The Nia Movement

A summer with street girls while an undergraduate at Harvard led Megan to commit her life to unlock the most opportunity for the most girls. She applied her Cognitive Neuroscience integrative approach to the question of sanitary pads and related health education, which evolved into ZanaAfrica’s work as a global leader in social enterprise and in non-profit programming for menstrual, sexual, and reproductive health and rights (SRHR).

Megan has informed Kenyan policy since 2006, established sanitary pad innovations, generated ground-breaking data on what works for girls, and impacted >150,000 females since ZanaAfrica’s inception (2007).

Megan is an Ashoka Fellow, a GOOD Pioneer of Health for Africa Fellow, PopTech Social Innovation Fellow, and was the the youngest President of a Kenyan Rotary Club.

Prior to ZanaAfrica, Megan was the Resource Mobilization Manager at Teule (Kenya), Creative Director at an internet startup, and volunteer campus minister with Black Campus Ministry (IVCF).

We solve the challenge for 4 in 5 females across East Africa who lack access to reproductive health information and sanitary pads. We create a new standard for consumer products: to become educational resources for people to find the information they need, access the services they deserve, and actualize their full potential. We use sanitary pad packaging and marketing to deliver partner-based free digital resources for full health rights, (eg. access to a safe counselor, text-based contraceptive knowledge, support during pregnancy and motherhood) which connect customers to local trusted clinics. Co-created with customers and offered at a socially just, affordable price, our products meet the limitations of females on daily wages and are proven high quality. Every $1 invested in this intervention yields $120 in social ROI. Nia is not just a pad brand but also a curriculum to help adolescents safely transition through to adulthood delivered by our non-profit.

Girls who safely transition through adolescence have greater income, decision-making power over family planning, better health, and break cycles of generational poverty; however this safe transition is illusive. Because they lack knowledge of their health rights and cannot actualize them, in Kenya girls are 6x more likely than boys to have HIV, 98% of first sex is unwanted with a man 8-10 years older, 21% are teen mothers, and 40% have experienced physical/sexual violence. Poverty drives girls to engage in transactional sex – of that, 10% is for sanitary pads so girls can stay in school. This replicates across Africa’s 1BN population, where the average age is 18, yet adolescents have the lowest rate of clinic visits.

A key driver of the problem is health ecosystem fragmentation: NGOs programs struggle to communicate to girls; service providers lack marketing budgets; clinics are unknown/inaccessible; adolescents are unable to find accurate answers to health questions. Our project addresses this by creating an integrated health ecosystem for girls and women to know, access, and actualize their full health rights through the vehicle of sanitary pads, to say “What if, for the >300M females who menstruate daily, their products supported informed health and safety decisions?”

ZanaAfrica leverages consumer markets to solve two overlooked critical challenges: access to affordable, quality menstrual products and free, confidential healthcare education alongside clinical services.

We transform access to healthcare and education through sanitary pads to address interrelated societal challenges around health and safety with the consumer in control: what to ask, from which provider, to access what she needs, when and in what format she wants. It is free, visible on supermarket/kiosk shelves, on posters, and across social media. Through whatsapp, text, or phone, confidential counsellors provide immediate answers to questions and referrals to trusted nearby clinics.

Our Nia pads are available within walking distance to low-income households who need high quality products at lower prices. Our eight-pack is 40% cheaper than its benchmarked competitor; our four-pack is the only small pack on the market – at $0.35, it allows women earning daily to buy both pads and food. We leverage packaging to communicate life-saving information and direct access to services across the spectrum of health, including support for pregnancy and newborns , contraceptive, domestic violence and child marriage, emergency support, mental health, COVID, etc. Service partners collect detailed monthly data so we can enhance messaging for increased engagement.

We are reshaping the feminine hygiene industry to impact 1 million low-income girls/women in East Africa by 2022, delivering dignified, affordable menstrual management alongside reproductive health education, with free rapid-response answers to health questions and referrals to clinical services.

