People & Planet

People

Combating Period Poverty

Periods are a natural process and a part of nearly every girl’s life. However, not having access to adequate period products can often lead to huge feeling of shame and embarrassment, resulting in girls having no option but to stay home and to missing out on school for up to 50 DAYS A YEAR! 

We believe no one should be held back because of their period, so Bucket Hats Against Period Poverty is a scheme that we have set up to combat this! 

90% of the profits from the sales of our ‘Charity Edition’ bucket hats will go towards purchasing period products (Tampons and Sanitary pads) to be then be donated to schools across Kenya.

We have partnered with Loldia Primary School located in the Rift Valley region of Kenya. Loldia Primary School has 2006 students in total with 360 girls in their top year. Due to the nature of the area many of their students live in very remote areas, some walking several hours every day just to get to school. As a result you can imagine that simply getting access to period products is tall order, not to mention the cost of them for parents who are struggling to put food on the table. 

Loldia Primary School has an amazing system where they have a storage space already set up for period products that can be accessed by any student who feels they need them. HOWEVER when talking to the Headmaster, Joseph Njeru, it became starkly apparent that the school was in desperate need for many more products than what they were receiving! This is the case with so many schools across Africa! As a result, we are committing ourselves to donating as many products as we possibly can! In the future partnering with many more schools to be able make as much of an impact as possible!

So please join us on our mission and purchase one of our handmade bucket hats!

UPDATE

In October 2023 we returned to Loldia Primary School to do our second donation.

In the Kenyan school system their Christmas break is equivalent to the long European summer break. As a result, due to not having access to the schools stores, the girls at the school would usually not have access to sanitary products over the break.

However this year is different! Due to the money raised by people buying our Pink Bucket Hat range, we managed to supply the girls of Loldia Primary School with enough sanitary products for the whole break! Allowing them to take home the supplies they feel they need.

This really made us feel so happy that our donation was directly helping the girls. THIS is why we go and donate products ourselves! Being able to see the direct difference that we make really hits home so much more than donating a large charity.

WHAT'S COMING...

Firstly, I want to address the elephant in the room... the single use pads that we have been donating.

We have been having a hard time finding any reusable pads available in Kenya that don't look horrible and uncomfortable to use and aren't extortionately expensive for what they are. As a result, we have been deciding to donate the single use ones to try and make the girls lives more comfortable and be able to help significantly more girls due to the cheeper price.

We have also been conscious that many of the girls don't have access to running water at home and so donating reusable pads would lead to them not being able to wash them. This would be extremely unhygienic.

HOWEVER, this having been said, we are currently working closely with the Kujuwa Initiative, that makes re-usable period pads. We are looking to develop a kit with them that we can donate that will support a girl for up to 5 years! Our aim is to start donating these kits in addition to the single use pads. Giving the girls a choice, depending if they feel they can wash the reusable pants at home or not.

So, please watch this space! We are very excited about our next steps.

Planet

The planet aspect of our mission is underway. We are about 98% plastic free, having removed plastic all though our supply chain and order packaging. I am proud to say our shorts are completely plastic free. However, there are 2 small pieces of plastic related to the hats that need to be sorted out, these are the plastic 'kimble tags' used to attach our labels, and the stickers that we send out with all orders. These should be easy to sort and will not be in our next order from our suppliers.

In regards to carbon, its a tough one to accurately track and manage. However, that is no excuse to not do as much as possible. We currently ship our products from Kenya using DHL. We have decided this as DHL has data to provide us with the amount of carbon we are producing with each shipment, this allows us to either work with them to offset this carbon or use our own methods of offsetting the carbon. Sea freight providers aren't able to provide us with this level of accuracy to base our decisions off. Sea freight from Kenya is also notoriously unreliable, with shipments often getting lost. Having to recover shipments or remake lost products leads to much higher carbon outputs in the long run.

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