Jane Maina
By Mary Kigo
Africa is experiencing development growth in the recent years, some of that growth has been brought about by ordinary people taking small but tangible steps to address the challenges faced by the communities they live in.
In 2015, Jane Maina, aged 27, was involved in a project that tickled her into taking action towards resolving community problems in her home county of Trans-Nzoia. She was tasked with the duty of implementing the Love Binti project run by Step30 initiative.
The Love binti project aimed at addressing the lack of sanitary towels among school going girls and stay at home mothers in Trans-nzoia county by empowering them with skills to make sanitary towels using locally available material like pieces of old cloths.
At the helm of implementing the project Maina organized community sensitization meetings with over 2,000 girls and equipped them with skills to hand make sanitary pads. During the process she realized that the challenge facing some girls was not only the lack of sanitary pads but also they did not have underwear’s to change during the messes.
‘’ during the meetings some girls come to me saying that it was a good thing that we were training them how to make sanitary pads but they did not have enough panties to use during the menstruation cycle’’ she noted.
‘’ after getting similar reports from various girls I decided to do something. I started the underwear campaign with the aim of giving girls at least four underwear’s alongside the washable sanitary pads’’
Maina says the first batch of underwear she distributed to the girls she identified was from her salary and later she decided to create awareness pages for the underwear campaigns on different social media platforms like Whats app and Facebook and the response was overwhelming.
‘’ I am grateful to all the people who have supported me in the campaign and together we have given over 1000 girls underwear’s and I am confident we are improving their lives’’ she said
Maina advises people who like to address problems in their communities to start with what they have and other will see their work and will join in the initiative’’ she added.
‘’ just help that one girl before moving to others, I believe that if we all took steps address the challenges we face in our communities in small ways we can change a lot of things’’ said Maina.
Recent studies by the ministry of education revealed that girls from poor families miss 20% school days in a year due to lack sanitary towels.
kigomary 