Champion Her Right to an Education

Dear Friends, 

Thanks to you and all of our amazing supporters, the fall has already been deeply impactful! We are thrilled to share that we have launched our 3^rd issue of Nia Teen magazine, and that we also held our final community-strengthening program of the year. 

Self Love. Self Respect. Self Worth. Voice. Choice. Agency.This is the theme of our 3rd issue of Nia Teen, and our pilot issue is hot off the press! This issue not only emphasizes the importance of self-love, but also covers the importance of finding your voice in the context of power-dynamics, gender-based violence, and assault. We teach girls that assault and disrespect are never acceptable, and offer guidance on consent, reporting abuse, and seeking support from safe people.

Girls are at the center of everything we do. That's why we test our magazine content among the girls we serve, to ensure we’re providing the relevant information that girls seek and need during adolescence. With our partner, Fountain Youth Initiative, we shared issue 3 among 200 primary schoolgirls in Nairobi in Septemeber. Based on feedback gathered from this distribution, we will finalize the content of issue 3 within this next month before distributing it in January to 3,000 girls in our seminal research study, The Nia Project.

In other news, thanks to our longtime partner, The PaperSeed Foundation, we hosted an amazing two-day workshop with our 14 community-based partners in Nairobi on Septmeber 14th and 15th, where we strengthened our shared interventions to help girls stay in school and thrive. We also distributed sanitary pads to reach 10,000 marginalized girls this school term. It was thrilling to hear from our partners about how access to pads, rights-based health education, and safe people, has positively impacted the lives of girls in their communities.

As a result of our interventions, our partners reported: 

•Increased confidence of girls which boosted their grades in school

•Reduced cases of school absenteeism due to menstruation

•Reduced taboo surrounding menstrual hygiene in schools

•Reduced cases of teen pregnancies and subsequent child marriage 

•Reduced cases of infections caused by unsanitary alternatives to pads

These are just a few examples of why our holistic interventions and community-based solutions are so critical to girls’ development. We are deeply honored to help girls safely and confidently navigate puberty, and we thank you for your enduring support. Thank you for everything you do!

Warm regards, 

Alison 

Dear Friends,

Progress is happening for adolescent girls! On June 22nd, Kenya's President Uhuru Kenyatta passed a law to ensure free sanitary pads for all schoolgirls. With our support, starting in 2010, the Government of Kenya was the first country to write sanitary pads into the national education budget, making them as essential as other school items like pencils and notebooks. And with this policy amendment, the provision of pads is not just a budget item that can be cut, but a law. We are hopeful that this initiative will roll out successfully, and we will continue to fill in any gaps as needed. 

In other news, on June 19th, with our partners, The Population Council, we officially launched the Nia Project! This two-year study involves 5,000 adolescent girls currently in Class 7 across 140 primary schools in three sub-counties of Kilifi, Kenya. It is designed to determine the degree to which providing girls with reproductive health education (our Nia Teen magazines) and menstrual hygiene products positively impacts their education, health, and safety. This is the FIRST rigorously evaluated study to provide longitudinal evidence regarding a) Primary school completion and Primary School performance and b) improvement of health and safety outcomes as defined by reduction of unwanted sex, delay of early pregnancies, and increased reporting of gender-based violence. 

The study will evaluate the individual and combined impact of sanitary pad distribution and reproductive health education on these two axes of evaluation. Evidence from The Nia Project will lay the foundation for future action and study on menstrual health management, and school-based reproductive health education. These results will represent a major step forward in the quality of evidence on approaches to improve the health, education, and social outcomes of adolescent girls in Kenya. We are inextricably excited and honored to walk with 5,000 girls on this journey!

Lastly, we presented our work at the 2017 Society for Menstrual Cycle Research Conference in Atlanta on June 23rd! It was wonderful to unite with our fellow menstrual health and equity advocates from around the world. This is truly a GLOBAL movement and we're thrilled to be a part of it.

I have attached a photo of some of our beneficiaries enjoying their copy of Nia Teen magazine, as well as a photo from the Society for Menstrual Cycle Research Conference!

Thank you, as always, for your support. We could not do this work without you!

Warmly,

Alison