A Not-So-Simple Plan to Keep African Girls in School
By CLAUDIA H. DEUTSCH
Published: November 12, 2007
THEY call it the Map of Africa.
It is a cute name for an acute problem: the stains that African girls often endure when they are menstruating and the rags or camel's skin they use for protection fail. ''Girls who can't manage their period stay home, and that is affecting their education,'' said Michelle J. Vaeth, communications director for FemCare, the Procter & Gamble unit that makes Always pads and Tampax tampons.
So FemCare is tackling the problem head-on. In March, it inaugurated Protecting Futures, a program to first build bathrooms, then educate teachers and finally distribute free pads, in hopes of keeping African girls in school.
Protecting Futures is not FemCare's first foray into Africa. For two years, it has been working with the Girl Child Network, a nonprofit, to give its pads to schoolgirls in Kenya, and it is compiling data to quantify the effect that the program has had on attendance.
Yet skeptics abound. Esther Duflo, an economics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, says that absentee rates are the same for boys and girls in much of Africa, and that programs like providing free uniforms and books seem to increase attendance. ''What's keeping children from school is the costs of attending,'' she said.
But studies by the Forum for African Women Educationalists, a nongovernmental organization, seem to support FemCare's hypothesis.
''Girls will stay home rather than be embarrassed,'' said Faith Macharia, the national director of the forum's Kenya chapter. She said the studies showed that ''cumulatively, they can lose a whole month of schooling each year.''
Protecting Futures, which started its first venture with two schools in Namibia, is the latest entry in Live, Learn and Thrive, Procter's three-year-old program in which managers of many brands find ways to better the lot of children in poor countries.
Its Children's Safe Drinking Water Program has been providing sachets of its Pur water-purifying powder at cost throughout Africa. Its Safeguard soap has provided the product as well as hygiene education to children in Pakistan and China. Pampers has teamed with Unicef on a promotion in which it donated a dose of tetanus vaccine in Africa for every package of diapers sold in Britain.
Protecting Futures may be the most complicated project Procter has undertaken yet. FemCare cannot distribute pads unless the girls have private places to change them -- so it is building bathrooms. The girls need clean water for hygiene, so in one school it is piping water from two miles away. It built dormitories at a school heavily attended by children from nomadic tribes.
It also needs to find ways to dispose of the pads, in some cases for practical reasons, in other cases for cultural ones. In some parts of Africa, people believe that one's blood can be used to cast a spell, so girls would fear leaving bloodied pads exposed. Procter will probably install small, sealed incinerators near the new bathrooms, and train teachers to burn the pads.
Procter also plans to send nurses or doctors to the schools four times a year to troubleshoot health problems, provide health education and distribute pads. The Protecting Futures staff is working with local groups to teach girls more about puberty, even when that means training male teachers to address a subject that is often considered off limits.
''Discussions about sexual maturation are just not commonplace in African society,'' said Ms. Macharia of the forum. ''The parents hope the teachers do it, the teachers hope the parents do it, and the girls wind up thinking that menstruation is associated with doing something wrong.''
Protecting Futures knew it would face problems carrying out its projects. Gregory S. Allgood, director of the children's drinking-water program, has been working in African communities for several years, and enlisted some of his own contacts among philanthropic and government groups there to help the new program. (They pointed out the blood-spell connection.) And he made sure that the FemCare people sought the aid of local leaders in schools.
''In Kenya alone, you need 20 partners,'' he said. ''The culture in rural areas is different from Nairobi, which is again different from the north, where so many of the Somali women are.''
In Kenya, FemCare is working with the Ministry of Education, tribal leaders, Unicef and Ms. Macharia's group. It is also working with Hero, a school-based campaign that the United Nations Association of the United States of America, a nonprofit group, runs to assist children in AIDS-ravaged parts of sub-Saharan Africa.
Yet Protecting Futures has run into snags beyond the hurdles it had anticipated. FemCare got into a mini-brouhaha with a council in Namibia when it neglected to register the location of its workers' camp site. Protecting Futures is on hold there until the issue is resolved. Meanwhile, it has sped up its program to introduce puberty education in South Africa.
''We've made a five-year commitment to expand this program in Africa,'' said Ms. Vaeth of FemCare. ''So from a long-range timing standpoint, we aren't missing a beat.''
The question, of course, is what's in it for Procter?
A great deal, marketing experts say. For one, girls who use free pads today can turn into paying customers when they grow out of the school programs. They could persuade their mothers and aunts to use the products.
''When you need to change a culture, it's good strategy to start with the younger generation,'' said Jill Avery, an assistant professor of marketing at the Simmons School of Management.
And the program sits well with the Kenyan government, which has cut tariffs on Procter's sanitary pads. Lisa Jones Christensen, an assistant professor at the Kenan-Flagler Business School at the University of North Carolina, who is familiar with Procter's philanthropy programs, says that Procter receives special treatment when its containers hit Kenya's docks.
''No one is saying, 'Just unload the pads, leave the boxes of Tide,' '' she said. ''This program is giving P&G a license to operate in Africa for all its products.''
There is a payback in the developed world, too. ''The idea of keeping an African girl in school resonates strongly with our consumers,'' Ms. Vaeth said.
PHOTOS: POWER: A Procter & Gamble FemCare project helps girls in Namibia, top. A new school, far left, and a volunteer, above, from the UNA-USA nonprofit group. (PHOTOGRAPHS BY VINCE COOK; KEVIN ZIER; AND COURTESY OF HERO: A UNA-USA CAMPAIGN)