The Best Thing You'll Read All Day

Lakshmi Sandhana for FastCompany's Co.Exist: An Indian Inventor Disrupts the Period Industry.

When Arunachalam Muruganantham hit a wall in his research on creating a sanitary napkin for poor women, he decided to do what most men typically wouldn't dream of. He wore one himself--for a whole week. Fashioning his own menstruating uterus by filling a bladder with goat's blood, Muruganantham went about his life while wearing women's underwear, occasionally squeezing the contraption to test out his latest iteration. It resulted in endless derision and almost destroyed his family. But no one is laughing at him anymore, as the sanitary napkin-making machine he went on to create is transforming the lives of rural women across India.

Right now, 88% of women in India resort to using dirty rags, newspapers, dried leaves, and even ashes during their periods, because they just can't afford sanitary napkins, according to "Sanitation protection: Every Women's Health Right," a study by AC Nielsen. Typically, girls who attain puberty in rural areas either miss school for a couple of days a month or simply drop out altogether. Muruganantham's investigation into the matter began when he questioned his wife about why she was trying to furtively slip away with a rag. She responded by saying that buying sanitary napkins meant no milk for the family.

"When I saw these sanitary napkins, I thought 'Why couldn't I create a low cost napkin for [my wife]?'" says Muruganantham.

Turns out, he could. And, in the process, he's not just created an important product for poor women, he's also created an easily replicable production process and a business model that he hopes will "create 1 million employment opportunities for rural women and expand the model to other developing nations."

[H/T to Shaker Kathy_A.]