The man who wore a sanitary pad to help his wife

In India, 88% of women use dirty rags, newspapers, dried leaves, and ashes during their periods, because they just can’t afford to buy sanitary napkins.

Think about this the next time you reach into your bathroom cupboard for a tampon.

Sanitary products are something we take totally for granted. They’re just there. At the supermarket. In the bathroom cabinet. Floating around the bottom of our handbags.

Hardly what you’d consider to be a luxury item, right? But for most women around the world they are. And they shouldn’t be.

But in India, one man has decided to do something about this.

After he discovered his wife was not buying sanitary items so she could afford milk for the family, Arunachalam Muruganantham decided to make a product that women could afford.

Better still, to fully understand just what was required to do such a thing, he wore a sanitary pad for a week and fashioned his own menstruating uterus by filling a bladder with goat’s blood.

This is his story, via Co Exist.

“When I saw these sanitary napkins, I thought ‘Why couldn’t I create a low cost napkin for [my wife]?'” says Muruganantham.

He first tried to get his wife and sisters to test his hand-crafted napkins, but they refused.  His wife, thinking his project was all an excuse to meet younger women, left him. After repeated unsuccessful research attempts, including wearing panties with his do-it-yourself uterus, he eventually hit upon the idea of distributing free napkins to the students and collecting the used ones for study. That was the last straw for his mother. When she encountered a storeroom full of bloody sanitary napkins, she left too.

Analyzing branded napkins at laboratories led to Muruganantham’s first breakthrough. “I found out that these napkins were made of cellulose derived from the bark of a tree,” he said.

Once he knew how to make them, he discovered that the machine necessary to convert the pine wood fiber into cellulose cost more than half a million U.S. dollars. It’s one of the reasons why only multinational giants such as Johnson & Johnson and Procter & Gamble have dominated the sanitary napkin making industry in India.

It took Muruganantham a little over four years to create a simpler version of the machine, but he eventually found a solution. He can now make 1,000 napkins a day, which retail for about $.25 for a package of eight.

These days his business helps rural women buy the $2500 machines through NGOs and government grants. The machines and products are lowering women’s risk of reproductive infections. And they’re giving women jobs too. Running the machines employs four women and gives them an income.

Wow, right?

Arunachalam Muruganantham’s story reminded me of a post we ran a while ago about an initiative called She28.

According to She Innovates, millions of girls and women in developing countries miss up to 50 days of school/work per year because they do not have access to affordable sanitary pads when they menstruate.Pads are too expensive and rags which, in combination with a lack of a clean accessible water supply, are unhygienic and potentially harmful, let alone ineffective to contain leakage.

Watch this clip. And share it with every menstruating woman you know.