This solution has been co-created with girls and their communities since 2009, pairing health programs with free pad distribution and evolving in response to girls’ and parents’ feedback. They wanted pads with stronger glue, more absorbency, softer top layers to not chafe on long walks and hot weather, and more health and safety information, both digital and print - including stories of real people and relatable comic characters. Our own printed health messaging has 98% sharing rates and 65% knowledge retention, and our partners’ resources have 3% usage uptake and are being adapted onto pad packs, into marketing materials, and into school curriculums. Through an independent study, our pads improve menstrual management by over 25% and help girls feel more self-determined, while our health education positively changed all three gender norms and reproductive health knowledge (STDs, pregnancy, contraceptives). Regular feedback via anonymous surveys on partners digital resources improves their service provision. We continue to introduce new menstrual products based on feedback.

By 2030, 320M African youth (15-24) will require solutions to ensure their safe transition into adulthood. ZanaAfrica solves this challenge through the lens of menstrual and related health, starting in Kenya. This innovative solution uniquely harnesses ecosystems of government (eg Ministry of Health clinics, State Department of Gender GBV shelters), NGOs (best digital health, education, and safety partners), and markets to put knowledge and choice literally in the hands of females. Our “Fast Moving Educational Good” (FMEG) is what a Fast-Moving Consumer Good can do when customer needs come first, allowing users to solve their challenges when/how it suits them.

I was privileged to work in a Kenyan children’s home from 2001-2005, where I witnessed how girls’ lives and development were derailed during puberty when they lacked answers to questions about health, safety, and rights, and how their self-determination was compromised when they lacked menstrual products. Pads were our second biggest budget item after bread, and I realized a market-based solution could address several root issues of poverty by incorporating safe health information and access. As a safe “mom” for 250 kids, I wanted to create a product that could be a “mom” to females who had no safe person in their lives, and could give them tools to make decisions in line with their values to safely navigate puberty and beyond, so they could live their full potential. Over the last decade, my team – including graduates of that home – has listened deeply to girls to create powerful products and programs that save money, facilitate behaviour change, and inspire and challenge all consumer products to do more to help people actualize their potential. Our work over the decade has helped spur a movement to normalize periods, expand menstrual product access, and help girls step into their full potential.

Working with street girls during the summer of 1998 I realized how we could have been in each others’ shoes if not for the accident of birth. Returning in 2001, I witnessed their suffering when they were denied answers to questions about health and safety, relationships and consent. I saw how they were not treated respectfully or given honest answers to help them align their decisions with their values. I was heartbroken when they got raped or accidentally pregnant, or contracted HIV. This was adults’ failure, not theirs. Our long late-night conversations were formative for me.

At the same time, I saw how expensive pads were. As I dug into the issue I realized how solving the cost and availability of pads could combine with addressing the issue of rights-based answers to girls’ questions to address fundamental root issues of poverty. When I gave out pads in Kibera in 2007, I asked a girl how she would feel to receive a year’s supply of sanitary pads. She responded, “I would feel the whole world loves me.” I knew this was my destiny – if that product alone can change her self-perception, what could it do when combined with rights-based resources?

This project was birthed by listening to girls I love, many of whom I still have a relationship with two decades later, and responding with wisdom, tenacity, and forging partnership. The spark of innovation of combining pads and health education in 2003 has grown into a fire, stoked by formulating teams of diverse Kenyan professionals over time to bring this vision to life. I have refused to give up in the face of consistent adversity because I kept faithful to the truth I had witnessed and knew what was at stake for girls/women. I have been a global advocate for menstrual health and the role it can play in opening conversations about comprehensive health and safety issues, bringing the experiences of girls to global conferences to shape policies. Listening unceasingly, and working within the limitations of funding and technology, my idea has taken shape beyond what I imagined possible, birthing i) magazines and a curriculum that has been proven independently to change gender norms and reproductive health knowledge in just 18 months, ii) a high quality affordable product that can be made locally from non-wood and recycled pulps at 23% cost savings, iii) our FMEG, a reclamation of pad packaging to deliver partners’ life-saving resources, iv) a spectrum of comic characters that connect with youth and amplify their voices. Over the last year, like a complex puzzle, it is coming together, and with the onboarding of Eveready as our distributor we are now at a moment of catalytic impact.

