The opposition Democratic Party Youth wing, the Uganda Youth Democrats has spearheaded a one day campaign of distributing sanitary pads to school going girls at Kisenyi Faith Primary School.
This they claim is show the First Lady and Minister for Education Janet Kataha Museeni their dissatisfaction with her announcement that the government will not be able to fulfill its promise of providing free pads because there is no money.
The development comes just hours to this year’s International Women’s Day celebrations under the Global theme, "Be bold for change." Uganda however considered "Women's empowerment for the changing world."
National celebrations will be held in Dokolo District.
But according to Rita Nakyanzi the UYD Secretary General says “beyond these boardroom phrases, there is a strong call for us to pause for a reality check and assess the real situation of the Ugandan girl child of school going age.”
She quoted a UNICEF report which indicates that 1 out of 10 school going girls skips 4 to 5 days when under-going menstruation, for every 28 days cycle, which translates into an estimated 13 learning days or 104 hours, of school time lost every term.
It is also estimated that about 23% of adolescent girls drop out of school when they practically begin menstruating as a new experience.
She explained that the bold ones, who cannot afford proper menstrual products, but are determined to study, have limited and sometimes very crude choices to rely on to absorb their menstrual flow, for example; pieces of old clothing, wards of toilet paper, banana fibers, leaves, mattress sponges among others while others scrap papers out of their exercise books. All these options are uncomfortable and inefficient to say the least.
That situation, coupled with the fact that some cultures in Uganda do not prioritize the girl child education and also because the mothers, who understand the needs of the girl child have weak say in the allocation of resources in many homes, explains the high dropout rate of the girls, especially in the upper classes in the primary and lower classes in secondary schools.
“Whereas there have been some Government efforts towards policy interventions on the matter of the girl child education, Democratic Party (DP) notes that those interventions have at best been political rhetoric’s and at worst difficult to implement and or to monitor” she said.