On its website, the Days for Girls charity asks: “What if not having sanitary supplies means days without school, days without income or days without leaving the house?”
Girls use leaves, mattress stuffing, newspaper, corn husks, rocks, anything they can find … but still miss up to two months of school every year. Worse, girls are often exploited in exchange for hygiene. It turns out that this issue is a surprising but instrumental key to social change for women all over the world. The poverty cycle can be broken when girls can stay in school.
Days for Girls empowers days of education. Days of health. Days of safety. Days of dignity. “We do this by distribution of sustainable feminine hygiene kits by partnering with non-profits, groups and organisations, by raising awareness, and importantly, by helping impoverished communities start their own programs to supply kits and training. Together with our network of thousands of volunteers and partners, we have reached tens of thousands of girls and women in over 60 nations on six continents and counting.”
The goal is to reach every girl and woman with this need by the year 2022.
Apart from direct donations of money, you can do volunteer preparation of kits or give material resources for volunteers who do that. What is being prepared is a kit which works efficiently during the menstruation period and can then be washed and re-used for a considerable length of time.
If you do want to make a donation, this gives you an idea of what your gift would fund: $30 provides three washable feminine hygiene kits girls can depend on for up to three years; $35 purchases eight metres of cotton fabric for local women to sew more kits for girls; $60 will provide local vocational, leadership and women’s health instructor training; $100 buys moisture barrier fabric for 600 feminine hygiene shields; $185 will provide a treadle sewing machine … and so on.
This is a well-organised charity which gives people around the world all sorts of ways of helping to transform the lives of thousands of vulnerable women and girls.
