AFRIpads has its origins in unlucky timing. Volunteering in rural Uganda in 2008, Sophia Grinvalds was caught unprepared one month and couldn’t find sanitary products in the village, so she sent her boyfriend to the nearest town, 40 minutes away by motorbike. Realizing their neighbors faced similar stress each month, the couple decided to do something. AFRIpads emerged, now one of Africa's largest manufacturers of reusable sanitary pads.
Long taboo, menstrual hygiene management is entering the mainstream. “When we started, MHM wasn't even an acronym,” Grinvalds recalled. Eight years on, Uganda’s Ministry of Education hosts monthly meetings on the topic and is producing a manual for schools. Globally, advocacy groups have marked Menstrual Hygiene Day each May 28 since 2014. Sales at AFRIpads, meanwhile, doubled from March 2015 to July 2016, with up to 70,000 washable pads now produced per month at a plant — largely staffed by women — in Masaka, southwest Uganda.
Around 30 percent of Ugandan women and girls use disposable products, Grinvalds estimates. Usually imported, these sell for around 3,500 shillings or more for a pack of 10 pads (just over $1). Most women instead use pieces of cloth or foam mattress, toilet paper, newspaper or banana plant fibers — which are unhygienic, ineffective and uncomfortable. Some girls complain of chafing so painful they can’t walk to school.