IDW Spotlight on OCIC 2014 Global Changemaker: Ella Marinic & Sabrina Rubli

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• published: 03 Feb 2014
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OCIC's Global Changemaker Awards are celebrated during International Development Week each year to honour outstanding youth who have demonstrated active engagement with communities and civil society organizations in the promotion of international cooperation and social justice. Transcript: My name is Ella Marinic. I'm from Toronto Ontario and I'm 28 years old I was in Kenya with Sabrina Rubli, co-founder of Femme International, we founded the organization together. Femme International is a non-profit organization. Its focus is feminine health and hygiene. Menstruation is actually one of the main reasons why girls in developing countries miss school, or drop out altogether. In Kenya, particularly, girls miss up to 5 days of school a month. So Sabrina and I found this gap in development. Few NGOs were addressing menstruation in their water and sanitation programs and so we felt that it was imperative to address, and we didn't know how to go about doing it through another organization. We kind of felt like taking the initiative on our own. We kind of took our own experiences and asked ourselves what it would be like if it were different Femme International has a feminine health management program, and it's a two pronged program: education and distribution. The education side of things -- we take the girls through a series of workshops focussing on different topics from menstrual health and hygiene, tracking your cycle, sexual health, puberty -- basically all the changes that a young girl's body goes through as she grows into a woman. And we essentially create a safe space for these girls to ask questions about their bodies and learn about things that they might not otherwise have a place to learn about Femme International provides Femme Kits, and each femme kit has everything a girl needs to manage her period in a sustainable way. So it has a towel, a bar of soap, a small soap container, a menstrual cup made of medical-grade silicone, and when she wears it, essentially her period becomes inconsequential to her daily life. She can attend school, she can play sports, she can do everything a girls should be able to do every day of the month. Through education and distribution of the femme kits, we hope to not only give these girls everything they need to attend school every day of the month, but we hope to help de-stigmatize the issue of menstruation, and the taboo surrounding the female body.