6 Minute English / Sewing to fight period poverty

Note: This is not a word-for-word transcript.

Hello. This is 6 Minute English from BBC Learning English. I m Georgie.

And I m Beth. Menstruation is an issue that s not often talked about, yet every month it affects billions of women around the world. Menstruation, or periods, are a natural process that typically happen once a month when women and girls bleed from their vagina for a few days as part of the reproductive cycle. When this happens, women need special products like sanitary pads or tampons to manage the flow of blood and go about their day-to-day life.

Unfortunately, over 500 million people around the world either don't have access to these products or can't afford to buy them, and this is called period poverty. Period poverty has serious consequences, for example, girls on their periods not going to school affects their education, and women who can t work during their period have less income. What s more, it can cause health problems because, without sanitary products, its easy to get infections.

In this programme, we ll be learning about one project fighting period poverty affecting thousands of women refugees. And, of course, we ll be learning some useful new vocabulary as well. But first, Georgie, I have a question for you. Periods affect girls and women of reproductive age, that s roughly half the female population, or 26% of the global population. But how many people is that? Is it:

a) 2.1 billion people?

b) 2.3 billion people? or,

c) 2.5 billion people?

I ll guess it s about 2.1 billion people.

OK, Georgie, I ll reveal the answer at the end of the programme. Ella Lambert was a student at Bristol University when she started The Pachamama Project in 2020 during the first Covid lockdown. She d heard about period poverty and decided to put her lockdown time to good use by making sanitary pads, pieces of soft material used to absorb menstrual blood. Here s Ella explaining how her project got started to BBC World Service programme, People Fixing the World :