How sanitary pad shortages are disrupting girls’ education in Homa Bay

By  George Odiwuor

Correspondent

Nation Media Group

What you need to know:

• At Wasamo Girls Secondary School, lack of sanitary towels forces learners to hide during their periods and miss valuable classroom time.
• Poor families, stalled donor programmes and last-mile distribution problems are leaving these girls struggling to access sanitary towels.

At Wasamo Girls Secondary School on Mfangano Island in Homa Bay County, a girl can go missing from class without ever leaving the school. The register in the classroom says she is absent. The one in the dormitory says she is present.

This girl is not a truant. She is hiding from shame. Teachers here have learnt to read the gap between the two registers. A girl who is "absent in class but present in the dormitory" is on her period and has no pad. Rather than risk being seen, she stays curled up in her bed until it passes.

Wasamo is a boarding school of 130 girls, most from families on Mfangano Island who depend on a fishing economy that has been shrinking for years. For many of their parents, a packet of sanitary towels is simply out of reach, and the Ministry of Education's own data shows that period poverty remains a leading driver of absenteeism among teenage girls in rural and island schools, feeding into poor performance and early dropout. The government has a programme to provide free sanitary towels to adolescent schoolgirls, but at Wasamo, the girls only hear about that promise on the news.

Esther*, 17, a Form Three student, has lived this cycle more times than she can count. She lives with a well-wisher who took her in, along with six other vulnerable girls. "I live with someone I am not related to. She just chose to support me. I see her struggle to get what I need because she also has to support six other girls who need the same things as I do," she says softly.

At the start of every term, Esther brings one packet of sanitary towels to school. She knows it will not last, but it is all her guardian can give her. "I have in the past asked for help from classmates when I ran out of pads, but some got tired of helping me all the time. Others are in the same situation as me and would openly tell you that they also need help," she says.

Her fear of being caught out in public began on a football pitch. She was wearing white shorts, playing as one of the best players on her team, when she felt blood trickling down her thighs in the middle of a game. Spectators saw it. So did the opposing team.

"Nobody had sanitary towels at that moment, so I withdrew from the game to go and hide because of the stigma. I prefer being in solitude when I am on my menses and do not have pads," she says.

Since that day, she would rather miss three days of learning than risk another public embarrassment, and she makes a point of informing the school principal, Florence Oyoo, whenever she stays away from class for this reason.

Joyce*, Esther's classmate, knows the same struggle. She comes from Sindo, where families depend on fishing. She lost her mother when she was in Class Seven and now depends on a well-wisher.

Outside school, the lack of pads exposes her to a different kind of danger. "I have met many men who promised to support me in exchange for sex. The only thing that keeps me away from them is the dream I have in life. I have seen other girls tripping along the way and their lives become miserable. I do not want to be like them," Joyce says.

It is a reality that teachers at Wasamo know all too well: Poverty is pushing girls into transactional sex for as little as Sh150 worth of pads. The principal says up to 20 learners from extremely impoverished families miss up to eight days of school each term because they have no pads.

"Sometimes female teachers come together to contribute money to buy pads for the most deserving cases. We sometimes fix the school budget to try and support the girls, but this is not enough," Florence says.

In some cases, girls do not report back after the holidays at all, staying home for up to a week. "When asked after going back to school, they would say they were on their menses and were waiting for it to end before they could go to school," she adds.

Many of these learners are orphans who once depended on donor support programmes that have since collapsed. This was not always the case: donors used to supply the girls with pads regularly, but that support has dried up, and some organisations have cited US President Donald Trump's decision to dismantle the US Agency for International Development, cutting over 80 per cent of its programmes including in Kenya, as a major reason for withdrawing. With the funding gone, the safety net for schools like Wasamo has been torn apart, leaving the girls who once relied on it to fend for themselves.

Reusable sanitary pads

The school used to run a programme teaching girls to make reusable sanitary towels, after an organisation donated electric sewing machines and trained the female teachers and students to make washable pads. It worked best during the rainy season, when the school had enough water to support it, but the programme has since been scrapped: Florence says they stopped receiving the materials needed to make the pads.

Water remains its own daily struggle at Wasamo. The school has seven 10,000-litre water tanks and a single 5,000-litre tank, which collect rainwater used by the girls to wash their uniforms, bathe, drink, and cook.

"The girls bathe two times every day. We mostly get sufficient water in the first term after the December rains. We struggle during the rest of the year," the principal says.

When the tanks run dry, learners have to walk two kilometres to the lake to fetch water, over rough terrain that drains their energy even before they factor in the risks along the way. Florence says some girls have encountered snakes on these walks. "They have to walk through a thicket to get water. We do not know what they can encounter when they go through the bush. Besides snakes, some rogue individuals could be waiting to pounce on them," she says.

