Health officials and community stakeholders in Ghana’s Volta Region have called on the government to reduce the cost of menstrual products and help tackle period poverty.
They said affordable sanitary products, better school sanitation and stronger efforts to challenge menstrual stigma were essential to ensuring girls could remain in education.
The appeal was made during the Volta Region’s delayed commemoration of World Menstrual Hygiene Day, organised by the Volta Regional Health Directorate with support from UNFPA.
World Menstrual Hygiene Day is observed annually on 28 May, but the regional event was held in October. It brought together schoolchildren and girls who are out of school, while boys also took part to improve understanding and encourage support for their peers.
Dr. Hectoria Awekeya, the Acting Deputy Director of Public Health for the Volta Region, said many women and girls continued to experience period poverty because menstrual products were either difficult to obtain or too expensive.
“Majority of women are still facing period poverty because the menstrual products are either unavailable or they are available at a price they cannot afford,” she said.
She urged the government, development partners and other stakeholders to work towards lowering prices and making menstrual products accessible to vulnerable groups.
“So we are calling on all well-meaning people of the world and government to push the reduction of prices for menstrual products and make them affordable to even the vulnerable population,” Dr. Awekeya added.
She said the programme also aimed to give girls the knowledge and confidence to manage menstruation at school and at home. Menstruation, she stressed, was a natural biological process and should not be treated as a cause for shame.
Facilities needed alongside sanitary products
Joycelyn Tetteh, the Member of Parliament for North Dayi, said no girl’s education or ambitions should be affected by an inability to afford menstrual products or use suitable facilities.
Addressing the theme “Together for a Period-Friendly Ghana”, she pointed to the government’s free sanitary pads programme as an intervention intended to ease pressure on families and help girls attend school.
However, she said distributing sanitary pads alone was not enough. Schools also needed clean toilets, dependable water supplies, soap, private areas where girls could change and safe systems for disposing of used products.
She added that those facilities should be accessible to learners with disabilities.
The North Dayi MP also called on parents to prepare girls for menstruation before they experienced their first period. Teachers, she said, should provide discreet support to pupils who encountered menstrual difficulties while at school.
