Legitimising Adolescent Girls’ Voices: Menstrual Cup as the Mediator of Menstrual Hygiene Management in Urban Informal Settlements in Kenya

Adolescent sexual and reproductive health, particularly for adolescent girls’ in Low and Middle-Income Countries has emerged as a fundamental policy issue in the post-International Conference on Population and Development era. Despite the post ICPD progress, access to adolescent sexual and reproductive health has been incommensurable for adolescent girls in LMICs. Extensive literature document that poor, disenfranchised and marginalized adolescent girls in the urban informal settlements bear the highest burden, especially as pertaining to menstrual hygiene management. In Kenya these girls face unique infrastructural challenges associated with high population densities, dilapidated housing structures, abject poverty, limited access to WASH facilities, and high insecurity and crime incidences. Compounding this further, is the material poverty, social norms, taboos and gendered power relations in which their menstrual experiences are embedded. For such girls, menstrual hygiene management has emerged as a fundamental human right and gender equality issue that necessitate multi-level and multi-sectorial policy interventions. In social policies, menstrual hygiene management is approached from a technocentric perspective. However, menstruation is theorized as neither purely biological nor purely sociocultural. Its technical and sociocultural approaches are thus, essential to the way it is understood, experienced and intervened in. In the recent past, menstrual hygiene management discourses has subtly shifted to the most cost effective and culturally appropriate hygiene products. The menstrual cup has been conceptualized as the most appropriate for girls in urban informal settlements. With this in mind, this research was an attempt to bring to the fore the menstrual experiences of adolescent girls in Kibera, the biggest slum in Kenya. First, it explored whether the menstrual cup could be framed as a mediator of the menstrual hygiene management challenges these girls face. Second, it aimed to deconstruct the dominant technocentric way menstrual hygiene management is approached. The research findings point to the need for a nexus to be created between the technocentric and sociocultural approaches to menstrual hygiene management. Further, they point towards the potential of menstrual cup as the mediator of menstrual hygiene management in urban poor locales. Finally, they illuminate the girl’s resilience and potential to transform the dominant vulnerability discourses in adolescent-centred social policies. Rather than vulnerable, the girls are social actors that could transform their social worlds. However, for them to realize sexual and reproductive health rights and menstrual hygiene management, policy actors should address the material and discursive situations in which their menstrual experiences are embedded.