Virtual listening party on menstruation & puberty

Uzma while running audio menstrual health content in village, Haaji Lal Bux, Larkana

The new normal has presented new challenges for all the communities living in urban and rural areas. Nevertheless, we have designed new solutions to continue working for the development, education and health of women.

We particularly see girls and women badly hit by inadequate educational and economic prospects, dwindling health services, and increased family and caregiving responsibilities. We highlighted how we established Digital Incubators in rural areas in our last blog to improve digital literacy and inclusion. Now we are building upon our work with the women who are trained and piloting new ideas with them. 

Considering rural areas often don’t have internet infrastructure to use our chatbot Raaji, we realised that there was an opportunity in designing audio menstrual health content that could be downloadable and available offline to hear and learn from. 

We designed a new form of engaging with that content when we launched our concept of listening parties. A listening party is an event in a village where one community woman leader, usually a menstrual champion, receives audio menstrual content on her phone and then invites her village women and girls to hear that content together and follow it with a discussion. Any pending questions are answered by our team who is watching this party digitally from our homes and offices in different parts of Pakistan. 

Since menstruation is often associated with shame, a party allows them to disassociate the concept with bad feelings. We piloted this idea with 10 community leaders during the Digital Literacy Training, and it was a resounding hit since everyone enjoyed the idea of giving such audible knowledge in their areas.

Uzma, the leader of our Raaji Room, was the first to execute this idea in her neighbouring community, with 9 adolescent girls. She travelled to Haaji Lal Bux, her neighbouring community, to set up the audio curriculum.

Haaji Lal Bux is one of the villages of District Larkana, where more than 320 families dwell. The village has a good drainage system, according to one of the community leaders working there. For a living, the people of Haaji Lal Bux engage in labour, as well as small businesses such as clay art, stitching, beauty parlours, and cultural food. There is also a school and a health centre in the community, and teenage girls also go to school.

Uzma began her session by greeting everyone and then introducing Raaji by showing her short film on her phone. After a short film about menarche by Raaji, Uzma explained the idea of Listening Party to the participants and delivered the Sindhi audio menstrual awareness. The audio curriculum was over 9 minutes long, so Uzma used pauses to discuss the topics they had just learned, which included health and hygiene management, proper pad/cloth usage, and myths and misunderstandings about menstruation.

Then , Uzma also showed a video story named “Meri Pehli Periods Ki Kahani” over a smartphone, so that participants could get familiar with the topic and talk easily. 

We were thrilled to be able to join virtually and engage with the participants from rural areas. Our main goal was to know what rural girls thought of the new curriculum, and they certainly enjoyed it. They also shared that they used to avoid showers and drink certain juices/drinks during their periods. They also mentioned that they manage their periods well enough to go to school during their periods.

Similarly, Urbeli, our second Raaji Room leader, replicated the Listening Party idea in Meerdad Gopang, her neighbouring village. The village has around 115 families, and the majority of the residents rely on labour work to earn their living. Unfortunately, the village does not have a school yet, but locals care about sanitation and hygiene.

Urbeli ran a similar audio curriculum with some of the village's adolescent girls, connecting them virtually with us. We discovered that the girls were hesitant to speak with us, which was reasonable considering that they had never been to a conversation like this before. The most essential thing to note was that the girls learned some basic menstrual information, such as health and cleanliness measures, managing periods, myths and misunderstandings. 

One of the Community leaders, who has attended our Digital Literacy Training also implemented the audio curriculum in the community meeting at village Sahib Khan Lashari with 15 members including girls and women. Our goal is to disseminate this audio information to other rural Sindh communities and villages, so that every girl or woman, regardless of her background or literacy level, can benefit from it.