This first installment of the “IMHER Asks” series provides an introduction to the work of Kasole Secrets and Hedhi Salama, based in Tanzania. In this video, founder and CEO Hyasintha Ntuyeko briefly discusses her brand of disposable menstrual pads (Glory Pads), why she began working on the issue of menstrual hygiene in Tanzania in 2010, and what has been meaningful to her in doing this work.
Grace Ningejeje came to Dartmouth in 2017 through the YALI Mandela Program to work on a project on menstrual hygiene in her home country of Burundi, a country facing a tremendous degree of menstrual stigma combined with unusually high degrees of poverty and school dropout rates by girls. IMHER was developed to help Grace – and by extension, other innovators like her — to gather much of the foundational information usually needed to get started in this work, and that can help an organization to grow. In the meantime, Grace has been making considerable progress at home, with a new organization focused on education, disposable pad donations, and a newly published book for girls in her country about menstrual hygiene. But she is still trying to figure out how to produce commercially viable pads in a place where little disposable income exists for most families, and where the almost-never discussed challenges faced by girls do not tend to get ranked highly among other pressing family needs.
