ZanaA :: Tools for Transformation

Solution

Solution
The ZanaA solution

Currently in Kenya, more than 868,000 adolescent girls miss 17% of each school year due to a lack of sanitary pads and underwear, which leaves them trailing behind their male counterparts in school as they are absent for 3.5 million school days per month.

ZanaA has found a long-term and holistic solution to this problem, which is to establish a sustainable business creating locally-produced, environmentally-safe sanitary pads in Kenya.

First, ZanaA plans to coordinate the national distribution of sanitary pads, to ensure all vendors are distributing proper sanitary pads and with synchronized training in sanitary pad use and disposal as well as age-appropriate sexual maturation education. This will help reduce the logistical burden of sanitary pad distribution, ensure sexual predators are not given entry to the school, distribute pads at the convenience of the school curriculum, enable equitable distribution across the country, and reduce the cost burden to donors.

Second, ZanaA has become the exclusive distributor to school girls for a sanitary pad invented by Dr. Musaazi of Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda, called MakaPads™, made from local, easily replenishable natural resources.

MakaPads has been approved by the Ugandan Bureau of Standards, is in the final stage of registering with the Kenyan Bureau of Standards, and is pending international patent. This is the first of several solutions, to provide sanitary pad production opportunities using available natural resources.

ZanaA is interesting in networking with any producers of sanitary pads and any organizations who provide or who are planning to provide sanitary pads to schools.

Conversations have also been started with five networks of women’s groups regarding sales of MakaPads to women at the bottom of the pyramid.
read more...