Turning Period Poverty to Period Wealth By Nneka Ukachukwu
Post Published on January 31, 2026 by Anthony Ekata
It was another school day in Port Harcourt, southern Nigeria, and 15-year-old Chinaza was getting ready for school. While having her bath, she noticed that her monthly flow just started that morning. The thought of staining her uniform once again while in class demoralized her. Her mother always gave her tissue paper to hold the flow, but it always found a way to leak through to her pinafore.
She had to go to school all the same, but it was going to be a bad day for her. She would not concentrate in class, all because of period poverty.
Period Poverty
Period poverty is the inability to afford and access menstrual products, sanitation and hygiene facilities, education, and awareness to manage menstrual health.
It can cause some reproductive health issues such as vaginal infection, infertility, unwanted pregnancy and others. Lack of proper hygiene and sanitation leads to infection that, if left untreated, can affect long-term reproductive health and fertility. Also, the anxiety, shame and stigma surrounding lack of access to products, combined with fear of leaks, contribute to psychological stress.
Millions of women and girls worldwide still experience period poverty every month. In Nigeria, for instance, the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), in its 2023 report, says approximately 37 million adolescent girls and women in Nigeria lack access to essential menstrual hygiene products. This makes them miss school and work, and impacts their health negatively.
According to the report, 23% of adolescent girls in Nigeria have also missed school due to menstruation. They may miss, on average, 24% of the school year due to a lack of a safe, private and hygienic place to manage their periods.
Period Wealth
But that was not the case for Chidimma as she always showed up in school even on her worst period days. Her determination paid off one day. She got relief from using toilet paper! A non-governmental organization (NGO), the African Immigrants Resources Centre, visited her school on one of the days she would have ordinarily been absent. The NGO was on one of their Give-A-Girl-A-Pad tour of some schools in the country, and Chidimma was among the recipients.
The Convener of Give-A-Girl-A Pad (GAGAP), Chimezie Oji-Kalu, recounted her experience in secondary school, which inspired her to start the programme.
“I attended secondary school in the village, so I saw some of my classmates using some unhealthy stuff like rags, dusters, question papers, and some of them even used cement paper. And in the bush, some of them used leaves to take care of their menstrual flow because their parents could not afford sanitary pads or even tissue paper that we used to use those days.”
Interventions
GAGAP is one of the other campaigns by organizations, individuals, and the government, aimed at ending period poverty in Nigeria by making sanitary pads available and affordable and ensuring safe menstrual hygiene amongst girls in the country.
On August 15, 2025, Nigeria adopted its first National Policy on Menstrual Health and Hygiene NPMHH. The policy was championed by the Minister for Women Affairs, Imaan Sulaiman-Ibrahim, in collaboration with stakeholders from all 36 states, civil society, and development partners. The policy is aimed at ending period poverty by reducing absenteeism and drop-outs, promoting dignity and equal opportunity, and advancing the right to education for every girl. The goal is that by 2030, no girl will miss school due to periods, and this would be supported by government actions such as tax waivers on sanitary pads.
Education and awareness play a vital role in demystifying conceptions around periods. And the new policy has as its key commitment, the provision of menstrual education in classrooms and ensuring safe Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH) facilities in schools by 2030.
The NPMHH was developed through consultations across Nigeria’s six geopolitical zones, ensuring voices from rural and urban communities were heard. It seeks to create an environment where menstruation is no longer a barrier to health, dignity or education. This step will also help to break cultural barriers associated with periods in some parts of the country, as Oji-Kalu witnessed in northern Nigeria.
“When we talked to girls in the northern part of Nigeria, understanding English was a barrier. But our volunteers in the north explained to them, and it was too hard to convince them, maybe because of their culture or something like that. But at the end of the day, they received the information with joy because it was an eye-opener. Some of their men attended our programme and were wowed and asked for more teaching. Even a prince invited us to his place to teach his community how to take care of themselves before, during, and after their menstrual flow.”
Also, the wife of the Nigerian president, Oluremi Tinubu, launched the ‘Flow With Confidence’ menstrual hygiene initiative in October 2025. It is a nationwide programme aimed at providing free sanitary pads and education to 370,000 school girls in rural areas to boost confidence and reduce school absenteeism. The event was flagged off across various states, where 10,000 packs were distributed per state to ensure girls stay in school.
“We’ll be distributing one year supply of disposable sanitary pads to 370,000 school girls in rural communities across the nation. This is to support our girls in rural communities and those who are unable to afford sanitary pads. Each beneficiary will receive one year supply of pads. We chose disposable pads because it offers a simple hygienic option that offers better health benefits for a woman’s reproductive wellbeing”, Oluremi Tinubu said, while flagging off the Flow With Confidence initiative in Gombe State, northern Nigeria.
Corporate Intervention
Collaboration with corporates would make a significant difference in the period poverty campaign. In South Africa, for instance, Dischem, the second largest retail pharmacy in the country, runs the Million Comforts campaign, an initiative of the Dischem Foundation, which has been running since 2015. This program aims to provide sanitary pads to young girls in underprivileged schools, ensuring they do not miss school due to a lack of menstrual products. The campaign has an educational component, which goes beyond just providing pads to training on puberty and menstrual hygiene to help break social taboos and stigma surrounding menstruation.
The campaign has successfully distributed millions of sanitary pads, with goals increasing from an initial one million to over 11 million in later years. It helps prevent girls from losing up to 20% of their school education.
Customers can participate by purchasing sanitary pads from participating brands at DisChem stores and placing them in designated Million Comforts bins in-store for onward distribution to schoolgirls, especially in rural areas.
Similarly in Nigeria, the African Immigrants Resources Centre, organizers of the Give-A-Girl—Pad campaign, entered into a partnership with the Imo State Ministry of Health on January 7, 2026. The ministry will support the organization with provision of resources in ensuring effective distribution of pads to girls.
Presently, the NGO has distributed sanitary pads to 4,072 school girls across four states in Nigeria, including Imo, Rivers, Lagos and Abuja. It hopes to sustain the initiative and reach out to more states, with collaborations from government and private partnerships.
Implementation and Sustainability
The adoption of policies and introduction of intervention programmes are well received as steps in the right direction. But implementation and sustenance is key. It is hoped that the National Policy on Menstrual Health and Hygiene will not weaken at the implementation stage or abandoned like some other policies adopted in the country.
Sustainable financing is also essential. Long-term budget provisions, and not one-off donations, are needed to provide pads and maintain the supply chain, in the case of Give A Girl A Pad and Flow With Confidence.
Attitude Change
With individual and collective efforts, period poverty will be reduced. There will be a noticeable shift in how girls, women, and everyone perceive periods. Girls will not stay out of school, women will not miss work, and a stress-free and healthier life will be ensured.
For Chinaza, “before Give A Girl A Pad came, I wasn’t given pads, I was given tissue. So I really got the advantage of it … like the new pad and how they taught us to use it, sanitation, hygiene, and many things. I will thank the convener for her efforts. It was good. It was awesome. It was top-notch.”
To be able to carry out impact assessments, accountability systems should be put in place to ensure proper distribution of the sanitary products and to monitor school attendance. More importantly, it would be able to observe shifts in the attitude of the school girls, as noticed in Chinaza.
Nneka Ukachukwu
