17 Rapport Menstruatie Armoede Midden-Groningen door studenten RUG - Engels

The results should be analysed and evaluated so that a reasoned decision on the future implementation on menstruation lessons can be made. Potentially, a successful pilot could also grab the attention of national policymakers.

5.4 Customer Journey To round off, we would like to return to the personal level. If our idea were to be realised, how would Emma van der Waal, our first persona, benefit? Emma would have received a basis of menstrual education in school. For example, she would have been taught that a tampon should not be worn longer than eight hours to reduce the risk of getting TSS. She was also shown how to use social media for further education. One morning, she notices that she has no period products left and wonders whether she could use toilet paper instead. But she remembers a warning on social media about this and ultimately decides against it. Instead, being more comfortable talking about periods, she will ask her friends for products and eventually talk about her problems with a close teacher.

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The thought of such added value of our solution makes us confident that we have initiated an important process that will hopefully be followed up with motivation.

6. Conclusion We want to summarise this report with a chronological overview of our research process before finally reflecting on our experience and the limitations of this project. The starting point of this project was a comprehensive problem analysis of period poverty in Midden-Groningen. Two questions accompanied our research in this Discovery Phase: We wanted to know how individuals were affected by period poverty in Midden-Groningen and why individuals were in this situation. Through the stakeholder analysis, a description of the research context and an initial imagination of our end-users, we familiarised ourselves with the problem and prepared our research. Our subsequent analysis compared existent claims in scholarly literature with our findings from qualitative and quantitative field research in Midden-Groningen. Potentially due to our limited time and lack of data at hand, little evidence could be found on adverse health effects of period poverty and increased absenteeism of affected individuals. We found some evidence on the financial inaccessibility of products and evidence on taboos regarding menstruation and period poverty within society. Importantly, we came across unexpected findings related to knowledge and awareness.

Our surveys and insights from in-depth interviews yielded strong evidence of gaps in menstrual knowledge and a lack of awareness of period poverty among school children in the area and the general population. Because of these research findings, we decided to choose the ‘educational path’ over the ‘product access path’ in the Define Phase. This decision allowed us to concretise our end-users. From this point onwards, school children in Midden-Groningen constituted our primary end-users and members of society our secondary end-users. Empathising with both types of end-users through personas and customer journeys, we were then able to formulate a problem definition. Gaps in menstrual knowledge and lack of awareness of period poverty contribute to individuals potentially exposing themselves to health risks through harmful behaviours due to period poverty (e.g. the use of toilet paper as an alternative menstrual product). Secondly, this results in a lack of open conversation, making it difficult for people affected to express their needs. Thirdly, the lack 33

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of awareness leads to a lack of social empathy and motivation in Dutch society for solutionoriented action. In the search for solutions to close gaps in menstrual knowledge and raise awareness about period poverty during the Ideate Phase, we elaborated on two visions, the combination of which proved to be promising. On the one hand, comprehensive school education on menstruation, by filling all knowledge gaps our research identifies, ensures a necessary basis of menstrual knowledge. On the other hand, virtual education opportunities, like social media, can be used in the classroom or outside of it, thereby enabling on-demand “here & now” learning in a real-life context. Within the Prototype and Test Phase, we used our research and understanding of the problem to develop a prototype educational Instagram page. While we continuously sought to improve this prototype during a four-week testing phase, we also gained insights into how young people react to information on the thematic areas that we identified knowledge gaps in. These findings confirmed our conviction that the combination of school education and virtual education would be impactful. Afterwards, we communicated with teachers from the AJC, a high school student, the wethouder and our clients on how to implement the school education part of the solution package.

The result is a package of two policy briefs, one recommending the AJC to prepare, test and evaluate a pilot and another one advising the municipality of Midden-Groningen to support this pilot financially and to establish useful contacts.

6.1 Experience and Limitations Overall, this project has been a challenging yet ultimately rewarding experience for the entire team. While we were sometimes frustrated by some stakeholders’ lack of understanding, social empathy, and willingness to make a change, we were also pleasantly surprised by others’ motivation and ambition. Although many of our peers saw period poverty as a problem of product inaccessibility, we observed an increasing understanding of the phenomenon’s educational dimension over time. We also see this as a success and confirmation of our achievements. In general, the growing number of people who recognise and want to fight the problem of period poverty in Midden-Groningen and the Netherlands gives us confidence that progress will be made despite the official end of our involvement. Furthermore, several stakeholders predicted a high probability for the implementation of our policy proposals. A great confirmation of our efforts is also the invitation from the municipality of Midden-Groningen policy advisor, Alice Tamminga, to

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present our policy brief and research publicly. We hope that we can meet the expectations of our clients with these prospects. Ultimately, however, we have to point to the limitations of our research. Expectedly, the Covid-19 pandemic influenced our field research opportunities. Due to the topic's sensitive nature, we would have preferred face-to-face meetings and interviews, but for public health reasons, we had to settle for virtual means in most cases. The current situation also often delayed or prevented communication with stakeholders (see the large number of email inquiries compared to email correspondence in the list of stakeholders contacted in the appendix). In addition, the taboo concerning the topic made it difficult to approach people, for example, for interviews. When using our research results, these circumstances should be taken into account. They also had a significant influence on our project development. If we had been able to establish contact with food bank customers, we might have opted for the ‘product access path’ and sought solutions to facilitate access to free menstrual products in Midden-Groningen. In the end, however, we believe to have found a promising alternative in the form of the ‘educational path’. In retrospect, this had at least as much intervention potential, and we are very satisfied with the results of our research project.

