This year’s World Menstrual Hygiene Day has been celebrated by SWIDA – Ghana with some basic schools across the Savelugu Municipality, with the main aim to sensitize the students about menstruation and its related issues.
The Savannah Women Integrated Development Agency (SWIDA – Ghana), has some communities within the Savelugu Municipality as part of its operational areas, hence its decision to focus on schools for this year’s celebration of the MHD.
In partnership with the World Vision, Ghana Education Service and Ghana Health Service, a total of eleven Junior High Schools were brought together across the Savelugu Municipality, most of them girls, to discuss topics on empowering girls to stay confident in school and at home during their menses.
The main topics discussed included menstrual hygiene management and leadership, Child Marriage and girl child education which are all hinged on activities on the Women – LEAD project.
Lead facilitator and Gender and Communications Officer at SWIDA – Ghana, Abdul Samed Khadijah admonished the students to be bold and resist all forces that seek to make them feel inferior because they are in their period.
She encouraged them to confidently share with their boy child colleagues what menstruation is, how positive they feel about it and what support they can offer to help them go through it without feeling stigmatized against.
The Menstrual Hygiene Day – 2021 is commemorated under the theme “Action and Investment in Menstrual Hygiene and Health”, calling for stakeholders to invest resources in the management of menstrual hygiene across the globe.
The key messages for the Menstrual Hygiene Day 2021 includes “A world without period poverty and stigma is possible”; emphasizing that the world cannot wait for the COVID – 19 pandemic to end before achieving them.
SWIDA – Ghana’s activities on the Menstrual Hygiene Day – 2021 was replicated in Damongo in the Savannah Region.
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