Our Work

Being that this is a new project to Pete’s class, we had the unique opportunity of picking a topic we’re passionate to work on. For me, this was women’s reproductive health and rights. My interest came to fruition after being paired with the wonderful Olivia and Jessica whom I had the pleasure of working with this quarter. Together we met Dr. Roberts, a professor in the kinesiology department at Cal Poly, who helped us establish and connect with our target population: school girls in rural communities of Jinja, Uganda. From here established the menstrual health and hygiene needs of the girls in those communities.

 

After pinpointing the needs of our focus population, our group spent time reading through the literature on current organizations addressing women’s menstrual health in similar rural communities in Sub-Saharan Africa. We did many comparative analyses, to better understand the good and bad of each existing initiative. This would later help us develop our long-term project vision, and establish how we were going to approach the issues dealt with by the menstrual health and hygiene management school girls in Jinja, Uganda. 

 

From here we envisioned what we hoped to accomplish by the end of the quarter, and how we hoped our project would continue in the hands of future students. As you’ll see following our extensive research phase, we spent the rest of the quarter individually designing prototypes.

 

As far as our hopes for the future of our project, we developed a website to guide future students interested in overseeing the continuation of our project. As you’ll find, our project was largely planning and research-based, our intention being to deliver knowledge and insight to future groups to use as a basis for implementing our long-term vision. On the website, we also have a contact form, for students with additional inquiries. I myself, intend to see this project to the end. I've recently contacted Miranda Kelly with WAEV, who expressed interest in helping me through the next stages of the design process. I'm excited to see what's to come.

​

 

Best, Sophia