A qualitative study of a Menstrual Hygiene Management project in northern Malawi: A contribution to a broader understanding of interventions targeting menstrual-related challenges

Abstract

There has been increasing global attention towards teenage girls’ experience of menstrual-related challenges and how it effects their education. The objective of this qualitative study was to generate new insight into development projects focusing on the menstruation of young African women, how they may be carried out and understood by the various actors who are involved in them. To construct knowledge about this, I explored a project in northern Malawi from September to December 2019. The project was run by a non-governmental organization (NGO) fictitiously named Healthy and Educated Malawi (HEM). Participant observation was carried out at HEM’s office and at eight primary schools where I took part in activities related to the project such as training in sanitary pad making and education about SRH. I wrote fieldnotes, consulted documents and spent time getting to know the social, political and economic context of Malawi. Qualitative interviews were carried out with 19 people including students, members of committees engaged in the project, and staff from HEM. This thesis aims to answer: How actors involved in the project understand its purposes and what it was meant to achieve; What possibilities were understood to be embedded in the sanitary pads that the project promoted and made available?; How demands for development projects’ ‘sustainability’ played a role in the project and what was sustainability understood to mean? Although participants described the initiative of the project to source from gender gap in education, the project alone was not perceived as able to halt school absenteeism among girls. Instead of supporting the common interpretation that sanitary pads hide structural problems, participants provided extended perspectives on what pads could do, foregrounding a complex picture of pad provision. Findings demonstrate pads as enablers of secrecy which can protect from harassment, giving girls an opportunity to control sexual attention towards them, stalling early pregnancy and marriage. Participants described attempts to ensure durability and sustainable financing of the project through providing quantitative results, negotiating with the funders and discussions on how the project could be less dependent on HEM. This study contributes to the research field of ethnographies of NGOs by exploring local realities and practices of an MHM project. By exploring the action of sanitary pads, it provides a new layer to the debate about MHM projects and how pads may contribute to education other than directly reducing school absenteeism. This study brings local realities of MHM projects to the fore, which can be of high value both for researchers and development actors as the global interest in MHM seems to continue to rise.