ManaShare

Period poverty is a widespread problem that many women and girls experience. Menstrual products in the developing world are expensive, limited, and often harmful for the environment. Those who can't afford products are forced to use rags or cloth, but these methods can be uncomfortable, impractical and unhealthy, and many report low self-esteem, lack of dignity and shame. Mana Care provides an environmentally friendly alternative which is comfortable, affordable, and safe for women's health and mental well-being: reusable cloth pads. We are different from other cloth pad companies because we want to teach women and girls how to make their own cloth pads.

Mana Share programs can be set up globally - lessons can be delivered both in person or through video tutorials. The goal is widespread sharing of this information to as many women and girls in need, in as many languages and countries as possible.

Women and girls around the world, in both developing and developed countries, face challenges in safely managing their periods for a number of reasons, the most common being that many can't afford mainstream traditional products. However, as technology advances and companies expand, there has been a natural surge in growth of disposable plastic sanitary products being produced to meet the demands of our global population. And as products become cheaper to mass produce, they become more affordable and accessible for more communities which previously could not afford these products. The result is an alarming increase in plastic products being used and disposed of, often by burning, collection in landfill, or thrown into rivers and waterways. This puts more pressure on our environment, and as the plastic will take hundreds of years to decompose and the average woman will use around 1600 products within her lifetime - the impact of these disposable products will continue to harm our environment long after the lives of the women who used them.

Our goal is to help women and girls of all economic situations, religions, locations and ethnicities, gain access to safe, affordable and environmentally friendly period products, such as reusable cloth pads.

Those who can't afford mainstream products are using risky and unsafe methods to manage their periods. And those who can afford plastic products and continue to use them are contributing to harmful waste, polluting our environment and oceans.

By providing environmentally friendly alternatives to plastic products like the reusable cloth pad, we can prevent the health and environmental impacts associated with mainstream products.

Our solution is two-fold. First, we produce reusable cloth pads which can last up to 3 years. Our cloth pads replace disposable plastic pads which account for around 20% of average household waste. If one woman switches from plastic to reusable cloth pads, we can prevent over 1000 plastic pads from entering our environment.

Second, to bridge the economic gap, particularly for at risk populations such as refugees and remote communities who may only be able to access products via free handout programs, we want to teach them how to hand sew and make their own using readily available materials. Our first focus is low-income families from remote or rural areas, and refugee camps, but from there we want to be able to hold train the trainer programs nationally and regionally to help give everyone access to proper products to manage their periods.

Reusable cloth pads are not new, and many businesses around the world are already mass producing reusable cloth pads, with tiered pricing and product designs targeted at different consumer groups or market segments. For example, low cost materials and plain styles for low income households, or more costly materials and elaborate styles for middle to high income households.

While this is also Mana Care's current business model, we now want to shift towards a knowledge sharing model where we provide the skills and tools people need to make their own pads. This service will be provided to marginalised, remote and impoverished communities, such as refugee camps and remote areas of developing countries.

Our knowledge sharing service, or training of trainers program, can be delivered in person however we understand there are limitations to this. We want to be able to provide visual learning tools, such as video tutorials, teaching women and girls how to hand sew and make their own cloth pads using whatever materials they have at home. For example, old shirts, towels, blankets, etc. This technology component would require a medium that is easily accessible from anywhere in the world, online via smart phones - or offline via ipads or laptops provided by Mana Care to training of trainers programs. The tools and videos would need to be translated to different languages.

In Samoa alone, it is estimated that more than half of menstruating women and girls cannot access disposable pads and use rags to manage their periods. As technology advances and cheaper pads become more available, they will eventually reach our shore and women and girls will be able to easily access them. This would double the amount of sanitary waste that ends up in landfill, or pollutes our environment, rivers and oceans.

Currently Mana Care and other companies producing, selling and distributing cloth pads or other alternative products to mainstream plastic pads often adopt a 'buy one, give one' model when trying to reach impoverished or marginalised communities. However this model has been cited to create and perpetuate a culture of dependency among those communities it aims to serve.

Mana Care's new model of providing the skills and knowledge to those communities who otherwise could not access reusable cloth pads (as are either using plastic pads or rags) is a viable solution to the problem because it can help prevent dependency on free products. More than this, by coupling understanding of environmental impacts of plastic products with the skills to create their own reusable cloth pads, women and girls will be more likely to use reusable products and say no to disposable plastic ones.

Currently we have served around 500 women and girls in our community, and within a year we hope to reach at least 1000 more through both our product and service provision. With our service, for each one woman we could reach another ten at least to hand sew and make their own cloth pads. In five years, we hope to be serving the entire menstruating female population of Samoa (around 50,000 to 80,000), including populations of other countries in the Pacific and hopefully in other developing areas of the world.

