Alumnae strive to keep girls in class

Last Friday, Regina Ombam, the Ngara Girls’ Alumnae Association president, made her way to the school located a few kilometres from Nairobi’s central businesses district.

Accompanied by three of over 200 old girls, they entered the school at 7am with one mission on their mind; fight menstrual shame and poverty. They donated 100 boxes of menstrual hygiene products to the girls.

“We do this to bring out the positivity, value for education and then strengthen the girls so that they can study with minimal interruptions,” Ms Ombam, the East Africa director at Health Policy Plus, told the Nation.

Ms Ombam and her team are among thousands of alumnae associations fighting to keep the girl child in class. Period shame and poverty affects thousands of schoolgirls, with many staying out of class during menstruation.

According to statistics from ActionAid, one in 10 girls in Africa miss school because they don’t have access to menstrual hygiene products, or because there aren’t safe, private toilets at school.

In Kenya alone, approximately 50 per cent of schoolgirls don’t have access to menstrual products, the international NGO that fights poverty and injustice says.

“There are some students who can’t concentrate in class because they don’t have a sanitary towel,” Valentine Wanjiru, Ngara Girls school president, said.

The situation is dire in public boarding secondary schools.

Borgen Project

“I never received any pads from the government when I was in high school. Our school had a strong alumnae association that donated them one time and that is the only time I got free sanitary towels,” says Winfred Aura, who studied at Kaimosi Girls’ High School in Western. Desperate schoolgirls have had their education dreams cut short after trading sex for sanitary products, according to Borgen Project, an international NGO fighting poverty.

“Shockingly, two out of three feminine pad users in rural Kenya receive their products from sexual partners,” the non-profit says in its fact box on period poverty in Kenya.

Ngara Girls principal Beatrice Ndiga said they had never received sanitary products since she joined the institution in 2019.

“I think the government gives sanitary towels to schools in [informal settlements]. They should also consider,” she said, that there are some girls in such localities learning in other schools far away from their homes.

In 2011, Kenya launched the sanitary towels programme under the Ministry of Education. It was to procure and distribute pads for about 3.7 million girls in public primary and secondary schools at a cost of Sh470 million.

In June 2017, President Kenyatta signed an amendment to the education law to state “free, sufficient, and quality sanitary towels must be provided to every school-registered girl, as well as a safe place to use and dispose of the products”.

But the programme was shifted to the Ministry of Public Service and Gender in 2018.

Last year, as though the programme was a ping-pong game, it reverted to the Education ministry amid spirited fights by Woman Reps to take charge.

Ms Nereah Olick, the director of Basic Education in charge of the programme at the Education ministry, said financial constraints have forced them to focus on primary schools and under-served secondary schools.

Sanitary towels

The government provides nine packets of sanitary towels to all girls in Standard Six through to Standard Eight for the nine months that they are in school.

“The ones that we give to high schools are mainly donations that we receive from the private sector such as M-Pesa Foundation and, since they are not enough, we have to make a decision based on poverty levels,” she said.

This year, the government has distributed pads to about 2.6 million girls in primary school and some day secondary schools.

Education Chief Administrative Secretary Mumina Bonaya said Covid-19 had derailed the strides made to keep girls in school.

“The pandemic has shown that girls are safer in school than at home. The long period they were at home led to some level of disruption and a number of the girls became pregnant,” she said.

Menstrual Hygiene Day is marked every May 28 because girls menstruate at an average of five days, and the standard menstrual cycle is 28 days.

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