Planned Parenthood, Kenya Style

Numerous US states have been rushing to defund Planned Parenthood at an alarming pace, arguing that no tax dollars should be spent on anything that the organization does.

Compare this to a recent event in Kenya. Members of Parliament approved a motion to establish a new department that would source and distribute sanitary napkins to school-aged girls. The MP (a male!) who proposed the motion noted that many girls miss four or five days of school a month because they lack sanitary pads. The government allocated about $3 million dollars this year to provide sanitary napkins. The Assistant Minister of Education noted that about $13 million more was needed. One could only imagine how this would have been handled during last week's US debt ceiling debacle, should there have even been a fund for this.

Many girls use pieces of "old blankets, mattresses and rags as sanitary napkins," said MP Rachael Shebesh, one of the supporters of the motion. She suggested that panties be distributed with the sanitary napkins. "You can give out all the sanitary towels you want but if you don't give panties you are losing the war because many girls cannot afford them," she said. Another MP noted that providing sanitary napkins was an important component of the Free education system because without them, girls could not participate fully in education.

This brings me, indirectly, to the subject of birth control. At our teaching site in Kibera there are many posters on the walls, with themes on safe sex, much like the one shown here. We were curious about the training that was given to young people regarding sex. Apparently training is quite explicit at the youth centres (for instance showing films of what the various STDs actually look like), so we wondered at what age discussion on “safe sex” started. Age 10. My team was a bit stunned at how young the training started, and we mentioned that this direct, blunt education at age 10 would be highly unusual in Canada and the US. (A 2009 article in the journal Reproductive Health suggested that the prohibitions on sex education in “religious” states was partially responsible for the higher rates of teen pregnancies.) So what do youth centers do in Nairobi? They place free condoms in the washrooms (both genders) so that there is easy access to them. As one of the instructors noted, it was difficult, even for him, to go to the pharmacy and ask for condoms (too embarrassing!), but free condoms in the privacy of the washroom guaranteed access to anyone who needed them.

Has the availability of free condoms made a difference? Kenya has one of the highest rates of AIDS and HIV in the world. But the epidemic peaked in 2000, and the numbers are starting to come down. Which means that sex education, particularly for the youth, is having a positive impact on outcomes.

Kenya is clearly more advanced than the US on the sex education front. It is an interesting contrast.