SwostiPant

The Opportunity

SwostiPant is an underwear brand designed for female garment workers in Dhaka, Bangladesh. Women and girls in Dhaka often stay home from work or school when they are on their period because they do not have access to sanitary supplies. SwostiPant helps Bengali women to stay out all day while menstruating.

Establishing Customer Personas

In June 2018, I began an internship with International Development Enterprises (iDE.org) at their office in Dhaka, Bangladesh. My team had received a $10k grant from another local nonprofit organization called International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Research, Bangladesh (ICDDR,B) (icddrb.org). The purpose of the project was to address the problem of vaginal infection among garment workers. Our assignment was to interview garment workers who live in the slums of Dhaka to better understand their menstrual hygiene needs. ICDDR,B asked us to use a human-centered design research approach to prototype and manufacture a product that would help these women more effectively wash the scrap fabric they use to absorb blood during their periods.

Our interview team recorded audio and handwritten notes from over 100 Bengali women and girls. Most families we spoke to live on less than $2.50 per day. Some of these women live in Dhaka’s urban slums, while others invited us to conduct the interview at their homes in a rural village outside of Bogura, Bangladesh. We summarized our qualitative findings into three customer personas.

Wabisa Wage Earner

Characteristics: 

• Wabisa works as a garment worker in an unairconditioned garment sewing center in Dhaka. During the garment factories’ layoffs, wage cuts, and subsequent protests during the COVID-19 lockdowns (link), Wabisa worked as a domestic maid to earn money for her family. 

• Wabisa’s husband works as a rickshaw puller and her brother sells goods at an open street market.

• Wabisa lives in a slum neighborhood where bathing and laundry are done at a communal water pump. Occasionally, Wabisa is jeered by male neighbors when she goes to wash her menstrual rags.

• Wabisa shares a room of about 4 square meters with her daughter and husband. Their home is sometimes flooded with water that reaches 0.5 meters in height. This water is often contaminated with fecal matter because of Dhaka’s open sewage system. 

• The slum where Wabisa lives is also used as Dhaka’s city waste dump.

• Wabisa disposes of used period clothes by burying them in the sand or tossing them in the local river, which is already contaminated with plastic and other waste.

• In the morning, there might be a long queue outside the latrine. On some days, she does not get a chance to use the toilet for long periods.

• The washroom at Wabisa’s work does not have running water or toilet paper. The washroom has nowhere suitable to rinse and replace period fabrics.

• Usually, Wabisa uses a collection of strings tied together into a “period belt” to secure scrap fabric to her body during her period. As is the local custom, she does not usually wear underwear.

• About half the women in Wabisa’s workplace receive their wages in cash. Wabisa has her payment sent directly to her bank account.

• Wabisa does not own a phone, but her aunt occasionally lets her borrow a cell phone to make calls and send text messages. This phone does not have access to the internet.

Saabira School Girl

Characteristics: 

• Saabira is Wabisa’s daughter. Like her mother, Saabira has nowhere suitable to tend to her period when she is away from home. The school washroom does not have running water or toilet paper, so there is no place suitable to rinse and replace period fabrics.

• Saabira recalls when she first got her period, she was taking an exam at school. She was extremely embarrassed and she was taunted by her classmates. Saabira tore some fabric from the bottom of her kameez (long shirt) and placed the scrap fabric into her salwar pants to absorb the blood.

• Like many female students at Saabira’s school, Saabira will likely drop out of class before she finishes 6th grade (link), and will likely become part of the 41% of women in Dhaka who are married before the age of 18. If she is lucky, she will not be part of the 16% of Bangladeshi girls who are married off before the age of 15.

• Saabira rarely has the cash to spend on products for herself, but when she does, she must purchase from men at her local market. Most stores are owned by men and Saabira thinks it would be immodest and embarrassing to ask a man for menstrual supplies.

• Saabira knows how to read and write in Bangla script. Through print advertising, she is familiar with popular self-care brands such as “Fair and Lovely.”

• Saabira is generally well-behaved at school, but she and her peers still sometimes receive physical punishment. A 2021 survey from UNICEF found that “87.6 percent of schools [in Bangladesh] still use switches and canes to discipline students, and that the most common forms of punishment are: hitting with a switch or cane, pinching or pulling ears, hair or skin, and slapping. Some 23 percent of students said they had to face different forms of corporal punishment every day. Seven percent reported injuries and bleeding following punishment administered by teachers” (link).

