20-year-old Nana Akua Aduofuaa is a menstrual hygiene advocate who wants to eradicate truancy in schools caused by a lack of proper facilities to manage their menstrual flow. She believes that everyone should stand a fair chance at receiving education irrespective of their gender or social status. She said, “The community project I would want to pursue is to help produce sanitary pads for the ladies in my region. I realized that sometimes they are not able to go to school or play with their friends. Because they are in their periods and they don’t have what is required of them.
“It makes them timid because everybody is having fun and they are not. And the person can’t go out and then shine. So it is my dream that I would help those people in my region to provide them with sanitary pads as much as I can.”
Sanitary pads are the most reliable way girls can manage their periods at school. Unfortunately, access to these feminine products is quite difficult for many girls in rural areas. Most often, they are too expensive for their families to provide every month. And so Nana and her team from Odotobibi Foundation have set up funds to provide a year’s supply of sanitary pads per girl.
“I started a foundation, the Odotobibi Foundation, named after the late chief of Techiman, Odotobibi Takyi Ameyaw. We went around to inquire, and then we made a budget that an estimated Ghc80 cedis can provide one girl with sanitary pads for a whole year. So we went around schools to know their numbers so that we can provide pads for them. I was able to raise some funds that can provide sanitary pads for the girls .”
Nana hails from Techiman in the Bono East Region. She wants to leverage the GMB platform to promote the culture and language of her people. According to Nana, the Bono language is a beautiful and unique dialect on the verge of extinction. She said, “I have realized that the Bono language most people do not speak. Even on campus, people pretend to be Ashanti. They will be speaking Ashanti and other languages.
“I don’t know why I would speak Bono, and I have to feel shy. The moment you speak the Bono dialect, everybody turns to look at you. I think Bono is a very unique language. And GMB is more interested in culture. How we can modernize and then patronize our culture for others to buy as Ghanaians. And that is why I came to GMB.”
Nana aspires to be a leading French tutor in the country. As a language student at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, Nana speaks a little Chinese, Spanish, French and English. She says these qualities makes her outstanding among her peers as language is not a barrier on the international front.
By Grace Somuah-Annan|3news.com|Ghana