The retail price of top-of-the-range sanitary pads – ultra thin, with wings and side-leakage protection – is about sh65 per pack. One packet is required each menstrual cycle, thus a woman needs about 13 packets each year. [There are] 1.7 million schoolgirls, [therefore] the total requirement is 22.1 million packs annually. At sh65 each, the total amount required is just over sh1.4 billion every year.

Now that is surely a large sum of money but compared to the total education budget, it is peanuts. The annual government expenditure in this sector is over sh80 billion; sh1.4 billion is less than 2% of that figure. Thus it is affordable.

But is this expense justifiable? In other words, does it make sense to increase the expenditure [on education] by 2% in order to realise an increase of 10 percent in school attendance? You be the judge of that.