This NGO founder Is On ‘Mission Menstruation’

Written By: Tasneem Akbari Kutubuddin

May 27, 2021

Highlights

Humans For Humanity, a non-governmental organization (NGO) headquartered in Dehradun, is founded by Anurag Chauhan.

In 2015, Anurag started a project called WASH (Women, Sanitation, Hygiene) that works to educate women about menstrual hygiene, providing them sanitary napkins and training them to make biodegradable sanitary napkins making them self-reliant and earn an income in the process.

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Humans For Humanity, a non-governmental organization (NGO) headquartered in Dehradun, is founded by Anurag Chauhan. In 2015, Anurag started a project called WASH (Women, Sanitation, Hygiene) that works to educate women about menstrual hygiene, providing them sanitary napkins and training them to make biodegradable sanitary napkins making them self-reliant and earn an income in the process.

In 2018, WASH started the Breaking The Bloody Taboo campaign where, as the name suggests, Anurag and his team strive to strip women of the age-old taboos. The WASH project started by him has reached over 1.5 million women in over 6 states in the last 5 years. The workshop is led by doctors to tell the women about biological reasons behind menstruation, hormonal changes, about various stages right from teenage to menopause. Counseling is given to women particularly those who are dealing with menopause. Nutritionists tell women and girls about the importance of food & nutrition intake. Affordability and sustainability are big issues, which is why they train the women to make their own sanitary napkins at home. The workshop also covers the harmful effects of poor menstrual hygiene and teaches about the disposal of napkins.

Humans For Humanity started the Red Cloth Campaign during the pandemic, to spread awareness about menstruation & bust the taboos.

During the nationwide lockdown, the efforts of Humans for Humanity have come as a great help to the women who have been taught how to make sanitary napkins at home as they don’t have to go out and buy them but they can make hygienic sanitary pads themselves at home. Anurag was honored with the International Women Empowerment Award by the Ministry of Women and Child Development, Ministry of Drinking Water and Sanitation, Government of India and UNICEF in 2019

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At fourteen years young when teenagers are dabbling with modern paraphernalia, Anurag Chauhan found his calling in social service. By the time he was twenty, Anurag had founded a non-government organization, Humans for Humanity in his home town Dehradun to bring awareness about menstruation, health, hygiene among women across India. At twenty-one, he launched the WASH project on Women, Sanitation, Hygiene, which educates rural women about Menstrual hygiene and provides training to them for making biodegradable sanitary napkins.

Had his mother discouraged him from playing with her sanitary pads saying, “Don’t touch that, it’s a ladies thing”, Anurag probably wouldn’t have been honored with the International Women Empowerment Award by the Ministry of Women and Child Development, Ministry of Drinking Water and Sanitation, Government of India and UNICEF in 2019. Instead, his mother chose to educate her son about what sanitary pads and periods were all about. This made all the difference for him growing up as an empathetic young man.

However, the turning point of working in this area came after reading an article written about deaths caused due to lack of menstrual hygiene. “I read a report stating that over 1,50,000 women in India die every year, due to menstruation-related problems. I was shocked at this statistic,” says Anurag. He started with awareness sessions and started distributing low-cost eco-friendly sanitary napkins for free. His cause received support from actress Twinkle Khanna.

But what bothered him was till when one could give something for free. “Today, we train women to make biodegradable sanitary cloth pads at an affordable cost”, says Anurag. “The women-centric workshop is headed by experienced doctors to make women aware of the biological reasons behind menstruation, stages from teenage to menopause, and other hormonal changes”.

Anurag’s organisation runs awareness programs in many villages, slums, schools, and colleges of Uttarakhand, Delhi, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, Maharashtra, and Karnataka.

In the community, counseling is provided to women in need who are dealing with menopause. With a separate team of nutritionists, the workshop provides information related to the importance of a healthy diet and food. Affordability and quality are the two big concerns in sanitary napkins.

“For me, quality remains a very important factor even while making cost-effective sanitary products because I would never want to give another woman a substandard product that I would hesitate to give my own mother or sisters”, says Anurag.

Therefore, the organization trains women on how to make good sanitary napkins in their homes. It also covers the adverse effects of poor menstrual hygiene and spreads awareness about the proper disposal of napkins in the waste bin.

The WASH Project

Today The WASH project started by Humans For Humanity has reached over 1.5 million women in over 6 states in India in the last 5 years, as of October 2020. However, HFH is not restricted to just the WASH project. In May 2016, they launched an initiative called ‘Stree-The Woman’, a one-day event that focuses on self-growth, self-empowerment and self-love which was attended by renowned personalities.

In the year 2018, the organization started a new campaign named ‘Breaking the Bloody Taboo.’ The main aim of this campaign is to stop the old-age taboo against women.

In one of the campaigns in Rajasthan, the team members of Humans For Humanity organized a sessions with young girls and women of menstruating age where they even talked about the importance of holy plant Tulsi and were handed over a few leaves to women and asked them to nurture the sampling and observe the results after a month.

