Jagrutiben, a 33-year-old woman living in Dharshana, Gujarat, India, benefitted immensely from the Asani program. She is married with two children (girls) and is currently working as a distribution specialist in the program, earning Rs.2000 (approximately $30) per month. Prior to joining the program, her role was limited to a homemaker who couldn’t travel to the city for the job due to unavailability of transport facilities and familial responsibilities - taking care of her husband, in-laws and children.
Asani gave her a platform to learn new skills, grow professionally and become an earning member of her family. Her monthly family income is in the range of Rs.10,000-15,000 ($120-$130), which is on the higher end for a family living in rural India.
Today, Jagruti is an independent and confident woman who is performing two roles- financially supporting her family, and helping women and girls learn about the importance of menstrual hygiene and management. As a mother, she ensures that her daughters are aware of what is a period and have access to safe sanitary napkins, unlike her.
Asani has helped many like Jagruti to learn about menstrual hygiene and the health benefits of using safe sanitary napkins. It has cultivated dignity in them by making them financially independent. It has not only resulted in enhanced knowledge on MHM but has also provided livelihood opportunities to women who are restricted to their household chores due to traditional norms or scarce options. We have reached out to 3,000 women alone in Gujarat and are planning to scale the same model to other Indian states by end of 2019.
We are excited to announce that with your help and support our Asani Sanitary Napkin program is doing great! It currently employs 11 women in the production unit who with their dedication and commitment have managed to produce 150,000 + sanitary napkins so far, out of which 20k sanitary napkins have been sold by our sales team of 20 will-powered women.
Apart from making a living for themselves, these women also contribute to the greater good of the society. They contributed 65k sanitary napkins in collaboration with Saral Designs to provide relief to the hundreds of women and girls affected by the Kerala floods.
Our Asani Sanitary Napkin Program has been successful in creating awareness and more women are keen on learning about the program. As part of our expansion plan we are creating awareness about the Sanitary Napkin Program and during one such awareness campaigns at the Gram Vikas Trust in Bharuch we were able to successfully enroll 2 women who travelled from different villages just to learn more about the program. They are now independent women who have been selling Asani sanitary napkins since the last 15 days.
We are gearing up to expand the Asani program to two more regions by the end of the year - expanding our impact by thousands.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
We're happy to share Zahida’s story with you. She is a 39 year old married woman and a mother of 4 children. She belongs to the Khergam village and is currently employed in the sales department.
She lost her father at a young age and had to give up her education due to financial issues. After her marriage, Zahida and her husband, who is a truck driver worked hard so that they could make ends meet.
Zahida did not want to compromise on her children’s education and wanted them to receive the education she never did and so she and her husband admitted their children, three girls and a boy in a good school. In 2017, Zahida and her husband faced a financial crisis when her husband left his job as a truck driver. It was then, that Zahida learnt about the vocational sewing program and the Sanitary Napkin Program. She enrolled herself in these programs and dedicated her time to learning.
With her commitment and hard work she is now independent and runs her own business from home by tailoring custom-made clothes. She is also part of the sales team where she sells Asani Sanitary Napkins.
She is happy and has a sense of pride in her achievements while being able to contribute her bit for this social cause. She is grateful that through the Asani Sanitary Napkin Program she is able to make extra income, provide better education for her children and dream beyond her circumstances.
Your support makes many such dreams come true.
As we prepare for Menstrual Hygiene Day (May 28th), we are excited to share an update with our Global Giving community about our current initiatives and our progress with our new SWACHH machine. Since the purchase of this groundbreaking machine, we are pleased to report that we have improved the quality of our Asani products and have received positive initial feedback from our customers. With this machine, a new Asani technician was hired to help program the equipment and provide any maintenance support needed. Since transitioning to this upgraded machine, we are delighted that we have already been able to increase our sales team from seven to fifteen women, with each woman selling 100-200 pad packs per month.
Meanwhile, in the U.S., we have also made some progress! May 1st marked the launch of a new Desai Foundation advocacy campaign called #PledgeYourPeriod - which aims to get our U.S. community more deeply involved in supporting our work with Asani and exposing the reality of the issues around menstrual hygiene in India. Though this campaign is still underway, we have seen that this subject remains a controversial topic of discussion in the western world. The campaign encourages both men and women to share on social media why they believe this is subject is important to talk about. We have learned through this experience that a taboo still exists (in the U.S.) around openly talking about this topic. We have been affirmed that much work is still needed!
In the coming weeks, gearing up to Menstrual Hygiene Day and our 1 year Asani anniversary, we are planning events in both the U.S and India.
As we prepare for our 1 year Asani anniversary, we are humbled by all that we have accomplished this year with your support and hope that you will stay with us on our journey as we continue to spread Asani’s message in new communities throughout the year to come.
Thank you for being a part of our team!
Sincerely,
Tess
Links:
Thanks to your support of our #PowerofaPad campaign and your investment in providing women in rural India access to menstrual health and hygiene we are excited to announce a new chapter for Asani! The funding generated from your donations has enabled us to purchase a new groundbreaking machine that will increase our production speed to 16 sanitary napkins every minute, allowing us to improve the quality of our product and simultaneously hire more women to help us serve more communities.
Throughout the past ten months, we have been humbled to watch as bit by bit more women and girls have adopted sanitary menstrual health practices through our Asani products and programs. However, we learned through listening to our users that due to the hand made nature of our pads, some of our customers were experiencing a problem with the pads bunching or the adhesive being too strong. We listened and sought out a solution to improve these issue. Thanks to your support we have now secured a cutting-edge new machine that will: create pads which are even more sanitary, eliminate the issue of bunching and use a softer gel adhesive.
Since the inception of Asani, we have taken great pride in the program's ability to provide reliable employment and job-training for women, most of whom have never had formal employment, and are happy to share that this switch will enable us to dramatically elevate our job opportunities. With more efficient production, we will now be able to scale up our sales and distribution team and hire a female engineer while maintaining our current production team. We are thrilled to be able to offer more women the opportunity to become educators, entrepreneurs and ambassadors for menstrual health and hygiene; providing more rural women and girls with the basic needs to grow and thrive.
Our team looks at this new chapter as a super-boost in chipping away at the antiquated stigma around menstruation and as we prepare for spring are excited to share that menstrual health and hygiene will now be a part of our school curriculum! As we launch these new developments for Asani... we invite you to join us as a recurring donor and train more women in the principles and practices of MHM every month!
Sincerely,
Tess Fenn
Director or Partnerships and Development
Links:
Project Reports on GlobalGiving are posted directly to globalgiving.org by Project Leaders as they are completed, generally every 3-4 months. To protect the integrity of these documents, GlobalGiving does not alter them; therefore you may find some language or formatting issues.
If you donate to this project or have donated to this project, you will get an e-mail when this project posts a report. You can also subscribe for reports via e-mail without donating.
We'll only email you new reports and updates about this project.
Support this important cause by creating a personalized fundraising page.
Start a Fundraiser
Make a monthly donation & get 
