Positive Environmental Impact of our Positive Period Project in Sierra Leone

In 2019, we set up our Positive Periods project in Sierra Leone. It is a sustainable solution to the need for menstruation protection products and health education that is accessible to all, including women and girls in remote areas with low income. By learning to make re-usable period pads from local materials, and tackling the stigma attached to periods through education, communities in Sierra Leone can share their knowledge and empower women and girls to take control of their lives. Girls can miss up to a quarter of their school education because they don’t have an adequate way of managing their periods, and are often told to stay at home during menstruation.

The Environmental Impact of Periods

Another very significant challenge is that for those who can afford shop bought disposable sanitary protection there is no way to properly dispose of these pads and they can end up in open landfill areas near to habitation and ultimately cause a health concern. Disposable pads do not disintegrate. Most menstrual pads are made from 90% plastic. It takes nearly 500-800 years for one sanitary pad to decompose as the sanitary pad's plastic is non-biodegradable. They also contain super-absorbent polymers (SAP), which don't decompose. They gradually break down into what are known as micro-plastics, which contaminate soil, water and air. They also enter the food chain injecting toxins into the food humans and animals consume.

There is also a huge carbon footprint that goes into making these products. Sanitary pads contain volatile organic compounds and phthalates and, according to a new study, continued, long-term exposure to these, a significant amount of these harmful chemicals could be absorbed into the body. Women around the world are concerned about the products they use and this is the case in Sierra Leone, we have interviewed many women who do not want to use disposable sanitary pads for this reason alone, not just the cost.

The aims of the Positive Periods Project

In an interview with Isata, the coordinator of the project, we wanted to explore life for women and girls before the Positive Periods Project.

Similarly to many countries, Sierra Leone suffers from an unequal literacy rate gap between their male and female citizens: in 2018, male literacy rates were 51.65% while female literacy rates were only 34.85%. This divide is a result of a range of factors including teen pregnancies, attitudes towards girls education, gender equality, access to health education and even the distances of schools from homes.

During the interview with Isata regarding life before the project, she explained that the embarrassment and taboo of menstruation and the development of female bodies also aided the lack attendance of girls to school. The fear of bleeding in class and the responses from not only their male peers but also their teachers, leads to girls to opting to stay at home, and in many instances, they are asked to stay home when menstruating.

One of the aims of the Positive Periods Project is to teach girls, women, boys and men how to make sustainable, re-usable period pads from local materials, to reduce the cost and the waste caused by disposable pads. This ensures that girls will always have access to period pads when they need them during menstruation because they can make them themselves.

Importantly the other aim of the project is to educate both men and women about gender equality, women’s health and development, and help remove the taboo around menstruation and the development of female bodies, to create a more excepting and fairer environment for both girls and women. This project has also been extended in some schools to include Gender Based Violence awareness and prevention training for teachers, and sexual health education and awareness for girls.

Implementation of the Project

During the interview with Isata, she reflected on how initially it was difficult to get schools to comply with the project. Factors such as limited government funding and the ingrained taboo towards women’s health among the communities contributed to this difficulty. To overcome these initial challenges Istata understood that the way to encourage people to engage is to ‘deliver with passion’. This was how she was able to get people to listen and make them aware aware of the importance of this situation, not only sustainable period products, but also women’s health, education and wellbeing. Those involved must truly believe it and teach with emotion.

The Steve Sinnott Foundation has launched the PPP in different areas of the globe and each community adapts it to fit their needs, their local circumstances and national issues. Within Sierra Leone, the types of volunteers, the specific needs of the teachers and the girls Isata talked to in the schools, along with the affordable materials they had access to, helped develop the project in the direction it needed to go to suit the specific needs of the recipients.

During the global Coronavirus pandemic the number of volunteers and access to materials decreased. Despite this, the project managed to persevere due to the prior training of teachers conducted before.

The training process for the project started with winning over the headteachers of 15 schools in 4 regions of Sierra Leone. This led to two teachers from each school, being invited to the workshop where they were taught how to make the re-usable period pads, and taught by psychologists and economists about womens health and the economic and environmental impacts of the project.