“I am sometimes shocked at the lack of menstrual awareness and menstrual literacy that women have. A 40 year old woman, married, was not aware that menstruation was restricted to bodies with the female reproductive system. She assumed it is something all humans go through, and thought probably her husband bled too but hid it from her as she did from him”, shares Anurag. “These are the kinds of myths we aim to dismiss”.

In 2020, Humans For Humanity launched ‘Red Cloth Campaign’ during the COVID-19 pandemic, to spread awareness about menstruation and bust the taboos. Actor Lisa Ray and singer Shibani Dandekar, Kirti Kulhari, Kubra Sait, Divya Seth supported the campaign along with thousands of social media users.

A Saviour Amidst The Pandemic

During the difficult times of nationwide lockdown in India, Humans for Humanity came forward to help women and train them to make hygienic sanitary napkins at home safely. Thanks to this project, during the scarcity of sanitary napkins during the lockdown, the seeds of WASH project he had sowed in the various states helped him procure 50,000 plus pads for distribution in Delhi. The initiative has made hundreds of women financially independent and empowered.

Their future plans include setting up machines that make eco-friendly bio-degradable sanitary pads from bamboo plants. This will be set up in villages and provide employment to many women making them self-reliant and financially independent.

“We talk about eco-friendly and sustainable products but in villages with a scarcity of water, water is an important resource and hence cloth pads fail the cause. Hence we are working on products that will be eco-friendly in the true sense”, adds Anurag.

Anurag’s project also extended to art classes in some schools where some classes were taught to make sanitary cloth napkins. This brought up a discussion among the class of boys and girls on what the whole thing was about therefore bringing out the subject up and breaking the gender barrier.

This Padman from Delhi is an example of how the youth of India are breaking the stereotype associated with menstrual hygiene by touching the lives of those who need awareness and education with a will to bring a positive change. Being bullied for his gender while working for a cause that largely relates to women, Anurag Chauhan says it does bring him down and affect him many times. But when he thinks of the larger good that is being done it’s nothing in comparison to that joy.

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Tasneem Akbari Kutubuddin

Tasneem Akbari Kutubuddin has done her masters in Journalism & Communication and has worked as a senior journalist, editor and columnist for leading publications like The Logical Indian, Deccan Chronicle, Worldwide Media Corporation, The Bridge and Provoke.
With Infano, she hopes to create more awareness about women’s health issues. Suffering with Fibromyalgia, a chronic pain condition, she has also been advocating for its awareness through media.

This Women-led Initiative Empowers Other Women

Written By: Gitika Debnath

May 24, 2021 | 09:00 AM |

1,245

Highlights

Project Baala is an impact-oriented youth-led organization that is started by women, largely run by women to make menstrual hygiene and access to better sanitary products as a major priority for women in rural India.

The organization has come out with an intensive report highlighting how the global pandemic and the lockdown have worsened the situation for women in rural areas.

They introduced hyperlocal resource persons known as Baala Associates to directly take a grip of the situation and solving the issues of economic loss and compromise of menstrual hygiene.

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Project Baala is a menstrual hygiene solutions provider that works towards improving the menstrual health of vulnerable women and girls. Their major aim is to spread awareness about menstrual health and effectively keep improving and innovating menstrual health facilities. Since there is an immense lack of awareness, infrastructure, accessibility to better sanitary products coupled with grave financial restrictions, women still lack basic menstrual hygiene resources. Soumya Dabriwal who is the co-founder of Project Baala, during the interview with Infano said, ” We employ a two-pronged approach inclusive of comprehensive menstrual health awareness programs to inculcate behavior change and distribution of safe and hygienic reusable sanitary napkins ensuring sustainable menstrual protection for up to two years”.

Baala pads come in two sizes and consist of three layers. The Baala Kit comes with three pads and one carry bag for storage and carriage. Making it more convenient for women and also keeping in mind the water crisis, Soumya adds, “These pads can be washed with 150 ml of water and some soap or detergent like any other piece of cloth, you can also use home remedies such as lemon to clean the pad as well”.

During the pandemic, the organization did intensive ethnographic documentation to recognize the menstrual hygiene issues faced by women covering twenty clusters in Delhi. The key problems that the communities and women were going through because of the lockdown were limited financial resources, shortage of sanitary products, restriction of movement, and increase in the price of these products. 97% of women went back to using old cloth and rags. There was a major disruption in the distribution of Baala pads in the schools and communities. Given the existing crisis and the anxiety around the same,

Baala derived a new approach to continuing their work; they provided digital access to menstrual awareness through their social media channels and their mobile app, Baala Boss. Individuals who were sensitive enough towards these concerns and were driven to learn as well as impart knowledge and awareness about menstrual health while also generating financial independence for them were trained by the organization. These hyperlocal persons were knowns as Baala Associates. These associates further went ahead and directly sold Baala pads reducing their economic burden and eliminating the unmanaged sanitary wastes.