My vision was always to impact millions, sustainably through local manufacture of pads. To achieve this, I forged a pioneering relationship with a local manufacturer, which allowed us to prove our intellectual property. However, as we finalized our insights around product specifications that women wanted, we realized this partner’s machine could not create the right quality/cost product to prove our commercial business model. This crisis compelled us to outsource to China and focus on commercial sales first before manufacturing. We quickly found a wonderful factory partner. However, this automation meant we could not put information inside pad packages, which was my initial idea for delivery of “pads plus health education.” We allowed this second limitation to result in further innovation, and birthed two groundbreaking concepts: 1), the concept of the FMEG, to connect users to free, trusted digital partners on pad packaging; and 2) distinct educational materials from the initial health content, which through deep listening to girls evolved into a set of five story-based magazines and a curriculum, which we tested in a randomized control trial and which now the government of Kenya wants to incorporate into their new curriculum.

In 2006 as I sought a sustainable, scalable solution to the challenge of sanitary pads plus health education, it was evident that a policy framework was necessary. At the time I was the youngest-ever incoming President of a Rotary Club in Kenya. In that capacity, I galvanized Rotary and partners to launch the National Sanitary Towels Campaign. A global first, it built on women Parliamentarians’ zero-rating of pads in 2004. I brought together the Ministry of Education, private sector, and NGO stakeholders to demand free sanitary pads for all schoolgirls as a basic human right and as important an investment in their education as textbooks. Launched Valentine’s Day 2006 it was a statement of love for all girls and garnered much media attention. This was a fulcrum moment, one that shifted the conversation permanently to discuss periods in the media and enabled a sustained effort by many to see this campaign through. Kenya quickly and proudly became the first country to write pads into education budgets in the 2007-2008 budget. This is now referred to as  “the tampon tax,” but it started in Kenya.

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Sanitary pads, clinics, digital health providers, and behaviour change education – none of these are new. Bringing them together, however, creates a sea change for access and actualization of full health rights. ZanaAfrica moves and strengthens the health ecosystem from fragmentation (where disparate organizations struggle to communicate to a girl; service providers have minimal marketing budgets; clinics are unknown/inaccessible; adolescents lack accurate answers to health questions) to integration, delivering a harmonized and easy-to-access information and referral system with synchronized data collection for impact analysis with the best free, pre-vetted digital service delivery partners. Through quality products that women and girls want and can afford, we put factual, confidential resources and choices directly into their hands.

We measurably transform access to essential healthcare and behaviour change education through a product required monthly (sanitary pads). We curated the best digital providers in health, safety, and education to ensure customers who can find a phone find trusted answers and referrals to a nearby clinic. Education resources support school retention, further contributing to lifetime health outcomes. This partnership-driven approach is supplemented by our own proven behaviour change communication materials anchored in storytelling and comics. Our patentable product innovation will reduce the cost of pads a further 30% and reclaim waste materials.

With Elevate, we will enroll 3x health clinics and ensure data collection down to the clinic level, to prove the FMEG as model of what happens when companies truly understand their customers’ needs in a responsive way and work collaboratively to elevate humanity.

Reproductive health education and supplies are out of reach for 4 in 5 across East Africa. The consequences are significant, from gender-based violence (10% of transactional sex is for sanitary pads; 40% believe GBV is acceptable), to inefficiency in agriculture (70% of farmers are female) to >3% reduced output in factories.

Quality products are not affordable, and manufacturers are interested in their margins rather than in ensuring access for all. We can change this through a social justice approach: taking reduced margins on quality products, while preserving traditional mark-ups across commercial channels, will provide pads within walking distance of most girls and women. (We can further improve margins through local production of pads from non-wood and recycled pulps, as fluff pulp is the key cost driver.)

By putting digital reproductive health and education resources on pad packages and posters, at least 5% of viewers will use them to know, access, and actualize their full health rights, impacting hundreds of thousands. This access then offers opportunities for powerful societal transformation. Putting our proven health content materials in pad packages will further actualize reproductive health knowledge and positively impact gender norms.

For every $1 invested, menstrual management returns $31 through improvements in educational retention, reduction in HIV, and lower teen pregnancy. Kohler and Behrman showed each dollar invested addressing family planning yields $120, including $40 through reducing maternal and infant mortality by reducing unplanned pregnancies. In our two-year randomized control trial, our pads improved girl’s menstrual management by >25% while our health education materials changed all three gender norms positively and changed reproductive health knowledge of pregnancy, STDs, and modern contraceptives.

