Menstrual Hygiene Day 2025: Why This Global Movement Still Matters
Yesterday, on May 28, 2025, the world marked Menstrual Hygiene Day, a global initiative with a powerful mission to end the silence around periods. The day is more than symbolic. It is a rallying call to raise awareness, break cultural taboos, and fight for access to menstrual products, education, and infrastructure for everyone who menstruates.
Global Challenges in Menstrual Hygiene
Even in 2025, menstrual hygiene is not a given for millions of people. While more than 90 percent of women in 46 out of 51 surveyed countries use suitable menstrual materials, disparities persist. In five countries, over ten percent of women lack basic materials and rely on alternatives like toilet paper, old cloth, or nothing at all. In rural Niger, fewer than half of women have access to private spaces to manage menstruation. In Chad and the Central African Republic, more than thirty percent of women and girls miss school, work, or social activities during their periods. These are not just statistics. They are real barriers that limit education, health, and participation.
Why Empowerment Matters
When girls and women are empowered with knowledge and resources, everything changes. Education leads to understanding. Understanding leads to confidence. Confidence opens doors. Menstrual health is deeply tied to empowerment. It is not just about access to pads or pain relief. It is about ensuring people can live, work, and learn without being held back by a natural biological process.
Equipping girls with accurate information about their bodies breaks shame and silence. Giving them safe spaces to talk and learn builds resilience. Ensuring they have products and clean facilities helps them stay in school and remain active in their communities. It all adds up to brighter futures.
Where Does Skillbloom Fit In?
Skillbloom is actively creating change through its year-round initiative, empowerHER, which is dedicated to protecting vulnerable children and women. This program provides counselling, guidance, and safe spaces, while also meeting urgent needs with essentials like food, clothing, hygiene products, and healthcare items. At its core, empowerHER is about dignity, care, and long term empowerment.
The initiative is built on three key projects that work together to address the barriers that menstruation and other challenges create:
Kids Clubs offer children safe, nurturing spaces to play, learn, and grow. Through educational and recreational activities, children build confidence and creativity while forming positive social bonds.
Girls Support Groups focus directly on the needs of adolescent girls. These groups provide emotional support, mentorship, and counselling. They also offer crucial education on menstrual hygiene, helping to reduce stigma, improve school attendance, and foster confidence, resilience, and leadership.
Hope’s Table mobilizes resources to meet urgent material needs in vulnerable communities. By providing food, hygiene kits, clothing, and healthcare items, this project restores dignity and supports basic wellbeing for those in crisis.
In 2025, empowerHER is focusing its efforts on supporting the women of Nsawam Women’s Prison, who face food insecurity, limited healthcare, and lack access to hygiene and clothing. Through this targeted campaign, Skillbloom is delivering nutritious meals, tailored hygiene kits, durable clothing, and medical supplies, bringing comfort and hope to women who are often forgotten.
Skillbloom does not just respond to need. It builds a culture of compassion and action. By addressing the real world barriers that girls and women face, including those related to menstruation, Skillbloom helps create stronger, safer, and more supportive communities. Its work through empowerHER is a direct response to the challenges Menstrual Hygiene Day brings to light and a powerful reminder that when we uplift women and girls, we all move forward.
The Bigger Picture
Menstrual health is a matter of rights. It is about access, equity, and dignity. Days like Menstrual Hygiene Day bring needed visibility to an issue that too often goes unspoken. But real change happens every day in classrooms, homes, clinics, and communities when people are equipped, supported, and heard.
Skillbloom’s work reminds us that menstrual health does not exist in isolation. It is connected to education, employment, health, and human rights. By embedding menstrual health within broader empowerment efforts, organizations like Skillbloom are pushing the conversation forward and taking real steps to ensure that no one is left behind because they menstruate.
Start conversations. Support education. Volunteer or partner with organizations like Skillbloom. And most importantly, treat menstrual health as what it truly is: a basic need, a human right, and a critical part of the journey to equality.
Let us keep moving forward. Let us keep breaking the silence. And let us work together to create a world where no one is held back because they menstruate.