Our mission

ZanaAfrica Foundation equips adolescent girls in Kenya with the tools they need to safely navigate puberty and step into their potential, while also leading global advocacy efforts to break the period taboo.

What we do

Currently, 4 in 5 girls and women across East Africa lack both access to sanitary pads and to related health education. The consequences of this are dire, from missed education to intergenerational trauma.

For over a decade, ZanaAfrica has been creating opportunities for Kenyan girls and women to know, access, and actualize their rights to health and safety, starting with the provision of sanitary pads and health comics as a gateway to strengthening health ecosystem.

During COVID this is more important than ever, as teen pregnancy has doubled, and girls are getting married off at unprecedented rates due to the spiraling poverty.

We've benefitted over 70,000 students to date, completed a groundbreaking two year randomized control trial, and are well positioned to have our health and life skills curriculum integrated into the national school curriculum.

Moreover, we launched a social enterprise to meet the demand for affordable, quality menstrual products, with sales scaling nationally. Our pad package connects users to free digital health resources and then onward to local clinics.

Together, with your help through Catchafire, we're going to do some amazing work to break taboos, put girls' voices even more at the center of new communications, and showcase our incredible cast of comic characters that girls love and admire. And if we do it well enough, we may even be able to launch programs in the US sooner than expected - because providing adolescents with knowledge of their health and rights is needed now more than ever.