Within the next year we hope to pilot our training of trainers program with rural communities in Samoa where the need is greatest, while also entering the markets of other Pacific island countries like Tuvalu and the Marshall Islands, and New Zealand and Australia who have large Pacific island populations. More and more people are becoming conscious of their consumption patterns and lifestyles being harmful for the environment and our oceans. Which means more and more people are searching for better alternatives to the disposable plastic products they currently consume and rely on. Within five years we hope to be one of the leading actors within the Pacific region providing reusable menstrual products and services to menstruating women and girls, including impoverished and marginalised communities.

Currently we are facing barriers to investment and seed funding we require to grow our business, and if we want to enter international markets. In addition to financial barriers, we also face technical barriers in understanding and managing mass production of our product. All of our raw materials are imported into Samoa, which is a large portion of our operating costs. We are also faced with the issue of limited trade routes within the Pacific - shipping routes to and from Samoa are limited and require intensive financial resources. If we are to successfully export our product, we would need greater capital than we currently have.

Our knowledge sharing model can help us generate income and revenue, by exchanging our services for consulting fees. We aim to target humanitarian response organisations and groups who have the financial resources to pay for our train the trainer programs.

We hope to gain greater knowledge and understanding of mass production and exporting through researching and self-learning the skills required, and utilising networks within our business community to successful do so.

The more experience we have trading within our local market, the more exposure we will have with potential investors interested in helping us scale our business internationally.

We have one full-time employee paid, our seamstress who leads all production. Myself and my co-founder work as much as we need to support the daily operations, but this is not our full-time job as we cannot yet afford to receive salaries/wages with Mana Care.

Isabell and I have complimentary experiences with MHM - I having access to plastic pads my whole life and only later choosing reusable alternatives in order to decrease my consumption and waste production. My co-founder having had the experience of using cloth rags to manage her period as a young adolescent in Samoa. We both understand the different perspectives and realities of women in Samoa, and the world, and why affordable reusable alternatives to current mainstream products is extremely important.

Both Isabell and I have professional careers working for the environment at the regional level, and understand the many challenges Pacific island countries face in dealing with solid waste management. In addition to this, we understand fully that the current global rate of consumption of single use plastic products is unsustainable and needs to change. The only way we can hope to change is by providing better alternatives for people to use, and start to stop the production and safe of current harmful products by introducing bans or carbon tax, etc.

Our understanding of policy and legal requirements at the national level to implement positive changes can help us provide assistance to countries seeking to ban plastics.

Mana Care is a social enterprise which aims to provide women and girls with safe, affordable and environmentally friendly period products, such as reusable cloth pads. We have a buy one give one model, where we provide an option for people to not only purchase a pack for themselves, but also for adolescent girls which is distributed to them for free. We also provide seminars to rural communities on menstrual hygiene management (MHM) and samples of our pads. We are currently in the process of finding a donor to sponsor packs for rural communities which we will distribute in partnership with Samoa's Ministry of Women and Community Development. Our main market segment is middle to high income women who are wanting to decrease their waste and live low or zero waste lifestyles. However with our new model, we hope to be able to reach impoverished and marginalised communities by providing training of trainers programs which humanitarian, government and social well-fare organisations such as UNDP are willing and able to fund.

We will continue to sell our products and hope to be able to enter international markets within the next year. This will be one of our main revenue streams. However, by providing our service of train the trainers programs, we will target governments, organisations and other major actors working in humanitarian response and social development, to pay for Mana Care to run these programs, whether in person or by video tools, to communities where the need has been identified.

Grant funding of any amount would benefit us tremendously, as a small social enterprise. We have very limited opportunities in Samoa and within the Pacific region as a whole. If we were given the opportunity to pitch as a finalists of the Solve Challenge 2019, the experience alone and the exposure to potential partners, investors and networks would help us raise our business profile, and provide our solution of knowledge sharing on MHM across the globe.

UNHCR, UNDP, World Food Program (WFP), and those working with impoverished or marginalised countries and communities where MHM needs are greatest. In addition of course we want to continue working with UN Environment and other environmental organisations seeking to change legislation and policies around single use plastics and how to provide alternative products to replace these, and a road map for banning these products successfully.

If we won the GM Prize on Circular Economy - we would use this to include waste fabrics and clothing from the fashion industry to create our reusable cloth pads. A survey found that the average person will throw out more than 70 pounds of clothing each year, amounting to more than 20 billion pounds of textiles and clothes ending up in landfills, or in our environment and oceans. If clothes were recycled, and textile cuttings from fabric companies within the fashion industry were regulated, we could easily turn those excess and discarded materials into other useful items, such as reusable cloth pads.

The Innovation for Women Prize would help Mana Care scale significantly to be able to operate internationally, and increase the availability of our knowledge sharing service through making our video tools and tutorials readily available for women in a number of developing regions we would normally not be able to access. We would use this prize money to create a platform for trainers to receive online technical support, and have access to mentors and other trainers of the program for problem solving and other solutions. A platform for Mana Care's sharing of knowledge service would be the most ideal way for our training of trainers program to be run, because it would help us avoid travelling to remote areas to provide face to face training, and increase the probability of success of the program.