How our girl-led group got our state government to reduce taxes on menstrual products
(Courtesy of Helena Branco)
18-year-old student Helena Branco writes about her efforts to end period poverty in Brazil.
It all started with a message from my dear friend Maria Antônia, an 18-year-old activist and law student. “Did you know that pads and tampons are not considered essential products by the Brazilian tax law?,” she asked our group chat of friends and fellow change-makers. “And did you know that most essential supplies kits donated during the pandemic don’t include menstrual products?”
I did not.
I couldn’t believe that the government did not consider products that ensure the healthy management of menstruation — a fundamental natural process — essential. In fact, in my home state, São Paulo, taxes make up 34% of the price of menstrual products. Thinking about the menstruators who couldn’t afford access to products to manage their periods, I felt a flame of indignation spark inside me. Eager to do something about it, my friends and I decided to rally other girls behind this issue to make sure that the pandemic didn’t prevent women and girls from having healthy periods.
Recruiting our team and getting the support we needed to build our campaign wasn’t a problem. My teammates and I are all part of Girl Up, a global movement for gender equality created by the United Nations Foundation to train, inspire and connect girls, and help us become advocates for gender equality. Since we already belonged to a supportive community, we decided to focus our efforts there. We started by creating an online group on WhatsApp to gather all the Girl Up leaders in Brazil interested in this issue.
(Courtesy of Helena Branco)
Before moving forward, we took the important step to first understand the problem as much as we could. We started our research on the internet with major news websites from Brazil and then, to verify their reliability, we went straight to the sources of the research, which were organizations like UN Women, UNFPA and UNICEF. Ultimately, we learned that the issue we wanted to tackle is called period poverty, which refers to the lack of access to menstrual products, information about menstruation and water, sanitation and hygiene facilities to manage menstruation.
One of the things that struck me was the fact that in Brazil there hasn’t been any national research exploring the connection between period poverty and basic indicators such as health and education. This gap shows just how much this issue has been neglected. Still, we can get an idea of the scale of the problem by looking at some statistics.
According to data from the WHO and UNICEF Joint Monitoring Program for Sanitation and Hygiene (JMP), in Brazil, 39% of schools lack basic hand-washing facilities, impacting around 16 million students. Approximately five million Brazilians live in places that don’t have bathrooms. These low levels of basic sanitation in Brazilian schools directly affect young people's education. The Sanitation Panel Brazil estimates that in Brazil, young people with basic sanitation at home complete four more years of school on average than those without those resources at home.
Even though this data is not broken down by gender and we can’t know precisely how menstruation affects it, it’s simple math. How can a girl on her period go to school knowing she won’t have access to basic facilities to change her pad or even to wash her hands? If she can’t afford menstrual products or doesn’t have them for any reason, how will the stress and anxiety resulting from it impact her attention in class?
Confronted by this alarming reality, our group of Girl Up Brazil leaders started to brainstorm how to take action. Despite the complexity of the issue, we decided to begin mobilizing for an emergency short-term response. As the pandemic hit Brazil and unemployment numbers rose, we decided to first focus our efforts on providing menstrual products to people who were in difficult financial positions because of the pandemic. We created the campaign #AbsorventeUrgente (“#UrgentPads”) to mobilize our communities to donate menstrual products to NGOs and local organizations supporting people in vulnerable situations during quarantine. From April 6 to 19, 16 girl-led gender equality clubs from seven Brazilian states participated in this effort to help the girls and women most affected by the pandemic access menstrual supplies.
Most clubs collected product donations and/or fundraised to buy them, since there are multiple online platforms dedicated to that. My club did both. We left boxes in the common areas of our buildings with posters explaining the campaign so people could donate the items, and then we collected and cleaned them, always following WHO safety recommendations. But online fundraising brought the best results by far. The people engaged in our campaign could see in real time how much money we had raised and how far we were from our goal. Most donations were from friends and family of our club members, so we focused our messages for that audience and built a social media campaign on our Instagram account. In the end, we were able to send donations to 27 organizations, distributing more than 60,000 menstrual products, raising R$14,000 ($3,200) and impacting more than 3,000 people.
Yet, by the end of #AbsorventeUrgente we knew that long-term change was necessary to sustain our movement. We needed to promote open conversations and promote education on menstruation. Since period poverty is powerfully sustained by the taboos limiting access to information, it is essential to equip menstruators with the knowledge to understand what goes on with their bodies and empower them to make their own informed decisions.
“Since period poverty is powerfully sustained by the taboos limiting access to information, it is essential to equip menstruators with the knowledge to understand what goes on with their bodies and empower them to make their own informed decisions.”
With that in mind, we organized a one-week digital awareness campaign to celebrate Menstrual Hygiene Day. We created informative social media posts by girls about the biological, historical, social and political aspects of menstruation, and also shared books, movies and girl-led organizations that focus on period poverty to inspire our audience. We organized webinars on Instagram and Zoom led by girls and with guest speakers. We discussed the physiology of menstruation, menstruation and sustainability, period poverty, the role of the government in menstrual equity with a state representative and many other topics.
The success of our campaigns showed us the power of mobilizing people and resources. But we didn’t forget about what had inspired our efforts in the first place: the tax law. We knew that the unequal and old system had to change and that we needed to make leaders see menstrual dignity not as a girls’ and women’s private issue, but as a human right. Thus, led by the club Girl Up Elza Soares, we took our fight to the government.
Our first step was networking with people who worked at the Legislative Assembly of Rio de Janeiro. We figured out which of those legislative staff members would be open to our ideas and had worked on gender equality issues. Then we reached out to those contacts and arranged three meetings with different political advisors, the people who help organize state representatives’ terms. It was the perfect opportunity to educate those legislative staff members on Girl Up, the club and our proposal to advance menstrual equity.
(Courtesy of Helena Branco)
In the last one of those meetings, something unprecedented happened: a state representative decided to also join the meeting with his political advisor due to his interest in our proposal. After the meeting, the representative agreed to sponsor our (unwritten) bill and help us work on it with his team. Once we had this support, it was time for us to actually write the bill. Though no one in the group had any idea about how to do so, we learned the structure and the technical terms used in a bill by studying other bills about menstrual products.
Just having period poverty on the Rio de Janeiro Congress’ agenda thrilled me; it was an important step towards dismantling taboos. But we did more than just put period poverty on the agenda. As a result of our girl-led movement, on July 2 the state of Rio de Janeiro passed our bill reducing taxes on menstrual products and making them more accessible.
I couldn’t help myself but cry with overwhelming joy. What was first a girl-led collaboration at a community level now had evolved into structural change — and it didn’t stop there. We have bills addressing period poverty on seven other states’ agendas and have bills in development in other five.
Instead of waiting for decision-makers to engage with us, we engaged them. Our group, Girls Against Period Poverty, has the potential to reach every girl in every corner of Brazil. Our next goal is to help pass a national bill that addresses period poverty in all its nuances. We have sparked a nationwide discussion and know that it is only a first step. We are determined to continue using our power for social change to rethink stigmas and redesign public policies, making sure girls’ voices are heard and included in decision-making spaces and that our rights are protected.
You see a girl, we see the future.
Read more
