Hi SuperForest
I’ve been having one of those crazy weeks, where your only real awareness of news and current events comes from those stolen minutes, halfway between sleep and wake, when your radio alarm’s gone off, but you can’t quite bring yourself to stir (I surely can’t be the only one who often starts the day wondering how many of the day’s news stories were fabrications of a quasi-dreaming mind?! The world’s a fairly magical realistic place for me – at least for the first hour of the day). Anyway! One story that did grab my attention this week was this little tidbit:
The winner of the $100,000 Curry Stone Design Prize, which rewards innovative designs that solves public health problems, goes to a graduate of Harvard’s M.B.A. program. Elizabeth Scharpf is not a trained designer, but created an affordable sanitary pad out of the trunks of banana trees.
The pad will be 65 percent cheaper than the one’s offered by Proctor and Gamble and 35 percent cheaper than the generic brands, according to Scharpf.
This is brilliant! So, yes – sanitary protection is both unglamorous and one of those things we just don’t think about – particularly if you’re one of the 50% of the population who don’t need it, but also if you’re among the lucky of us who simply take our monthly tampax outlay for granted. But – as studies have shown – things as seemingly rudimentary as reliable sanitary protection or provision of designated ‘girls” toilets in schools can make a huge difference. As Unicef says:
Many girls drop out of school at the onset of menstruation, partly because there are no separate toilet facilities.
So I think the idea of affordable sanitary protection made from natural fibres is great - and Sharpf’s Sustainable Health Enterprises organisation aims to help women in Africa run their own banana pad business, starting in Rwanda.
Also – looking for sources on what I recall reading about girls’ education and lavatory availability, I hit upon this UNICEF paper on Strategies for Girls’ Education. Please read it.
And – since I’m on a feminist tip here – I just received my delivery of Half The Sky - have any of you read it? I’m keen to delve in this weekend.
Love to you, totally feeling like riding a white horse along the windswept beach now, whilst wearing an entirely uncharacteristic pair of white capri pants.
P
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