Challenge
Globally, 150 million children currently enrolled in school may drop out before completing primary school – at least 100 million of these are girls. Kenyan adolescent girls miss approximately 3.5 million learning days per month due to lack of funds to purchase sanitary pads. This impedes their ability to compete in the classroom, leads to low self-esteem, higher drop-out rates and, in many areas of Kenya, makes them vulnerable to early marriage. Along with the lost learning days, girls not surprisingly lose self-confidence, and their chance of rising to the top of their class drops farther each month. Most of these girls will join the ranks of the unemployed, standing now at over 54% in Kenya and will undoubtedly remain throughout their lives amongst the 58% living in absolute poverty. The great potential they had before adolescence is blotted out, and their children will more than likely repeat this cycle.
Girls who lack sanitary pads often use crude and unhygienic methods, including using dry cow dung, or inserting cotton wool into their uterus to try to block the flow. In urban slums, girls are widely known to collect used pads from garbage dumps, and wash them for their own use. These measures often result in serious health complications. It is common to tear blue-jeans and use that fabric as a sanitary pad, but the resulting chaffing often causes extremely painful and embarrassing boils to develop. [sex]
Currently, women constitute the majority (58%) of illiterate adult Kenyans, with a significant reason being their own inability to complete school for many of the reasons listed here among others. The focus on girls’ education is timely, because there is an astonishing future earning potential on a national and household level investing in girls’ education in Kenya. This problem is sure to escalate, and there is currently no lasting solution to address these growing needs for girls or growing environmental crisis from all the sanitary pad waste.
Facts
Current challenges facing Kenya’s youth
* 150 million school children may drop out before completing primary school
* 11,114,782 children are enrolled in Kenyan schools
* 1,454,600 of these are known menstruating girls between 6th grade and high school
* 868,000 (three fifths) miss four to five days of school per month due to lack of sanitary pads and/or underwear (Girl Child Network and Ministry of Education, 2006)
* 3.5 million learning days per month are missed by Kenyan adolescent girls
* 42% of Kenya’s population is under age 15
* 58% of Kenyans are living in absolute poverty
* 58% of adult Kenyans are illiterate, the majority being women
Some of the benefits of keeping girls in school
* Improved income: One extra year of education beyond the average boosts eventual wages by 10-20% with primary school returns 5-15% and secondary education 15-25%.
* A 100-country study by the World Bank shows that increasing the share of women with a secondary education by one percent boots annual per capita income growth by 0.3 percentage points.
* Improved harvests: If women farmers in Kenya had the same education and inputs as men farmers, crop yields could rise 22%.
* Reducing HIV rates: A Kenyan study indicated that girls who stay in school are four times less likely to be sexually activity than those who drop out, reducing the incidence of HIV and early pregnancy dramatically.
* Enhancing women's choices over family planning: Doubling the proportion of women with a secondary education empowers women to better plan their families, resulting in smaller families from 5.3 to 3.9 children per woman (Kenya has one of highest birth rates globally, over 3%, placing a larger burden on young mothers).
* Reducing infant mortality: An extra year of education reduces infant mortality 5-10%
* Reduced teen pregnancy: 40% of adolescent girls in Kenya with no education are pregnant versus 26% of those who completed only primary and only 8% of those with secondary education or higher (note: 40% of deaths from botched abortions are adolescent girls (CSA 2008)
From “What Works in Girls Education: Evidence and Policies from the Developing World” (Council on Foreign Relations, 2004) Herz and Sperling
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