Pads For Girls Everywhere; HFFG Mobilizes 3 million Sanitary Pads For 500,000 Girls

The UN Sustainable Development Goal Five (SDG 5) is to ‘Achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls’. The UN notes that sexual and reproductive rights are critical as shortfalls in them multiple other forms of discrimination, depriving women of education and even decent work and increase in Gender Based Violence (GBV)’. One critical area for women and girls empowerment is Menstrual Hygiene Management.

Menstruation is a normal and healthy part of life for most girls and women. According to UNICEF, roughly half of the female population – around 26 per cent of the global population – are of reproductive age so are likely to menstruate monthly. However, many girls are unable to manage menstruation safely, hygienically, with confidence and with dignity due to various barriers including; inadequate Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH) infrastructures, stigma, insufficient education or information on menstrual hygiene and limited access to hygienic menstrual products.

The situation is even dire for girls with disabilities who have limited ability to gather information on how to manage menstruation and cope during those times. For girls even in school, aside inadequate WASH infrastructures, existing education materials do not include relevant aspects for women and girls with different disabilities or do not cater for different learning requirements.

For the past 19 years, Hope for Future Generations (HFFG) has been at the forefront empowering women, children and the youth to reach their full potentials. One of the key areas of empowerment is promoting menstrual hygiene among girls and women and prioritizing the inclusiveness of Young Persons Living with Disability (YPWDs) in the design, implementation, monitoring and evaluation in all of our programmes.

As part of our 20th Anniversary, HFFG is embarking on a Menstrual Hygiene Intervention in all the 16 regions of Ghana dubbed “Pads for Girls Everywhere” with a key focus on girls living with disabilities and girls from underserved communities. The project seeks to achieve 3 key objectives:

• Promote good menstrual hygiene management for girls (both in school and out of school), including those living with disabilities. Under this, HFFG is raising 3 MILLION pads to support over 500 THOUSAND girls from June 2020-2021 and beyond.
• Organize seminars for girls to promote menstrual hygiene management for girls. This include a boys’ talk where boys will be educated on menstruation and encouraged to support girls when they are menstruating.
• Break the silence and change the negative social norms around menstruation and engage decision-makers, traditional leaders and opinion leaders to increase the political priority for Menstrual Hygiene at all levels.

1.     Target Groups

For the purpose of this project, our beneficiaries include Head porters (kayaye), girls in and out of schools in underserved communities throughout the country and all girls who are in puberty in Special Schools across the country. Under this project, each beneficiary will receive two packs of feminine towels.

2.     Project Period

The anniversary legacy project is scheduled to begin in June 2020 and end in June 2021 to climax HFFG’s 20^th anniversary. It is expected that by the end of June 2021 the targeted 3,000,000 pads would have been distributed to our target beneficiaries.

3.     Partnerships for implementation

HFFG will roll out this intervention with partners in the media, government agencies development partners and other benevolent organisations and individuals.

To Support or Partner, Send a mail to: Csenoo@hffg.org or info@hffg.org