By Wilma Correa | Donor Development & Communication Manager
There are over 355 million menstruating women and girls in India, but millions of women across the country still face significant barriers to a comfortable and dignified experience with menstrual hygiene management.
Catalysts for Social Action conducts ongoing menstrual hygiene sessions with girls from orphanages in some remote districts around Mumbai, Madhya Pradesh, Pune & Goa to explain the importance of hygiene, usage and disposal of sanitary napkins.
Special Adolescent Health Program (AHP) is also designed in very elaborative way so that this module of 10 sessions will educate girls about menstruation, menstrual hygiene, usage and disposal of sanitary napkins, puberty, reproductive system etc.
These girls have many questions to ask but in daily life they hesitate even to speak about it and it leads to many health & hygiene related issues. Questions like how to keep hygiene? When menstruation starts? And why it is important and what are the consequences if it is not handled properly. Adolescent Health Program addresses some of these questions & dilemmas. We conduct AHP sessions at various Child Care Institutes (CCIs) pan India from the age group of 13 years and above.
Menstrual hygiene awareness is also one of our critical approaches to understand the menstrual status of girls at the CCI’s by the doctors. After health check-up, doctors spend some time separately with adolescent girls and help girls understand menstrual issues and hygiene. We are also in the process of creating a period tracker for girls at CCIs so as to record their cycles & other observations. The same information can help the doctor during periodic checkups. Sanitary napkins are given by CCI to respective children and usually disposed in an environment friendly manner.
With an aim to strengthen facilitator capacity to deliver awareness training, improving the reach and quality of low-cost pads and ability to manage their menstruation, CSA is trying to create maximum awareness between these girls.Girls are very open these days and feel confident to deal with such issues.
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