The Sanitary Dignity Framework (2019) is a policy that aims to preserve and maintain indigent girls' and women's dignity during menstruation. In South Africa, the term “sanitary dignity”, can be equated to what the rest of the world recognizes as menstrual hygiene management (MHM). Sanitary dignity or MHM is centred around the provision of menstrual health hygiene products (MHPs) such as tampons and sanitary pads to anyone who menstruates and cannot afford to purchase MHPs for themselves. Limited of access to MHPs, water and sanitation facilities, and privacy make it impossible for vulnerable menstruators to achieve sanitary dignity. This policy excludes street-based homeless menstruators as it only makes provisions for those who have access to state-funded institutions such as; quintile 1, 2, and 3 schools, mental institutions, hostels, places of care, and prisons. Street-based homeless menstruators are marginalized twofold; they reside on the streets and they menstruate. This dissertation discusses how the social exclusion of street-based homeless menstruators within the Sanitary Dignity Framework strips them of their fundamental right to dignity by denying them access to the sanitary dignity they are entitled to.

Menstrual health management can be a difficulty for menstruating women and girls, especially in low- and middle-income countries or other areas of poverty. Menstruation being characterized by stigmatisation, myths and taboo makes it especially troublesome, preventing women and girls to handle their menstruation safely and with dignity. Male attitudes have been argued to play an important role in perpetuating these stigmas and taboos, yet little is known about them. This study sets out to investigate male menstrual knowledge and attitudes, the role of religion in shaping menstrual attitudes and the potential consequences for menstruating women and girls. Qualitative data from group interviews with 24 boys aged 15-19 in a Senior High School in Accra, Ghana is used as basis for analysis. The results are organised along three themes, reflecting the three sub-research questions guiding the study. Findings demonstrate how schoolboys have an elemental understanding of the physiological process of menstruation yet demonstrate a deep understanding of cultural restrictions and the way menstruation may be experienced. Attitudes contain both positive and negative elements, including menstruation as normal and natural on the one hand, and the menstruating girl as unclean and impure on the other. Religion seem to play in important role in perpetuating negative menstrual attitudes, reinforcing the idea of menstruation as impure and unclean. Potential consequences of these attitudes risk menstruation continuing being considered as unclean and impure in addition to be neglected as a “girl’s matter”. However, respondents also identified menstrual difficulties which may foster supportive involvement in menstruation. The findings suggest the importance of continuing to address the surrounding communities of menstruating women and girls, including within and outside of educational and religious institutions.

The study was conducted throughout November 2021 in the township of Langa, in the Western Province of Cape Town, South Africa. The purpose of the study is to explore the menstrual health literacy of adolescent boys through collecting data capturing knowledge, experiences and attitudes. The ambition is to locate the findings within the Human Rights Framework, and explore how they may have implications for the ability of girls to realise their right to education. 32 learners between the ages of 13 and 17 years participated in focus group interviews and 8 informant interviews were held. The findings illustrate that adolescent boys have inadequate knowledge about menstrual health, and how their menstrual literacy is shaped by observations from girls in school, and puzzling together informal pieces of knowledge and  experiences. The potential implications this illiteracy may have for girls are practical and social, where the lack of infrastructures responsive to distinctive needs of female learners deprives the right to education. At the same time, the educational context in South Africa is characterised by inequality and learners from the low-income settings are behind the national curricula, making it unreasonable to expect menstrual literacy being prioritised, given its stigmatised connotations. It concludes highlighting how menstrual literacy matters for altering the patterns of unequal development, and for recognising distinctive realities lived by adolescent boys and girls throughout the world.

Pollutants can harm menstrual health, and raising awareness of this is vital. This study is a research-through-design project that aims to investigate the design qualities of interactive technologies that aim to raise this kind of awareness. This study used first-person experiment method to design and develop cultural probes. The probes were iterated based on the results of a pilot study. The cultural probes were deployed with five women from Asia and Europe, followed by a semi-structured interview. The probes were designed to prompt participants to reflect on pollution and menstrual health. The results present confusion about pollutants, negative feelings and conflicting feelings while awareness is raising, being watched by technology, lack of more profound knowledge of menstrual health, infringement upon individual bodily autonomy and human responsibility on pollution, and connection between our bodies and environment. This paper highlights the importance of designing and mitigating these design tensions in designing technologies to raise awareness of pollution’s impacts on menstrual health. / Föroreningar kan skada menstruationshälsa, och att öka kännedomen av detta är viktigt. Denna studie är ett research-through-design-projekt som försöker undersöka designkvaliteterna i interaktiv teknologi som försöker att öka kännedom om detta. Studien använde sig av metoden förstapersonsexperiment för att designa och utveckla kulturella sonder. Sonderna itererades baserat på resultaten från en pilotstudie. Kultursonderna utplacerades hos fem kvinnor från Asien och Europa, och följdes upp av en semistrukturell intervju. Sonderna var designade för att få deltagarna att reflektera på förorening och menstruell hälsa. Resultaten presenterar förvirring kring föroreningar, negativa känslor och motstridiga känslor när kännedomen ökar, bli bevakad av teknologi, brist på mer djupgående kunskap kring menstruationhälsa, kränkning av den personliga autonomin och mänskligt ansvar kring förorening, samt kopplingen mellan våra kroppar och miljön. Studien lyfter fram vikten av design och mitigering av dessa designspänningar när man designar teknologi för att öka kännedomen om föroreningens påverkan på menstruationshälsa.

Menstrual management is a pervasive issue for women globally, and it becomes critical in times of crisis. During these times of crisis and disaster, humanitarian response seeks to provide relief of suffering by meeting essential needs, in a comprehensive and predictable manner. Yet the provision of menstrual management remains largely ad hoc. Through a comprehensive literature review of documents pertaining to menstrual management in emergencies, this paper offers a qualitative analysis of modern humanitarian strategic approaches, to explore the place of menstrual management in emergencies. The core findings are that menstrual management is not fodder for strategy in humanitarian aid, and therefore lacks a ‘home’ in any of the humanitarian approaches to response. It is not fully integrated into either technical strategic implementation, typified by the cluster approach, nor through cultural implementation approaches, typified by gender mainstreaming. This paper also offers some explanations of why such an omnipresent need has, as yet, remained un-championed. This discussion is based on a theoretical framework offered by feminist theory. Supplemented by an understanding of organisations as gendered structures (Acker, 1990), this thesis posits that these cavities in modern humanitarian response are due to the inherent inability and reluctance of the humanitarian system to concern itself with a bodily, female issue such as menstrual management.