Katherine Campbell
Iganga, Uganda
Women Alliance and Children Affairs (WAACHA)
Recently, I took on an unexpected project: re-usable menstrual pads, or RUMPs as we call them. Sophie, my host here in Iganga and a Peace Corps volunteer, took over the project from two previous volunteers who were completing their service. She asked me if I was interested in participating, and because it somehow falls into Reproductive Health, I agreed.
A re-usable menstrual pad is just what it sounds like: a menstrual pad that can be used over and over again, (when thoroughly washed after each use). This is a concept that had never actually occurred to me prior to being asked to work with them. At first, I was, admittedly, hesitant to make a commitment to advocating for RUMPs. For many reasons, they did not appeal to me—I wrote them off as something dirty and gross. Yet, when I finally embraced the project, made my own RUMP, and started interacting with female students and teachers about RUMPs, I realized the significant difference RUMPs could make in these women’s lives. We went into a secondary school (US equivalent high school) on Wednesday and taught our first RUMPs workshop. The response was overwhelmingly positive. The students were excited by the prospect of an affordable option that would prevent their menstrual periods from keeping them out of class; even teachers told us they were going to stop buying sanitary napkins seeing it as an unnecessary expense.
We provided the materials to make two RUMPs to the female teachers for free, and trained them on how to make the RUMPs a week before our all school event. We did this in hopes that they would be incentivized to help us when we were teaching the female students how to make their RUMPs…
Only one showed up on the day of. We charged the female students 300 shillings to get a kit with enough material to make two RUMPs. This is equivalent to 12¢ in the US, and the actual price of all the materials is 1,600 shillings, but we were told charging any more than 300 would be too much. One RUMP, when washed and cared for properly can be re-used for two years.
Out of the 91 students who bought RUMP kits from us, 38 students listed their monthly cost for sanitary napkins after indicating on surveys that they most commonly used sanitary napkins when they had their periods. The average monthly cost was 4,000 shillings. This is equivalent to $1.54. So what’s the big deal? In Uganda, $1.54 cents is a lot of money! Yesterday, I went to the market. For 4,000 shillings I bought 1 kilo of potatoes, a bundle of cilantro, ½ kilo of carrots, 6 leaves of spinach, and 2 cucumbers. Yet, this is still only contextualized for you in a “Mzungu” fashion. For a Ugandan woman, 4,000 shillings could feed her large family (8-12 people) for an entire day. This means that too often, women opt to not buy sanitary napkins because they can’t afford to subtract from their family’s meal budget. Instead they use rags, cloth, leaves, or just literally any material they can find. This is both unhygienic and prohibits a woman from carrying out her usual daily activities.
Ironically, this morning I watched a TED talk that discusses this exact issue. It’s brilliant, relevant, and hilarious! Check it out:
What do you think? Is access to necessary sanitary items, such as sanitary napkins for a woman’s menstrual period, a human rights issue?
On the surface, sanitary napkins are not what comes to mind when you hear human rights. Yet not having access to sanitary napkins, as you refer to, can inhibit women from access to other human rights such as dignity and education. In this sense, sanitary napkins can be expanded from a basic need to a gateway for human rights, thereby making sanitary item access a human rights issue.