The principal says the school has tried to help by buying pads from its own vote head, but the allocation is never enough. "We try to help, but we cannot sustain it. Most of our girls come from families that struggle to even pay for examination fees," she says.

The government distributes free sanitary pads to public schoolgirls through the National Free Sanitary Towels Programme, meant to reduce absenteeism and keep girls in class. The programme is run by women representatives. Homa Bay Woman Rep Joyce Osogo says her office has distributed sanitary towels to schoolgirls twice across the county, with a third phase planned for October.

Dr Osogo says the sanitary towels budget sits with the Ministry of Gender, and the towels are delivered to the Deputy County Commissioners' (DCC) offices, but getting them from there to the girls who need them remains a challenge. Principals are required to collect the pads themselves, she says, and some teachers end up tying bales of sanitary towels onto motorcycles to get them to school, a task not everyone is willing to take on. Safety concerns, fuel costs, and poor road infrastructure all make it harder for some principals to collect the pads at all, and even when the material is collected, it does not always get delivered to the girls.

The county MP wants more funding put towards closing that last-mile gap, from the DCC offices to the schools themselves.

"We want to ensure that once the sanitary towels reach the DCCs, we are facilitating so that the students get them at their school and they get adequate guidance and counselling and even exposure on how to use the sanitary towels," she says.

In the last distribution cycle, her office reached 100,000 girls, giving out eight packets per student, but ran into problems when towels were collected on the girls' behalf without them being present. "There were challenges when they were not collected by the students themselves. Some of them do not get an opportunity to get them," she says.

Dr Osogo notes that girls are starting their periods earlier, some as young as Grade Three, and urges parents to keep a stock of towels ready in advance. "Menstrual flow does not tell you that tomorrow it will start. It can start at any time. So there must be levels of preparedness in terms of sanitary access, distribution and sanitary use," she says.

Homa Bay County Gender Director Elias Odinga says the programme is ongoing, with 2 million pieces of sanitary pads distributed last year, and a new consignment has already started arriving this year to address any shortages in schools. He says every girl from Grade Four to Grade Nine in the county's public schools is entitled to six packets of sanitary towels for the year, and this year's consignment will also total 2 million.

On the mainland in Kasgunga, one entrepreneur is trying to close the gap by making pads cheaper. Peter McOdida was in a conversation with a group of women about the challenges of menstruation when the idea came to him: the women spoke of being unable to afford pads every month, and of simply not being able to find them in remote villages like the islands.

Local production

His idea became a factory. Galentine Sanitary Pads opened in January. The factory's machines can produce at least 200 pieces of sanitary towels every minute, using cotton, an absorbent core, a waterproof back sheet, and other synthetic protective materials imported and assembled along an automated conveyor belt.

The real innovation, though, is in the pricing. While most companies sell in packets of eight, pushing the cost up, they sell just two pieces at a time. "Women with Sh20 should be able to at least get sanitary pads for themselves or for their daughters," McOdida says. "Our pads meet the Kenya Bureau of Standards (Kebs) requirements and ISO certification. We have gone through a rigorous evaluation."

When the factory opened, McOdida said he would supply free sanitary towels to learners at Wasamo Girls. He later stopped the programme, since running a business also meant needing to make a profit, and asked the school to start buying from him instead.

"One of the ironies we face is that soft drinks can be supplied to every corner of the country yet some women lack pads in some regions because of difficulties in delivering them there. The government should start treating sanitary pads as free and consider it an essential product that women need," McOdida says.

Tracy Mackavin, a co-founder, says the idea began with a group of women who used to make pads by hand, known as "change makers." "They had an idea that they would produce more pads if they automated their production. They brought the idea to us," she says.

Jane Anyango, founder and executive director of Polycom Girls, which runs a pads company in Kibera, says local manufacturing lets consumers buy what actually suits them, but warns that starting a pads factory takes serious groundwork. "Don't just establish a business. Learn and set up what can be sustainable," she says.

In Mfangano, administrators say they are also trying to protect girls by talking to the men around them. Some girls have resorted to using old clothes and mattress fillings, which exposes them to infection.

Mfangano West Location Chief Kennedy Odari says his office works to sensitise men to why their teenage daughters need sanitary towels every month.

"Some are not aware that their teenage daughters need sanitary towels every month," he says. His office also engages fishermen to help fight the sexual exploitation of girls who are desperate for pads.

For Esther and for Florence, these interventions cannot come fast enough. Every month, a girl's education at Wasamo still hangs on whether she can find Sh20 for a packet of pads.