This post is about what Walter and Milly have been working on for the past month, in our 6 pilot schools, where we want to try out different sustainable solutions to empower parents to keep their girls from dropping out of school due to menstruation.
This year, we've paused distributions in order to work on a solution to this problem. And we're doing it together with the parents. Walter and Milly are guiding groups of parents to think about what we can do to assist them to be able to provide pads for their girls in future. Solutions may include trying again to train the girls to sew (this time with more follow-up and focused teaching time), training groups of mothers to sew the pads, training parents who are already trained tailors to mass produce them and showing them where to get higher quality materials, and continuing to produce them ourselves with our own local tailor and making them available for sale at schools, whereby the money collected in the first year is saved to buy what is needed for the next year. Interestingly, our office just received a visit yesterday from a Pader man who opened a skills training centre, and one of the things they do is make high quality sanitary pads at a very affordable rate. Helping them to market their products may be yet another approach.
Which is the best solution? We don't actually know! So this year is going to look quite different for the pads ministry - with a smaller number of schools, using different approaches in different schools, and then comparing after a few months to see what has worked and what has not.
Our goal remains the same - working together to keep more girls in school and build a brighter future for Uganda!