Angella Nampewo
A few days ago, I was pleasantly surprised to hear from a luminary in the women’s movement. I first encountered Mary Karooro Okurut not as minister or Member of Parliament, but as the founder of Uganda Women Writers Association (FEMRITE). The Mary I spoke to last week sounded very much like that Mary I first met in the early 2000s, very simple, down-to-earth and with zero airs. The thing about girls is that once you come from a sisterhood such as FEMRITE, the bonds formed there are for life. The issue we discussed over the phone at lunchtime in between our busy schedules has far-reaching consequences for women and girls in the country and in poorer parts of the world. If you come from privilege, it may be hard to appreciate the real difficulties faced by girls who have no access to sanitary pads and safe menstrual hygiene spaces during their menstrual cycle.
Appropriate sanitary materials are still relatively unaffordable and out of reach for many women and girls across a broad spectrum of society. In 2015, is a commitment by the Ugandan government and its partners signed the Uganda National Menstrual Hygiene Management (MHM) Charter, to promote the rights of girls and women during menstruation. To date, efforts towards ensuring proper menstrual hygiene for Uganda’s girl child are piecemeal and are mostly led by volunteer and non-government actors. While the Ministry of Education’s leadership proposed in 2018 that “we should provide girls with specific rooms to change in case menstruation starts and she isn’t prepared. These rooms should also have clean water, menstrual towels and painkillers,” this is hardly the practice anywhere in the country, whether in schools or workplaces, complicating the daily lives of millions of girls and women countrywide.
In February last year, we reported that girls in Busoga were crafting menstrual pads out of soil and rugs—a move borne out of frustration by girls from families that could not afford better materials for menstrual care. Naturally, using such cumbersome materials while going to school presents its own set of problems and disruptions. Many girls cannot concentrate in school or at work due to all the interruptions. In Karamoja, challenges such as these are keeping girls out of school. An astronomical number of girls in the northeastern sub-region did not even make it past primary school level, dropping out instead to fend for their little siblings in community settlements or work in mines as babysitters.
It is this dire situation of menstrual hygiene that we spoke about as Ms Karooro Okurut unveiled her vision to set up a pads factory that will produce a diverse range of sanitary pads tailored to meet the varied needs of women and girls across East Africa, with a production capacity of 800 to 1,000 pads per minute, translating to approximately 11.98 million packs of 10 pads annually. What was striking is that the funds required to start and sustain this operation for a year—Shs3b—is just a tiny fraction of the Shs10 trillion that the IGG once revealed is lost in corruption scandals annually.
Once I heard the plan, I wanted to high-five the former minister of Gender and Social Issues and tell her, “Now you’re talking.” The dream is still a long way from fruition but the ideal of it is what a progressive country that cares about all of its people should aspire to. Once we create favourable conditions for girls and women to thrive in education and work, we will pave the way for a healthier and happier nation on the whole.
Angella Nampewo is a journalist and editor
