Supporting girls at Twegashe School
December 16, 2025 / in Programs / by admin
One of CORE Tanzania’s priorities for Twegashe School is to keep girls in school. Our admission policy – equal numbers of boys and girls admitted to each class – is a step in this direction. Our girls wear skorts for their uniforms so they can participate in activities as freely as boys. Twegashe teachers pay attention to the learning needs of all students and are careful to call on children in an equitable way. We’ve also been proactive in constructing our girls’ toilet blocks with an extra room for changing and washing.
Girls missing school because they don’t have access to sanitary hygiene products is a well-known problem in many countries, including Tanzania. We’ve been researching this issue for several years so we would have a plan for when Twegashe’s oldest students reached puberty.
Last year we learned about an organization in Tanzania called Maji Safi which promotes rural health through WASH programs (Water, Hygiene and Sanitation). One of their areas of focus is menstrual hygiene health. A conversation with Maji Safi convinced us that a partnership to provide education to both our students and families would be beneficial in the future. However, a partnership with Maji Safi wouldn’t provide what we’ve been looking for most urgently – access to menstrual hygiene products for our students. Disposable pads are now available in Tanzania but have two major drawbacks – their high cost and the lack of infrastructure for proper disposal, especially here in the village.
The ideal we have been searching for is reusable pads that mothers or other women in the village could sew themselves. Earlier this year we discovered an organization called Too Little Children that runs a “Pad Project” where they recruit volunteer seamstresses in the U.S. to make reusable pads. Too Little Children then collects the pads and distributes them in Kenya. The Pad Project has starter packages that include patterns, instructions, a sample sewn pad, and fabric to make three more. They send these packages to their U.S. volunteer seamstresses to get them started – just what we needed to get someone started here in Bushasha! We wrote to Too Little Children, explained our situation, and requested several starter packages. They happily obliged.
By good fortune, our head teacher is a seamstress. She doesn’t have a sewing machine here in Bushasha, but she knows enough about sewing to take on the task of finding a parent who could do this. Mama Aniseth (grade 2) volunteered. She sewed a satisfactory sample and was tasked with sewing a few more so we would have them on hand if needed for our students. The timing was good, since the first one was needed only a few weeks later!
Our program is only in its infancy and needs to be made sustainable for the future. We still need to find the right kind of fabric here in Tanzania, and we need to help facilitate a system for sewing and distributing the pads. One possible scenario would be for mothers with sewing skills to form a small business cooperative and provide these reusable pads at a reasonable price, not only to our students, but possibly also to other girls and young women in the village.
Although there is still work to be done, we’re happy to have taken these first steps. And we’re very grateful to Too Little Children for sharing their design and samples to help us get started!