Taahira Teacher

Characteristics: 

• Taahira is an assistant teacher at a high school in Kawkhali, Pirojpur, a town near Dhaka, Bangladesh (link).

• Taahira hands out sanitary pads from the hygiene corner of her classroom. She is the sole source of sanitary napkins for most of her students.

• Taahira teaches her students how to deal with menstrual pain and bleeding so that they will not feel embarrassed about their periods.

• Taahira wants to participate in community events even when she is on her period, but she and many of her students are not allowed to participate in community events when they are menstruating. A report from UNICEF (link) found that “In Char Bramagacha, a village in northern Bangladesh, menstruating women cannot use the kitchen or observe religious practices for fear of contamination. ‘We are taught that things will be spoiled if we touch them during our periods,’ says 14-year-old Shopna. ‘And we can’t go to the temple or the mosque,’ adds 17-year-old Monira. ‘Hindu girls can’t touch cows or even the cow shed because cows are holy.’ Many Bangladeshi people consider period blood polluting and dangerous and view the menstrual body as impure and sacrilegious.”

• Taahira reminds her students not to bury their used menstrual supplies in the mud near their homes because they could be washed away by monsoons, floods, and seasonal rain, exposing the period supplies to passing pedestrians.

• Taahira and the other adult women in her neighborhood suffer from white discharge as a result of vaginal infections. Itching, discomfort, and pregnancy complications are common problems.

Menstrual Products in the Bengali Consumer Market

Sanitary Napkins and Disposables 

Disposable period solutions such as sanitary napkins are rarely used by garment workers and their daughters because they are so expensive in Dhaka. One Taka is worth roughly $0.01 USD. Garment workers typically earn about 7,683 Taka per month and spend about 3,585 Taka on monthly rent. This translates to $75 USD per month in income and $35 USD per month in rent. When asked how much money they spend on menstrual supplies per month, most women answer “0 Taka”, because they use scrap fabric which they can get for free from the scrap piles at the garment shops. Scrap fabric is often not properly disinfected before use, leading to infection. 

Import taxes and a local monopoly on the production of absorbent wood pulp keep sanitary towel prices artificially high. The sanitary towels available in Dhaka are seen as too expensive to be practical for garment workers or indeed, most working-class Bengali women. Although the value-added tax (VAT) was temporarily removed for two years (2019-2021) on imported raw materials used to produce sanitary pads, the retail prices of sanitary pads have barely decreased, and most garment workers in Bangladesh still cannot afford them (link).

Tampons and Inserted Menstrual Products

We at iDE decided early on that we would not discuss insertable menstrual products during our interviews so as not to offend the women who invited us into their homes and schools. However, this interview (link) with Dr. Madhu Goel, Associate Director at Obstetrics and Gynaecology at Fortis LaFemme, sheds light on why so many South Asian women do not use tampons or menstrual cups. Dr. Goel says the driving factor is the social taboo propagated by Bengali schoolgirls’ female friends and relatives. Some South Asian women distrust insertable menstrual products because “some believe [using tampons] will lead to losing vaginal tightness, cause an injury, or give [the user] an infection.” Some South Asian mothers tell their daughters that “tampons are...a demonic entity that will take your virginity and get lost inside of you.”

Although most Bengali women the iDE.org team spoke to do not take these myths at face value, we found religion-influenced cautionary tales to be common. Some Bengali women told us their grandmothers had warned them of punitive treatment from “demons” or “spirits” that result from improper menstrual care.

Period Underwear and Wearable Menstrual Products

Most of the women we interviewed in Dhaka and Bogura told us that they do not wear underwear on a typical day. However, reusable period underwear and reusable panty liners are both promising solutions for garment workers because their reusability makes them economical. Wearable products made of absorbent fabrics can be an infection risk if they are not regularly washed with soap and boiled water, then dried before they have the opportunity to grow mildew. 

Even when garment workers do have access to the soap, clean water, and privacy necessary for this procedure, they often do not have a safe way to dry and store their period fabrics. Many women drape their washed clothing over the roof of their homes to dry. Menstrual fabrics, by contrast, are considered private and are often stored underneath other clothing where they do not dry properly. Some women prefer to wash especially dirty items such as used period fabric by pouring water onto the fabric, laying it on the floor, and stepping on it with their feet to squeeze out the excess water. Based on these stories, we decided that it would only be practical to offer wearable solutions if we also offered the materials for a safer washing, drying, and storage process.

