It is with great hope and excitement that we embraced the United Nations’ call for a universal celebration of all women on International Women’s Day on March 8. Women’s History Month is an ideal time to highlight the work of organizations like CouldYou?, established in 2008, which champions the causes aligned with this year’s themes identified by the UN: advancing gender equality, ending poverty, promoting gender-responsive financing, transitioning to a green economy and care society, and supporting feminist changemakers.
Investing in Women as a Human Rights Issue: The CouldYou? Cup
Investment in women is not merely a matter of gender equality, it is a vital investment in human rights. CouldYou? understands that to achieve gender equality, the basic needs of girls and women must take center stage in tangible, concrete, and measurable actions rather than performative measures or lip service. That is why CouldYou?’s mission is to “curate, prove, and scale the solution to end period poverty by 2040,” according to founder and CEO Christine Garde-Denning.
Garde-Denning has devoted her life to caring for the impoverished. She is one of “Forty Over 40” women who are reinventing, disrupting, and making an impact globally. CouldYou? was recently nominated for an Earthshot Prize for “creating a waste-free world” while addressing a global issue, impacting 500 million girls and women each month.
Period Poverty: A Global Women’s and Human Rights Issue
In Africa, 1 in 10 girls miss school during menstruation, and 80% live on less than $2 per day, with 60% living in severe poverty. In the United States, 1 in 4 women/girls cannot afford menstrual products, 1 in 5 girls miss school during menstruation, and 1 in 10 college students miss class during menstruation. For Garde-Denning, “every nation is impacted by period poverty, and, frankly, that’s unacceptable.”
CouldYou? tackles such issues head on, centering period poverty as a fundamental health issue that is either unknown, ignored, stigmatized, or outright overlooked. Through its innovative CouldYou? Cup initiative, established in 2018, the nonprofit has garnered a 91.5%+ acceptability in Africa, the U.S., Ukraine, Nepal, and India. Through widespread use of the CouldYou? Cup, absenteeism is decreasing and health increasing.
Monitoring and evaluating is key to CouldYou?’s work. The organization has been invited to author a chapter in the book “The Elgar Companion to Social Innovation and the UN Sustainable Development Goals,” highlighting its work with the cup, including the Wa East Pilot in Ghana, which saw 97% acceptability of the cup in a region where a Plan international-funded study revealed that 83% of adolescent girls engage in transactional sex for pads. The book will be published in Q3 of 2024.
The data from CouldYou?’s pilot was recently published in the British Journal of Healthcare and Medical Research.
The cup offers sustainable solutions to menstrual hygiene while also ensuring that girls can continue their education and work without interruption, promoting equality, empowerment, and fueling economies. Further, girls and women, no longer have to make impossible decisions like choosing between food or buying sanitary products. Food insecurity and period poverty are inextricably linked.
Ending Poverty Through Direct Action: Literacy Campaign in Mozambique Evolves into Producing a Sustainable CouldYou? Cup
CouldYou? began as literacy program to educate children in Mozambique, training teachers how to identify illiterate studies and get them literate in five months. At the time, the country was 70% illiterate. Even though the program was successful, it emerged that while 94% of girls entered kindergarten, only 11% entered middle school, and just 1% attended college. Local partners and Provincial Ministries of Education asked CouldYou? to help close the gap.
Further research uncovered one key reason for girls missing school: period poverty, which was not just an issue impacting girls in Mozambique, but one afflicting women and girls worldwide. The World Bank found that girls not completing 12 years of education results in $15 trillion to $30 trillion in lost earnings.
Period poverty causes girls to miss school, abandon dreams, and fall into depression (a common byproduct of poverty). Others become sick from using unsanitary rags, T-shirts, leaves, dirt, and even their children’s diapers, living in indignity and shame, while some quite unnecessarily die from infections.
With 1.8 billion girls, women, and other persons menstruating, nearly 500,000 of them face period poverty. By providing menstrual health products like the CouldYou? Cup, we can both remove barriers and break the cycle of poverty.
CouldYou?’s approach is direct and action-oriented, acknowledging the urgency to act before the 2040 deadline, when the number of women and girls living in poverty could rise dramatically.
Use of the menstrual cup is not new; versions of the cup have been used around the world for more than 85 years.
The CouldYou? Cup is an FDA-registered, sustainable, reusable, manufactured in the U.S., 100% medical grade, silicone menstrual cup. The nonprofit has distributed menstrual cups to 170,000 women and girls across Africa, Ukraine, India, Nepal, and the U.S. There is now a waiting list of more than 200,000. Each cup comes with a cotton carrying bag for convenient and discreet storage. CouldYou? employs marginalized girls in numerous countries to sew the all-cotton bags.
Gender-Responsive Hiring, Uplifting Feminist Changemakers
Girls in Uganda ages 10-17 make the majority of the cloth bags for the cups distributed in the U.S. Many of these girls are transitioning out of sex trafficking. CouldYou? also embodies the principles of feminist leadership, advocating for systemic change while providing practical solutions.
Advocating for a Green Economy and Care Society
The shift toward a green economy and care society requires a re-evaluation of our current economic systems and their multifaceted impacts on women. CouldYou? is at the forefront of this shift, offering an eco-friendly alternative to traditional menstrual products.
Women menstruate monthly for up to 40 years. Using 25-plus tampons/pads per month is equivalent to 300-plus per year, 3,000-plus over 10 years, and 12,000-plus over 40 years – not to mention plastic wrappers, applicators, and absorbent lining equaling more than 300 pounds of waste per menstruator. Stanford University researchers report that up to 12 billion pads and 7 billion tampons are disposed of annually, ending up in a landfill, while others clog sewers or contribute to the staggering number of plastic products in our already-polluted oceans. It takes pads/tampons a minimum of 500 and a maximum of 800 years to decompose. The CouldYou? Cup lasts a decade.
Due to a unique partnership with Stericycle, the cup can be repurposed into renewable energy, further promoting environmental sustainability. One cup saves 89 kg of carbon dioxide emissions, the same as charging a mobile phone 10,000 times.
Uniting to Transform Challenges into Opportunities
This International Women’s Day, the call to action was clear: Unite to transform the challenges faced by women into opportunities for growth and empowerment. Organizations like CouldYou? are crucial in this transformative work, addressing the intersectionality of education, health, women’s rights, and environmental sustainability to forge a better future for all. To find out more about CouldYou?’s work and how you can end period poverty, visit CouldYou?’s website.
