Make Sanitary Pads Affordable and Accessible to Women; Empower Them to Manufacture Low-cost Sanitary Napkins

As per a recent study, around 87% women in India are unaware about menstrual hygiene, and many of them do not even have knowledge about its purpose as a biological process. Only 12% of India’s 355 million menstruating women use sanitary napkins. All in all, the story is more horrifying than you could have ever imagined!

Inadequate menstrual protection makes adolescent girls (aged 12-18 years) miss 5 days of school in a month (50 days a year). Over 88% of women in our country resort to shocking alternatives like unhygienic cloth, ashes, dried leaves, cow dung, and husk sand. The dismal state of feminine hygiene and care in India and rampant unhygienic sanitary practices leads thousands of women every year, particularly in rural areas, to critical health issues, infections, infertility, and even cancer!

The problem of lack of access to menstrual health products has been multiplied by the affordability dilemma. Around 70% of women in India say their family can't afford to buy them. Apart from this, a multitude of taboos around the menstruation issue and ignorance on the part of both men and women intensifies the problem all the more.

At Deepalaya, changing the narrative for our country’s women via making them self-reliant and sensitizing the communities to address issues affecting women, is one of our priority areas. To overcome the horrible situation of negligence to our mothers, daughters, etc., the best way is probably to form self help groups of the underprivileged, where each participant contributes a fixed minimal amount or can opt for micro funding.

A community survey conducted by Deepalaya few years ago pointed out that affordability was a major reason why women do not use sanitary napkins, particularly in economically backward households. In view of this, Deepalaya and Amway India joined their hands in 2016-17 to kill two birds with one stone–by promoting women entrepreneurs and helping them in manufacturing cheap and easy-to-use sanitary pads.

With an aim to promote menstrual hygiene awareness and at the same time, address the socio-financial needs of women in a community near JJ Colony, Dwarka, we motivated women to form an SHG in order to start production of low-cost sanitary napkins, create awareness amongst the community and make the enterprise self-sustainable over a period of 2 years. We helped them in setting up the machines and understanding the process involved in making sanitary napkins. The sanitary napkins are now available in the market by the name “Sangini”. The material used to make this product is fully tested and is harmless to skin. In its initial stage, Deepalaya also helped them to market it at very low cost but now this unit is being autonomously run by women from “Umang SHG”.

Initially, these women were not even aware of how to use sanitary pads, but with time and Deepalaya’s intervention, they have started a journey towards leading an empowered life. The napkin they manufacture has been named as 'Sangini', which interestingly means a friend, a companion.

Over the last one year or so, this project has created awareness amongst more than 4000 women: more than 2000 women changed their habits from using unhygienic alternatives to using napkins. The SHG group has manufactured over 2000 packets during 2017, and sold them, including Deepalaya’s different project locations. We also conduct regular workshops to create large scale awareness on the issue of menstrual hygiene, otherwise considered a taboo subject in the society till date.

With all such baby steps, we are working towards a larger goal—of women empowerment, and to take menstrual hygiene awareness and care to a whole new level.