Nevertheless, we hope that we could also provide an incentive for further research on period poverty in the Netherlands since this will be required to put an end to the problem once and for all.

7. References Baer, K. (2008). Information Design Workbook: Graphic Approaches, Solutions, and Inspiration + 30 Case Studies. Rockport Publisher Inc. BBC (2019). Sex education: Menstrual health to be taught in school by 2020. BBC. https://www.bbc.com/news/newsbeat-47350835. Bobel, C. (2019). The Managed Body: Developing Girls and Menstrual Health in the Global South. Palgrave Macmillan. Boyce, S. (2020, December 8). How Social Media Helps Reduce Menstrual Stigma. Accessed December 12. https://borgenproject.org/tag/period-poverty/. Bruins, B. J. (2020). Reactie op verzoek commissie over het onderzoek over menstruatie-

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Bruins, B. J. (2020). Reactie op verzoek commissie over het onderzoek over menstruatiearmoede in Nederland uitgevoerd door De Bovengrondse. Tweede Kamer. file:///C:/Users/shant/Downloads/mmissie_over_het_onderzoek_over_menstruatie-armoe de_in_Nederland_uitgevoerd_door_De_Bovengrondse.pdf. Coast, E., Lattof, S. R., & Strong, J. (2019). Puberty and Menstruation Knowledge Among Young Adolescents in Low- and Middle-Income Countries: A Scoping Review. International Journal of Public Health , 64 (2): 293–304. DOI:10.1007/s00038-019-01209-0. De Bovengrondse. (2019). Rapport Onderzoek “Verkenning Van Menstruatie-Armoede in Nederland. https://denhaag.raadsinformatie.nl/document/8168870/1 RIS303934_Armoede_en_menstruatie_Bijlage_1. Dron, J. & Anderson, T. (2014). Teaching Crowds: Learning and Social Media. Edmonton, AB: AU Press. Forbes, G. B., et al. (2003). The Role of Hostile and Benevolent Sexism in Women’s and Men’s Perceptions of the Menstruating Women. Psychology of Women Quarterly 27 (1): 58-63. DOI:10.1111/1471-6402.t01-2-00007. Grabinsky, J. (2019). The SDGs, Surveys, and the Need for Additional Evidence on Menstrual Hygiene Management. World Bank Blogs. https://blogs.worldbank.org/water/sdgs-surveys-and-need-additional-evidencemenstrualhygiene-management. Hoffman, V., Adelman, S., & Sebastian, A. (2014).

Learning by Doing Something Else: Experience with Alternatives and Adoption of a High-Barrier Menstrual Hygiene Technology. Heart. https://www.heart-resources.org/doc_lib/learning-something-else-experience-alternatives adoption-high-barrier-menstrual-hygiene-technology/. Jonston-Robledo, I., & Chrysler, J. C. (2013). The Menstrual Mark: Menstruation as Social Stigma. Sex Roles 68 (1–2): 9–18. DOI:10.1007/s11199-011-0052-z. Kissling, E. A. (1996). Bleeding Out Loud: Communication About Menstruation. Feminism & Psychology 6: 481-504. DOI:10.1177/09593596064002. Lave, J. (1988). Cognition in Practice: Mind, Mathematics, and Culture in Everyday Life. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Martin, F. & Ertzberger, J. (2013). Here and Now Mobile Learning: An Experimental Study on the Use of Mobile Technology. Computers & Education 68, 76-85. DOI:10.1016/j.compedu. 2013.04.021.

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NL Times. (2019, November 9). One in Ten Dutch Girls Can’t Afford Tampons, Sanitary Pads. NLtimes. https://nltimes.nl/2019/11/09/one-ten-dutch-girls-cant-afford-tampons-sanitary-pads. Plan International NL. (2019). Bijna een op de tien meisjes heeft weleens geen geld voor maandverband of tampons. Plan International. https://www.planinternational.nl/actueel/bijna-een-op-de-tien-meisjes-geen-geld-voormaandverband-of-tampons Statista. (2019, October). Which Online Social Network Activities Have You Engaged in Over the past 3 Months? https://www.statista.com/statistics/575564/online-social-network-activitiesin-the-netherlands-by-age-group/. Sociaal Planbureau Groningen (CMO STAMM) (2018). Monitor Armoede en Schulden Midden-Groningen. Onderzoek. https://onderzoek.in/monitor-armoede-en-schulden/. Torondel, B., et al. (2018). Association between Unhygienic Menstrual Management Practices and Prevalence of Lower Reproductive Tract Infections: A Hospital-based Cross-Sectional Study in Odisha, India. BMC Infectious Diseases 18 (473). DOI:10.1186/s12879-018-3384-2. Tull, K. (2019). Period Poverty Impact on the Economic Empowerment of Women. K4D Helpdesk Report 536. Institute of Development Studies UK. https://opendocs.ids.ac.uk/opendocs/handle/20.500.12413/14348. UNESCO (2014) Good Policy and Practice in Health Education.

Booklet 9 PUBERTY EDUCATION and Menstrual Hygiene Management, Paris: UNESCO. UNICEF. (2018, May 25). Fast Facts: Nine Things you Didn't Know About Menstruation. Accessed November 15. https://www.unicef.org/press-releases/fast-facts-nine-things-you-didnt know-about-menstruation. Images of personas: https://generated.photos/.

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8. Appendix

IDENTITY

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