Why Menstrual Health is a Leadership Issue

Every time we run a menstrual health outreach in an underserved community, we encounter the same moment. We finish the education session, and a girl raises her hand. Not to ask a question — to thank us. She thanks us for talking about something that had never been spoken about in front of her before. She is twelve, thirteen, fifteen. She has been managing her period alone, often with rags or paper, missing school during heavy days, sometimes too ashamed to even tell her mother how much pain she is in. And we are the first people who have ever told her that what is happening to her body is normal, that it deserves attention, and that she deserves care.

People sometimes ask me why GEAN includes menstrual health in its programmes. They wonder if it is a stretch from our core mission of girls’ empowerment and leadership development. But I have never seen a stretch — I have only seen a straight line. A girl who is missing three to five school days every month during her period is not falling behind because she lacks talent. She is falling behind because her basic health needs are being treated as shameful rather than ordinary. She cannot lead from a position of shame.

In Nigeria, the data is sobering. Studies consistently show that menstrual absenteeism is one of the leading drivers of school dropout rates for girls in the 11–17 age bracket, particularly in rural and peri-urban areas. The implications do not end at the classroom door. A girl who drops out is more vulnerable to early marriage, to gender-based violence, to economic dependence, and to the perpetuation of exactly the cycles that organisations like GEAN are working to break. Menstrual health is not a hygiene issue — it is a systemic issue, and it has systemic consequences.

What GEAN’s outreach has shown us is that the solutions do not have to be complicated. Education — frank, shame-free, age-appropriate information about menstruation — is transformative on its own. Access to affordable or subsidised hygiene products changes a girl’s ability to attend school and participate fully in public life. Changing the conversation in communities, so that fathers, brothers, and male teachers understand and support rather than stigmatise, multiplies the impact of everything else we do.

I want to make a direct ask to every person reading this who has the power to fund, legislate, or advocate: menstrual health belongs in every girls’ empowerment programme, every school health policy, and every CSR mandate that claims to care about gender equity. It is not a side issue. It is the ground beneath the girl’s feet. And you cannot ask her to rise if you have not first made sure she can stand.

At GEAN, we will keep showing up in communities where this conversation has never been had. We will keep distributing products, training teachers, and telling girls that their bodies are not a burden — they are a gift worth knowing and protecting. And we will keep making the case, loudly and without apology, that a girl’s health and her leadership are not separate concerns. They are the same conversation.