This theory of change began to be proven in our 2019 FMEG pilot, where 350,000 FMEG sold packets yielded 2.9% engagement with health and education partners, with 65% requesting family planning information and receiving a clinic referral. Now, messaging of each partner has been improved and printed on pad packages. With posters being introduced into commercial markets with FMEG partners, we expect an additional 200K people to see posters every month.

Right now, we serve 80,000 sanitary pad customers/month. With an estimate of 5x people actively looking at the FMEG resources on shelves or in homes, and with 10,000 posters promoting these FMEG resources viewed actively only 25x, we expect a viewership of 650,000. With 2.9% engagement per the 2019 pilot, this is 19,000 users of FMEG resources, who now have answers to health questions, who have spoken with a counselor, have accessed critical study materials, or have specific contraceptives knowledge they were seeking. If even only 10% of engagements lead to a clinic visit, this means nearly 2,000 females will have been able to seek out a safe local clinic to get their contraceptive or other health needs met.

In one year we will serve 425,000 customers, have 3.6M view FMEG resources with 3.9% engaging (141,000) and 21,000 clinic visits.

In year five, we will reach 1,500,000 customers across three countries. 120,000 posters will be put up at low-income retail points. With a 15x viewership of FMEG partners on pad packs (eg. broadly available in supermarkets where customers can interact with the product and see the free FMEG contact numbers displayed by the tills) and 25x viewership of posters, our FMEG will reach 26M views. Having optimized our ability to convert viewers to user engagement, doubling their engagement to 6%, we will actualize 1,500,000 using FMEG services, and with clinics expanded 3x, 20% of viewers would be referred to clinics, positively changing health outcomes for 300,000.

With our pads, low-income families reclaim 4% of their monthly budget that was spent on poorer quality sanitary pads. Next year we will work with Glatfelter to reclaim their factory waste material, establishing local manufacturing with our own lower-cost, environmentally friendly technology to double family savings on pads by 2022 across East Africa and add 150 jobs. This will enable us to repurpose our proven health messages, incorporating singular, actionable messages in pad packages like a Cracker Jack box improving knowledge in UTIs, STDs, pregnancy, contraceptives, etc.

Within a year we will add more radically affordable products (maternity, adult diapers, and ultra-thins). These will allow for more tailored messages to target audiences and add new FMEG partners (the government SGBV hotline, LVCT Health or Marie Stopes).

FMEG impact goals are to achieve 3x clinics registered by partners so more users can find a local clinic. Simply by promoting partner services and collecting monthly data reports, we expect:

By mid-2021: 7,000 safe hospital births; 35,000 new mothers supported; 21,000 escaping SGBV; 78,000 accessing contraceptives; 21,000 supported in crisis pregnancy; and 50,000 tutored on government curriculum.

In year five: 77,000 safe hospital births; 383,000 new mothers supported; 230,000 escaping SGBV; 842,000 accessing contraceptives; 230,000 supported in crisis pregnancy; and 535,000 tutored on government curriculum.

We are in advanced conversations with the Teacher Service Commission and Office of the President to adapt our curriculum into the new government curriculum. Our goal is to serve half of Kenyan Class 6 students by year 5.

The most significant current barrier is working capital to meet the demands of our distributor (Eveready) and NGO partners. As we think internationally, we need to find the right scaling distribution partners for sales, and to ensure our FMEG partners have the capabilities to grow to meet the growing demand. This includes their abilities to direct users to safe clinics everywhere, including in new countries.

We also lack the ability to gauge user satisfaction of the FMEG partners’ resources as well as to assess our customers’ satisfaction.

Technologically we need to convert a machine to be able to suit our process innovation. This requires very customized engineering experience.

Legally we need to protect all our trademarks as we expand, and to file a patent for our process innovation, ensuring we are protected in all territories we plan to be in and have the capabilities to defend against infringement.

A potential market barrier in the next year is affordability – product costs are increasing for sanitary pads as the top layer is used for masks and the bottom layer for protective material, while people are jobless and struggling financially. We expect this to continue through at least December 2021.

