Social startup creates business-in-a-box solution to empower women
Monday, December 19, 2016
JOHANNESBURG – When digital strategist Jovana Korac first heard that many South African girls missed school because they couldn’t afford to buy sanitary products, she was appalled.
It isn’t a South Africa-only problem either. The United Nations Children’s Fund estimates that tens of millions of African girls miss school during their periods every month. Socks or newspapers are often used as a replacement for sanitary products.
There is just a point of privilege where you don’t even consider that this could be an issue, Korac tells Moneyweb.
“I just remember sitting in this meeting and just feeling outraged and I spent the next two, three days like Googling and researching and it is like: What can you do? And there wasn’t really anything short of setting up a large-scale manufacturing plant.”
Such a solution would have required millions of rand and just wasn’t feasible, she says.
But about three years ago, she came across an article about a man in India who developed a machine that could produce sanitary pads at a fraction of the cost.
“I remember reading this article and I was like: This is it! We need to get this machine here.”
Source: Money Web (link opens in a new window)
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