How This Ethiopian Inventor Created the Pad Keeping 800,000 Girls in School

Freweini Mebrahtu (ፍሬወይኒ መብራህቱ) grew up in rural Tigray in the 1970s with no one to tell her what a period was. When she got hers at 13, she thought she was sick. She used rags. She hid it from her mother, her four sisters, everyone. One day she bled through her clothes in class and sat terrified for the rest of the school day. She still remembers it.

Decades later, that memory is what drives a factory in Mekelle that produces 750,000 reusable menstrual pads a year.