It is well-known how millions of girls are deprived of access to education in India due to lack of access to basic menstrual hygiene facilities in their schools. A UNICEF Report from 2014, categorised States across India based on their inability to access menstrual hygiene services and Uttar Pradesh ranked 2nd on the list. The study indicated that UP has more than 66% of women and girls in the State who are unaware of basic menstrual hygiene services. Another study revealed that more than 5 lakh school girls are dropping to of school every year due to lack of access to menstrual hygiene facilities in their schools. And the number is only growing.
But Kiran Sahu, 19, who comes from a low-income family in Lucknow realised this early on in school and decided to buck the trend. “My eldest sister, who is also a mother right now is highly ignorant of her own body and decisions around it. I realized that the trend was similar in most households. Mothers in the lower socio-economic strata are much more ignorant and therefore do not succeed in passing on information to their children and the cycle continues,” says Sahu, who has been educating teenage girls in her village about dealing with their Periods more constructively, which in turn has helped build their self-esteem and confidence.
The youngest of five siblings, Sahu has been a Community Youth Leader for over a year at Project KHEL in Lucknow. She has trained hundreds of girls to face their Periods with confidence and not feel ashamed about it. At YKA’s first-ever Action Network on Menstrual Hygiene Management in Lucknow (18-19 October, 2019), Sahu was among 15 other young campaigners and educators working tirelessly on creating inspiring and innovative solutions to address issues around menstrual health and hygiene (MHH).
The Youth Ki Awaaz Action Network is the first ever campaign boot camp organised by Youth Ki Awaaz, aimed at training and mentoring young changemakers working on issues of MHH and its management and helping them discover innovative ways of digital storytelling to amplify the impact of their work.
Just like Sahu, 18- year-old Roli Kushwaha from Lucknow has also become a role model for the hundreds of girls in her school and village, to educate and inspire them about the need to break away from restrictions imposed by society. She says, “I’ve felt helpless several times, when I heard my own relatives ask girls not to take a shower during their periods. Whereas, I know for a fact that we need to keep ourselves cleaner on those days,” says Kushwaha, also working part time as a Community Leader for the past year.
The discourse around menstrual hygiene and its services has not just been about better access to services but largely about breaking the myth that this is a “women’s only problem”. The web of Patriarchy that surrounds the discourse around MHM has become the root cause for many underlying problems, which in turn has affected girl’s Education, their ability to earn, their Health and Livelihood.
It was heartening to see so many young male campaigners in Lucknow at the workshop also who are not only challenging this stereotype, but smashing it with conviction. Twenty-six-year-old Chitransh Saxena has been running an initiative called Padbank, which aims to break the myth that menstruation is a ‘women’s only’ problem. Padbank as the name suggests, is a physical bank of sanitary napkins and Chitransh and his team work with volunteers to deliver one pack (comprising eight sanitary napkins) monthly, free of cost, to women and girls in rural areas of Uttar Pradesh during their periods.
This initiative has touched the lives of more than 200 women in rural parts of Uttar Pradesh in just over a year, through its awareness drives and door to door marketing. Lalit Yadav has been organising education camps and workshops with young women and girls to make them more aware of their Sexual & Reproductive Rights and also how to deal with their Periods. This 26-year-old believes that it will result in women’s progress and they will be able to assert themselves better in society. Not just men, the discourse around MHM has become a lot more inclusive and one cannot overlook the rights of the Trans community and especially Trans-men in this debate. Twenty-four-year-old Clinical Psychologist Ritika Rachel Wilson has been openly talking about the rights of Trans Community members in her personal capacity. As a Trainer at a Mental Health organisation called Customise, she has been training members of the Trans Community to become Peer Educators, who are in turn training other members of the Trans Community on various aspects of MHM.
This 2-day bootcamp not only equipped these young campaigners on how to amplify their issue through different mediums of storytelling, but also to be aware of the larger economic context of their campaigns and how Gender Budgeting as a concept works. This session was important from the point of view of explaining to the campaigners the importance of using reliable data while defining the outline of their campaigns.
Gender Economist Mitali Nikore, who took the session, stressed on the importance of using “government-backed data sources” for creating a compelling argument to decision makers. For 23-year-old, Aastha Narang, who has just started a movement around MHM and SRHR called the “3 Hole Initiative”, this session became a crucial eye-opener about how to create greater impact through her work. The ‘3 Hole Initiative’ aims to normalise the discourse around Periods, where talking about it as as simple as talking about the weather. Over the past 12 months, Narang has been able to reach out to over 1,000 girls and over 100 women in Odisha by conducting face to face sessions around menstrual health with adolescent girls and how to maintain good sexual health (with women). For her, the importance of being able to scale this movement will be the true test of success of her work.
For other young campaigners like Lalit, Ritika, Chitransh, Roli, Kiran and others, the boot camp sessions helped to channelise their thoughts and shape their ultimate objective in a time bound fashion.
Anyone can become a campaigner, as long as they have a clear vision of what they want and know the tools of how to achieve that. Over the course of the next few months the campaigners will be busy crafting their campaign outlines and defining a Roadmap for achieving their various objectives.
Similar Action Networks around MHM and SRHR issues are planned across the country to empower young changemakers in creating impact within their target community by reaching the right decision makers in the process.
In case you are keen on becoming a YKA Action Network Fellow on MHM you can apply to one of the nine workshops happening over the next year across the country. Here is a link to apply for the YKA Action Network.
You can find out more about the #PeriodPaath campaign here.