CHAMPAIGN – Period poverty is a global phenomenon. When girls don’t have access to pads and tampons for their periods, it can cause shame, and keep them from attending school.
Journalists from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign are working with student reporters in Sierra Leone to explore the issue of period poverty. The work will be presented in a documentary film titled, “Uman Tok: Tailoring Hope, Renewing Futures.”
Uman Tok is a women-led non-governmental organization that’s working to provide free, reusable menstrual hygiene kits to girls and women in the city of Freetown.
In Sierra Leone’s Krio language, Uman Tok translates “woman talk.”
“There are lots of women that are suffering because of lack of this simple, feminine hygiene products,” said Juliet Rhoman, executive director, in an interview with the documentary film team.
Khadija Marrah, a student from Education For All — a nongovernmental organization in Sierra Leone that provides education for children — recalled feeling ashamed when she got her period and it stained her uniform.
“They mocked me and I went inside and took off my uniform. I was not coming to school,” Marrah, in tears, said in an interview for the film.
A teacher at the school reassured another student who had a period stain on her dress, telling her, “Hey, no for shame you. It’s part of being a girl.”
Rhoman said her passion is “to provide reproductive health awareness, education and sustainable feminine hygiene kits to empower women and girls.”
The Uman Tok documentary film team will present their work at an event on campus at 6 p.m. Thursday at the University YMCA Latzer Hall in Champaign.
The event, titled “Uman Tok: A Discussion on Global Collaboration and Period Poverty” will include speakers from the U of I Center for African Studies and College of Media, along with speakers from Fourah Bay College and the University of Birmingham.
Also participating in the event: CodeRed, a student organization at the U of I founded in 2020 with the mission to educate people about menstrual cycles and period poverty and spread awareness of the issue in the Champaign-Urbana area.
Dua Iftikhar, co-president of CodeRed, said the group hosts weekly open meetings on Thursday to provide a comfortable place for people to talk about menstruation and destigmatize it.
One of CodeRed’s key initiatives is Period Drive, a semesterly event aimed to collect money and donations of menstrual products, and provide menstrual kits to the underserved women in the community.
“We make little period packs with a bunch of different products in it, and we give them out to the community,” Iftikhar said.
CodeRed expanded their work by contacting more organizations to join in, including sororities.
“A lot of the sororities are now involved with us and they help us with our period drive,” said Savannah Welch, another co-president of CodeRed.
Last semester, CodeRed raised over $200 and donated 300 period packs to Avicenna Community Health Center in Champaign.
“We believe that these types of products [menstrual kits], this education around menstruation, it should be a human right, not a privilege,” said Anjali Prabhakar, president of CodeRed. “We just want everyone to be able to have… access to the resources.”
The group is encouraging attendees at Thursday’s event to bring a donation of a period product.
CodeRed leaders said they’re inspired by the women in Sierra Leone who provided reusable menstrual pads and educate both girls and boys about menstruation.
“We are hoping that this event would bring awareness to period poverty in our community [and]… inspire action to alleviate this period poverty in Champaign-Urbana,” Welch said.