The Iterative Prototyping Process

After the first two months of research, we organized our collective findings and brainstormed product solutions for our customers’ unique needs. We prototyped the following product iterations:

Iteration 1: Disposable Jute Pads

In Dhaka, jute plants are abundant and are often used to make inexpensive burlap fabric and rope. I purchased some jute rope from a street marketplace in Dhaka and experimented with the raw plant fibers in hopes of making absorbent stuffing for disposable pads. I boiled the jute fibers and mixed them with some organic cotton pillow stuffing I purchased from AliExpress. For the outer layer, I hand-sewed some perforated polyester fabric that I cut from fabric shopping bags that I got from a local grocery store in Dhaka.

Features

This option is much cheaper than the sanitary napkins available for purchase in Dhaka. I estimated we could purchase the materials locally, hand-sew these jute pads, and then sell them for less than 5 Taka per pad. 

Feedback From Beta Tests

I was the only beta tester for this prototype. In September 2018, I began my period and attempted to wear this pad all day as a test. The rough texture of the jute plant was so uncomfortable that I threw the sample away and decided not to ask any other women to endure the experience.

Later on, we visited the research lab of Dr. Mubarak Ahmad Khan, who had recently patented the process for creating a wood-pulp alternative called jute-pulp. He gave us a free sample of the product and explained how the material could be used to make domestically-manufactured disposable products such as menstrual pads and diapers. This product would eliminate the need for wood pulp in sanitary napkins, which, due to value-added taxes, is too expensive for garment workers. Dr. Khan’s invention was promising, but it was not yet at the stage where we could reliably purchase the material for manufacturing. For that reason, we decided to focus on more immediately available absorbent materials.

Iteration 2: Recycled Cotton Scrap Pads

In Dhaka, shredded cotton fabric can be purchased cheaply from large warehouse stores that collect scraps from local garment manufacturers. We visited several scrap fabric dealers to see if it would be economically feasible to make disposable, biodegradable pads from shredded 100% cotton T-shirt fabric. I also experimented with absorbent cotton quilt stuffing, which tested well among American beta testers I recruited from Cornell. However, we could not find comparable materials local to Bangladesh for samples, so we ultimately moved away from this design.

Features and Characteristics

• This is a fully biodegradable option. Pads can be used once, then discarded either in the trash, the mud, or in the river, where the fabric will break down naturally.

• This option does not need to be washed or dried, avoiding mildew that leads to infection.

• This product can be cheaply manufactured in Dhaka and perhaps even by the garment workers themselves. The assembly process involves placing three layers of sterilized cotton on top of each other with the absorbent layer sandwiched in between. The next step is to sew the sheet of fabric in a grid pattern, then cut the pads out with a straight blade.

Feedback From Beta Testers

I then sent a collection of product samples to my friend Zvonimir Stojanovski (link), who lived in Ithaca at the time. He helped distribute the products to the volunteer beta testers on Cornell’s campus. Here is some of the most useful feedback we received:

• One beta user said, “Even though I didn't bleed through the pad, my underwear got stained because the pad moved out of place and I bled directly onto my underwear. Also, this is just my own personal preference but I only have pads with wings so I am not used to pads without security on the underwear. The material and thickness of the pad was great.”

• Another beta user reported, “This product is very comfortable. Prior to actually using it, it did appear very large to me when I first opened the package it came in. I had to use the larger underwear I own to hold this pad. I would maybe use it again. The primary reason being is that I only use tampons. Some additional thoughts for your consideration include having these pads come in different colors and having different sizes (i.e., thickness) depending on whether you have a light, medium, or heavy flow.”

The cotton scrap pads were absorbent and comfortable, but we could not find cotton fabric for the outer layer that was cheap enough to make these pads practical. 

Iteration 3: Washing Kits

Since we were not able to prototype a cheaper disposable solution for Bengali garment workers, we ultimately delivered a washing aid to ICDDR,B, who distributed the kits to the garment workers local to the slums of Dhaka.

