Days for Girls International
Do you know how Days for Girls began?
In 2008, Celeste Mergens, Founder and CEO, was working in an overcrowded orphanage in Kenya where she learned girls were sitting on cardboard for several days each month, often going without food unless someone would bring it to them. This set in motion her first intervention with disposable pads. Learn the whole powerful story by watching the Celeste Mergens TED Talk “What Are We Not Asking”.
In the middle of the night, she woke up with a nagging question: “What are girls doing for feminine hygiene?” Seeking an answer, she ran to the computer and sent an email to the Assistant Director of the orphanage. He replied right away, “Nothing. They wait in their rooms.”
Celeste and her team began by distributing disposable pads, but soon learned this was neither a viable nor a sustainable solution. Plan B was a washable, long-lasting pad. The first Days for Girls Kits were quite different from the design in use today. Each of the 28 iterations that followed would be informed by extensive feedback and designed to meet unique cultural and environmental conditions in communities throughout the world. What would eventually become clear in the years following Days for Girls’ beginning was just how much of a difference hygiene solutions would make in assisting women and girls to break the cycle of poverty and live lives of dignity.
Today, Days for Girls has reached more than 1.5 million women and girls in 125+ countries with DFG kits and menstrual health education. This translates into millions of days of dignity, health, and opportunity!
To learn more about Days for Girls International, visit their website at www.daysforgirls.org.
Lake Chapala became an official Team of Days for Girls in 2017. We achieved our first milestone of reaching 1000 local girls in December 2018 and by the end of 2020, we estimate that we would have reached 1000 more.