Did you know that a girl misses up to 5 days a month, 15 days a term and 45 days a year due to lack of sanitary towels. Your donation of USD 50 will help to keep a girl in school for 45 days more in a year and improve her learning.

Mary is one of the 10,050 marginalized girls that Jielimishe GEC Project targets to improve their life chances through education. She lives in Ng’onyi village in Imenti North, Meru County with her parents, two brothers and a sister-in-law. The area is a predominantly an agricultural region, which relies on income from cash crops such as coffee, small tea plantations and food crops such as bananas, arrow roots and various vegetables. Despite the rich agricultural setting of the region, most people in are living in abject poverty and cannot adequately afford the basic needs.

Mary’s parents are both peasant farmers whose income is less than Kshs.10,000 (80.64 GBP) a month, which is insufficient to meet the basic family needs, leave alone pay school fees. The family lives in a compound made up of three semi-permanent wooden houses.

Mary says that she repeated class 6 thanks to her monthly menstrual periods that began in 2012. At that time she could neither afford nor access sanitary towels for herself. “I could not concentrate in class; I tied a sweater around my waist to cover my dress. I felt shame and I preferred missing school,” she began her conversation. When asked if she approached her mother during her periods, she replied by saying that she felt shy to do so. During her periods, she would borrow pads from her sister-in-law, who at times did not have sufficient for herself. In such times she opted to spend the whole day in bed, “I would only think of what was happening to me throughout as I lay in bed,” she pointed out further. When asked why she did not want to go to school, she would tell her mother that she feared being taunted by fellow pupils, and she avoided explaining herself further. To keep clean, she would change her clothes often but according to her “when all the clean clothes got soiled, the only solution left for me was to just sit still without having any towel in place,” Academically, Mary’s performance has been consistent throughout: she has always been a top performing student. But the performance dropped drastically when she joined class six for the first time in 2012.

This coincided with the onset of her menstrual periods which led to irregular school attendance coupled with low self-esteem.