by Elly O’Rourke
BRAC Uganda Intern
After working in the private sector for 6 years, I started my MBA at Duke with an aim to be involved in international development through profit-generating social businesses. In my summer at BRAC Uganda, I worked for the Research & Evaluations Department on the market assessment of low cost sanitary napkin production in Uganda. This was a perfect experience to pair along with my studies of social entrepreneurship and finance at school.
Through conducting focus groups and interviews with microfinance borrowers and adolescent girls in the Empowerment and Livelihood for Adolescents (ELA) program and secondary schools from eastern, western, and central Uganda, I collected qualitative (and some quantitative) information on the consumer demand of low cost sanitary napkins. In Uganda, sanitary napkins are imported from other countries and too expensive for most women below the $1.25/ day poverty line to afford. Women often resort to the use of bark cloth, banana leaves, rags, newspaper, or toilet paper to control the menstrual bleeding. The local production of cheaper sanitary napkins will not only provide income generation for the factory workers and the community health promoters, but also improve the health outcomes of women in Uganda.
BRAC has a successfully operating sanitary napkin production center in Bangladesh. The organization is now conducting market research and analysis to set up a similar social enterprise in Uganda.
Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn explain the importance of affordable sanitary napkins in their 8/17/09 New York Times Magazine piece "The Women's Crusade>"
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