On World Menstrual Health Day, the MENstruation Foundation calls on South Africa to confront the truth it has been too uncomfortable to name: period poverty is not a hygiene issue. It is an education emergency.
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1 in 3 school girls cannot afford sanitary products |
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5 days of school missed per girl, per month |
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8 million women and girls affected in South Africa |
JOHANNESBURG, 1 June 2026 – She wakes up before sunrise. She checks what she has. She does the math she should never have to do: can she afford to go to school today? Not because the fees are unpaid. Because she cannot afford a sanitary pad. She is 14 years old. This is South Africa.
Approximately 8 million women and girls in South Africa cannot afford basic sanitary products. More than half are learners. Girls without access to sanitary products miss up to five school days a month. Over a school career, that is the difference between a matric certificate and a statistic. What do they use instead? Newspaper. Rags. Cow Dung. Anything they can find.
The MENstruation Foundation was built on the conviction that no girl should choose between her education and her dignity. The Foundation installs free sanitary pad dispensary machines in schools and communities across South Africa, distributing over 1 million pads every month from its manufacturing facility in Paarl, which produces 192,000 pads per eight-hour shift. This is not charity. It is infrastructure.
“Period poverty keeps girls out of school. It ends careers before they begin. It tells a young woman that her body is a problem she must solve alone, in secret, without help. That is not a hygiene issue. That is a human rights violation,” says Siv Ngesi, Co-founder of the MENstruation Foundation.
World Menstrual Health Day is observed on 28 May each year — the 5th month, the 28th day, reflecting the 28-day cycle and the 5 days a period lasts. Globally, an estimated 500 million people lack adequate access to menstrual health management. In South Africa the scale is staggering, and the silence around it has been deafening.
The MENstruation Foundation, together with Joe Public and Independent Media, is launching the campaign Period Paper today. The campaign uses the very material girls resort to in the absence of pads to force a national reckoning. A full-page ad in The Star, The Mercury and The Cape Times carries the campaign’s headline alongside a stark visual. It makes the newspaper itself complicit in the truth it has too long been used to conceal.
The ad carries a QR code linked directly to www.menstruation.foundation. Every scan is a donation request. Every donation moves the Foundation closer to its targets: 30,000 more schoolgirls with access to free pads and 65 additional dispensary machines installed across the country.
The campaign was delayed and could not launch on World Menstrual Health Day on 28 May. The launch is now happening today, 1 June 2026.
The MENstruation Foundation is asking South Africa to end that silence. Donate at www.menstruation.foundation. Change your profile picture to a red blood stain on 28 May. Tell someone. This stops being someone else’s problem the moment you decide it is yours.
About the MENstruation Foundation: The MENstruation Foundation is a South African non-profit committed to ending period poverty through sanitary pad dispensary machines in schools and communities nationwide. The MENstruation Foundation was founded by two men, Siv Ngesi and Marius Basson. Hence the name of the foundation, because period poverty isn’t just a women’s issue ,it’s a humanity issue.
The Foundation distributes over 1 million pads monthly.
Campaign: Period Paper is a campaign by the MENstruation Foundation in partnership with Joe Public, launching on World Menstrual Health Day, 28 May 2026.
Donations: www.menstruation.foundation
Spokespeople available for interview: Siv Ngesi (Co-founder); Marius Basson (Co-founder) and Babalwa Latsha (Director), Mpakie Hude (Director) MENstruation Foundation
Media contact: [Engage PR Lungile Siyaya] | [lungiles@joepublic.com]
Issued by Engage PR (Joe Public Group) on behalf of the MENstruation Foundation | Period Paper Campaign 2026 | www.menstruation.foundation
