What six years in Addis Ababa taught us about menstrual health, and why we’re giving it away.

For years, too many girls have experienced school differently once they begin menstruating.

The change is quiet, but it is real. A girl who used to raise her hand starts staying silent. She sits toward the back. She counts the hours until she can go home. Some days she doesn’t come at all, not because she wants to miss school, but because school doesn’t yet feel like a place where she can manage her period safely.

Hygiene supplies help. But they don’t turn the tide on their own. What changes a girl’s experience of school is harder to package: students willing to support one another; teachers willing to lead conversations they were never trained to have; caregivers willing to move past their own discomfort; school staff working to improve facilities; and partners who stay after the installation, training school teams, working alongside government, and planning for the handoff from day one.

In Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, that kind of work is finally showing what it can produce.

The evidence

Six years, 500 schools, and a measurable shift.

Since 2019, Splash has partnered with more than 500 government schools across Addis Ababa to strengthen water, sanitation, hygiene, and menstrual health support for students. The goal was never a single intervention. It was to change the whole environment around a girl’s period. That means the facilities, the information, and the culture, so that menstruation stops being a reason to fall behind.

A new multi-year evaluation of Splash's work in Addis Ababa, Improving Menstrual Health in Urban Schools of Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, offers encouraging evidence of what that looks like:

It's easy to glance at numbers like these, but they tell a story worth pausing to consider. A drop from 16% to 3% in missed school days is not a statistic; it is thousands of ordinary school mornings that used to be lost and now aren’t.

Behind every percentage, a person.

The data points to something the data can’t fully hold. Girls reported feeling more supported by their peers. Mothers said they had become more comfortable talking with their daughters about puberty, often for the first time. Boys became more informed and more empathetic about something they had been taught to treat as a joke, or to ignore entirely.

None of this happened by accident, and none of it happened easily. To shift a culture, everyone had to step outside their comfort zone. Schools hosted workshops and peer-mentoring sessions. Teachers led conversations about puberty and health. Mothers joined support discussions. Students helped normalize a topic too often wrapped in silence and shame. The change was not handed to these schools. It was built by them.

Belief in harmful menstrual myths among girls fell from 50% to 8%.

The evidence leads to an unavoidable question.

Here is where a success story usually ends: with the evidence, the gratitude, and a promise to keep going.

But six years of work in Addis Ababa raises a harder question. If we now know, with data, what helps girls stay in school through their periods, what do we owe the millions of girls who don’t happen to live in a city where that work has already been done?

This is the quiet crisis of global development. The sector is very good at proving that things work in one place. It is far worse at making sure those proven things travel. Hard-won evidence gets stranded inside the program that produced it. Every new partner, in every new country, is left to start from scratch, re-learning the same lessons and re-making the same mistakes, while a generation of girls waits for an answer someone, somewhere, already found.

Proof isn’t the finish line. It’s the beginning of an obligation.

The answer

From proof to platform.

That obligation is why, alongside the Addis Ababa evaluation, Splash and WASH United have launched yes.period, an open-access global platform designed to help governments, schools, and organizations deliver effective menstrual health education and support at scale.

The yes.period platform gathers proven, field-tested tools and resources into one place, so partners around the world can adapt and implement what already works instead of building it alone. The approaches behind it are not theoretical. They have already reached more than 2.7 million girls, worked through 700+ partners, and been adapted across more than 30 contexts globally.

Splash’s contribution reflects the exact lesson Addis Ababa taught: menstrual health is not only about girls. It’s about the boys, caregivers, teachers, and community leaders around them. Lasting change happens only when the whole community is part of the conversation. Those are the environments yes.period is built to help create.

Why sharing is the strategy.

A solution held closely helps one community. A solution shared openly, adapted locally, and designed to last helps thousands. That’s why Splash’s instinct isn’t to protect what works. It’s to hand it to anyone who can use it.

That is the throughline connecting a single school in Addis Ababa to a platform available anywhere in the world: prove it where you are, then give it away so it can be proven again somewhere else. Evidence and access are not two separate projects. They are two halves of the same promise

Every girl deserves to manage her period with dignity. And no child's dignity should depend on which school they attend.