Support SHE Enterprises

“Sustainable Health Enterprises or SHE is a social venture that is on a mission to invest in people and ideas that are typically overlooked (and often taboo) as vehicles of social and economic change. The SHE28 campaign is its initiative to address this pressing and silent problem through innovative product design and sustainable economic opportunities for women and their communities.  

SHE has developed an patent-pending, low-cost, and eco-friendly menstrual pad, the SHE LaunchPad, that makes an absorbent core (the highest material cost driver) for pads from agro-waste (i.e, banana fibers) without using any chemicals or super absorbent polymers. The SHE28 campaign launched in Rwanda in 2009, and girls and women, will now have access to a menstrual product that will be priced at 5 cents/pad. 

SHE is coupling its LaunchPad with a sustainable business model that will create economic opportunities all across the value chain – from the banana farmers who will sell their banana fiber to SHE to the women entrepreneurs that will be equipped with business skills training and education to sell the LaunchPads in their communities. For every women-led and operated business that SHE invests in, approximately 100 jobs are created and approximately 100,000 girls and women have access to affordable menstrual pads.”

I think this is such a great cause because it does not only deal with the menstrual issue, it also addresses women entrepreneurship. SHE has done a tremendous job with this alone but they’ve done so much more. In 2010, the SHE team hit the streets in Kigali with their Breaking the Silence on Menstruation event. They talked to girls, women & men regarding how to break down menstrual taboos that serve as a barrier to girls’ education. Because of this, the Rwandan government placed a new line item in the national budget for a $35,000 procurement of menstrual pads for the poorest girls. Such an achievement!