ONE Gauteng government department together with Procter and Gamble have just signed a five-year partnership to supply Gauteng girls with sanitary towels and education.
The Always Keeping Girls in School programme, launched by the Gauteng Department of Social Development, aims to get school girls the vital information– they need about their periods. The launch was held at Radison Hotel in Sandton.
Nandi Mayathula-Khoza, acting head of the Gauteng department, said they want more than 500 Gauteng schools to benefit from the programme.
Research by the University of Cape Town has found that puberty education is key in helping to reduce school absenteeism.
It shows girls can miss up to four days of school a month due to periods, which means that, over a period of five years, they could have missed up to 30 weeks of school out of a total of 180, leading them to fail or drop out altogether.
Palesa Botha (17), a grade 12 pupil at a Diepsloot High School, who was at the launch, said: “The programme gives us information about puberty that I didn’t know before.
“Many of us had to miss school when we had our periods as our parents couldn’t afford sanitary pads and it was embarrassing to be on a period while at school.”
One of the objectives of the campaign is to roll out sanitary pads to reach one million girls by 2019.
