After an old bell rang one July afternoon in 2024 to signal the close of day at Gowrie-Tingre D/A Junior High School, a schoolgirl remained seated in the classroom as her classmates hurriedly picked their schoolbags and left for home.
She was sitting on something she did not want her peers, particularly the boys, to see. And she was prepared to wait behind until everybody had left.
She was there for a long while, occasionally placing her head on a desk in front of her and at times staring at a cracked cement chalkboard on a wall.
Then, when she felt there was no one else around, she slowly stood from the chair and used her own schoolbag to wipe a blood stain from the surface of the seat.
She did not know that some teachers, who had noticed her unusual delay in the classroom since the brass bell rang, were paying a curious attention to her actions from a distance.
After wiping the face of the seat, she came out of the classroom. As she walked out of the premises, the teachers spotted a blood spot behind her school uniform.
Moments after she disappeared from sight, the teachers walked into the classroom and went to her seat.
They observed a partly cleaned blood spot on the seat’s surface and understood that she was on her menstrual period. They realised she was avoiding an abnormal stigma girls generally suffered at the hands of their peers at the school during menstruation.
WaterAid Ghana intervenes
That girl was not the only pupil going through that serial, silent suffering in Bongo, a border district in Ghana’s Upper East Region, where countless teenagers from underprivileged homes mostly use toilet tissue as menstrual pads.
And that school was not the only public centre of learning in the district where girls were involuntarily staying away from the classroom— and missing lessons— because stigma had inspired them to accept menstruation as an inborn scandal for which they ought to feel guilty and strictly self-quarantine for a while.
Some disadvantaged families in the district earn so little from their subsistence farming they cannot afford a pack of disposable sanitary pads sold at Gh¢20 ($2) consistently for their girls.
That Gh¢20 is all some households need— and may scarcely get— to buy ingredients for a family supper.
And because toilet paper is not liquid-resistant, it cannot absorb menstrual flow. Its use as a sanitary pad substitute leads to leaks from the girl’s underwear to her school uniform.
It causes discomfort and distraction to her while a class is in session or while she is taking part in a Physical Education (PE) activity. And it may also expose her to infections.
A month after the schoolgirl wiped the blood-stained chair with her schoolbag, WaterAid Ghana, a non-governmental organisation established in 1985 to improve the access of poor communities in Ghana to safe water, better sanitation and good hygiene, extended its outreach efforts to Bongo under a project called SHARE.
An acronym standing for Sexual Health and Reproductive Education, SHARE is a project jointly being implemented by Right To Play, Forum for African Women Educationalists (FAWE), Family Health International (FHI) 360 Ghana and WaterAid Ghana. It was launched in 2022 to protect, educate and empower young people, with Right To Play leading the quartet in the project execution.
What WaterAid Ghana did against menstrual stigma
When WaterAid Ghana arrived in Bongo, it selected 12 public basic schools in the district as it set out to uproot the centuries-old menstrual stigma from the SHARE catchment area.
The schools were Goo D/A JHS, Kadare D/A JHS, Ayopia D/A JHS, St. Luke R/C JHS, Salibga D/A JHS and Gowrie D/A JHS.
The others comprised Tarongo D/A JHS, Dua D/A JHS, Gowrie-Tingre D/A JHS, Kunkua D/A JHS, Fr. Lebel Memorial R/C JHS and Bongo D/A JHS.
WaterAid Ghana, in collaboration with the Ghana Education Service (GES), organised a sensitisation workshop under the SHARE project for a number of teachers from the 12 schools.
The teachers subsequently educated the pupils at their respective schools about personal hygiene manners, menstruation, menstrual hygiene practices, the dangers associated with substance abuse and their rights.
They also formed school health clubs aimed at empowering the schoolchildren to become health advocates and good sanitation promoters.
WaterAid shares reusable sanitary pads
It did not end there. WaterAid Ghana also distributed free reusable cloth sanitary pads to schoolgirls in the district through their school authorities, bringing the years-long use of toilet paper as menstrual pads to an end.
Both the girls and the boys in those schools also were taught how to make the reusable cloth menstrual pads on their own. The boys were not left out of the training so they could produce the reusable pads for their sisters— and future wives.
“Before the intervention of the SHARE project, we used to record students staying away from school or girls giving themselves to men to get money to buy sanitary pads,” a teacher at Gowrie-Tingre JHS, Rebecca Akadoore, told journalists during a WaterAid tour of Bongo on Monday, 24 June 2025.
The teacher doubles as a school-based health coordinator for Gowrie-Tingre JHS.
“But we don’t record absenteeism during their menstrual periods anymore. The SHARE project has provided them with reusable sanitary pads they can wash, dry and use again. They can even use it for more than a year.”
Impact of the project
The school-based health coordinator said the project had helped the girls “to improve their hygienic practices, to know more about their rights, to calculate their menstrual cycles ahead, as to how to keep themselves during the period and to stay in school during their menstrual periods.”
She affirmed that menstrual stigma had come to an end at the school because the boys, thanks to the SHARE project, “now see menstruation as a good sign, not a sign of danger or a thing of shame.”
Louisa Akanobre was 12 years of age when the SHARE project started at Gowrie-Tingre JHS. She told newsmen during the Monday tour that she now felt comfortable in school because boys no longer laughed at menstruating girls.
A boy in the same school named Prosper Ayinbotima said: “Before the SHARE Project came to this school we used to laugh at the girls who [experienced] menstruation. But now we know that menstruation is a natural thing; so, we help them to buy or sew the reusable sanitary pad.”
The Bongo District Coordinator of the GES’ School Health Education Programme (SHEP), Evelyn Yadeh, remarked that some GES officials also benefited from the SHARE project through a training programme WaterAid Ghana undertook in the district.
“Those days they absented themselves from school because of menstruation. They would stay at home for five or seven days. But this time round, because of the reusable sanitary pad, they still come to school when they are menstruating.
“The reusable sanitary pad also has drastically reduced the number of girls dropping out of school in the district. And through the education on sexual health, boys now know that menstruation is normal and natural and that if a girl fails to experience it at the expected time it means there is a problem,” she added in her remarks.
Some observations made by the press and the regrets some schoolboys expressed during the tour regarding their initial misconceptions about menstruation may bear witness to the fact the SHARE project has made the expected impact.
And menstrual stigma may now be declared ‘dead and buried’ in some of the schools in Bongo, thanks to WaterAid’s sensitisation efforts and the introduction of reusable cloth menstrual pads.
But one problem still exists. The schools have no changing rooms. Girls experiencing menstruation during contact hours change their pads in a washroom. The boys and the girls share the same washroom. And the washroom has no door!
Source: Edward Adeti/Media Without Borders/mwbonline.org/Ghana
