A school classroom in the Ashante region of Ghana. (Photo credit: Jim Hecimovich)
An Oxford University pilot study, published in the journal PLoS One , shows that providing free sanitary pads to teenage girls in Ghana markedly improved attendance levels at school over just three months. More surprisingly perhaps, the attendance levels of girls who did not get free pads but had lessons on puberty also improved by the same rate over a slightly longer period of five months. The lessons included information on personal hygiene during menstruation, as well as the biological processes behind their developing bodies and pregnancy. Researchers chose secondary schools in four different sites in Ghana - three of them in urban areas and one in a remote rural area. The study involved a total of 120 teenage girls with an average age of 15.7 years. Intervention strategies were used at three sites, but pupils received neither free sanitary pads nor puberty classes at one school (the control group). At the two schools where the girls received both the free sanitary pads and puberty education, attendance levels rose by an average of six days per 65-day-term or by nine per cent of a girl's school year.
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