As you know, I am currently in Malawi working alongside ICS and Lattitude on a women’s empowerment project. The charity that I am working with here for the 3 months is called Determined to Develop. D2D works closely with women’s groups within the Chilumba region of Malawi, to support and enhance their activities. D2D is targeting women’s groups specifically as they have access to fewer opportunities than men here in Malawi. On arrival here, I thought that all of us 20 volunteers would be working together on one big project, but we have been split up into 4 groups of 5 which makes a lot more sense. The 4 groups within D2D are vegetable farming, poultry, sewing and baking. I was so happy when I found out that I was on the sewing team and knew it would be right up my street! We met with the women in the sewing group at Hangalawe school, a 45 minute walk from our homes, and they told us all about what thy already do and what they hope to achieve. They are a group of 10 seriously amazing women and it was so nice to sit with them and find out all about them and their backgrounds. In their free time and using their own money, they provide porridge for free before school to encourage children to go to school, as many of them do not have breakfast at home and turn up hungry. They also sew sanitary pads, so that if a girl starts her period at school, she does not have to go home like most do. The women do this in their free time, with their own resources and their own money. At the moment, they explained that each pad they make lasts only 1 hour before it needs changing, so they are not currently achieving what they want to achieve. Currently, girls who start their period at school will just go home and will stay at home for a few days or even a week, so they are missing out on their education. This amazing women’s group aims to keep these young girls, and as any children as they can in school, for as long as they can. We discussed with the women the idea of making reusable sanitary pads which would last a lot longer and could be washed at the end of the day and worn again. We found out that reusable pads are commonly made from chitenje fabric that can be purchased from Uliwa market. The women seemed very excited at this idea, so us volunteers went out and conducted some market research to help us. We spoke to many tailors in Uliwa and surveyed them on where they source their sewing machine, materials and accessories from. The women also asked us to help them improve their sewing skills, so we asked the local tailors whether they would be willing to teach the women’s group how to sew, and surprisingly they all said yes! Another question we asked the tailors was what they do with their offcuts and scrap pieces of fabric. A lot of them said they sell it on, but a couple of them said they normally just burn it and that we could collect it and use it if we wanted to. Of course we took them up on their offers as even the smallest amount of offcut fabric can be used to make the sanitary pads. So we met again with the sewing ladies, this time with lots of fabrics and fed back to them what we had researched and found out. The women were very grateful for the fabric we had collected and said it would help them a lot. Currently the women are making pads out of folded chitenje and plastic and are separately making a pair of knickers that holds the pad in place. We felt that this was a very long process which required a lot of fabric, so we researched and got some training into making simpler, more sufficient pads which we will soon present and teach to the women’s group. The overall hope is that the women start producing good quality pads to give to the school girls, not only at Hangalawe School but to branch out to other local schools too such as Sangilo and Uliwa schools. We spoke to the head teacher of Sangilo and he expressed interest in the pads and said he would be willing to purchase some pads in the future, provided we speak to the girls at the school and tell them how they work, what they are used for and to get their feedback. After speaking to the Sangilo head teacher we decided that it would be a good idea to set up an awareness event at the local schools on sanitation and propose out new reusable sanitary pads. It would be really useful to receive feedback and ideas from our target market! All of the girls ages 11-16 at each school should have access to a pad when they need one. This seems like a very very big mission for a group of 10 women who are paying for everything out of their own pockets, which is why they want to create an IGA (income generated activity.) The women want to sew high quality bags made from chitenje fabric to sell in the shop which will be funded by D2D; they hope to make a good profit on the bags so that they can use the extra money to buy materials to make the pads, and also to buy porridge for the school breakfasts. These women are so inspirational and it really is a privilege to be working with them. I hope we can help them make good quality products and that what we do will benefit the community in some way. Being the first group of volunteers to work with this project we are not expecting to see amazing results straight away, we know it is going to be a slow and hard process to get the women to where they want to be. There is no way that within 12 weeks we will be able to see the women making and selling quality products and generating a high income, which will be for the volunteers in the cycles after us to see. This cycle is all about setting the foundations, making the contacts and getting the women up and running and so far it’s been very fun and very rewarding. Let’s see what we can achieve in the next 9 weeks!
Alexandra Cullip -
