The MENstruation Foundation, together with Joe Public and Independent Media, launched the Period Paper campaign. The campaign uses the very material girls resort to in the absence of pads to force a national reckoning. A full-page ad in The Star, The Mercury and The Cape Times carries the campaign’s headline alongside a stark visual. It makes the newspaper itself complicit in the truth it has too long been used to conceal.
The ad carries a QR code linked directly to the MENstruation Foundation’s site. Every scan is a donation request, and every donation moves the Foundation closer to its targets: 30,000 more schoolgirls with access to free pads and 65 additional dispensary machines installed across the country.
The MENstruation Foundation calls on South Africa to confront the truth it has been too uncomfortable to name: period poverty is not a hygiene issue. It is an education emergency.
Approximately eight million women and girls in South Africa cannot afford basic sanitary products. More than half are learners. Girls without access to sanitary products miss up to five school days a month. Over a school career, that is the difference between a matric certificate and a statistic. What do they use instead? Newspapers, rags, cow dung or anything they can find.
The MENstruation Foundation was built on the conviction that no girl should choose between her education and her dignity. The Foundation installs free sanitary pad dispensary machines in schools and communities across South Africa, distributing over one million pads every month from its manufacturing facility in Paarl, which produces 192,000 pads per eight-hour shift. This is not charity, it is infrastructure.
‘Period poverty keeps girls out of school and it ends careers before they begin. It tells a young woman that her body is a problem she must solve alone, in secret, without help. That is not a hygiene issue. That is a human rights violation,’ said Siv Ngesi, Co-founder of the MENstruation Foundation.
Globally, an estimated 500 million people lack adequate access to menstrual health management. In South Africa the scale is staggering, and the silence around it has been deafening. The MENstruation Foundation is asking South Africa to end that silence.
THE MENSTRUATION FOUNDATION
www.menstruation.foundation
JOE PUBLIC
https://www.joepublic.com