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It is the 21st century and as a society, we are still plagued with patriarchal structures that seeps into our social systems. We are still reluctant to talk about sex education, mental health, menstruation, etc. The situations get worse when such issues are riddled with myths and taboos, and one such classic example that we still as a society need to recognize over and over again is menstrual health. Being perceived as unholy to dirty and even considering the menstruators as impure, is not a new phenomenon that we are encountering. Surrounded by shame and the cultural anxiety to establish control over the bodies of women, they are still expected to follow restrictions when they are menstruating. In rural India, where there is still a lack of awareness, facilities, and education or public health systems, we keep witnessing the alarming rates of girls dropping out of schools as soon as they reach puberty.

project baala founders — Founders Soumya and Aaradhna

Being acquainted with all these problems and the stigma attached to menstruation, Soumya Dabriwal, who has worked intensively in the social sector founded Project Baala, and later she was joined to co-head the organization by Aradhana Gupta, an alumnus from Cornell University.

What is Project Baala?

Project Baala is an impact-oriented, youth-led organization that is started by women, largely run by women to make menstrual hygiene and access to better sanitary products as a major priority for women in rural India. Soumya Dabriwal who is an alumnus of the University of Warwick, England, and a social worker recognized one of the most pertinent issues that women were facing of unhygienic menstrual practices, while she was teaching in India, Africa, and Ghana. The commonalities that she found while working in rural areas in these third world countries were the lack of public health infrastructures such as toilets and proper sanitary products, the issue of disposal of menstrual waste, and lack of awareness and information on menstrual health. Different social and cultural taboos attached to menstrual blood, especially in a conservative society such as India, make it even harder. Since its inception, it has done tremendous work in imparting awareness and education about hygiene and menstrual health and also creating more innovative and sustainable sanitary napkins.

Keeping in mind the immense waste production and lack of proper sanitization and disposable methods, the organization has researched and come up with a product that is cost-effective, safe, and supports sustainability. They have provided free reusable sanitary napkins in schools in rural areas, urban slums, and villages that can last for two years.

“Through the use of Baala pads we can reduce menstrual waste by 99 % in rural areas, from using approximately 240 pads in 24 months, we will be down to 3 pads, which is 800 times less than what we generate now “, says Aradhana.. During her fieldwork in different rural areas, she heard experiences where women and girls get harassed and assaulted in the middle of the night when they go to dump their menstrual waste, making it extremely dangerous. Such use of technology and innovation that can produce safe, hygienic, reusable pads which can tackle multiple problems with one solution is a great achievement.

The Baala Kit

The Baala Kit comes with three pads and one carry bag for storage and carriage. While recognizing the weather conditions in different cities and rural areas and the drying time of 1 to 3 hours on an average, the Project Baala team has been mindful about their methodology of distribution of these kits, for example; 4 instead of 3 pads are given in the areas that are prone to heavy rain, realizing the obscurity of drying the pad. In India, these pads have already been distributed in rural settlements and urban slums of seventeen states, the organization has gone above and beyond to also send Baala pads to villages in Nepal, Ghana, and Tanzania.

Work During Covid

Even through this crisis, Project Baala has kept working, investigating, and developing new methods to impart awareness and create mobilization on menstrual health. Recently they have come out with an intensive report highlighting how the global pandemic and the lockdown have worsened the situation for women in rural areas. The study used a structured methodology of doing a telephonic survey with 368 participants, covering twenty clusters in Delhi.

Given the existing crisis and the anxiety around the same, Baala derived a new approach to continue their work; they provided digital access to menstrual awareness through their social media channels and their mobile app, Baala Boss. The project launched its digital library with recourses catering to menstrual health, both in Hindi and English. They collaborated with organizations like Sewa to create a larger mobilization and connect to different rural communities, who have also been working with women, making them empowered and self-reliant.

The Inception of Baala Associates

Even though the organization was already trying different modes to cater to the concerns of menstrual hygiene in the middle of a pandemic, they came up with the idea of introducing hyperlocal resource persons to directly take a grip of the situation and solving the issues of economic loss and compromise of menstrual hygiene. These people were known as “Baala Associates”. Individuals who were sensitive enough towards these concerns and were driven to learn as well as impart knowledge and awareness about menstrual health while also generating financial independence for them were trained by the organization. These associates further went ahead and directly sold Baala pads reducing their economic burden and eliminating the unmanaged sanitary wastes.

While discussing the future goals for Project Baala, Aradhana said, “We are working with different textile scientists and manufacturers who can create a pad that can be used even in drought-stricken areas, eliminating the use of water, which can last for a longer time “. If this product is successfully made, it can completely revolutionize menstruation and effectively cut the financial burden that comes with it. Whilst discussing the commercialization of Baala pad in urban settlements, Soumya added that they right now strictly want to use their resources for women in rural areas where they do not have access to better sanitary products.

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