icddr,b scientists win major research grant to improve menstrual hygiene management in schools

18 AUG 2016

icddr,b scientists and their international collaborators have been awarded a US$ 500,000 grant by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to develop innovative menstrual hygiene interventions that will reduce the numbers of school days lost by girls due to menstruation. 

The project’s pilot study entitled ‘Piloting menstrual hygiene management interventions among urban and rural schools in Bangladesh’ was launched on the icddr,b campus on 16 August.

 

Photo: Asian Development Bank. CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

At present, many Bangladeshi girls lack menstrual hygiene management facilities in school settings. The lack of proper facilities, combined with pervasive cultural shame around menstruation, is known to negatively impact girls’ education.  It has been estimated that 40% of menstruating girls in Bangladesh regularly miss three days of school a month. The new icddr,b project will seek greater insights into the challenges posed by menstruation to female school attendance and academic performance, and will work towards developing cost-effective and culturally-acceptable solutions.  

“We expect this study to lead to a standard intervention package with multiple iterations that is sustainable, feasible and acceptable,” says Ms Farhana Sultana, a scientist in icddr,b’s environmental interventions unit (EIU), and the project’s principal investigator. “Long-term, we look for these menstrual hygiene interventions to create a sufficiently supportive environment in schools so that girls miss less school during menstruation.’’

The study also hopes to demonstrate the value of integrated community-based interventions, with teachers and community members contributing to the empowerment and educational development of schoolgirls. The researchers plan to develop a novel intervention that brings together girls, boys, schoolteachers, parents, community members, school management committees and staff from the Ministry of Education. Representatives from these groups will form a steering committee and will lead and endorse the development of a menstrual hygiene management action plan and guideline.

Creating a supportive environment for menstruating girls at schools is a critical step towards eliminating gender disparities in education. Pilot programmes like this are essential in encouraging relevant stakeholders to invest. Successful demonstrations of female educational empowerment could motivate educators and policy makers in Bangladesh to implement a menstrual health management strategy more broadly.

Other personnel working on the project include icddr,b researcher Dr Mahbub Ul Alam, as co-principal investigator, together with Professor Stephen P Luby  from Stanford University, USA and Professor Peter J Winch from Johns Hopkins University, USA, as international collaborators.

The project is funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation as part of the ‘Grand Challenges: Putting Women and Girls at the Center of Development’ initiative. 

AWR