Hope to transform India's attitude towards menstrual health forever: Ujaas founder

Prioritising menstrual health and hygiene as a key focus area, the Aditya Birla Education Trust has launched a new vertical called Ujaas. Its vision is to create a positive and sustainable impact in the menstrual health landscape in India by empowering adolescent girls and women to adopt effective menstrual health and hygiene management practices. As per Ujaas, in India, 23 per cent of girls drop out of school on reaching puberty; one out of three women do not have access to sanitary products; 71 per cent girls in their adolescence remain unaware of menstruation till their first period. We spoke to Advaitesha Birla, Founder of Ujaas on the initiative.
Excerpts

1) What made you launch Ujaas?

Since generations, my family has always been involved in social work. Throughout my childhood, I've been influenced by strong-minded, independent and progressive women, including my mother - Neerja Birla. As a result of her untiring efforts, Aditya Birla Education Trust (ABET) has been able to positively impact the lives of people from all sections of society and bring about progressive change in the field of education and on the mental health landscape of India. Having seen her passion towards the welfare work that ABET does, I've always been inspired to follow her footsteps.

Since my early teens, I've felt passionately about menstrual health and management. As I read more about the prevailing issues in India, the statistics that came out were really startling and highlight the gravity of the issue. The fact that even in this age so many women still have no access to safe menstrual absorbents and have to resort to unhygienic and unsafe alternatives, is disheartening. It is disillusioning how a process that 'gives life' can be considered impure. These beliefs violate basic human rights. I truly believe that a woman must never-ever be afraid or ashamed of her periods. Period!

And so, advocating for menstrual health became my calling. Ujaas, the newest vertical of ABET, started as a small dream and humble initiative to make a difference. We hope to turn it into a 'Movement' that can transform India's attitude towards menstrual health forever.

2) What kind of challenges do you foresee?

When we thought about starting Ujaas, we first looked at all the challenges and hurdles that we would face. And to tell you the truth, we foresaw most of them right at the start.

Like it is in so many other parts of the world, the stigmas surrounding menstrual health are so strong in our country that it remains a taboo topic. People still believe in the archaic myths about menstruation and continue to practice the age-old rituals where women are made to feel conscious, ashamed and apologetic about their periods. In fact, society's attitude often amounts to 'menstruation/period shaming'.

Families and communities still don't want to discuss the issue openly and often choose to not send the women and adolescent girls of the family to our awareness workshops. Convincing people to let them participate is definitely a challenge at times. Also, in remote areas, without support from their families, girls lack the means of

transportation to come to our workshop venues. This is where we have to make the effort to reach out to them.

I can say with honesty that despite having made inroads, the challenges still exist. But we intend to keep chipping away at the resistance and work unflinchingly towards the fruition of our goal - a world where period poverty no longer exists.

3) Will Ujaas be a pan-India initiative?

Most certainly. Ujaas has started its work in Maharashtra as of now, but plans to take our program to other states too and, hopefully, will see fruition very soon. We're here for the long haul and don't intend to stop. Slowly and surely, we plan to reach out to as many adolescent girls, women, families and communities as possible across the length and breadth of India. We also understand that the challenges will differ in some ways in different parts of our country. But we're learning something new each day and putting the experience that we gain to use as we expand the scope and area of our operations. In my mind: The movement has just started, there is so much more to come.

4) What kind of targets have you given yourself? How many villages/urban centres do you plan to impact in the first year and in five years?

At the conceptual stage, when we looked at facts, figures and demographics, we realised the issue of menstrual health and hygiene

management exists in both the urban and the rural areas of India. In rural areas, however, the situation is much worse due to the lack of awareness, education and resources. And we came to the conclusion that one way of reaching out to the maximum number of women in rural areas would be to start operations in urban areas and then use the city or town as a base to go into the interiors.

Most importantly, one of our goals is to work with as many schools as we can. Collaborating with schools will allow us to reach out to young girls who have just begun to experience menstruation but do not understand it properly and are even afraid of it. Some of them even choose to or are made to skip school because of it. By creating awareness and educating them about it, we will be able to influence their thought process. By giving them confidence, breaking taboos and encouraging open conversations, we can try to ensure that young girls can continue to go to school and articulate their needs more openly at home as well.

We've started implementing our project in 16 villages and 13 tribal padas in four districts of Maharashtra, where we're working with grassroots level organisations. We're already working with around 50 schools in Amravati, Washim and Palghar districts of Maharashtra to promote awareness about menstrual health. So far, we've been able to reach out to 7000+ beneficiaries and have distributed over 1,50,000 sanitary napkins. Currently, we are in the process of chalking out a roadmap for next five years, basis our learnings of last 6 months.

5) What initiatives do you plan to take to make women and young girls more aware of menstrual health?

To create awareness, we conduct workshops with adolescent girls and women in rural areas to give them a platform to receive accurate and necessary information about menstruation and hygiene. This, despite the fact that we also distribute sanitary napkins to them, which they otherwise have no access to. And so, we have resorted to a much more well-rounded approach. We are now talking to the families and communities as well. We particularly look forward to conducting workshops with mothers and train them so that they can take the initiative to instil a progressive and educated approach to menstruation in their daughters.

Similarly, collaborating with local organizations is helping us reach out to the rural communities in their language and with respect to their cultural ethos. Our attempt is to promote sustainable measures for menstrual health management by setting up support groups and support systems within the communities themselves. To achieve this, we're tapping into the vast potential of communities and training many of our beneficiaries so that they can become torch bearers of our movement. When we create awareness in 10 girls and train them, each one of them can then go on to train 10 more girls… and so on. This will have a ripple effect where the number of people that we start reaching out to grows exponentially.

6) How do you plan to fight the taboo around periods?

During their periods - women are not allowed in places of worship and in kitchens. In extreme cases, they have to go and live outside their villages. The worst thing is that women themselves are conditioned into

accepting these beliefs and practices. Fighting these stigmas and beliefs is a Herculean task that will definitely take time.

But we've realized that the best way to fight the stigmas and the taboo around periods is to use facts to dispel the myths. Through various activities, interactive games and instructive sessions during our workshops, we deliver an age-appropriate learning to our beneficiaries, covering an array of important topics ranging from the biological importance of menstruation to medical facts about it and dispelling the myths, taboos and stigmas surrounding it.

I genuinely believe that as awareness and knowledge about menstruation grows, the myths will begin to vanish over time.