MENSTRUAL HYGIENE & SANITARY PAD BANK

The appearance of a girl’s menstrual period should be something that every girl should look out for when it comes to confirming womanhood and the ability to have children but is not so for many girls in most rural parts of Ghana, the orphanage, and poor homes.

These girls miss five days of school every month because they can’t afford to buy sanitary towels to help hold the blood, they therefore resort to other means which is unhygienic bringing them a lot of reproductive health issues like urinary tract infection and cervical cancer. Some of these girls use old clothes, maize cobs, tissue paper, exercise books, etc. which can’t hold the blood thereby making them soil themselves.

The fear of getting their clothes soil deters them from attending school for fear of their friends knowing that they are menstruating especially their male counterparts. This makes them unproductive since they can neither go to school nor go out of their homes.

These five days of no school make it difficult for these girls to concentrate and match up to their other colleagues especially the males since they don’t get to learn or hear their teachers teach topics needed for a particular level. This makes them drop out of school.

As part of Solutions for Life Initiative Ghana’s (SFLIG) quest to “Make Every Life Count” SFLIG is seeking support to create a PAD BANK to provide sanitary towels for girls in the orphanages and selected communities at the beginning of every semester so they can stay focus on their studies, get their confidence built and for them to stand up to their male classmates academically. Do you know you

SINGLE AND TEENAGE MOTHERS INITIATIVE

AT SFLIG we have realized that most often early mothers after giving birth are not allowed to get back to the classroom to continue their education since they are stigmatized as a bad influence on their other schoolmates and family members also don’t support them by encouraging them to go back to school or learn a vocation but rather push them to “compulsory adulthood” to fend for themselves and their babies. We believe the many street children and vagabonds in society are a result of the lack of support for these mothers. SFLIG, we give them counseling to boost their confidence and reintegrate them back into their old self again through back-to-school or vocational training project that makes them independent.

Another aspect of our single mother’s program is the support for mothers with “Special Needs” children. Children with special needs are mostly considered a curse in our society, some are killed by relatives and others abandon in the forest, etc.  Fathers of such children abandon them and don’t want anything to do with them as well as family members.  This makes life very difficult for the mothers, in terms of taking care of the child since they end up not working because the child may mostly need their attention 24/7.

SFLIG volunteers, therefore, come in to support these mothers with medications, training in vocational skills, etc. to help them care for themselves and their children.

BACK-TO-SCHOOL INITIATIVE

Though basic education is free in Ghana to the senior high level, most children are still not able to go to school because their parents can’t afford school stationaries, uniforms, shoes, and food for them. SFLIG, therefore, runs a Back-to-School initiative that supplies stationaries, and other school needs as well as supports some of our girls in the tertiary level through vocational skills and other disciplines.

To help us reach a large number of girls, we seek the support of benevolent individuals and organizations to join us keep girls at home.

We welcome individuals and organizations to support and donate to any of our social projects.