Salma remembers the shame she felt when she got her first period. She stayed in her room for hours.
“I was so disturbed, and I didn’t feel like myself; I felt like I was changing,” she recalls.
Meanwhile, Samira felt confused when she got her first period.
“I couldn’t accept that this is something I have to live with for the rest of my life,” she says, “it also prompted all these questions I went to my mother with, like why does this happen, and why does it have to happen every month?”
For millions of women and girls in Egypt like Salma and Samira, and around the world, not only is menstruation a monthly biological occurrence, it is a time when their dignity, health and hygiene are challenged.
Menstrual health is not merely a health issue; it is a human rights issue.
Only by ensuring that women and girls make well-informed choices about their bodies and lives can they reach a state of complete physical, mental, and social well-being in relation to the menstrual cycle.
At UNFPA, menstrual health is a core component of our work on ensuring reproductive health and rights for girls and women, not only for physical well-being but also for achieving social equity, economic prosperity, and mental well-being in an enabling environment where menstruation is managed with dignity.
This week, we mark Menstrual Hygiene Day – a day dedicated to breaking taboos and raising awareness about a fundamental reproductive health and rights issue. Yet, girls are often afraid, worried, or ashamed at the onset of their first period. In most cultures, menstruation is shrouded in myths, taboos and stigma.
Sadly, information offered to girls around menstrual health is limited and sometimes inaccurate. This leaves girls unprepared for menstruation, uninformed about menstrual hygiene and often ashamed.
According to the Egyptian Family Health Survey (EFHS) 2021, nearly half of never-married women aged 15-29 (48 percent) have not received information about puberty and menstruation.
This may have broader repercussions for managing women’s and girls’ menstrual health and hygiene. Misconceptions around menstrual cycles affecting girls’ and women’s physical and emotional capacities, and other discriminatory cultural norms may prompt teasing, shaming and even public exclusion.
Other challenges include difficulty in accessing water, sanitation, or healthcare. An estimated 500 million women and girls worldwide lack access to menstrual products and adequate facilities for menstrual health, according to World Bank data.
That is how menstrual health relates to human rights.
When women and girls cannot manage their menstrual health and hygiene, it can negatively impact the extent to which they enjoy certain rights. The ability of girls to care for their bodies while menstruating is an essential part of their freedom and their ability to reach their full potential in life.
This includes the right of women to work and attend school. The EFHS 2021 findings also reveal that in Egypt, 37 percent of never-married women aged 15- 29 reported that their menstrual cycle affected their school attendance.
When schools lack clean water, disposal facilities, and affordable menstrual products, menstruation can cause in-school absenteeism, which severely compromises their right to education and, ultimately, widens literacy and labour gender disparities. Similarly, for women, missing work due to inadequate workplace facilities directly undermines their right to work and economic independence.
At UNFPA, our mission is anchored in the belief that managing your period with dignity is central to reproductive health, gender equality, and basic human rights.
UNFPA launched a policy brief to inform and mobilize stakeholders and decision makers on the issue of menstrual health management, with key recommendations for cross-sectoral collaboration, between the education, health, and economic sectors.
Through the Noura Investment Framework, UNFPA’s Girls Assets flagship programme targeting adolescent girls between ages 10-14, implemented in partnership with the National Council for Women, we offer girls comprehensive information on menstrual hygiene. Additionally, the first Arabic-language training manual on the topic was developed to target outreach workers affiliated with the Ministry of Health and Population and raise community awareness.
UNFPA also developed a peer education guide to empower youth to raise community awareness about menstruation. Through private-sector partnerships such as the one with BeGirl, UNFPA raises girls' awareness of menstrual health and hygiene, including those from refugee communities.
Still, ensuring menstrual health and hygiene demands bolder, collective action. We cannot view menstrual health solely as a women’s or girls’ issue. It is an economic, educational, and developmental imperative.
We must ensure that schools and workplaces have private, clean sanitation facilities. We must work with the private sector to make high-quality menstrual products affordable and accessible. Workplaces should also integrate menstrual health into their policies and practices, and national health frameworks should continue to do so.
We must also spread information about menstrual health and hygiene to the entire community, not only girls, to ensure understanding of girls’ needs during menstruation, which will, in turn, translate into adaptability in infrastructure, health systems, and the education system. also noting the importance of having teachers, mentors, sports coaches, male family members and community members supportive of girls
Let us normalize conversations around menstruation and end stigma and ensure that no girl misses school, no woman is excluded from work, and no one is denied their dignity because of their period.
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