As we have strong local Kenyan talent on our team, and are regularly engaged in policy and grassroots work through our non-profit, we neither have nor anticipate having any cultural barriers. Our Afrocentric product appeals deeply to women, and we see men on twitter proudly buying it for their loved ones.

We are seeking working capital now and carefully managing our cash flow. Most of our marketing spend is via discounts to distributors to push the product into the market. In addition, as we introduce new products into the market our revenues will increase and the business will be able to cash flow itself. We have a strong push to target NGO accounts, which are donating for free – sanitary pads are considered an essential relief item and are in all household donations alongside food.

We are actively seeking a partner to facilitate affordable data collection from customers and FMEG partners, as well as writing grants to better support FMEG partners.

We are in conversations with Glatfelter’s Innovation Project Lead for Absorbent Materials to partner to offload the off-specification materials they have, which is hundreds of tons and suitable for our process innovation. Now, the challenge is to engineer a production line with our innovation. Already, our innovation reduced fluff pulp from 35% to 3%. Now that 3% will be free and by year five we are confident we will be manufacturing for the region and passing cost savings on to consumers.

As we launch a capital raise for manufacturing, we will ensure legal protection costs are included. We have several pro-bono legal resources that will help keep costs minimal.

As we evaluate our working capital, we are projecting to absorb the cost increases between ourselves and Eveready through December 2021 in a 60/40 ratio to keep the end-consumer cost as-is.

FMEG partners: Ticah Health runs the Auntie Jane hotline on SRHR with free counseling support; Ask Nivi has a free text-based platform for menstrual health; Mum’s Village supports from pre-conception to post-birth support for parents with peer and expert support. Eneza provides low-cost tutorial resources for primary/secondary school. Soon: State Department of Gender’s SGBV hotline once they have capacity to manage the projected volume. We have an MOU and receive data monthly. We work to help them harmonize their data collection and support clinic expansion.

Government: Ministry of Health – worked on Menstrual Hygiene Policy; have clinics in our FMEG referral network; Ministry of Education – collaborated on our curriculum and visual health content (comics + stories);

Eveready East Africa: Exclusive distributor of Nia pads for Kenya

Living Goods: First customer selling Nia to last-mile communities

Population Council: monitoring and evaluation for our RCT;

Plan International: oversaw mentors in 70 schools in our RCT

Cora Life: US menstrual product company donates product for us to give for free to girls. Over 4M pads to-date.

P.H Glatfelter Co.: collaborating to reclaim their off-specification absorbent waste to use in our novel manufacturing process to reduce cost by 30%.

Access Afya: Network of low-cost clinics with excellent data collection. Planning a pilot for clinic data collection of Nia referrals to validate a low-tech, free solution to help government hospitals and private low-cost clinics register and report Nia user engagement (anonymously) to track health access and uptake.

Pro-bono legal counsel: Trust Law

Our goal is to deliver a more affordable, quality sanitary pad to low-income consumers so they use fewer pads per month, reclaiming at least 3% of their monthly income.

Nia is benchmarked to the market leader but 38% cheaper. We take low margins (20%-35%) while preserving mark-ups along the distribution chain. This delivers an 8-pack for $0.60 and a 4-pack for $0.35 that saves women 65% in expenses, allowing her to meet menstruation needs and buy food for her family.

The 74% of Kenyan households earning >$500/month are our focus and where Eveready is selling. This comprises 100% of our current 80K end-customers.

The 34% of Kenyans (16M) who live below the poverty line (>$1.92/day) are the target of our Institutional Account sales, which are primarily NGOs who donate in emergency baskets of products, or who buy for schoolgirls whose families cannot afford pads at any price. They are seeking value for money and health resources to leave behind.

We do not charge FMEG partners for the advertising we provide as this is part of our brand promise and provides tremendous value as a safe resource for life-saving answers and referrals. Customers now choose which method of engagement they want, when it is convenient for them, on non-feature phones.

In the next year we will introduce an ultra-thin at $0.50, competing directly on price with low quality alternatives. We will meet additional needs for maternity pads, incontinence, and adult diapers. This increased pulp volume will justify internalizing manufacturing.

