In 2000, while working for the Aga Khan Foundation in Uganda, Farah Ahamed read about girls who stayed home from school for several days every month. They had no menstrual products, and their schools had little or no sanitation. Some were using leaves, mud, feathers and dirty rags. “What stayed with me was the inequality of it,” she says. “Menstruation itself was not the problem. The circumstances surrounding it were.”

Ahamed is a Kenyan human rights lawyer and writer who moves between London and Nairobi. Eleven years after reading that article, she and her sisters founded Panties with Purpose, a Kenyan campaign on menstrual poverty and education. She later edited Period Matters: Menstruation in South Asia and her first short-story collection is due out in December 2026, titled ‘Queen Victoria in the Basement and Other Stories’.

Her argument is that the world has made periods visible without making them dignified. Call it the Dignity Gap: the distance between what a law, a product or a policy promises and what a menstruator actually experiences…