We are delighted to share a blog written by student Bidisha Sedai from Dartford Grammar School for Girls, who is part of a team delivering a Global Goals project for the 2019-20 Global Goals Competition.
Their project is among over 957 social action projects currently running as part of the GSL movement and we are excited to be supporting them to design and lead positive social change in their community.
We want to change how the world sees period poverty because this needs to end - full stop.
Project Overview
One of our goals (good health and well-being) is to help vulnerable women who experience period poverty. Further more we think that is a very sensitive topic that does not get any views and as a team we think that this view that the world sees needs to be changed. As a team we will raise money and donate the money to a charity/foundation that supports to help vulnerable women.
Although zero hunger is not our main aim, we have decided as a team that we will also donate some of this money to support our other goal (zero hunger). We feel that some people in the world don’t have enough to eat whilst others have a lavish amount (that mostly get thrown or wasted). Also people who are in a malnutrition condition have disease like kwashiorkor, so that is why we want to support them.
Our Journey
We have gained many interesting and heart-breaking facts of the world, so we made a list of possibilities that we can use to face and overcome these challenges. Some of our fundraising ideas include a teachers talent show and a mini-games competition. These are effective ways to raise money and they are low cost and easy to set up.
We have also done some research on period poverty and saw how big the problems actually were. Some of the problems we saw were that in a survey of more than 1,000 girls, nearly half were embarrassed by their period, many were afraid to ask for help because of the stigma and 68% said they felt less able to pay attention in class at school or college while menstruating, and if a pupil misses school every time they have their period, they are set 145 days behind their fellow students. We knew we had to help women who were going through this problem.
The Next Chapter
I would recommend people my age to participate in a similar project because who knows we CAN CHANGE THE WORLD!!! All of our hard work will pay off some how. Unfortunately team sapphire had run out of time but if we had more time, we would have conducted more research on the particular global goals that we pick so that would that we would have a better understanding. Then, we would have made an initiating plan of what we wanted to do and how to advertise the issue we were trying to raise awareness on. These are some of the organised steps that we didn’t take before. So, in the future this would have really helped us. To make sure this doesn’t happen to you and your team I would make sure you do this before time runs out!
The 2019-20 GSL Global Goals Competition is now open and runs until June 2020. If you belong to one of the 700+ teams of students currently delivering a social action project as part of the competition we would love to hear from you and feature your blog and project photos on our website to inspire others.