During the interview Isata emphasised that it was important that both male and female teachers were included in the workshop to break the taboo around womens’ health and bodies, to promote gender equality.

Results of the Project

Following the start-up of the Positive Period Project in Sierra Leone in 2019, Isata has recorded the influential changes that are currently being seen as a result.

To ensure the teacher training workshops are successful, teachers had to evidence that they would be able to pass on what they had learnt to the other teachers in their schools and to their students. In this way the training is cascaded down through the communities. Isata is then able to visit these schools to follow up and make sure that the training has been passed on and the girls are benefiting from this, and running additional workshops with pupils at school. She explained that other organisations had made the mistake of offering training, but not following up, so in many cases the training was not passed on and there was limited benefit. Working with The Steve Sinnott Foundation she was able to convey this concern and we made sure that following up was an integral part of the project.

Isata has been able to overcome the initial resistance and connect to the communities in Sierra Leone. She has been able to help the teachers to overcome the challenges they have faced in cascading the training down through their communities and make sure that the knowledge is passed on. In this way she has seen the numbers of girls benefiting from this work increase to an estimated 5 thousand in the three years that it has been running.

Overall, the project has been a success with Sierra Leone. Girls are now more willing to go to school during menstruation, they feel safer knowing that their teachers understand and are supporting them to do this. In many schools there are now reporting systems in place for girls to use if they feel unsafe or threatened as their bodies change and gain the attention of boys and men in their communities and school. As they become less embarrassed about menstruation and their bodies, and more aware of their rights and how to access them, girls are changing their attitude and expectations. This results in male teachers and students changing their mindsets towards women and girls, their health and menstruation.

One more outcome of the project is that women and girls are seeing the economic opportunity for themselves too. Some are acting on the potential to create an income from selling the re-usable pads they are making, and that offers them more independence and self-reliance too.

The Future of the project

After two years of the Positive Period Project running in Sierra Leone Isata has some big plans on how to develop this to ensure that it reaches more than the four regions that it is currently targeting.

Ideas on the expansion of the project in Sierra Leone include creating centres where women can access the materials necessary to create their own period pads, and information around womens’ health, pregnancy and gender equality, instead of only targeting schools. This could become an entrepreneurial venture to help women earn their own income, from learning how to make re-usable pads and how to run their own entrepreneurial enterprise. This was inspired by the pandemic when many started profiting from making sustainable masks to sell.

To support this next chapter, Isata needs more sewing machines for each local area, or centre. To create pads on a larger scale, more materials are needed, and tools such as scissors and clips. They also face other challenges including the lack of funding, which limits each school workshop to 30 children rather than 150, and the limited amount of material resulting in teachers expecting this to be provided with their training, all need to be resolved before the expansion of the overall project.

What next?

With the success of the Positive Period Project in Sierra Leone, The Gambia, Cuba and Haiti, we are aiming to enable more countries to benefit from this project.

It benefits women and girls in an economic way, enables them to access their education and not have to take time off, but as well as that, it benefits the environment. This is a win win project, benefiting women and the environment, which ultimately benefits the whole human race and opens up the future prospects for the entire planet.

Who knows, with an estimated 2 billion menstrual items being flushed down Britain's toilets each year, maybe women and girls in the UK would like to be involved in this benefit too. Exploratory workshops run here were successful and opened up the conversation around period poverty in wealthier countries, as well as women’s commitment to a more environmentally friendly way of managing our periods.

