Girls living in rural areas, secondary school girls and other poor girls can now have smiles on their faces as the weight of buying sanitary pad is about to be lifted from them.

The Nigerian Government has announced that it will be subsidizing the cost of sanitary pads and commence free distribution to secondary school girls around the country.

Mart Ekpere-Eta, The Director-General, National Centre for Women Development (NWCD), a parastatal of the Ministry of Women Affairs, during a press briefing held in Abuja in commemoration of the 2019 International Day of the Girl Child, encouraged companies into sanitary pads production to key into the gesture as part of their corporate social responsibilities through contributions, price reduction and availability.

She said through such efforts, young girls would not have to suffer as a result of the high cost of sanitary pads. And that NCWD was in talks with sanitary pad-producing companies towards ensuring that the price of the pad was subsidised.

She said, “We have a menstrual hygiene corner in our programme whereby many of you could just drop in maybe N10 or N20 and there’s an arrangement with most of these companies who produce sanitary pads who will now sell at subsidised rates, which we will distribute to rural areas, especially in secondary schools.

“Be that as it may, we are working further to see how the issue of price will be dealt with. But it is a gradual process and we need to find a way to reach the manufacturers and find out how to reduce the price.

Through advocacy, we encourage as a corporate social organisation from other agencies and private sector, to ensure that every organisation will buy a certain quantity of pads available to schools and send to rural areas as their own CSR.”

Sanitary pads largely go for between N250 and N400 per pack, depending on the quality.

Culled from www.punchng.com