Keeping Rural Adolescent Girls in School

Mission for Community Development (MCODE), a Ugandan local NGO is innovatively looking at keeping adolescent rural girls through tackling some of the challenges that lead to their school dropout. It is estimated that a rural girl child loses 11% of her class time due to reasons related to poor menstrual blood management. This affects their academic performance which on many occasions make their parents or guardians think that paying for the girls school fess is wasting their money and stop doing so. Girls lose their self esteem whenever their menstrual periods arrive, they can't risk to attend school while not sure if the materials they use to manage blood will drop while walking at the school compound or blood will leak onto their clothes/uniforms. And because menstruation is a human turned taboo, other pupils most especially boys will instead laugh at these girls which irritates the girls very much to the extent of deciding not to attend the same school anymore.
MCODE therefore comes to counteract this human turned taboo through breaking the silence about it. It's not a common practice for menstruation to be discussed which makes menstruating girls feel that what is happening to the might not be normal and natural. Sensitisation sessions are carried out within schools and communities while educating people that menstruation is a natural occurrence to every girl or woman of reproductive age. In addition, we provide selected girls with a re-usable kit each which is estimated to last for 2 - 3 years of using, washing, drying, ironing and re-use. Each kit contains 8 liners (blood absorbent cloth material) and 2 shields (liner holding component with snaps that fixes the whole kit onto a knicker and has a polythene material in between to prevent blood from crossing into the knicker in case the blood exceeds the liners), and a bag where the pads are kept. The kit is comfortable enough to the extent that even when the girl is playing, it's held firm enough to drop.