You can support our Positive Periods Project here

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Steve Sinnott • Nov 08, 2021

Capacity development as part of education

By BY JOSEPHINE DODDS • 06 May, 2024

Education has been identified as a key aspect to achieve societal development. This has been highlighted with the 2015 sustainable development goals, with goal 4 being to ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all. Education has also shifted to being a means to transmit peace and global tolerance through increasing the understanding of other cultures. This has tied in with the rise of capacity development initiatives in development practice that seek to empower and enable individuals and communities to build upon their preexisting capacities. It is a key strategy to ensure educational development by international organisations, governments, and communities. The main principles of capacity development are participation, locally driven agenda, ongoing learning, long term investment and building upon local capacities. By integrating these principles into educational development, it allows for school communities to become involved in peace building activities. Through following a locally driven agenda schools can become centres for fostering peace and understanding and address local issues that may prevent children from attending or staying in school. This is what the UNESCO Associated Schools network aims to achieve by involving schools and educational institutes at a global level, creating networks of educators and students that share information, knowledge and spread UNESCOs value of peace. It aims to join schools through four pillars of learning: learning to know, learning to do, learning to be and learning to live together to create sustainable learning and teaching environments that involve communities in conservation activities, petitions and cultural events. Schools undertake social and educational projects that allow students to get involved with supporting developmental and humanitarian organisations, through fundraising and field trips. Recently The Steve Sinnott Foundation organised an international trip to Japan for the 70th Anniversary of UNESCO ASPnet for the Arts and Culture for peace exchange, bringing together students from The Gambia, Oman, Singapore, Korea and Coventry. By expanding education to include individuals and communities’ local agendas and addressing international issues, education can provide a platform for ongoing learning and development. It allows for students to develop their ability to think critically and connect with others meaning they can both learn and understand issues that might not be highlighted otherwise. By allowing schools, students, and communities to connect and direct their own development and focusing on developing existing capacities, the meaning and aim of education shifts from traditional roles to being focused upon understanding and peace.

Women and girls education GUPT perspective

By BY DALILA EL BARHMI • 29 Apr, 2024

Women’s and Girls’ Full Participation in Society: “Are Palestinian women reaping the benefits of education in similar ways to the rest of the world?” Palestinian women continue to be some of the most educated women in the Middle East-North Africa (MENA) region. While women’s academic participation is indeed measurable, they are not reaping the benefits of education. Palestinian women, especially educated Palestinian women, are overlooked, and under-represented in Palestinian society. Current indicators reveal that access to education has not significantly improved women’s status in Palestinian society. It is therefore imperative to benefit from Palestinian women’s education and skills in society not only as a social right, but as a development necessity. The percentage of educated women in Palestine is remarkable and one of the highest around the world with a 99.6% in 2020 for completion in primary and upper secondary. While Palestinian women have always been visible in the national struggle, they have limited leadership and decision making-opportunities. Their participation in civil society and the formal government has been restricted. In decision making positions, women comprise only 8.3% of all ministers, 0% of ministerial representatives, and 6% of assistants to the ministerial representatives. Within all ministries women comprise 30% of staff. In the Ministry of Women’s Affairs, women are the majority, comprising 68.1%. Education unions leading by example: Education unions have viewed the education of future generations, with a focus on girls, as a form of protest, resistance to the country and Arab region’s ongoing-conflict, displacement, and upheaval. Accordingly, women and girls’ education has thrived in recent years. COVID 19 crisis a catalyst for transforming education unions: Education unions voiced that an appropriate response to COVID -19 in the education sector should consider the rights and best interests of students, teachers and education support personnel and involve education unions in developing the containment and recovery measures. This response accelerated the transformation process of the largest union in Palestine, the General Union of Palestinian Teachers (GUPT). They want to have a truly representative union and integrate women educators in the union decision making structures. Despite the pandemic, GUPT continued to engage in social dialogue with the government, continued to fight for decent working conditions and welfare for teachers and education personnel and engage in a process of trade union transformation reflecting the realities of the 21st century. The union stepped up during the rapid shift to distance learning, they have developed online programmes, trained teachers on distance learning and supported students to decrease inequality among learners. The union also urged that the transformation should also challenge discrimination and increase women’s involvement in education, in trade unions and in society. This process was a driver to enhance women’s leadership within the union’s structures. From words to action: Mechanisms put in place to enhance women educators’ participation. With the support of international sister organisations, GUPT developed their own strategy to promote women’s participation and leadership within their union and in education. They developed a strategy, and we identified the following objectives: Increase the number of women in key union leadership and decision-making bodies at the regional and national level, through capacity development training on leadership for women. They have also introduced policies such as gender quotas and allocated budgets for their gender equity programmes. Activate the role of their Women’s Committee and prioritise the recruitment of young female teachers. The union is also working to identify and address the barriers to women’s participation in union leadership and decision making. In education the union is working with the Ministry of Education to review school books so that gender discrimination is not inherently written into the curriculum. GUPT is also organising sensitization training for educators so that discriminatory stereotypes are not perpetuated in the classroom. Finally, for the GUPT it is important to secure the right to education for all Palestinian students, especially girls. Teaching and learning must occur in quality, safe environments. Every effort must be made to eradicate the different types of violence that occur all too frequently in and around educational settings.