Our business requires economies of scale: low margins for a once-a-month purchase requires patient capital but is inherently sustainable at 4M pads/month, which we expect to achieve in late 2021 with only an additional $25,000 needed in working capital. Ordering multiple containers at a time results in a 3% cost of goods savings; internalizing package in Kenya will save an additional 8% while enabling additional social impact through enhanced, tested, health and safety messaging. The business model is sustainable without the health messages; however, the social impact improvements are monumental.

To sustain sales growth towards sustainability, we are actively seeking grants, loans, and award funds due to the lower margins but substantially higher and well-documented social returns on investment. We are well positioned to meet our targets for the coming year: ZanaAfrica generated $60K/year from 2016 to 2018 in retail learning pilots, and $159K in 2019 the first year of commercial scaling, which attracted Eveready in March 2020. Their first month of sales was $35K. Whereas in 2019 we sold 4.5 containers of product total, we are now selling three containers per month and will sell >$400K in products this year, growing to >$2M in 2022 through simply getting Nia into Eveready’s full sales pipeline nationally.

While being financially sustainable, from 2022 we expect to raise additional blended capital to actualize our partnership with Glatfelter and our patentable, eco-friendly manufacturing process. This will achieve macro-economic impact in health and manufacturing and ensure we maintain customer prices while enhancing our margins.

ZanaAfrica won the 2009 Wharton Africa Business Forum Business Plan Competition, which was our first prize funding of $7500. They heralded our model as “game changing for Africa”.

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation began our grant funding with Phase 1 support for scientific product innovation to create sanitary pads from novel materials (2011); Phase 2 expanded this work alongside health content development and route to market strategy (grant; 2012-2014). Grand Challenges Canada joined in Phase 2 (grant) and added Phase 3 (loan, 2015). The combined total of these was $1.1M in grants, $748K as a loan. Concurrently, Abt Associates contributed $150K (2013) to create and test our first health comics.

Gates Foundation further funded our purely non-profit programs via a randomized control trial for $2.9M over four years under their Grand Challenge “Putting Women and Girls at the Center of Development.” For this, we developed our comic- and story-based magazines and curriculum for health education and tested them in a two-year study following Class 7 students with measurable outcomes in changing positive gender norms and reproductive health knowledge (pregnancy; STDs; contraceptives). Our affiliated 501c3 in the US, ZanaAfrica Foundation has provided $430K between 2014-2019 for general operating and programmatic support for non-profit activity and now directs those funds to our newly-separated non-profit in Kenya, ZanaAfrica Programs.

This year Amplify Change ($45K) and Preston Werner Ventures ($30K) joined to support the FMEG learning work to uptake contraceptives.

Our Nia pad sales generated $159K last year and $80K year-to-date.

Winning Elevate will accelerate our FMEG reach regionally while deepening our social impact and its traceability. With $300K, in Year 1 we will conduct a one-year pilot with Access Afya (clinic partner) and Ask Nivi (to adapt their technology) to create a simple USSD reporting tool for clinics to trace referrals by FMEG partners from Nia down to the clinic and health service uptake ($150K). This will help the Ministry of Health gain better health data too, and could be replicated by other countries in international expansion. In year two, we will sub-grant to FMEG partners to increase vetted, participating clinics in our FMEG partners’ network 3x or more ($100K). These two requirements would enable us to verify our impact on the health ecosystem at scale and ensure full knowledge, access, and actualization of health rights for 1M cumulatively between 2020-2022. The remaining $50K would facilitate working capital growth for two shipping containers.

From 2021, a $250K loan would facilitate working capital for regional expansion of diversified products, while a research and development grant of $750K would allow us to purchase and convert a pad machine to begin manufacturing in Kenya and would catalyze an investment round of $1.5M to run the facility. This would in turn validate a regional model with manufacturing that could be replicated across other African regions with an ultimate goal to serve 13M – which would be 10% of menstruators on the continent, in the next 10-15 years with measurable health access and actualization.

The biggest cost driver is working capital: we must order three months in advance of sales, and receive revenue up to two months after sales are made. We will spend $750K on product purchases, including introducing a 16-pack for supermarkets and a $0.50 ultrathin 8-pack this year – based our learnings from market insights.

