British company drawing attention to “period poverty”

A British maker of sanitary products has placed adverts in newspapers featuring a cut-out pad to raise awareness of “period poverty” in a country where one in 10 girls have had to use toilet paper, socks or newspapers.

Hey Girls said it wanted to “stop people in their tracks” with the double-sided adverts, which tell readers to “make your own sanitary pad” – and then explain why on the reverse.

“Nobody thinks about period poverty or girls missing school because of not having menstrual products,” the company’s founder Celia Hodson told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

“Everybody thinks about India and Africa, they don’t think of our girls… If it makes you think about that in a different way, it’s really interesting.”

Hey Girls is a social enterprise – a company that aims to do good as well as turn a profit. It gives a packet of sanitary pads to a girl from a low-income family for everyone it sells, and has so far donated 850,000 packets.