Twenty kilometers north of Gulu City, Panykworo Primary School serves as a critical educational hub for over 1,200 learners, standing as the sole primary institution within a six-kilometer radius. However, for young girls traversing these long distances daily, the barrier to educational retention extends far beyond geographic constraints. In a socio-cultural landscape where patriarchal norms frequently devalue female education as a “wastage of resources” and stigmatize menstruation as a period of “unworthiness and dirt,” the onset of puberty triggers a distinct protection and drop-out crisis. Lacking institutional and family support structures, managing a natural biological process becomes a compounding vulnerability, forcing girls to choose between chronic absenteeism, severe academic underperformance, or early school dropout.

Stitch by Stitch, Breaking Barriers: Proud pupils at Panykworo Primary School celebrate completing their practical pad-making training alongside the GDPU and Her Worth Foundation teams.

Our baseline data reveals that last year alone, 19 girls dropped out of Panykworo Primary School due directly to menstrual-related poverty. In the absence of menstrual hygiene management (MHM) commodities, many of these young girls migrated from their primary households to cohabit with older men effectively trading their bodily autonomy and academic futures for basic sanitary supplies, only to find themselves ensnared in early pregnancies and cycles of gender-based violence (GBV). The school’s deputy headteacher, Madam Acayo Evelyn, noted that “while previous humanitarian actors had implemented MHM awareness initiatives, these interventions remained strictly theoretical. This lack of practical, skills-based capacity building left a critical knowledge gap, resulting in girls routinely missing between four to eight vital instructional days every single month”.

The coping mechanisms adopted by these learners under acute resource scarcity underscore a severe public health and protection gap. Akello Lucky Jenneth, a Primary 5 pupil, highlighted the intersection of economic deprivation, physical distress, and improvised sanitation, explaining that “girls frequently resort to cutting up foam mattresses to use as makeshift pads. Because these materials fail to dry rapidly after washing, she is forced into systemic isolation”, staying home during the drying process without any alternative sanitary protection. Jenneth’s own older sister succumbed to this exact vulnerability last year, entering a violent, premature marriage after a predatory perpetrator exploited her family’s denial of basic hygiene materials a cycle Jenneth is now determined to break.

Precision and Agency: Armed with the correct measurements, girls carefully cut their fabric at Panykworo Primary School before stitching their own handmade, reusable sanitary pads.

In direct response to this systemic crisis, our team at the Gulu Disabled Persons Union (GDPU), under our Water, Sanitation, and Hygiene (WASH) program, partnered with the Her Worth Foundation and with support from The Advocacy Project, we executed a targeted, evidence-based MHM intervention at Panykworo. Grounded in insights from our previous cycle’s pilot studies which identified male peers as the primary drivers of school-based stigma and harassment, we pioneered an inclusive approach by engaging boys and girls together in initial life-skills sessions. By deliberately targeting young men with specialized sensitization training, the training successfully converted potential institutional barriers into active support systems, shifting peer dynamics from stigmatization to active allyship.

Laying the Foundation: An instructor introduces girlchild learners to the various shapes and sizes of reusable pads, ensuring they understand the specifications before beginning production.

Following this collective sensitization, the cohort was stratified to provide the girls with intensive, hands-on technical capacity building. Deviating from passive pedagogical lectures, the practical sessions equipped the learners with sustainable tailoring skills to fabricate their own reusable sanitary pads using cost-effective, durable fabrics easily procured from local village markets. This strategic focus on localized supply chains ensures long-term community ownership and project sustainability. Empowered with tangible production skills, Jenneth committed herself to peer-to-peer training, transforming her personal experience into community-led advocacy designed to sustain female retention in school.

Stitch by Stitch, Step by Step: Panykworo learners carefully sew their own reusable sanitary pads, crafting a sustainable future and bringing their community one step closer to ending menstrual poverty.

Ultimately, when the reproductive health needs of adolescent girls are neglected, systemic protection failures inevitably follow. Denying a girl basic MHM materials is not merely a sanitation omission; it is an active institutional barrier that drives educational exclusion and heightens vulnerability to exploitation. A fragmented piece of foam mattress must never dictate the boundary line between an adolescent girl’s educational attainment and her socioeconomic vulnerability. By converting schoolboys into allies and putting the tangible power of self-reliance into the hands of these young women, we are rewriting the narrative in Gulu District. We are proving that a girl’s period is not a “mark of unworthiness”, it is a natural cycle in her life, not a taboo. The cycle of poverty is heavy, but as Panykworo Primary School is proving, the thread of resilience is infinitely stronger.