Bushra Mahnoor grew up in Attock, in Pakistan’s Punjab province, where sanitary pads were carefully rationed among six menstruating women in her household – a reality reflected in many homes across the province.
In a home shared with her mother and four sisters, supplies often ran low, and the cost of pads, classed as non-essential goods by the government, meant every purchase had to be weighed and stretched.
Mahnoor, 26, remembered how the stockpile was carefully watched over and had to be divided between them, and the strain this caused at home.
“I felt like we were competing with each other for the supplies,” she said.
At school, there was always the fear of starting her period without the means to manage it. She would secrete away pads for herself when she could.