Marketing costs are primarily free boxes of product to distributors to incentive their push into new markets across Kenya. We expect to spend $50K in free products to generate $485K in commercial sales, $35K in point-of-sale materials including posters with FMEG resources, and $8K in online advertising. General and administrative costs are expected to be $60K which includes office running costs, insurances, licenses and fees, labor costs to conduct stock checks, offload containers of products, and put KEBS stickers on pad packs (legal quality validation sticker), and our corporate secretary for governance compliance. Legal costs for new trademarking are expected to be $8K. Staff costs this year are minimal due to leveraging shared resources and receiving some volunteer support, with a spend of only $35K – this is planned to increase substantially from 2021.

These total expenses of $946K are against total revenues of $867K ($294K from Cora donations, $88K from Institutional Accounts sales, and $485K from Eveready’s commercial sales. We will reach 380K customers by Q4 this year and can manage the deficit until we become profitable in late 2021 with $50K of the Elevate grant allocated to working capital for two additional shipping containers.

Elevate will help us cross the finish line, ensuring FMEG partners can support girls anywhere in Kenya with clinic referrals, and that clinics can report back. This vital challenge to strengthen the health ecosystem will validate our ability to support women and girls to know, access, and actualize their full health rights.

We seek to raise awareness about menstrual health and how a Fast Moving Educational Good and can overcome key societal challenges such as SGBV support, contraceptives access, and crisis pregnancy counseling - especially critical during COVID-19 – while increasing brand equity. We have quietly grown over the last decade; this is the time to amplify our work and facilitate replication. Elevate offers the unique opportunity to inspire students and industry leaders alike to collaboratively tackle this global problem affecting 2.5 billion.

As this is an MIT-affiliated prize, there may be exciting alignment in engineering innovation to convert a machine to cost-effectively use our technology, and in IT to support clinic reporting. Combined with industry-level introductions for sales distribution partners, Elevate could accelerate our ability to replicate internationally and achieve our target of 13M African customers with radically affordable FMEG products.

Last, our comic characters from our health materials are already finding a new life on social media and on our pad packages, and Elevate offers meaningful opportunities for collaborative innovation with Elevate partners for media and PR campaigns internationally and across the US with African-led characters who speak to issues of history, justice, reproductive health, and overcoming taboos.

Our advisory board and board of directors is expanding for our business and non-profit (both US and Kenya) to accelerate our networks for impact. I welcome coaching to assess the right models/partners for international scale during 2021-2022, as well as for business planning for manufacturing and preparing a capital raise. Additional support for monitoring and evaluation across our FMEG partners down to the clinic level would be welcome – with opportunities for Masters or Thesis-level research projects for MIT students.

We are preparing an exciting Headwrap-based campaign for both Kenyan customers and to raise funds (Kenya/US) while stimulating conversations on taboo reproductive health issues. This would be an exciting project for industry leaders and students. We have had significant media coverage including cover stories for Newsweek, Forbes, Greenwich Magazine, and Christianity Today. As our work has evolved, there are new stories to tell and more media would be welcome.

We seek engineering and fabrication partners to help us accelerate our ability to convert a pad machine with our own technology to make use of waste materials (first from Glatfelter). Facilitating students collaboration with industry leaders for this environmental and social benefit would be rewarding.

We seek introductions for sales distribution partners, similar to Eveready East Africa, across Africa (eg. Nigeria, Ghana, Egypt, South Africa), with large populations that need menstrual products and health resources. Partners would be local or multinational companies with established distribution networks who seek to support mission-driven SMEs while making a margin.

In non-profit partnerships, we seek large international NGOs who 1) would purchase product from us; 2) have free health-based mobile apps that could be put on our product as we scale internationally; or 3) want a stronger, proven health and life skills curriculum for their preexisting adolescent programs. Partners in Health, Plan International outside of Kenya, and others are target iNGOs.

Government partners we seek include those that would like to pilot our school curriculum in culturally sensitive frameworks, or who want to learn about the return on investment for menstrual health policies, including free products to schoolgirls.

We seek to diversify funding sources for East Africa, including from US and European funders including SIDA, NORAID, DANIDA, CIFF, USAID, and large private foundations. At the same time, we know our program and product is deeply relevant for the US, and we would wish to explore how to bring this African-led innovation to America.