Features and Characteristics

My project partner, Ahad, assembled kits that included a waterproof bag that can be sealed closed with a water-tight zipper, a bag of soap powder, and instructions for safely washing and drying reusable period fabrics. 

Feedback From Beta Testers

There are several reasons why garment workers who use this period product are still at risk of vaginal infection and still likely to miss work and school:

• The user needs to provide her own water for this washing kit. Most people in the slums use water from a communal pump. This water is not safe to drink and the women usually drink water after it is boiled using a propane stove. It’s unlikely that the user will boil the water before using it with these washing kits.

• This kit is not practical outside the home because garment workers and their daughters do not have access to running water at work or school. It’s likely that women who use this product will continue to stay home from work and school during their periods in order to use these washing kits.

• This kit is designed to wash the scrap fabric that garment workers sometimes get from the floor of their sewing factories. It’s unclear if these fabrics can be made fully safe with soap powder. If they contain dyes, chemicals, or bacteria from the factory floor, infections could still occur.

• The zipper bags offer garment workers a more private alternative to the transparent poly bags they often use to store washed period fabrics. However, it’s still unclear how garment workers are meant to dry their washed fabrics in a mostly humid and public living space. If wet fabrics are stored in a zipper bag, they are likely to grow mildew.

Iteration 4: SwostiPant

In 2022, I began a new job as a software project manager at Eigen Technologies. I was excited to use a portion of my increased salary to hire a sample-maker and manufacturer in India called “Sudam Designs” to create 50 samples of SwostiPant. I also worked with Ahad, who still lives and works in Dhaka, to purchase zipper bags, bottles of isopropyl alcohol, and rolls of sterile cotton to include in the SwostiPant kit.

The Water-Free Cleaning Procedure

The SwostiPant is a hybrid period underwear that does not require water to clean. It comes with a kit that allows the user to sterilize the pants for reuse in their bedroom, where they have the most privacy.

The kit’s contents and instructions for cleaning the SwostiPant kit are as follows:

Kit Contents

1. One SwostiPant with smooth plastic lining

2. One roll of unwoven sterile cotton

3. One bottle of rubbing alcohol

4. Black zipper bag for storage

5. Laminated sheet with written instructions in Bangla.

Written instructions (English)

Here’s how to prepare your SwostiPant:

1. Put on the underwear. Make sure it stretches tight around your body and legs. 

2. Cut half a meter of cotton from the roll.

3. Add cotton until all blood is absorbed into the cotton.

4. Wear the pants for no more than 8 hours before replacing the cotton.

5. Remove the pants and bury the cotton and blood in the sand or in the river. Cotton is made of plants and it will rot away completely in the soil in 1–5 months. The blood has iron, which is nutritious for the grass.

6. Lay out a polybag on your bed so that you have a clean surface. You can use alcohol and cotton to disinfect the poly bag.

7. Place the used panty on top of the poly bag and wipe down everything using cotton and lots of alcohol. Repeat this process until you are sure you have removed all traces of white vaginal discharge. If you cannot remove all of the blood stains from the underwear, that is okay.

8. Allow the underwear to dry completely. Do not allow any alcohol to touch your vagina. Alcohol that touches the inside of the vagina will cause pain and irritation.

9. Store the pants, the roll, the bottle, and these instructions within the black zipper bag. Don’t let any water touch the black zipper bag, or the cleaning process will need to start over.

10. Repeat this process the next time you have your period. Reach out on WhatsApp to the team at SwoshtiPant.org to send us feedback and win prizes.

As of December 1st, 2022, the SwostiPant team is creating a list of beta testers local to Dhaka, Bangladesh. 

Big Lessons

Even in the past few years since I’ve visited Dhaka, the garment workers have been through a lot. A series of wage cuts and layoffs during the pandemic led to protests where women marched in the streets (link). These women have survived electricity shortages in intense heat, flash floods, and tropical storms (link). Their fortitude makes me confident that we’ll be able to overcome the cultural and stigmatic barriers that make it hard to sell menstrual hygiene products in Bangladesh. 

Special Thanks

Md. Abdullah Ahad

Jess MacAurther

Naz Bari

Rebeka

Nusrat

Rabeya

Popi

Afroza

Rokea Khanam

Antora

Smita

Tajmary Akter

Tishan Mahfuz

Lutful Alam Nitul

Aradhana 

Afroza

Antora

Smita

Aradhana