Pakistan has 126 million women, which includes 118 million girls. Take your pick of these statistics out of 250 million registered Pakistanis. What is undisputed is that 118 million require sanitary pads for basic menstruation hygiene. This staggering number should have facilitated, triggered a market for personal hygiene products?
In a country which is completely elite expenditure-focused and only develops according to a coterie of needs, the products that the majority of women need are in fact absent. The demand and supply chain makes no economic sense.
In most muhallahs, villages, towns and cities in Pakistan, the sewerage and waste management systems are weak and dysfunctional. Add cultural practices of hiding anything related to women’s bodily/biological needs, which must remain shrouded and invisible. Add the lack of economic power or disposable income to purchase, and the result is toxic, dangerous and unhealthy.
What sanitary products should women and girls use and dispose of in this socio-cultural economic landscape? What kind of personal hygiene product can they afford? Is there a product in the market, and is it also accessible in their local shops for women to purchase? Will male shopkeepers and male family members purchase these products for the girls and women? I have asked these questions, and the answers in most rural and peri-urban areas are depressing.
Most women do not save or spend from their meagre disposable income on their essential personal hygiene. These basic fundamental human rights are not considered essential and remain at the bottom of the list within the restricted totem pole of family expenditures. In this environment, when there is an opportunity to receive goods for basic needs, the giving agencies need to be sensitive and cognisant of these realities. Socially mobilising for improving personal hygiene also requires local options to be able to do so.
Whatever donor agencies give must also be repeatable, available, sustainable, and must also do no harm to the already fragile environment, and must be sensitive to the existing personal practices (hygienic).
Government and donor agencies which purchase and supply the products need to rethink their procurement policies that promote unsustainable interventions over and over again
Since 2005, where disaster response management, relief works, funded by donors’ agencies and all the associated businesses and non-governmental organisations including federal and provincial government departments involved, should have implemented at least ONE lesson: Do not buy or distribute single-use sanitary napkins in Pakistan’s weak waste management landscape, and do not include unaffordable sanitary napkins in the dignity kits distributed to displaced families. Whether in camps, encampments, on the roadside, in tents, in KP, Balochistan or Sindh, women use pieces of cloth (dirty) as their menstruation napkin. Therefore, to replace this practice, we must provide a clean, hygienic, cloth-based reusable napkin that absorbs and is easily reusable and disposable without harming the clogged waste management system.
Depending on the level of education or personal hygiene awareness, women have to be reminded about the linkages of personal hygiene to the exorbitant, unaffordable health costs. Therefore, when they are menstruating, they must use a clean pad/cloth which they can wash properly, dry and reuse multiple times safely and hygienically.
Access to clean water is another challenge everywhere in Pakistan and therefore their ability to access water for personal hygiene is also a factor; another is privacy to wash. In spite of both these challenges, factoring in affordability and sanitation systems, reusable environmentally sanitary is the most sensible option.
In light of these concrete and multiple challenges, it is seriously remiss of aid agencies and their extension partners to purchase, push and support products which are not environmentally friendly and unaffordable. This remains a basic need product for all girls and women and must remain unharmful to the fragile environment of women. Government and donor agencies which purchase and supply the products need to rethink their procurement policies that promote unsustainable interventions over and over again.
Donor development needs to rethink these easy, lazy corporate practices of bulk buying in urban areas, and shift and walk the SDG talk and begin supporting community-led sustainable, localised options. Purchase reusable sanitary pads made by women who have been trained to do it cleanly and hygienically, which strengthens their economic ecosystems, while also reinforcing environmentally friendly practices.
In my recent visits to Buner and Swat, I realised UNFPA, UNICEF, ONEWOMEN, CARE, and IOM were all distributing single-use sanitary pads in their dignity kits; in all the water, sanitation, and women-related interventions. WHY? Have these agencies forgotten the “do no harm” conventions, and especially since climate change and adaptation policies have become the rhetorical language of every development speaker?
Why do they continue to pursue procurement policies with big corporates undermining all the environmental development sustainable goals associated with personal hygiene, menstruation products and practices?
The lack of integration of sectors remains a huge challenge in the business of donor development. Without connecting all the dots related to personal hygiene practices, at the individual level, the availability of disposable income, affordability, with promotion of health/hygiene/illness prevention measures, or mitigation measures to intervention policies of supply chains of the policy makers, we are collectively contributing to worsening climate change adaptation.
Policies of procurement must link to strengthening the livelihoods of women and increase the demand from the trained cottage industries/enterprise development clusters, thereby developing a local supply chain in emergency or all year round, which encourages better health and personal hygiene demand in local markets, thereby triggering a transformation and a sustainable outcome. This is not rocket science; if those who make procurement decisions are sensitive to strengthening local communities to help themselves and trigger local supply chains, which help women personally and economically. A win-win.
I have identified a cottage unit in Swat, in Charsadda, in Quetta and one in Sukkur, which is also fed by a cluster of women in Jaffarabad. How many more are there in the 154 districts of Pakistan who can make reusable, environmentally friendly sanitary napkins?