Kenya's National Sanitary Towels Programme — Free Menstrual Products for Schoolgirls

Kenya's Ministry of Education began distributing free sanitary towels to girls in classes 4–8 in the 2011/2012 financial year, with an initial budget of about $3.34 million reaching roughly 444,000 girls. In June 2017, President Uhuru Kenyatta signed the Basic Education (Amendment) Act, inserting Section 39(k), which makes it a legal obligation for government to provide "free, sufficient and quality sanitary towels" to every girl who has reached puberty in public basic education institutions, plus safe disposal facilities. The programme is now named as a component of Kenya's Vision 2030 School Health and Nutrition flagship project.

By 2022, an Auditor-General performance audit found the government had spent roughly KSh 3.1 billion and reached about 8.86 million girls in classes 6–8 since inception, though actual annual distribution has often been 7 sanitary-towel packets per girl rather than the legally required 9. Administrative responsibility for the programme has shifted between five different government departments in seven years, which government auditors and Members of Parliament have linked to recurring distribution delays; in 2023, four months into the financial year, a doubled Sh940 million budget still had not reached schools, and by 2025 some constituencies reported girls receiving as few as six packets over three years.

Critically, the strongest available evidence on effectiveness contradicts the programme's popular rationale. A cluster-randomised controlled trial by the Population Council (3,489 girls, 140 schools, Kilifi County, published in Reproductive Health, 2021) found "no evidence of an effect on primary school attendance" from pad distribution, alone or combined with reproductive health education. A separate cluster-RCT (Phillips-Howard et al., BMJ Open, 2016) and a larger follow-on trial (Zulaika et al., eClinicalMedicine, 2023, 4,137 girls) likewise found no significant reduction in school dropout from menstrual product distribution; the 2023 trial found pregnancy and marriage, not menstruation, drove most dropout. Kenyan and World Bank audits have also documented tender irregularities (including a parliamentary finding of a Sh25 million loss from tenders not awarded to the lowest bidder), supply stockouts, and quality complaints about distributed products.

The programme should be read as a well-intentioned, legally entrenched and still-operating policy with strong institutional and gender-mainstreaming embedding, but weak evidence — from multiple independent randomised trials — that it achieves its stated goal of reducing menstruation-related school absenteeism, compounded by persistent budgeting and procurement problems.

Read the full analysis: https://kenyalaw.org/kl/fileadmin/pdfdownloads/AmendmentActs/2017/BasicEducation_Amendment_Act_17of2017.pdf