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.

Neither of Prof. Freweini's parents went to school. Her father taught himself to read and write through church, started working at 12, and eventually owned a small motel in a town near his village. He put all eight of his children through school, daughters included, at a time when that was far from obvious.

With his backing, she left Ethiopia in 1988 to study at Prairie View A&M University in Texas, where she graduated in 1992 with a Bachelor of Science in Chemical Engineering. She had promised her father she would come back. She kept that promise. And what she found was that nothing had changed.

According to UNICEF, menstruation is still not taught in most Ethiopian schools, and roughly 75% of Ethiopian women and girls lack access to adequate menstrual supplies. Girls use dry grass. They use strips of cloth. One in ten girls miss school because of their periods, and in some rural areas that figure rises to nearly 50%.

Prof. Freweini spent two years trying to get funding. The men at the banks, she later said, found it hard to believe in a sanitary pad business. She kept going anyway.

In 2005, she designed a reusable pad from scratch. The chemistry background mattered here. She built a washable pad with an absorbent cotton lining and a waterproof backing, secured to underwear with a small button, designed to fold into a small discreet package. With proper care, it lasts up to two years and costs around 90% less than a year of disposable pads.

In 2006, Ethiopia's Science and Technology Ministry granted her a patent. Three years later, with a $150,000 loan from the Ethiopian Development Bank, she opened the Mariam Seba Sanitary Products Factory in Mekelle, named after her daughter.

The factory employs 42 local women and currently produces 750,000 pads and 300,000 undergarments a year. Over 80% of the pads go to NGOs that distribute them for free to girls who could not otherwise afford them.

Her main distribution partner is Dignity Period, a St. Louis-based nonprofit founded by Washington University physician Lewis Wall and his wife. Together they developed a model that pairs pad distribution with classroom education, teaching both girls and boys that menstruation is a normal biological process. The educational program, run in partnership with Mekelle University, has reached over 300,000 students.

The results are measurable. Schools reached by Dignity Period recorded a 24% increase in girls' attendance. Since 2009, nearly 800,000 girls and women have benefited from her work.

In December 2019, CNN named Prof. Freweini its Hero of the Year, selected by public vote from among ten finalists, and awarded her $100,000 to expand her work. Accepting the award, she said: "This is for all the girls and women everywhere. Dignity for all."

The goal she keeps repeating is simple: every girl in Ethiopia should be able to go to school during her period without fear, without shame, and without having to improvise.