By Wakesho Tabitha, AMT officer

Menstrual health can often be a big challenge, especially for adolescent girls who live in informal settlements. Lack of access to clean, affordable toilet facilities both at home and school is a constant source of worry and stress. In Kenya, many young girls can’t afford sanitary pads and so often skip school during their periods. Some even resort to giving sexual favors as a means of obtaining menstrual hygiene products or the money to pay for them.

In 2016, President Uhuru Kenyatta signed into law the Basic Education Amendment Act (2016), which aims to reduce the number of girls missing school during their menstrual cycle by placing responsibility on the government to provide sufficient free, good quality sanitary towels to every girl child who is registered and enrolled in a public basic education institution and who has reached puberty.

But, since many schools in slums are informal and not government supported, their students have not benefited from this Act. The government needs to register such schools or otherwise address this gap, so that pupils of informal schools can also benefit as per the provisions of the Act.

For the past 6 years, the Muungano Alliance (in particular AMT and Muungano wa Wanavijiji) have partnered with Lixil, a large Japanese corporation, to try to tackle these problems in Mukuru, one of Nairobi’s largest informal settlements.

The Lixil Next Door project was started by Lixil staff who wanted to support vulnerable school-age children in informal settlements by supplying them with both reusable and disposable sanitary pads. The project also educates young girls at Mukuru’s informal schools about menstrual hygiene and sex.

The project in 2020

In 2020, Lixil Next Door raised KES 200,000 (about USD 1900) for AMT to purchase menstrual pads. The Muungano Alliance collaborated with three schools in Mukuru kwa Reuben—Little Bells, Fadhili Foundation and St Austine—and 174 girls from the three schools, all between 9–15 years old, benefited from the program.

In 2020 the project trained a team of youth facilitators from Sauti Afrika, a youth group in Mukuru. The facilitators play a pivotal role in training the schoolgirls on how to use and care for the reusable pads, and also guiding them on issues of menstrual hygiene, adolescence and sexuality. Each schoolgirl who takes part in the training is then provided with a pack of 6 reusable sanitary towels. 

Challenges and Lessons learnt

• ·The project has a limited scope and reach. Lack of access to sanitary towels for all girls and throughout the year remains a major challenge across Nairobi’s informal settlements.

• In 2019, the Lixil Next Door project partners conducted a survey to find out the opinions of girls living in Mukuru about the most appropriate menstruation products for them. Many said that it was embarrassing to carry around used reusable towels during the school day, and so they refrained from changing pads until they got home. This is a major challenge to menstrual hygiene due to the risk of infection.

• Water shortage being a major problem in Mukuru, washing reusable pads is sometimes a big hassle for the girls.

• Since access to pads is still a challenge for program beneficiaries’ parents and siblings, in some cases, the beneficiaries had to share their reusable pads with others in their household. This leads to an increased risk of cross-infection.

• Talking about their knowledge and experiences of body changes, adolescence and sexuality is still difficult for many young girls.