Thursday, September 15, 2022
The Recent Floods Have Put a New Focus on the Problem of Period Poverty in Pakistan
BY SANYA MANSOOR
Many of the more than 8 million women of reproductive age affected by Pakistan’s unprecedented floods have been turning to desperate measures to manage their periods. One woman in the hard-hit province of Balochistan, who called volunteers in distress, reported using tree leaves. “It was heartbreaking,” says Bushra Mahnoor, one of two college students who in July founded Mahwari Justice, a grassroots movement to distribute menstrual products to women in need.
Floods have inundated one-third of Pakistan and displaced more than 33 million people. The waters have also killed more than 1,400 individuals and destroyed hundreds of thousands of houses, as well as bridges and roads. More than 660,000 people are still living in relief camps and makeshift homes.On Monday, Prime Minister Shahbaz Sharif said the country was grappling with food shortages. Relief organizations are rushing aid to affected areas—but supplies of menstrual products are often overlooked. That’s partly because of the stigma around discussing periods in Pakistan, according to Mahnoor.That’s why Mahwari Justice chose such an unapologetic name for itself: Mahwari simply means “periods” in Urdu, Pakistan’s national language. As the flood waters intensified, the group redoubled its efforts to get menstrual products to Pakistani women, knowing that the deluge could lead to a higher incidence of reproductive and urinary tract infections by making safe menstrual practices even harder. So far, Mahwari Justice has delivered 20,000 menstrual kits to those in need and Mahnoor and her co-founder Anum Khalid have been invited to speak about their efforts on the BBC. Along with similar organizations, they have also helped generate a general discussion about the most effective way to help women in flood-stricken areas. “This is something that gets neglected really easily because for a lot of people, and especially for countries like Pakistan—where laws are made by men, when relief work is led by men—there’s no discussion around what a woman needs,” says Sana Lokhandwala, co-founder of HER Pakistan. The group has so far handed out more than 7,000 menstrual kits and partners with volunteers, community mobilizers, activists, and other organizations to distribute additional essentials such as food, shelter, and clothing.
The needs of Pakistan’s rural womenEven before the floods, misconceptions about periods were rife in Pakistan. Dr. Sidra Nausheen, an assistant professor and vice chair of research in obstetrics and gynecology at the Aga Khan University Hospital in Pakistan’s biggest city Karachi, has been working for many years in rural communities to raise awareness about proper menstrual management. She has encountered girls and women who would not take a bath for a week, or avoid drinking hot or cold beverages, for fear it would disrupt their cycle. Some women would be confined to a room until their periods were over. Many girls were not attending school during their periods because of the lack of availability of menstrual products. “Menstrual hygiene is something that in Pakistan especially nobody talks about,” Nausheen tells TIME. In such an atmosphere, inaccurate information can thrive. “Lots of women don’t know what’s happening to their bodies.” When Mahnoor and Khalid first started Mahwari justice, they studied other disaster relief efforts to learn about the most effective ways of supplying menstrual products. They also spoke directly with women in rural areas to find out what items would be most helpful.
Then they came up with three kinds of kits. One contains a pack of sanitary napkins and underwear, the second small towels and underwear, while the third consists of cotton pads. Diagrams accompany the kits, showing the right way to use the products. Different circumstances determine which items are most effective. Lokhandwala, of HER Pakistan, explains that if flood waters haven’t receded, cloth towels may present problems as there is no clean water to wash and dry them. “Cloth pads might work in one community if they are still living in homes and have washing supplies, but might not work in relief camps,” she says.Doctors, relief workers, and public health advocates have long called for Pakistan to remove its luxury tax on menstrual products. “Women don’t feel luxurious during these days,” Khalid says. “Menstrual kits [and] sanitary napkins should be free but the taxes on them are so high people cannot afford it,” says Dr. Alia Haider, a doctor currently working in relief camps. “It’s the responsibility of the state to give us a healthy life—health should be free.” But until menstrual products become affordable, many Pakistani women will have no choice but to rely on private organizations and volunteers for help in managing periods.
