Why do girls need sanitary pads to stay in school?

You start to see a real difference in rates of school attendance for boys and girls as they move from primary school to secondary school. Rates for girls can be 8 to 10 percent lower than for boys. There are a lot of reasons for this. If there’s a need for help in the home, for example, often a girl may be held back.

Now, if a girl doesn’t have access to sanitary pads or a safe and clean place at school to change them, that becomes another reason to keep her home. She starts missing a few days every month, she falls behind, and she may eventually drop out. In fact, some small studies in Ghana and Uganda found that if you provide a girl with underwear and sanitary pads, her chances of staying in school are 30 to 50 percent higher.

Keeping girls in school is important to health and development—not only for the girls but for their communities and countries. When girls stay in school, they are less likely to get HIV infection, wages go up, teenage pregnancy rates go down, and the children they have are healthier. You educate a girl and you change the world.

Five colorful sanitary pads, one with absorbant substance that looks like cotton balls pulled out.

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