Image: Girls from Homa Bay with their personal care packs containing re-useable sanitary towels.
We envision a world without period poverty and are driven to ensure all woman and girls are able to reach their potential. Lilypads is providing a simple solution to a monumental issue and strives to end exploitation. Period.
Alison Wood Volunteer with Mango Tree
Our appeal, fronted by actor Suranne Jones, was to raise funds and awareness about period poverty in Africa. Thanks to the generosity of Radio 4 listeners we raised £48,000!
£30,000 of the Radio 4 Appeal funds were used towards secondary school fees for girls.
However 65% of girls and women in Kenya are unable to afford sanitary products and girls as young as twelve are making an impossible decision: have sex with older men in exchange for pads, resort to unhygienic alternatives to sanitary pads, or drop out of school. So we have used the other £18,000 to expand our reproductive and sexual health education programme in secondary schools but also to support the development of a new social enterprise project trying to tackle the sanitary product problem.
The re-usable sanitary towel project grew out of the research work of one of our volunteers, Alison Wood, who visited our Kenyan programme in 2015 and 2016 to carry out research for her dissertation. After graduating from University, she co-established Lilypads, a social enterprise based in Edinburgh. Lilypads aims to eradicate period poverty by selling affordable, reusable sanitary products and providing menstrual health education within schools. They have developed and trialled their own reusable pad designs which are made of recycled material donated to by Nairobi hotel chains. This enables them to keep the cost of the pads low whilst simultaneously reducing waste. The Mango Tree, together with Lilypads, has supported 32 local women in Homa Bay to set up small businesses selling Lilypads reusable pad designs within their local communities.
Lilypads has now distributed pads to over 100 disadvantaged girls for free.
You can find out more about the charity .
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