In a garment factory in NCR (India), only 200 free pads are being used per month from the factory dispensary by over 3,000 low-income women. It appears that workers continue to make less than ideal health choices with regard to menstrual hygiene.
Understand the impact of low take-up of safe menstrual hygiene products at the workplace.
The impact of menstrual health on women’s health outcomes or workplace outcomes, such as absenteeism, lacks evidence. Therefore, in an industry whose workforce is overwhelmingly female, there is opportunity to explore fitting interventions, which could yield business returns.
We aim to find the impact of this intervention on the wellbeing of workers and their workplace outcomes, such as productivity, absenteeism, etc.
The firm wants to develop a company-wide strategy, which goes beyond simply providing sanitary napkins in dispensaries. Our learnings from the pilot will help develop this strategy and create fitting interventions to improve health outcomes at the workplace. We intend to evaluate the same for business returns through rigorous research methods.
Image credits: Nayantara Parikh / Shalin Gor