Support the Women in our Public Schools on the way to Diversifying Teaching

By BY MARY CATHRYN RICKER • 22 Apr, 2024

Early in my work as the president of my local teacher’s union I was invited to a community leader meeting about reforming the teaching profession. Amidst the discussion of harsher teacher evaluations, raising standards for teaching, creating easier entry into the profession, merit pay for “good” teachers, and more, I brought up the fact that working conditions and salaries hadn’t meaningfully changed since the 1960s. “We’re in favor of paying math and science teachers more so they can be compensated closer to what they’d get in the private sector,” a business community representative replied, offering an idea that was not new to me. Full disclosure: my dad was a career math teacher from that era of math and science majors who answered their government’s call to become math and science teachers who would boost the United States of America’s bench in the space race. I could easily picture how a larger salary could have changed our family’s budget. Teachers’ unions like mine (and my dad’s) addressed pay disparities based on gender that were common a generation earlier by fighting for a salary schedule focused on experience and education. So, I offered back, “If we want to differentiate pay related to the most important job in education, then we should seriously consider paying kindergarten and first grade teachers more than anyone because they teach students to read, which is the rocket science of education,” alluding to an influential issue of AFT’s American Educator magazine from 1999. “Well, I’m sure those teachers are fine but I have volunteered in first grade classrooms and their work doesn’t compare to math and science teachers.” Oh. Interesting. We clearly weren’t going to see eye to eye in our differentiated pay conversation. More so, there are decades long gender stereotypes lurking behind that conversation. In addition to the history of gender based pay inequities, elementary school teachers are assumed to be female while more secondary teachers are male. There has long been a disconnect between the importance communities, elected officials, and countries have placed on education. From local funding efforts to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 4: Quality Education, support for education is nearly universal in most communities. That support for education doesn’t always translate to support for educators and, with a majority of educators worldwide being female, that sets a dangerous precedent. Our teachers deserve professional working conditions because teaching and learning begins with their expertise. Additionally, a teacher’s working conditions are a student’s learning conditions and so administrators, public officials, or policymakers mistreating, undermining, or disrespecting teachers sends a message to students that teachers do not deserve respect, fair treatment, or professionalization. In addition to a stubborn lack of recognition of teachers as professionals, a vicious cycle exists around salary. Teachers have historically low wages because it is feminized and because it is feminized teacher’s wages are suppressed. The evidence that belonging to a union, with the ability to negotiate collectively, improves teacher compensation is key in disrupting this vicious cycle. Teaching has been a feminized profession for over a century and, despite efforts to diversify the profession, remains a feminized profession. In fact, the OECD reports that the gender gap increased from 2005 to 2019. In order for our students to have the most representative learning conditions, we need the most representative teachers so we must continue to diversify teaching to represent everyone in our communities, including by gender. Efforts like Black Men Teach, active in my home state of Minnesota, can make a meaningful difference. I would posit treating the current majority female teaching population as professionals—with professional wages, recognizing their expertise in teaching and learning rather than infantilizing them, respecting their commitment to education rather than exploiting it—would both model for students the way to treat women (and thereby model for female students how they can expect to be treated in any profession) and create the conditions for everyone to see teaching as a profession worth pursuing.