Sanitary Pads Project

Wellspring Women's Network and our sanitary pad project came as a result of growing up in Zimbabwe, seeing a problem and searching for solutions. Every girl or women should celebrate her period, which is very easy to say when a healthy period is only a trip away to CVs, Walgreens. ln Zimbabwe and some parts of the African continent it can be a day or two worth of wages  to raise money to buy a pack of sanitary pads.

Periods, l tell can be a major hurdle to many girls across Africa. Many girls go through horrible things during their cycle, the percentage number of girls who stay home during their cycle is shocking, because they cannot simply afford to buy sanitary wear. Reportedly there are girls who use softened tree bark, tree leaves, newspapers, rags, mud and yes mud. This poses great health risks due to the different dyes and chemicals used on newsprint and urinary tract infections.
 This is a national catastrophe in Zimbabwe and across Africa.

This to me is a question of social justice.
The rate of poverty in Zimbabwe is unimaginable, unemployment is in the region of 90%. To allow girls and their future to drown deeper into the poverty lane because they lack funds necessary to stem the flow of their monthly periods and sit out of school for 3-4 days is mind boggling.

This project arrived as an attempt to do something and change a girls's life. This matter is solvable if the right people and right minds come together to solve it. Our aim here at Wellspring Women's Network is to find low cost sanitary pads, majority of these come from donations. We seriously need to retain the large number of girls back to the classrooms by providing them with sanitary wear.

The implementation of this project sounds like a great challenge, however with the right partners in place we can safely say "the sky is the limit".

With girls depending on us, we cannot simply afford to fail them.

Thank you for your interest and partnership.

Wellspring Women's Network.