Girl Power

They may only be in their early twenties, but for these young entrepreneurs their social enterprise is the first step towards their goal of ending period poverty in New Zealand.

- Monique McKenzie

In the summer of 2016, two Victoria University students with spare time on their hands decided they had the capacity to do something for the better. At the same time, new reports were coming out about period poverty affecting girls’ school attendance and their ability to perform their best academically. The students, Jacinta Gulasekharam and Miranda Hitchings, who were studying economics and marketing, respectively, were upset by the reports and consequently signed up for an entrepreneurial boot camp. What resulted was Dignity – a buy one, give one model where for every box of sanitary items a company purchases, Dignity gives the equivalent away to high schools in need all over New Zealand. Since then they’ve given away more than 11,000 boxes, partnered with 50 schools, and impacted over 20,000 students, with large corporates including ANZ, Xero and Flick Electric jumping on board.

Dignity’s mission is to make sanitary items accessible to all women, while being sustainable, transparent and progressive. While spurred by what was happening in schools, the idea came from their own need: they’d seen period poverty happening at tertiary level too. “At that stage there isn’t often a lot of money going around, so we’d experienced it ourselves too a little bit when we hadn’t budgeted effectively,” Miranda says.