Lead image for Sharing the gospel, one sanitary pad at a time.
Six years ago, when Wambui Njoroge first learned that there are girls who miss school because they could not afford sanitary products, she was dismayed. As a university student without a steady income, she struggled to figure out how she could help.
“Back in 2020, a friend who works in the tourism and hospitality industry went for a training camp in Kajiado, and when he came back, he talked about the hardships some of the people there were facing,” she recalls. “Of everything he mentioned, the one that stayed with me was the lack of sanitary towels.
I’d never gone without them myself, so it was shocking to learn that some girls missed school every month because they had no pads. But at the time, it felt like too big a responsibility for me to take on. The only money I had was the lunch and transport allowance my parents would give me for school. I kept telling myself that it was the Government’s responsibility.”
Six months later, another friend sent her a newspaper article reporting a surge in teenage pregnancies among schoolgirls, with some girls exchanging sex for sanitary pads.
“That’s when I realised that I couldn’t just keep pointing to someone else to solve the problem; I needed to step up, speak to whoever I needed to speak to and do whatever needed to be done.”
She embarked on what she thought would be a one-off initiative: ask women in her circle to donate pads and deliver them to a school in Kajiado. But as she mobilised resources, people encouraged her to formalise the effort.
“Pads Drive Africa, which is what we’re called today, was never built by just one person,” says Wambui, now the organisation’s director. “One friend helped me come up with the name, another came up with the slogan, someone else designed the logo, and even the colours were chosen by a different person. People simply came on board and shared their ideas. All I had was the vision.”
That vision kept evolving. After distributing pads to more than 300 girls in one outreach, Wambui felt something was missing.