A Crisis Within a Crisis
This challenge is not isolated to Cameroon’s Northwest. Across West and Central Africa, menstruation continues to disrupt girls’ education, with evidence showing that a significant share of adolescent girls miss school during their periods due to inadequate facilities, limited access to menstrual products, and entrenched stigma. These barriers are well-documented across the region, but in Cameroon’s Northwest, they are intensified by conflict. Located at the heart of the country’s Anglophone regions, the crisis-affected Northwest faces nearly a decade of armed conflict, where already fragile school systems are further strained, and basic support for girls’ menstrual health is often absent.
In conflict settings, the hierarchy of needs is brutally simple: food, shelter, and safety come first. Everything else, including menstrual health, is pushed to the margins. As observed by Lum Nathalie Akum, Executive Director of the Dorothy and Cecilia Memorial Foundation, “Everybody is looking for what to eat. Everybody is looking for shelter. And people don’t even pay attention to other sexual and reproductive health practices, much less menstrual hygiene.”
What this means in practice is that menstruation becomes an invisible emergency, one that does not appear in humanitarian dashboards, yet shapes the daily dignity and educational futures of thousands of girls. Akum further reveals that some girls resort to ‘survival sex’ to afford menstrual products. “We have heard stories of adolescent girls who are out of options, having sex with someone because they are trying to put together finances to be able to buy a pad.” That a basic hygiene product can become a driver of sexual exploitation speaks to how deeply period poverty compounds vulnerability for girls already among the most at-risk.
The Silence That Makes It Worse
Menstrual poverty in the Northwest is further reinforced by a culture of silence and stigma. “We still have many children who do not yet understand their bodies. For them, menstruation is confusing and difficult,” Akum notes. This is not simply a private matter; it is a public health failure rooted in schools and communities where menstruation is treated as something to be hidden rather than understood.
Harmful social norms deepen the problem. “There are still men and boys today who see a menstruating woman as dirty, who believe she should not sit with others or eat at the same table,” Akum explains. When fathers and older men carry these beliefs, they shape the attitudes of boys growing up around them, creating a cycle where stigma is passed down as a social norm. In this context, providing a pad without addressing the shame surrounding its use will never be enough.
Beyond Distribution: What Is Already Being Done
Faced with this reality, civil society organisations in Cameroon’s Northwest Region are refusing to wait for policy to catch up. In a context where humanitarian aid has long focused on food, shelter, and medical care, local actors are pushing a critical shift: menstrual hygiene is not a luxury; it is a core component of dignity in crisis response. Through its Africa Program in Cameroon, the Real Life Research Institute is amplifying this message through evidence-based advocacy, while organisations like Plan International and UNICEF are integrating menstrual hygiene kits into dignity kit distributions across Africa. The message is clear: neglecting menstrual health in emergencies deepens the marginalisation of girls and women already living at the sharpest edge of conflict, particularly across Central Africa, where vulnerability is compounded, not created, by crisis.
At the community level, local foundations are pushing beyond short-term aid toward lasting solutions. The focus is shifting from single-use pads which is costly and waste-generating to reusable pads and menstrual cups that can last for years. As Akum puts it, “A packet of pads for one month is not sustainability.” Just as critical are culturally grounded sensitisation efforts that engage community leaders, parents, and boys, because real change happens when solutions meet communities where they are.
What Must Change
What is needed now is not incremental adjustment, but decisive, coordinated action across policy, systems, and community engagement. Key stakeholders must act on the following priorities:
• Community action cannot substitute for systemic change. The government of Cameroon must remove the tax on menstrual products and treat them as essential goods. As Akum says plainly, “Your menstruation is what defines you as a woman. I don’t think it should be taxed.” Investment in locally manufactured, affordable reusable alternatives would further reduce financial dependency and build a more resilient menstrual health market within Cameroon.
• Schools must be recognised as the frontline of menstrual health. Despite menstrual health being part of the standard curriculum, evidence from the Northwest Region suggests that policy has not translated into practice on the ground. Governments and education authorities must therefore prioritise enforcement and implementation, ensuring that what is written in policy is actually being delivered in classrooms, alongside urgent investment in sex-separated and water-accessible sanitation facilities in all schools, particularly those in conflict-affected areas
• Humanitarian actors must mainstream menstrual hygiene into emergency response frameworks, treating dignity kits as standard rather than an afterthought. And sensitisation must actively engage men and boys as allies, because the stigma that surrounds menstruation does not sustain itself. It is reproduced through attitudes passed down in households and communities, and it must be dismantled there too.
• For girls in the Northwest region, navigating conflict, poverty, and stigma simultaneously, these are not abstract proposals. They are the difference between school and staying home, between safety and exploitation, between dignity and silence. That kind of political will is not a luxury. It is long overdue.
