For the past few months, Ellie Zodwa Maseko from Hhukwini, eSwatini has put her sewing skills to work on a new project. She earns a living by supporting girls whose families cannot afford sanitary pads forcing them to miss school, fall behind or even drop out. But Ellie and a group of women are sewing hope back into the community.
By Priya Iyer
A few times a month, Ellie Zodwa Maseko will hoist a heavy sewing machine onto her head, and walk nearly an hour from her homestead in rural Hhukwini, eSwatini to a small building. The gravel road, difficult to drive without a 4×4, winds through the Mdzimba mountains. Sometimes she will get a ride. The landscape is beautiful, but the walk arduous. To ease the load, Maseko will sing church hymns to herself. In the small construction, Maseko will gather with eight of her friends, as they’ve done for the last five months since the launch of the Tizabalazele Make Sanitary Project. Together, they will sew reusable menstrual pads.
The initiative was awarded the 2019 Karen Takacs Leadership Fund grant as it tackles the challenge schoolgirls are facing in the education system and provides an income for the entrepreneurial group of women who launched the business. The fund was created in 2016 by Crossroads to support organizations that advocate for women. The project managed by Bomake, a Crossroads partner, provides the women, and their daughters, access to an environmentally friendly option during their periods. By selling the pads, it also provides income, enabling them to leverage their sewing skills to feed their children and support their families.
A few of the women had already been working with Gone Rural, Bomake’s sister organization.
“What they had in common was that they could sew outside of the weaving they were doing,” said Nozipho Sasha Thorne, Bomake’s Program Director.
The women mobilized together, wanting to use their sewing to support themselves. Since Bomake had already been working with another organization to distribute pads to Eswatini schools, Thorne put the women in touch. “The women were very enthusiastic with that idea,“ she said. They learned the technique and were provided with access to a room, a sewing machine and the materials to sew pads.
Thorne says seeing Maseko and her friends organizing has encouraged other women as well.
“We’ve been getting more women coming with new ideas or existing ideas they want to develop, especially in areas they’ve started working, or within talents and skills they already have,” says Thorne. “And It was all made possible through Crossroads.”
Maseko really enjoys the work. “It is different and it has so much impact on women,” she says in her native Siswati. “It also gives us money. We found that it will give us better income, because its money we get every month, it helps us a lot.” The pads are reusable, which saves money. ”Now we don’t really need to go buy pads because they’re very expensive,“ she says.
“I’m happy and I’m proud of this job that God gave me so that I can be a woman that provides for my family.”