From 2019 to 2021, Nausheen and her colleagues from Aga Khan University Hospital conducted fieldwork on menstrual hygiene among women aged 14-49 in Dadu district, Sindh province—an area hit hard by the recent floods. About 40% of the 25,000 women surveyed in Dadu were not using any pads or napkins during their periods but instead would repeatedly change out of and wash their stained clothes. “Many weren’t aware of reusable pads or the availability of pads. They thought it was very expensive and ‘We can’t afford it,’” Nausheen saysNausheen and her team taught the women how to stitch pads from a cheap, absorbent cloth available in the local market. Now, some 90% of the women who took part in the survey are using such pads. Many are also making and selling them—even during the catastrophic floods. Says Khalid of Mahwari Justice: “Periods never stop during any calamity.” https://time.com/6213181/period-poverty-pakistan-menstruation-floods/
Experts slam ‘pittance’ in aid to Pakistan as they find climate crisis played a role in floods
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By Angela DewanAn analysis of Pakistan’s devastating floods has found “fingerprints” of the human-made climate crisis on the disaster, which killed more than 1,400 people and destroyed so much land and infrastructure it has plunged the South Asian nation into crisis. The analysis, published Thursday by the World Weather Attribution initiative, was unable to quantify exactly how much climate change contributed to the floods — which were caused by several months of heavy rainfall in the region — but some of its models found that the crisis may have increased the intensity of rainfall by up to 50%, when looking specifically at a five-day downpour that hit the provinces of Sindh and Balochistan hard. The analysis also found that the floods were likely a 1-in-100-year event, meaning that there is a 1% chance of similarly heavy rainfall each year. If the world warms by 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial temperatures — as it is on course to — short rain bursts like those seen in the five-day period will likely become even more intense. The Earth is already around 1.2 degrees warmer than it was before industrialization.
The scale of the floods and the WWA analysis highlight the enormous financial need to address impacts of the climate crisis. “The kind of assistance that’s coming in right now is a pittance,” Ayesha Siddiqi, a geographer at the University of Cambridge, told journalists at a press conference. “A number of Western economies have argued that they’re suffering their own crises, because of the war in Ukraine and various other issues.” She described the UK’s original assistance of £1.5 million ($1.7 million) as “laughable.” The UK has, however, increased its pledge to £15 million ($17 million) more recently. The geographical area that is now Pakistan was part of the former British colony of India until 1947, when the British partitioned the land into two separate dominions.Fully developed nations bear a far larger historical contribution to climate change than the developing world. Siddiqi said that the funds coming into Pakistan paled in comparison with the assistance sent after deadly floods that hit the country in 2010. “The big global news [in 2010] was all about ‘We must help Pakistan or the Islamists will win,’” she said, explaining that there was a fear in the West at the time that Islamist groups would take advantage of the floods’ aftermath to recruit more members. “And this time around, of course, we don’t have the same geopolitical imperative to help Pakistan, and so the aid has really been a pittance.” Pakistan is responsible for around 0.6% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions, even though it makes up nearly 2.7% of the global population, according to the European Union’s global emissions database. China is the world’s biggest emitter, at 32.5%, and while the US is second, accounting for 12.6%, it is historically the biggest emitter globally. More than 33 million people in Pakistan have been impacted by the floods, which is more than the population of Australia or the state of Texas. The floods destroyed 1.7 million homes, swept away dozens of bridges and turned verdant farmland into fields of dust. The UN estimates the recovery could cost around $30 billion, which around the same value as the country’s annual exports. What’s to come There were limitations to how much scientists could determine about the role of the climate crisis in the floods because the impacted area has such huge natural variability in rain patterns during monsoon seasons. It’s also a year of La Niña, which typically brings heavier and longer rainfall to Pakistan. The role of climate change in heat waves — which also hit Pakistan and other parts of the Northern Hemisphere this year — is much larger and often clearer to determine in South Asia, the scientists said. A WWA study published in May found that pre-monsoonal heat waves in Pakistan and India were made 30 times more likely by climate change. “Every year the chance of a record-breaking heat wave is higher than the year before,” said Friederike Otto, co-founder of WWA and a climate scientist with the Grantham Institute at Imperial College London. The next heat wave in Pakistan will probably have “quite devastating consequences,” she said. “Because even if everything is done now to invest in reducing vulnerability, that takes time.” She said that while scientists couldn’t determine exactly how much climate change contributed to the floods, it was probably closer to “doubling” their likelihood, as opposed to the 30-fold factor they found with the region’s heat wave. The issue of who should pay for the impacts of the climate crisis, known as “loss and damage,” has long been a sticking point between developing and some developed nations, and is expected to be central to the upcoming COP27 international climate talks in Egypt. “I think it’s absolutely justified to say, ‘We need, finally, some real commitment to addressing loss and damage from climate change,” Otto said. “A lot of what leads to disaster is related to existing vulnerabilities and not to human-caused climate change. But of course, the Global North plays a very large role in that as well, because a lot of these vulnerabilities are from colonialism and so on. So there is a … very huge responsibility for the Global North to finally do something real and not just talk.”
https://www.cnn.com/2022/09/15/asia/pakistan-climate-floods-attribution-intl/index.html
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