Dignity Kits for Menstrual Hygiene Management — UNICEF/UMCOR Response in Aweil, South Sudan

South Sudan has some of the weakest school water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) infrastructure in the world after decades of conflict, and girls frequently miss school during menstruation because of stigma, unaffordable sanitary products and a lack of private facilities. In a three-month project centred on Aweil Town, UMCOR South Sudan partnered with UNICEF to distribute reusable 'dignity kits' — sanitary supplies, soap and underwear, paired with a hygiene-education session — to 18,863 teenage girls across 476 schools.
The scale of the underlying gap was independently quantified by the government-led Girls' Education South Sudan (GESS) programme, funded by UK aid and Global Affairs Canada, which surveyed 4,159 of the country's roughly 5,500 schools between August and December 2020. It found 40% had no toilets at all, only 33% had a functioning handwashing facility, and of schools with working toilets, just 19% (316 schools) had any menstrual-hygiene components such as disposal bins or soap — leading the assessment to recommend that menstrual hygiene management be built into all girls' toilets going forward.
The kit-distribution figure comes from a single implementing partner's own reporting, and no independent evaluation links it to attendance or dropout outcomes — only individual testimonials are available. The GESS WASH assessment is methodologically stronger (government co-led, near-national coverage) but measures the baseline infrastructure gap rather than the outcome of the kit distribution itself, and about a quarter of targeted schools could not be surveyed due to insecurity. This is best read as a short-term humanitarian response layered onto a large, still largely unaddressed systemic gap, not a nationally scaled or independently evaluated programme.

Read the full analysis: https://girlseducationsouthsudan.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/WASH-Research-Brief-FINAL.pdf