend when she soiled her uniform, taunting her that she had slaughtered a hen.
Levin Foundation Mityana Uganda. 2020
Namazzi cannot envisage herself going through that. As for her friend, it was the last they saw of her. She decided never to return to school.
Menstruation in many societies is discussed in hushed tones. Unfortunately, the ripple effect is that young girls like Susan’s friend are forced to drop out of school. There are an estimated four million girls said to be in school today. If one million of them have started their periods, yet 80% of the country’s population lives in the rural areas, where menstruation is never freely talked about, then annually 800 girls might be contemplating dropping out of school.
Another 24.3% of the girls spoken to admitted to being stigmatized whenever they soiled their uniforms and as a result, they opt to stay at home until after their period. But according to An senior women teachers in Mityana district, these girls eventually give up on school all together and fitting in the community.
“When they are laughed at by other students and people, especially the boys, many of them lose the courage to go back to school and outside of their homes,” the senior ladies say. Forty five percent of the boys spoken to say they did not have knowledge on menstruation and their attitude even showed that they thought it an illness that should not get so much as a whisper in public.
Why create the “MY TIME PROJECT”?
The girls say whenever their periods come; they immediately go home, probably not appearing the entire week. But even at home, the situation is no different. They are pressurized into keeping the tiny rags they use to pad themselves out of sight from their family members. In the end, they hide them in dark places and sometimes wear them before they properly dry.
My village was in an evening news clip on NBS TV titled “Sex for Pads”. The national average of teen pregnancies is 26%. In our county of Mityana, that number is 61%; a higher rate in Uganda.
- Many Girls in our village are having sex with Boda Boda (Motorcycle taxi) drivers in exchange for 1 pack of pads
- Poverty puts Pads far down on the priority list.
- Period stigma is paralyzing.
- Awareness of their female body parts and their functions are absent.
- Girls have no ownership over their lives.
- Consent and Choice are foreign concepts
- No pads = Missing a month of school per year OR Dropping out OR Pregnancy OR Marriage
Solution
We wish to keep girls in school which in turn will affect the entire community through training students to act as peer leaders about reproductive health, distribution of sanitary pads to girls in school.
But why not use a Diva Cup or Re-Useable pads?
Of the girls spoken to, 90% say they use rags to pad themselves and make sure no one sees them hang to dry because it is quite embarrassing. However young these girls are, the effect of using a bacterial-infested cloth in their private parts poses a grave danger. Remember, this is blood we are talking about.
Imagine how fast it decays, how much bacteria it can hide, then instead of the full bloom of sunlight, the rag in question is bundled in a dark corner to dry? Really i wonder.
In the end, many of these young girls might battle bacterial infections, candida and all kinds of hygiene-related illnesses and fungi, which might pause a reproductive health threat in future, perhaps even render some of the girls infertile.
- Because there water problems in our villages
- No proper bathroom for washing and hanging them.
- No privacy
- often no Money for soap, and stigma
- They are also more Unhygienic
- Lack of time for the pads to dry out and reuse them
- They are also expensive and unreliable
- They cannot Hold Much when it comes to heavy bleeding
- They are not comfortable especially for big sized girls.
